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Feminist economics
Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented toward the social ecology of money.
Feminist economists call attention to the social constructions of traditional economics, questioning the extent to which it is positive and objective, and showing how its models and methods are biased by an exclusive attention to masculine-associated topics and a one-sided favoring of masculine-associated assumptions and methods. While economics traditionally focused on markets and masculine-associated ideas of autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for a fuller exploration of economic life, including such "culturally feminine" topics such as family economics, and examining the importance of connections, concreteness, and emotion in explaining economic phenomena.
Many scholars including Ester Boserup, Marianne Ferber, Drucilla K. Barker, Julie A. Nelson, Marilyn Waring, Nancy Folbre, Diane Elson, Barbara Bergmann and Ailsa McKay have contributed to feminist economics. Waring's 1988 book If Women Counted is often regarded as the "founding document" of the discipline. By the 1990s feminist economics had become sufficiently recognised as an established subfield within economics to generate book and article publication opportunities for its practitioners.
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. For example, Jane Jacobs' thesis of the "Guardian Ethic" and its contrast to the "Trader Ethic" sought to explain the undervaluing of guardianship activity, including the child-protecting, nurturing, and healing tasks that were traditionally assigned to women.
Written in 1969 and later published in the Houseworker's Handbook, Betsy Warrior's Housework: Slavery or a Labor of Love and The Source of Leisure Time presents a cogent argument that the production and reproduction of domestic labor performed by women constitutes the foundation of all economic transactions and survival; although, unremunerated and not included in the GDP. According to Warrior: "Economics, as it's presented today, lacks any basis in reality as it leaves out the very foundation of economic life. That foundation is built on women's labor; first her reproductive labor which produces every new laborer (and the first commodity, which is mother's milk and which sustains every new consumer/laborer); secondly, women's labor entails environmentally necessary cleaning, cooking to make raw materials consumable, negotiating to maintain social stability and nurturing, which prepares for market and maintains each laborer. This constitutes women's continuing industry enabling laborers to occupy every position in the work force. Without this fundamental labor and commodity there would be no economic activity nor we would have survived to continue to evolve." Warrior also notes that the unacknowledged income of men from illegal activities like arms, drugs and human trafficking, political graft, religious emoluments and various other undisclosed activities provide a rich revenue stream to men, which further invalidates GDP figures. Even in underground economies where women predominate numerically, like trafficking in humans, prostitution and domestic servitude, only a tiny fraction of the pimp's revenue filters down to the women and children he deploys. Usually the amount spent on them is merely for the maintenance of their lives and, in the case of those prostituted, some money may be spent on clothing and such accouterments as will make them more salable to the pimp's clients. For instance, focusing on just the US, according to a government sponsored report by the Urban Institute in 2014, "A street prostitute in Dallas may make as little as $5 per sex act. But pimps can take in $33,000 a week in Atlanta, where the sex business brings in an estimated $290 million per year." Warrior believes that only an inclusive, facts-based economic analysis will provide a reliable bases for future planning for environmental and reproductive/population needs.
In 1970, Ester Boserup published Woman's Role in Economic Development and provided the first systematic examination of the gendered effects of agricultural transformation, industrialization and other structural changes. This evidence illuminated the negative outcomes that these changes had for women. This work, among others, laid the basis for the broad claim that "women and men weather the storm of macroeconomic shocks, neoliberal policies, and the forces of globalization in different ways." Moreover, 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.
In 1988, Marilyn Waring published If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, a groundbreaking and systematic critique of the system of national accounts, the international standard of measuring economic growth, and the ways in which women's unpaid work as well as the value of nature have been excluded from what counts as productive in the economy. In the foreword to the 2014 anthology Counting on Marilyn Waring, Julie A. Nelson wrote:
Supported by formation of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1972, gender-based critiques of traditional economics appeared in the 1970s and 80s. The subsequent emergence of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the 1992 founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) along with its journal Feminist Economics in 1994 encouraged the rapid growth of feminist economics.
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Feminist economics
Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented toward the social ecology of money.
Feminist economists call attention to the social constructions of traditional economics, questioning the extent to which it is positive and objective, and showing how its models and methods are biased by an exclusive attention to masculine-associated topics and a one-sided favoring of masculine-associated assumptions and methods. While economics traditionally focused on markets and masculine-associated ideas of autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for a fuller exploration of economic life, including such "culturally feminine" topics such as family economics, and examining the importance of connections, concreteness, and emotion in explaining economic phenomena.
Many scholars including Ester Boserup, Marianne Ferber, Drucilla K. Barker, Julie A. Nelson, Marilyn Waring, Nancy Folbre, Diane Elson, Barbara Bergmann and Ailsa McKay have contributed to feminist economics. Waring's 1988 book If Women Counted is often regarded as the "founding document" of the discipline. By the 1990s feminist economics had become sufficiently recognised as an established subfield within economics to generate book and article publication opportunities for its practitioners.
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. For example, Jane Jacobs' thesis of the "Guardian Ethic" and its contrast to the "Trader Ethic" sought to explain the undervaluing of guardianship activity, including the child-protecting, nurturing, and healing tasks that were traditionally assigned to women.
Written in 1969 and later published in the Houseworker's Handbook, Betsy Warrior's Housework: Slavery or a Labor of Love and The Source of Leisure Time presents a cogent argument that the production and reproduction of domestic labor performed by women constitutes the foundation of all economic transactions and survival; although, unremunerated and not included in the GDP. According to Warrior: "Economics, as it's presented today, lacks any basis in reality as it leaves out the very foundation of economic life. That foundation is built on women's labor; first her reproductive labor which produces every new laborer (and the first commodity, which is mother's milk and which sustains every new consumer/laborer); secondly, women's labor entails environmentally necessary cleaning, cooking to make raw materials consumable, negotiating to maintain social stability and nurturing, which prepares for market and maintains each laborer. This constitutes women's continuing industry enabling laborers to occupy every position in the work force. Without this fundamental labor and commodity there would be no economic activity nor we would have survived to continue to evolve." Warrior also notes that the unacknowledged income of men from illegal activities like arms, drugs and human trafficking, political graft, religious emoluments and various other undisclosed activities provide a rich revenue stream to men, which further invalidates GDP figures. Even in underground economies where women predominate numerically, like trafficking in humans, prostitution and domestic servitude, only a tiny fraction of the pimp's revenue filters down to the women and children he deploys. Usually the amount spent on them is merely for the maintenance of their lives and, in the case of those prostituted, some money may be spent on clothing and such accouterments as will make them more salable to the pimp's clients. For instance, focusing on just the US, according to a government sponsored report by the Urban Institute in 2014, "A street prostitute in Dallas may make as little as $5 per sex act. But pimps can take in $33,000 a week in Atlanta, where the sex business brings in an estimated $290 million per year." Warrior believes that only an inclusive, facts-based economic analysis will provide a reliable bases for future planning for environmental and reproductive/population needs.
In 1970, Ester Boserup published Woman's Role in Economic Development and provided the first systematic examination of the gendered effects of agricultural transformation, industrialization and other structural changes. This evidence illuminated the negative outcomes that these changes had for women. This work, among others, laid the basis for the broad claim that "women and men weather the storm of macroeconomic shocks, neoliberal policies, and the forces of globalization in different ways." Moreover, 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.
In 1988, Marilyn Waring published If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, a groundbreaking and systematic critique of the system of national accounts, the international standard of measuring economic growth, and the ways in which women's unpaid work as well as the value of nature have been excluded from what counts as productive in the economy. In the foreword to the 2014 anthology Counting on Marilyn Waring, Julie A. Nelson wrote:
Supported by formation of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1972, gender-based critiques of traditional economics appeared in the 1970s and 80s. The subsequent emergence of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the 1992 founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) along with its journal Feminist Economics in 1994 encouraged the rapid growth of feminist economics.
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