Feminist economics

Feminist economics broadly refers to a developing branch of economics that applies feminist insights and critiques to economics. Research under this heading is often interdisciplinary, critical, or heterodox, and discusses the relationship between feminism and economics on many levels: from applying mainstream economic methods to under-researched "women's" areas, to questioning how mainstream economics values the reproductive sector, to deeply philosophical critiques of economic epistemology and methodology.

For example, feminist economists investigate the ways in which the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does not adequately measure unpaid work like childcare and eldercare, which are predominantly performed by women. Since a large part of women's work is rendered invisible, they argue that policies meant to boost the GDP can, in many instances, actually worsen the impoverishment of women, even if the intention is to increase prosperity. Opening up a state-owned forest in the Himalayas to commercial logging may increase India's GDP, but women who collect fuel from the forest to cook with may face substantially more hardships.

Origins

While attention to women’s economic role and economic differences by gender started in the 1960s and there were important feminist critiques of received economic theories in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist economics took off in earnest with the founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in 1990 and the journal Feminist Economics in 1994. As in other disciplines, the initial emphasis of feminist economists was to critique the established theory, methodology, and policy approaches. The critique began in microeconomics of the household and labor markets and spread to macroeconomics and international trade, leaving no field in economics untouched. Feminist economists pushed for and produced gender aware theory and analysis, broadened the focus on economics and sought pluralism of methodology and research methods.

Feminist economics is gradually becoming a widely recognized and reputed area of inquiry. In 1997, IAFFE gained Non-Governmental Organization status in the United Nations. The organization boasts approximately 600 members in 43 countries.

Theory and Methodology

Feminist economists have also challenged and exposed the rhetorical approach of mainstream economics (see Deirdre McCloskey's critique). They have made critiques of many basic assumptions of mainstream economics, including the Homo Economicus model. They have been instrumental in creating alternative models, such as the Capability Approach and incorporating gender into the analysis of economic data. Marilyn Power suggests that Feminist Economic methodology can be broken down into the following five categories: ^[1]

Domestic Systems

Feminist Economists argue that traditional analysis of economic systems often fails to take into account the value of the unpaid work being performed by men and women in a domestic setting. Feminist economists have argued that unpaid work is just as valuable as paid work and that measures of economic success should take unpaid work into account when evaluating economic systems.

Economic Success

Many feminist economists argue that economic success cannot only be measured in terms of goods, but must also be measured by human well-being. To evaluate economic well-being, one cannot only look at distribution of wealth or income, but one must also look at individual entitlements and needs. Amartya Sen, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and other feminist economists have been at the forefront of developing alternatives to the GDP, such as the Human Development Index.

Human Agency

Human agency is an approach that looks not only at the individual but also the system that constrains an individual's options, or the systems and process behind them. Often many systems have been established over a long period of time and are disproportionately hard for various groups of people to access or take advantage of. A human agency methodology attempts to look at where the power in a system lies and who has unequal access to it.

Ethical Judgments

This is a methodology that looks at systems not from the point of view of neutral observer, but from a specific moral position and viewpoint.

Gender, Race, and Class

Feminist economics attempts to not only examine women’s issues in economics, but to also examine the issues of as many other different groups of people as possible. No classification of people can ever capture every element at work and thus, gender, race, class, and caste must also be given as much attention and observation as any other issue.

Major Areas of Inquiry

Employment equity

Early on, feminist ethicists, economists, political scientists and systems scientists argued that women's traditional work (e.g. child-raising, caring for sick elders) and occupations (e.g. nursing, teaching) are systematically undervalued with respect to that of men. Measures such as employment equity were implemented in developed nations in the 1970s to 1990s, but these were not entirely successful in removing wage gaps even in nations with strong equity traditions. Systemic study of the ways that women's work is undervalued, undertaken by Marilyn Waring and others in the 1980s and 1990s, began to justify different means of measurement of value - some of which were influential in the theory of social capital and individual capital, which emerged in the late 1990s and ultimately merged with ecological economics to become modern human development theory.

Jane Jacobs' thesis of the "Guardian Ethic" and its contrast to the "Trader Ethic" was also influential in explaining in ethical terms why a trading culture would systematically undervalue guardianship activity, including the child-protecting, nurturing, and healing tasks that were traditionally assigned to women. This led to the more general idea of systems as expressing either tolerances or preferences, and never being very good at both.

Critics of the theses of Waring, Jacobs, and other feminists who explore the role of women in the economy, argue that protective activities, e.g. military and police and government, are just as much male as female roles, more so in times of chaos, and that these preceding theories are sexist. A striking example is World War II, in which women worked in factories while men fought - a reversal of the roles according to Jacobs, but entirely to be expected according to nearly everyone else.

Relation to other Disciplines

Green economics incorporates insights from feminist economics and Greens list feminism as an explicit goal of their political measures, often seeking higher valuations for such work. Feminist Economics is also often linked with welfare economics or labour economics, since it emphasizes child welfare, and the value of labour in itself, as opposed to production for a marketplace, the focus of classical economy.

External links

• International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)
• Journal of Feminist Economics

Useful texts

• Beyond economic man : feminist theory and economics, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson. The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Nelson, Julie. Feminism, Objectivity and Economics. Routledge, 1996.
• Power, Marilyn. "Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics" The Journal of Feminist Economics. Volume 10, Number 3. Routledge, November 2004
• Toward a feminist philosophy of economics, edited by Drusilla Barker and Edith Kuiper. Routledge, 2003.

References

1. ^ Power, Marilyn. "Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics" The Journal of Feminist Economics. Volume 10, Number 3. Routledge, November 2004.

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