Economic epistemology Feminist critiques of economics include that "economics, like any science, is
socially constructed." Additionally, feminist economists claim that the historical bases of economics are inherently exclusionary to women.
Michèle Pujol points to five specific historical assumptions about women that arose, became embedded in the formulation of economics, and continue to be used to maintain that women are different from the masculinized norms and exclude them. These include the ideas that: • All women are married, or if not yet, they will be and all women will have children. • All women are economically dependent on a male relative. • All women are (and should be) housewives due to their reproductive capacities. • Women are unproductive in the industrial workforce. • Women are irrational, unfit economic agents, and cannot be trusted to make the right economic decisions. Feminist economists also examine early economic thinkers' interaction or lack of interaction with gender and women's issues, showing examples of women's historical engagement with economic thought. For example,
Edith Kuiper discusses
Adam Smith's engagement with feminist discourse on the role of women in the eighteenth century
France and
England. She finds that through his writings, Smith typically supported the
status quo on women's issues and "lost sight of the division of labor in the family and the contribution of women's economic work." In response, she points to
Mary Collier's works such as ''The Woman's Labour'' (1739) to help understand Smith's contemporaneous experiences of women and fill in such gaps.
Engendering macroeconomic theories Central to feminist economics is an effort to alter the theoretical modeling of the economy, to reduce gender bias and inequity. This model highlights how gender effects macroeconomic variables and shows that economies have a higher likelihood of recovering from downturns if women participate in the labor force more, instead of devoting their time to housework. That fails to account for the fact that inputs are produced through caring labor, which is disproportionately performed by women. Stephen Knowels
et al. use a neoclassical growth model to show that women's education has a positive
statistically significant effect on
labor productivity, more robust than that of men's education. In both of these cases, economists highlight and address the gender biases of macroeconomic variables to show that gender plays a significant role in models' outcomes.
Two-sector system The two-sector system approach models the economy as two separate systems: one involving the standard macroeconomic variables, while the other includes gender-specific variables.
William Darity developed a two-sector approach for low-income, farm-based economies. Darity shows that
subsistence farming depended on the labor of women, while the production of income depended on the labor of both men and women in
cash-crop activities. This model shows that when men control production and income, they seek to maximize income by persuading women to put additional effort into cash-crop production, causing increases in cash crops come at the expense of subsistence production.
Bina Agarwal and Pradeep Panda illustrate that a woman's property status (such as owning a house or land) directly and significantly reduces her chances of experiencing
domestic violence, while
employment makes little difference. They argue that such
immovable property increases women's
self-esteem, economic security, and strengthens their fall-back positions, enhancing their options and bargaining clout. They show that property ownership is an important contributor to women's economic well-being because it reduces their susceptibility to violence. In order to measure well-being more generally,
Amartya Sen,
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and other feminist economists helped develop alternatives to
Gross Domestic Product, such as the
Human Development Index. Other models of interest to feminist economists include the
labor theory of value, which was most thoroughly developed in
Das Kapital by
Karl Marx. That model considers production as a socially constructed human project and redefines wages as means to earning a living. This refocuses economic models on human innate desires and needs as opposed to monetary incentives. Unlike traditional economic measures of success, focused on
GDP,
utility,
income,
assets or other monetary measures, the capabilities approach focuses on what individuals are able to do. This approach emphasizes processes as well as outcomes, and draws attention to cultural, social and material dynamics of well-being.
Martha Nussbaum, expanded on the model with a more complete list of central capabilities including life, health, bodily integrity, thought, and more. In recent years, the capabilities approach has influenced the creation of new models including the UN's
Human Development Index (HDI).
Household bargaining Central to feminist economics is a different approach to the "family" and "household." In classical economics, those units are typically described as amicable and
homogeneous.
Gary Becker and new home economists introduced the study of "the family" to traditional economics, which usually assumes the family is a single, altruistic unit among which money is distributed equally. Others have concluded that an optimal distribution of commodities and provisions takes place within the family as a result of which they view families in the same manner as individuals. These models, according to feminist economists, "endorsed traditional expectations about the sexes," and applied individualistic rational-choice models to explain home behavior. Agarwal shows that a lack of power and outside options for women hinders their ability to negotiate within their families.
Amartya Sen shows how social norms that devalue women's unpaid work in the household often disadvantage women in
intra-household bargaining. These feminist economists argue that such claims have important economic outcomes which must be recognized within economic frameworks.
Care economy Feminist economists join the
UN and others in acknowledging
care work, as a kind of
work which includes all tasks involving
caregiving, as central to economic development and human well-being. Feminist economists study both paid and unpaid care work. They argue that traditional analysis of economics often ignores the value of household unpaid work. Feminist economists have argued that unpaid
domestic work is as valuable as paid work, so measures of economic success should include unpaid work. They have shown that women are disproportionately responsible for performing such care work.
Sabine O'Hara argues that care is the basis for all economic activity and
market economies, concluding that "everything needs care," not only people, but animals and things. She highlights the sustaining nature of care services offered outside the formal economy.
Riane Eisler claims we need the economic system, to give visibility to the essential work of caring for people and caring for nature. Measuring
GDP only includes productive work and leaves out the life sustaining activities of the following three sectors: the household economy, the natural economy and the volunteer community economy. These sectors are where most of the
care work is done. By changing existing
economic indicators in a way that they would also measure the contributions of the three aforementioned sectors we can get a more accurate reflection of economic reality. She proposes social wealth indicators. According to her these indicators would show the enormous return on investment (ROI) in caring for people and nature. Psychological studies have shown that when people feel good, and they feel good when they feel cared for, they are more productive and more creative (example case study). As a result, the care economy has positive
externalities such as increasing the quality of human capital. Most nations not only fail to support the care work that is still predominantly done by women, but we live in the world with gendered system of values. Everything that is associated with women or femininity is devalued or even marginalised. Feminist economists have also highlighted power and inequality issues within families and households. For example,
Randy Albelda shows that responsibility for care work influences the time poverty experienced by single mothers in the United States. Similarly, Sarah Gammage examines the effects of unpaid care work performed by women in
Guatemala. The work of the Equality Studies Department at
University College Dublin such as that of Sara Cantillon has focused on inequalities of domestic arrangements within even affluent households. While much care work is performed in the home, it may also be done for pay. As such, feminist economics examine its implications, including the increasing involvement of women in paid care work, the potential for exploitation, and effects on the lives of care workers. Care work also involves "close personal or emotional interaction." Also included in this category is "self-care," in which leisure time and activities are included. Subsistence work is work done in order to meet basic needs, such as collecting water, but does not have market values assigned to it. Although some of these efforts "are categorized as productive activities according to the latest revision of the international
System of National Accounts (SNA) ... [they] are poorly measured by most surveys." Voluntary work is usually work done for non-household members, but in return for little to no remuneration.
System of National Accounts Each country measures its economic output according to the System of National Accounts (SNA), sponsored mainly by the
United Nations (UN), but implemented mainly by other organizations such as the
European Commission, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the
World Bank. The SNA recognizes that unpaid work is an area of interest, but "unpaid household services are excluded from [its] production boundary." Feminist economists have criticized the SNA for this exclusion, because by leaving out unpaid work, basic and necessary labor is ignored. Even accounting measures intended to recognize gender disparities are criticized for ignoring unpaid work. Two such examples are the
Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the
Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), neither of which include much unpaid work. So feminist economics calls for a more comprehensive index which includes participation in unpaid work. In more recent years there has been increasing attention to this issue, such as recognition of unpaid work within SNA reports and a commitment by the UN to the measurement and valuation of unpaid work, emphasizing care work done by women. This goal was restated at the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.
Measurement of unpaid work The method most widely used to measure unpaid work is gathering information on
time use, which has "been implemented by at least 20 developing countries and more are underway" as of 2006. Proponents of time use diaries believe that this method "generate[s] more detailed information and tend[s] to capture greater variation than predetermined questions." As domestic work is widely seen as "women's work", the majority of it is performed by women, even for women who also participate in the labor force. One study found that, when adding the time spent on unpaid household work to the time spent engaging in paid work, married mothers accumulate 84 hours of work per week, compared to 79 hours per week for unmarried mothers, and 72 hours per week for all fathers, whether married or not. Efforts to calculate the true economic value of unpaid work, which is not included in measures such as
gross domestic product, have shown that this value is enormous. In the United States, it has been estimated to be between 20 and 50%, meaning that the true value of unpaid work is trillions of dollars per year. For other countries, the percentage of GDP may be even higher, such as the United Kingdom, where is may be as high as 70%. Because this unpaid work is largely done by women and is unreported in economic indicators, it results in these contributions by women being devalued in a society.
The formal economy Research into the causes and consequences of
occupational segregation, the
gender pay gap, and the "
glass ceiling" have been a significant part of feminist economics. While conventional neoclassical economic theories of the 1960s and 1970s explained these as the result of free choices made by women and men who simply had different abilities or preferences, feminist economists pointed out the important roles played by
stereotyping,
sexism,
patriarchal beliefs and institutions,
sexual harassment, and
discrimination. The rationales for, and the effects of,
anti-discrimination laws adopted in many industrial countries beginning in the 1970s, has also been studied. Women moved in large numbers into previous male bastions — especially professions like medicine and law — during the last decades of the 20th century. The
gender pay gap remains and is shrinking more slowly. Feminist economists such as Marilyn Power, Ellen Mutari and Deborah M. Figart have examined the gender pay gap and found that wage setting procedures are not primarily driven by market forces, but instead by the power of actors, cultural understandings of the value of work and what constitutes a proper living, and social gender norms. Consequently, they assert that economic models must take these typically exogenous variables into account. While overt employment discrimination by sex remains a concern of feminist economists, in recent years more attention has been paid to discrimination against
caregivers—those women, and some men, who give hands-on care to children or sick or elderly friends or relatives. Because many business and government policies were designed to accommodate the "ideal worker" (that is, the traditional male worker who had no such responsibilities) rather than caregiver-workers, inefficient and inequitable treatment has resulted.
Globalization Feminist economists' work on
globalization is diverse and multifaceted. But much of it is tied together through detailed and nuanced studies of the ways in which globalization affects women in particular and how these effects relate to
socially just outcomes. Often country
case studies are used for these data. Additionally, Nalia Kabeer discusses the impacts of a
social clause that would enforce global labor standards through international trade agreements, drawing on fieldwork from
Bangladesh. She argues that although these jobs may appear exploitative, for many workers in those areas they present opportunities and ways to avoid more exploitative situations in the
informal economy. Alternatively,
Suzanne Bergeron, for example, raises examples of studies that illustrate the multifaceted effects of globalization on women, including Kumudhini Rosa's study of
Sri Lankan,
Malaysian, and
Philippine, workers in
free trade zones as an example of local resistance to globalization. Women there use their wages to create women's centers aimed at providing legal and medical services, libraries and
cooperative housing, to local community members. Such efforts, Bergeron highlights, allow women the chance to take control of economic conditions, increase their sense of individualism, and alter the pace and direction of globalization itself. In other cases, feminist economists work on removing gender biases from the theoretical bases of globalization itself.
Suzanne Bergeron, for example, focuses on the typical theories of globalization as the "rapid integration of the world into one economic space" through the flow of
goods,
capital, and
money, in order to show how they exclude some women and the disadvantaged. argue for the
degrowth approach as a useful critique of the devaluation of care and nature by the "growth-based capitalist economic paradigm". They argue that the growth paradigm perpetuates existing gender and environmental injustices and seek to mitigate it with a degrowth work-sharing proposal. Scholars in the paradigm of
degrowth point out that the contemporary economic imaginary considers time as a scarce resource to be allocated efficiently, while in the domestic and care sector time use depends on the rhythm of life. (D’Alisa et al. 2014: Degrowth. A Vocabulary for a New Era, New York, NY: Routledge.) Joan Tronto (1993: Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York, NY: Routledge.) divides the care process in four phases: caring about, taking care of, care-giving and care-receiving. These acquire different meanings when used describing the actions of males and females. Degrowth proposes to put care at the center of society, thus calling for a radical rethinking of human relations. It should be pointed out that degrowth is a concept that originated in the global north and is mainly directed towards a reduction of the economic (and therefore material) throughput of affluent societies. Environmental injustices linked to gender injustices are embedded in "Green Growth" due to its inability to dematerialize production processes, and these injustices are perpetuated through the Green Growth narrative and through its consequences. Ecological processes as well as caring activities are similarly, systematically devalued by the dominating industrial and economic paradigms. This can be explained by the arbitrary boundary between the monetized and the maintaining that remains largely unchallenged. Degrowth presents itself as an alternative to this dualistic view. If designed in a gender-sensitive way that recenters society around care could have the potential to alleviate environmental injustices while promoting greater gender equality. ==Methodology==