Women and the Economy: A Reader

A Reader

Ellen Mutari, Deborah M. Figart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317451877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This reader is designed for use as a primary or supplementary text for courses on women's role in the economy. Both interdisciplinary and heterodox in its approach, it showcases feminist economic analyses that utilize insights from institutionalism as well as neoclassical economics. Including both classic and newer selections from a broad range of areas, each section includes an introduction with background material, as well as discussion questions, exercises, and lists of key terms an further readings.

Section 1

Methodologies for Studying Women and the Economy

Why begin our study of women and the economy with a section on methodology? One of the most important insights that feminist scholars have emphasized over the past few decades is that how we go about studying issues in the social sciences can play a large role in the questions we ask and the answers we find. This opening section of three chapters will therefore introduce you to some of the methodologies that have been used to study women and the economy. The focus is both on the theories used to guide research and the techniques used for researchers’ investigations.

Because we are interested in women’s positions in the economy, we start by considering the role that economics, as a social science discipline, can play in guiding our studies. Unfortunately, according to Myra Strober, in “Rethinking Economics Through a Feminist Lens,” the discipline has been dominated by biased ways of thinking. She focuses, in particular, on feminist critiques of neoclassical economics, the dominant school of economics.

Within economics, there are several competing theories, approaches, and methodologies for studying questions of interest. The curricula of most undergraduate programs emphasizes neoclassical economics, the theoretical approach that developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Neoclassical economics defines its mission as the study of choices made under conditions of scarcity or constraint. Rational economic actors (once referred to as “rational economic men”) make decisions in pursuit of their own self-interest; economics thus emphasizes selfishness over altruism and empathy. Neoclassical economic theory has searched for laws of human behavior under conditions of scarcity and selfishness. In microeconomics, this gives us constructs such as the “Law of Demand” (stating that people will buy more of something when it is cheaper, if all else is held constant). In this respect, economics has modeled itself on the Newtonian school of physics that also dominated the late nineteenth century. By treating the economy as a natural object about which laws can be discovered, neoclassical economists have viewed themselves as objective scientists, rather than engaged citizens attempting to increase economic well-being.

Strober deconstructs each of these assumptions about economics. The work of economists has been flawed by an overemphasis on qualities that society traditionally associates with men. She argues that economics needs to be reformed not only to improve our understanding of women’s condition, but to better comprehend economic life in general.

Strober presents a summary of the ideas of feminist economics, a relatively new school of economic thought. However, there are numerous alternative or heterodox schools of thought. The term “heterodox” is often used as a synonym for nonneoclassical approaches. If you are an economics student, you may be most familiar with Keynesian or post-Keynesian economics from your macroeconomics courses. A few of the other heterodox schools of economics include institutional economics (emphasizing the influence of habits, social norms, and institutions within the economy), Marxist economics (focusing on class conflict over power and access to resources), and social economics (addressing ethical concerns). Strober points out that many feminist economists draw upon these other heterodox schools, as well as some of the strengths of neoclassical or mainstream methods. This is a theme to which we will return throughout this reader, as neoclassical methodologies are contrasted with heterodox views.

The second selection on methodology is by a sociologist who studies workplace organizations, Joan Acker. Acker analyzes work organizations, rather than disembodied labor markets, as a site for the determination of wages, employment, and working conditions. “Revisiting Class: Thinking from Gender, Race, and Organizations” also provides an overview of important developments within interdisciplinary women’s/gender studies. In particular, Acker’s contribution examines how feminists have interpreted and utilized the concepts of gender, race, and class in their work. She argues that class has become less salient in feminist scholarship in recent decades. Part of the problem is that traditional Marxist interpretations of class, divorced from gender and race, failed to account for the ways that many workers experienced their economic position. Like neoclassical economics, Marxism was biased by an emphasis on men’s experiences and male perspectives. In practice, Acker maintains, class, gender, and race interact in peoples’ daily lives in complex ways. We need all three concepts in order to fully appreciate the distribution of resources and responsibilities within work organizations and within society.

Martha MacDonald, in “Feminist Economics: From Theory to Research,” addresses some of the practical problems that feminist scholars have encountered in trying to improve their research strategies. Often, they find that the data they need are unavailable because the definitions used by data-gathering agencies are premised on the male-biased theories discussed by the first two authors in this section. For example, economic analysis has focused almost exclusively on market transactions. Because much of the work that women do within their households, on family farms and in family businesses, or as volunteers in the community is unpaid, it has been defined as outside the scope of economic analysis.

Economists also tend to treat households as a “black box,” meaning a vessel painted so that the internal mechanisms cannot be seen from the outside. In economics texts, households interact with firms, and the decisions economists predict from these interactions assume that the household can act with a singular sense of self-interest. However, if you accept that men and women may have different amounts of power within households, their interets may not coincide. MacDonald therefore discusses the issues involved in intrahousehold decisions about (1) the distribution of income (New dishwasher or big-screen television? Whose salary pays for child care?), (2) labor allocation (Who does the dishes? Who should work overtime or take off when the kids are sick?), and (3) power relations (Who makes the decisions?). These three areas—the value of unpaid labor, intrahoushold decisions, and power relations—will be revisited in more detail in Section 3 of this reader. Finally, MacDonald discusses the issue of gendered processes in the labor market, a topic to which we will return in Sections 4 and 5. MacDonald makes the important point that economists’ quantitative methodologies have focused almost exclusively on discriminatory outcomes such as wage inequality. Feminists are utilizing case studies in order to focus on discriminatory processes as well.

The methodological issues raised by MacDonald, Acker, and Strober highlight the contributions that feminism makes to social science methodologies. The issues they raise will guide our investigation of women in the economy, helping us analyze both women’s and men’s socioeconomic status.

1

Rethinking Economics Through a Feminist Lens

Myra H. Strober

Feminist economics is a rethinking of the discipline of economics for the purpose of improving women’s economic condition. As a by-product (or external benefit) of this rethinking, feminist economics provides an improvement of economic theory and policy.

John Maynard Keynes observed that all too often human beliefs and actions are the result of an outmoded attachment to some archaic economic doctrine. Feminist economics argues that many of economics’ core beliefs and policy recommendations are out of date, products of the peculiarities and politics of the periods in which they were developed and products of sexism in the West-em world during the past two centuries. Feminist economics provides an impetus for economists to revise these outmoded attachments.

Feminist economics is a radical endeavor. In a discipline (economics) that is still remarkably positivist, feminist economics questions the whole notion of objectivity and argues that what one chooses to work on and how one formulates theories and policy recommendations are dependent upon one’s culture, one’s position in society, and one’s life experiences. Feminist economics not only exposes the hidden political agendas of received economic doctrine, it straightforwardly acknowledges its own economic and political agenda: the improvement of women’s economic condition.

Feminist economics is reopening questions that were seemingly answered years ago, much larger questions than those that most economists currently ask—questions about value, well-being, and power. In the process of asking these larger questions, feminist economics challenges several basic disciplinary assumptions: for example, the value of efficiency, the existence of scarcity, the omnipresence of selfishness, the independence of utility functions, and the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons. Indeed, feminism’s basic assumption, that the oppression of women exists and ought to be eliminated, is a fundamental challenge to the supposed impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons.

Feminist economics points out that despite economists’ protestations to the contrary, economists do in fact make interpersonal utility comparisons and that often these are detrimental to women. Mich‘le A. Pujol (1992) shows, for example, that A.C. Pigou, the dean of welfare economics, openly argued that women are weaker and lesser than men and was primarily interested in how women’s labor in their homes could be used to increase national well-being. Pigou also argued that keeping women’s wages lower than men’s was “welfare maximizing” (Pujol 1992, p. 151). Clearly Pigou was making utility comparisons and equally clearly he was not concerned in the least with women’s utility.

Feminist economics is also interested in economics at a methodological level and provides a careful scrutiny of economics’ knowledge claims. For example, it asks how economists in fact come to know what they assert is true (Bergmann 1987). It also subjects to examination economists’ narrowly quantitative approach, their skepticism about the value of seeking information from interviews, and their insistence that economic analysis and its classroom presentation should be “unemotional” (Strober 1987).

Before looking at an example of feminist economic analysis, I will turn for a moment to what feminist economics is not. Feminist economics is not about essentialism, the doctrine that there are fundamental (essential) differences between women and men. Therefore, it does not say that women need a different economics than men. For this reason, feminist economics does not use the terms “masculine economics” or “feminine economics,” terms that confuse the issues and perpetuate the stereotypes. The point is that mainstream economics is sexist, not that it is masculine.

Feminist economics is also not about fundamental differences between women and men economists and therefore does not hold the view that women economists do economics in a different way from what men economists do, or even that women economists have a special pipeline to understanding women’s economic situation. Some of the insights that some women economists have, however, may come from experiences that most men economists do not have. For example, many women economists have a direct understanding of sexism gained through direct personal experiences in academe. Moreover, as bearers and rearers of children, some women economists may be more likely to question economics assumptions of a separative self and selfish utility maximization; but men economists who spend a great deal of time and effort rearing children may also find themselves questioning these assumptions for the same reason. The insights come not from gender, but from experiences. (See Amartya Sen 1992 on the roles that “position” and experience play in human knowledge.)

The questions that feminist economics seeks to answer at this point in its development are what Sen (1987) has called the “ethics” questions in economics (as contrasted to the “engineering” questions). In her comments on the feminist economics papers in the collective volume of Marianne Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (1993), Rebecca Blank (1993, p. 143), indicates that she would like feminist economics to become “a usable alternative model of economic decision-making.” This is not the current goal of feminist economics. For the time being, feminist economics is operating at the ethics level of theory and is engaged in rethinking the very foundations of economic suppositions and method.

A Quick Tour Through the Existing Literature

Feminist economics is hardly monolithic. Its practitioners come from multiple “schools” within economics: mainstream, institutional, and Marxist, to name a few. They also come from various “schools” of feminism: liberal, radical, Marxist, and separatist. Moreover, many feminist economists are as interested in race-gender or race-gender-class as they are in gender alone. Thus, the subject matter of feminist economic writing is extremely varied and wide-ranging....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Section 1. Methodologies for Studying Women and the Economy
• Section 2. The Rise and Fall of Separate Spheres
• Section 3. Households and Social Reproduction
• Section 4. Mainstream Approaches to Labor Market Outcomes
• Section 5. Heterodox Approaches to Labor Market Outcomes
• Section 6. Policies Affecting Women, Work, and Families
• Section 7. The Gendered Impact of Economic Development and Globalization
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index