Feminist Economics and Public Policy

Jim Campbell, Morag Gillespie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317361459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Professor Ailsa McKay, who was known not only for her work as a feminist economist but also her influence on Scottish social and economic policy, died in 2014 at the height of her academic career and impact on public life. Organised around the key themes of Ailsa McKay's work, this collection brings together eminent contributors to argue for the importance of making women's roles and needs more visible in economic and social policies.

Feminist Economics and Public Policy presents a uniquely coherent analysis of key issues including gender mainstreaming, universal childcare provision and universal basic income security, in the context of today's challenging economic and political environments. It draws on international perspectives to look at the economic role of women, presenting readers with interrelated sections on gender budgeting and work and childcare, before concluding with a discussion on Citizens Basic Income and how it could contribute towards a more efficient, equitable social security system. The theoretical, empirical and practice based contributions assembled here present recommendations for more effective public policy, working towards a world in which women's diverse roles are recognized and fully accounted for.

This book is a unique collection, which will be of great relevance to those studying gender and economics, as well as to researchers or policy makers.

PART I
Introduction and appreciation

1

INTRODUCTION TO THE THEMES OF THE BOOK

Jim Campbell and Morag Gillespie

As I am an economist I could provide you with a shed load of statistics. However as I am a Feminist Economist I am going to continue to tell you stories. Not because I can’t do statistics but because I think the statistics need the stories to provide a more rich understanding of their meaning. In that sense I like to follow the example of Keynes and Stiglitz – great economists of our time, who believed and continue to believe in the need to engage and persuade the public – and to tell the story in a way that we all understand and to appeal to us all to follow a path that makes sense with respect to valuing all of our assets and not just those with a market price.

(McKay, 2012)

Professor Ailsa McKay told stories about women’s disadvantaged position in the economy in a way that made people listen. She built a formidable international reputation as a feminist economist and had a profound influence on discussions of economic and social policy in Scotland and beyond. She died on 5 March 2014 at the height of her academic career and impact on public life.

This book is largely based on the contributions made at a two-day commemorative conference held in Ailsa’s honour in January 2015. The conference themes reflected the key areas of Ailsa’s research interests, namely: gender budgeting; women, work and childcare; and Citizen’s Basic Income (CBI). This book follows a similar structure and is divided into three distinct but inter-related sections.

With one exception, all of the contributors to this book would regard themselves not just as colleagues of Ailsa’s but friends and, in some cases, very close friends. The exception is Dr Caitlin McLean who did not know Ailsa but was appointed as the first Ailsa McKay Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University in January 2015. This position was created by Professor Pamela Gillies, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, in memory of Ailsa and to take her work forward.

This book encompasses a feminist analysis of a number of economic issues and policies and reflects upon the contribution of Professor Ailsa McKay to making women’s roles and needs more visible. It provides a unique analysis of key economic issues concerned with addressing the changing role of women in the economy and some of the barriers and challenges they face.

Part II explores recent experiences of gender budgeting and its potential impact on the ways in which macroeconomic policy, the allocation of public sector resources through the budget process and revenue raising can reflect women’s needs and roles more transparently and more effectively.

Part III on women, work and childcare discusses: the economic benefits of increased public investment in childcare for both women and the wider economy; women’s position in the labour market in Scotland, including in the aftermath of the great recession; and the role of training programmes in relation to occupational gender segregation.

Part IV discusses a CBI and considers how it could contribute towards a more efficient, equitable and gender sensitive social security system and its potential to be a transformative step towards greater gender equality.

The book draws on the perspectives of internationally renowned academics including some of the leading feminist thinkers in the world, as well as public policy practitioners. It highlights some of the measures and policies necessary to move towards greater gender equality and presents a unique collection that reflects on the issues about which Ailsa McKay wrote and taught from a feminist economics viewpoint, always with the aim of working towards transformation in what she viewed as an overly androcentric world. Her own writing and analysis is interwoven through the book. Before describing the key themes and chapters, the next section provides a short biographical note that outlines the key stages in Ailsa McKay’s career.

Ailsa McKay: a biographical note

Ailsa was born on 7 June 1963 in Falkirk, Scotland, and moved to Canada in 1965, returning to Falkirk in 1971 with her mum and three sisters. It would be fair to say that at school Ailsa was not an academic star and at seventeen she took the position as a clerical assistant in the Department of Social Security (DSS) in Falkirk. One of her roles there was to assess emergency payments for people on benefits and colleagues said that people would request her to consider their cases since she invariably found in favour of the claimant and authorised payments. She made a decision to return to education and in 1981 went to Falkirk College to do a Higher National Certificate (HNC) in Business on a part-time basis while continuing to work for the DSS. After successfully achieving the HNC in 1983 she left the DSS and became a full-time student at Stirling University in 1984, initially to do Business Studies but she switched very quickly to study economics and politics. She spent the third year of her course on exchange at the University of California, San Diego, and graduated in 1988 with a first class honours degree in Economics and Politics.

After graduation she went to work for Stirling Council housing department before becoming a welfare benefits advisor in Central Regional Council, using her knowledge of the social security system to help people obtain the benefits they were entitled to. In May 1991 she was appointed as a Lecturer in Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University, thereby beginning a highly successful academic career. She became Head of the Department of Economics and International Business in 2008 and in the following year she was made a Professor of Economics and became Vice-Dean of the Caledonian Business School.

In 2010 she established the Women in Scotland’s Economy Research Centre (WiSE) at Glasgow Caledonian University. Ailsa was a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and a founding member of the Scottish Women’s Budget Group (SWBG) and the European Gender Budget Network (EGBN). She was a representative of SWBG and then an academic adviser to the Scottish Government’s Equality and Budgets Advisory Group as well as being a Special Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Equal Opportunities Committee in the periods 2007–2009 and 2010–2011. She was a visiting professor at the University Complutense of Madrid and regularly delivered lectures to doctoral students at the university. Ailsa was a strong advocate of knowledge exchange and passionate about making economics accessible and relevant to women; she cooperated with a variety of women across the world to deliver lectures and training and promote gender equality.

Structure of the book

Whether talking to parliamentarians, students or community groups, Ailsa McKay always challenged listeners to view mainstream economics as a useful tool for explaining how the economy works, but to recognise that it has serious limitations, particularly in its failure to reflect the reality of women’s roles. She encouraged listeners both to engage with economics, but to be sceptical about and challenge mainstream economics assumptions and find ways to make economics more relevant to and reflective of women’s lives. Towards this end, she often quoted Joan Robinson: ‘The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists’ (Robinson, 1955: 75).

This mantra was one that Ailsa used to good effect in all her work. This book reflects upon and celebrates the full and varied contributions she made to making women’s roles and needs more visible in economic policies. Although the chapters cover a wide range of issues, a common thread that runs through the book is the notion of ‘provisioning’, a term that Ailsa often used, sometimes in relation to her own and other women’s caring roles but also more broadly in challenging mainstream economic analysis and assumptions. Ailsa’s approach reflected the idea that ‘a richer economics, whilst not excluding formal models or the study of choice, would be centred around the study of provisioning’ of human life (Nelson, 1993: 33).

Nelson’s definition of the economy as ‘the sphere of social activities that have to do with the provisioning of the goods and services that sustain life and can promote its flourishing’ (Nelson, 2006: 1061) summarises where Ailsa’s key points of interest and influence lay and she challenged others to think beyond conventional assumptions about who and what count.

Whether she was discussing families and care, how work in all its forms is valued, social security or wider economic analysis, provisioning was an important central concept for Ailsa. Each of the three sections in the book connects to this interpretation of women and the economy that challenges conventional forms of analysis in order to improve the way that progress is recorded so that all needs and contributions count.

Part I Introduction and appreciation: talking to Ailsa

One of Ailsa’s last publications was a co-edited volume with Margunn Bjørnholt on the influence and impact of Marilyn Waring’s writing, teaching and activism for advances in feminist economics (Bjørnholt and McKay, 2014). Marilyn Waring was one of the people who most inspired Ailsa in her work and from their opposite corners of the world, they shared many conversations about work, life, family, care and more. Marilyn travelled from New Zealand to Scotland to make the keynote address at the commemorative conference for Ailsa in January 2015.

Her appreciation (Chapter 2) celebrates the characteristics of Ailsa’s approach to feminist scholarship and strategy and reflects on the value of the conversations they had about the challenges facing feminist economics. With reference to key concepts of gender, care and ontological and epistemological differences in feminist economics, she discusses some issues she wanted to talk to Ailsa about: gender and the potential for ‘transformative strategies and outcomes affecting third gender’; care and her concerns about the direction that debate on care is taking in feminist economics; and her fears about a mono culture developing in feminist economics.

Part II Gender budgeting

At its heart, gender budgeting aims to help to ensure that the ‘provisioning’ and promotion of flourishing lives through public services reflect the needs and interests of all community members. Gender budgeting is concerned with making public resource allocation and revenue raising gender aware rather than gender blind so that decisions on public spending and taxation take account of the differential needs of and impacts on women and men. In other words, the economic models that account for progress should not presume that ‘rational economic woman’ is the same as ‘rational economic man’.

Gender budgeting is possibly the best example of how Ailsa McKay combined her academic and activist roles to create opportunities for change towards a new order for the advancement and protection of women and their rights as equal citizens. She played a central role in promoting gender budget analysis in Scotland as a key approach to making gender inequalities transparent and ensuring decision making and delivery are more responsive to and effective in tackling the causes and consequences of women’s disadvantaged position.

Diane Elson was another woman who inspired Ailsa. She was also an early supporter of efforts to take gender budgeting to Scotland. She was amongst the keynote speakers at the Scottish government’s first and only international conference on gender budgeting in 2002. In Chapter 3 Diane shows how macroeconomic policy decisions on whether to aim for a budget deficit or surplus are not gender neutral. She questions the rationale for viewing some aspects of spending, such as weapons systems, as suitable for public investment through borrowing, while spending on care, for example, is classified as public consumption and thus inappropriate for government borrowing. She argues that investment in social infrastructure would promote gender equality, challenges governments to design macroeconomic policy with a focus on wellbeing, not simply economic growth, and to invest in life rather than in death.

Angela O’Hagan draws on comparative analysis of experiences from Scotland, Spain and elsewhere to identify some favourable conditions that support the adoption and implementation of gender budgeting (Chapter 4). These conditions reinforce early principles proposed by the Commonwealth Secretariat – country ownership; participation; transparency; sustainability; and continuous improvement – that provided the foundation of Ailsa McKay’s advocacy of gender budgeting for transformative change.

Reflecting on Ailsa McKay’s distinctive approach and pivotal role in building awareness and support for gender budgeting advocacy in Scotland, Angela O’Hagan and Morag Gillespie review progress in Scotland where the Scottish government is working towards implementation of equalities budget analysis. However, an emphasis on process and procedural change has not yet delivered significant policy shifts. Ailsa McKay consistently highlighted how equalities mainstreaming and economic models fail to take sufficient account of women, reinforcing how crucial gender analysis is in Scottish budgetary decisions, but also that economic policy and strategy are key sites for gender budgeting and tackling women’s disadvantage.

Ailsa engaged with others in Europe and beyond with an interest in gender budgeting. She told the Scottish story and used the lessons learned to help others both inside and outside government who were involved in different stages of developing gender budget initiatives. In this process, she delivered lectures, training and resources in several countries, including Spain, Turkey and Georgia, working with academics, policy makers and practitioners (Chapter 5). The approach of mutual support and learning from each other continues in a strong European network of gender budget experts and practitioners, including several examples here.

In Chapter 6 Tindara Addabbo uses examples from Italy to explore a capabilities approach to gender budgeting which argues that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of UK and international legislation
• I Introduction and appreciation
• II Gender budgeting
• III Women, work and childcare
• IV Citizen's Basic Income
• Conclusions
• Index