Md Mizanur Rahman
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Feminist Economics is an approach that critically looks at the implicit gender biases prevalent in theories and practices in the study of economics. It has already emerged as an integral sub-field of economics. Feminist Economics challenges extant biases in economics, attempts to revise them, and searches for adequate alternatives both in theory and policy areas. Nelson writes, “it includes both studies of gender roles in the economy from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the content and methodology of the economics discipline” (Nelson 2008). The field emerged with a critique to the studies of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, where women’s lesser market earnings were not discussed, rather women’s specialization in household works was idealized, giving a justification for their unpaid household responsibilities and lesser market income (Nelson 2008). This research addressed women issues neither to equalize earnings nor to democratize working conditions but to rationalize women’s lower earnings and unpaid household responsibilities (Nelson 2008).
Feminist Economics focuses on the areas of research that are relatively ignored in mainstream economics, namely unpaid care works, intimate partner violence, the economics of sex workers. The research that ignited the field is Marilyn Waring’s If Women Counted (1988), which provocatively and systematically critiques the standard of measuring economic growth in mainstream economics that excludes the value of unpaid works of women and nature due to its biased understanding of the concept of productivity. It unravels how women’s traditional works have been made invisible within the national accounting systems and identifies the damages the economy incurs. The book, thus, “encouraged and influenced a wide range of work in ways, both numerical and otherwise, of valuing, preserving, and rewarding the work of care that sustains our lives” (Nelson 2014, ix-x). Nevertheless, Feminist Economics as a field of study emerged with the edited volume Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics published in 1993, and subsequently, the journal Feminist Economics appeared in 1994.
The volume shows that Feminist Economics challenges to mainstream economics, “not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough” (Ferber and Neslon 1993, 1). It argues that Feminist Economics can improve the objectivity of economic practices by including gender effects in economic thinking, focusing on “how economics could be improved by being freed from the straitjacket of masculine mythology” (Ferber and Neslon 1993, 8). Its objective was both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the volume shows how men have dominated the making of economics as a discipline from the classical to the contemporary theorization of the field. Feminist Economics declares that it tends to break this hegemony incorporating women’s voice in the discipline. Empirically, it shows that the standpoint from that traditional economists’ world view has been man-centric that either ignored or assumed facts about women and their works, which were not bolstered by empirical data. It further claims that the questions mainstream economics asked were so dominated by male understanding and patriarchal social norms that they either missed or ignored the crucial economic issues of equal pay for women and counted women’s unpaid care work. For example, they “ignore the socialization and education processes undertaken at home as well as the care from birth (or even from before birth, as in maternal health and nutrition) devoted to creating and developing a child’s capacities” (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 5). The essays of this volume also explain that men’s growth and the emergence of “economic man” was dependent on the nurture he got from women as an infant, care for his children, and promise to care for him in old age. They argue that a society cannot take these cares as a given.
Feminist Economics attempts to reshape the bias questions and ask the questions that remained excluded in the economic research. Diana Strassmann tells us the topics with which Feminist Economics is concerned and the questions it tends to ask in a recent interview with New Economic Thinking. She posits, “we want to measure human wellbeing…widespread care works, and care works’ interactions with the paid economy” (Strassmann 2020). She claims that without considering the economics of these works, the research in paid and unpaid sectors remains one-sided and less rigorous. For her, here, not only the unpaid women’s work is neglected, but the economics of earning women is misanalysed. According to Strassmann, Feminist Economics wants to ask: why are labor markets disaggregated? Why are women hired in specific jobs and not in others? How does that interact with social norms? Are not some occupations structured so that women cannot pursue them as the work condition does not fit with women’s social norms and their bodies and lives? Can we simply reduce them to women’s choices? What are the social, cultural, and structural factors that determine women’s eligibility for certain types of occupations?
These questions and concerns may raise the question of how Feminist Economics differs from feminism and other relevant fields of study. Ferber and Nelson (1993) clarify that Feminist Economics is not an entirely new approach to the study of economics, and it is inherently intersectional. Although Feminist Economics approach challenges the inbuilt biases of scientific economic investigations, it does not reject them. Rather, it tends to find “a new conception of where such methods fit in the overall picture of human knowledge and a willingness to consider methods previously rejected, not because they were bad or ineffective but simply because they were perceived as feminine” (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 14).
Feminist Economics has several perspectives; the central three include liberal feminist economics, constructivist feminist economics, and critical feminist economics. Liberal feminist economics focuses on gender equality through equal access to the labor market and institutions. It believes that if structures could be shaped in favor of women’s equal access and wages, individuals would realize their potentials, and gradually the berries of gender equality would be dissolved. Constructivist feminist economics concentrates on gender identities and gender performativity. They argue that gender identities influence economic decisions, structures, and processes. At the same time, processes and structures have repercussions on identities and other spheres. In the case of performativity, constructivist feminist economics is concerned if “women reproduce gender inequalities and stereotypes if they exercise a labor perceived as ‘female’ and thereby meet social expectations” (Urban and Pürckhauer 2016). Finally, critical feminist economics, dominated by Marxist feminist economists, focuses on the role of material foundations to understand inequalities. Marxist feminist scholars like Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa began debates on women’s unpaid reproductive labor and its relations in the production process; an integral aspect of the debate was to critique the Marxist labor theory of value, which does not account for the reproductive labor carried out by women (Urban and Pürckhauer 2016). They consider homework in the context of exploitative labor relations. They argue for the incorporation of reproductive labor in the capitalist production process. However, Marxist feminist scholars believe that “women’s liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women’s labor is uncompensated” (Feruson, Hennessy, and Nagel 2019).
Nevertheless, Feminist Economics is a well-grounded sub-field in the study of economics. Nancy Folbre (2009) argues that Feminist Economics, with a host of other approaches, substantially contributed to the changing nature of the discipline by facilitating a better understanding of the ways in which “individuals come to identify with and care for, others…challenging the conventional assumption that self-interest is just another word for selfishness” (Folbre 2009, 306). Folbre maintains that Feminist Economics research mainly contributes to drawing attention to the inherent intellectual bias in the discipline and resists the disciplinary bias in the data collection and research in viewing “family as an idealized, moral, feminine, non-economic realm.” It places the sexual wage inequality in the center of the economic debates, looking not at the effect of that, but unraveling their causes. Folbre further claims that Feminist Economics did not attempt to replace the rational economic man with irrational loving women but wanted to develop a broader perspective—economics for humans. She is optimistic that “feminist economics with roots in both the individualist and social traditions can flourish in the new terrain of institutional and behavioral economics” (Folbre 2009, 319).
(See Economic Reason, Primitive Accumulation, Social Reproduction)
Bibliography
Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Ferguson, Ann, Rosemary Hennessy, and Mechthild Nagel. “Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/feminism-class/ (retrieved on May 2, 2021).
Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Nelson, Julie A. “Feminist Economics.” In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_2210-1, 2008.
Nelson, Julie A. “Foreword.” In Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics, edited by Margunn Bjørnholt and Ailsa McKay. Bradford: Demeter Press, 2014.
Strassmann, Diana. “What is Feminist Economics?” November 18, 2020. Institute for New Economic Thinking. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/what-is-feminist-economics (retrieved on April 18, 2021).
Urban, Janina, and Andrea Pürckhauer. “Feminist Economics.” December 18, 2016. https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/orientation/feminist-economics/ (retrieved on May 1, 2021).