The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics

Günseli Berik, Ebru Kongar, Günseli Berik,Ebru Kongar, Günseli Berik, Ebru Kongar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429665387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics presents a comprehensive overview of the contributions of feminist economics to the discipline of economics and beyond.

Each chapter situates the topic within the history of the field, reflects upon current debates, and looks forward to identify cutting-edge research. Consistent with feminist economics' goal of strong objectivity, this Handbook compiles contributions from different traditions in feminist economics (including but not limited to Marxian political economy, institutionalist economics, ecological economics and neoclassical economics) and from different disciplines (such as economics, philosophy and political science). The Handbook delineates the social provisioning methodology and highlights its insights for the development of feminist economics. The contributors are a diverse mix of established and rising scholars of feminist economics from around the globe who skilfully frame the current state and future direction of feminist economic scholarship.

This carefully crafted volume will be an essential resource for researchers and instructors of feminist economics.

PART I
Core concepts and frameworks

2
Feminist challenges to development ECONOMICS

Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen

Introduction

Those of us who were students as the second wave of feminism was making its way into academia remember well the absence of gender analysis in the courses we were taking, and generally in the programs in which we were involved. In the late 1960s, courses on development proceeded as if colonialism and the historical evolution that followed worldwide did not have differential implications for or impacts on women and men. It was quite usual for them to ignore colonization itself! Likewise, development theory did not pay any attention to gender differentials, at least in the field of economics. The history of “underdevelopment” only seemed to have a male workforce and male actors in general. With exceptions in the field of anthropology, women’s lives, work, and contributions and the impacts on them of development policies and programs were ignored. A major turning point in this gender-blind scenario came, however, with the publication of Ester Boserup’s book Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970).

This chapter argues that the work of feminist economists (and their colleagues in other disciplines) since the publication of Boserup (1970) has challenged theories and policy prescriptions of mainstream development economics in fundamental ways. Concepts and analysis developed by feminist writers are rooted in the material and ideological basis of gender power and inequality, and its implications for the distribution of income, wealth, and work in economy and society. At the same time, feminists have explored the links between gender and other bases of power and inequality such as, inter alia, economic class, race, and ethnicity. Although feminist development economics began with the idea that women are marginalized from the economy, a view that still finds its champions in mainstream development discourse, it has evolved beyond that to challenge core concepts in both micro- and macroeconomics.

This chapter discusses three of these challenges in particular and shows how the work of feminist economists has advanced development theory and policy. We focus on (i) changes in the conceptualization and accounting of work, (ii) the links between reproduction and sustainable development, and (iii) feminist approaches to globalization and macroeconomics. There are of course a number of other areas also where feminist economics has made major contributions, as argued by other chapters in this volume.

Development economics is at its core a practical field driven by the compulsions of policies and programs. This has naturally affected how feminists have contributed to the field. In developing the arguments in this chapter, we highlight the synergies among feminist theoretical and empirical work, advocacy, and activism. These links advanced analysis by grounding it in the lived realities of women, and fed concepts and analysis into advocacy and activism in fruitful ways.

The early years of feminist development economics

A Danish economist who had worked with the UN and had traveled extensively as a researcher in the Global South, Boserup (1970) wrote an informative description of many aspects of development with regard to women. The book soon became a basic starting point for those who were interested in what became the “women and development” field. Focusing on Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the topics in the book were many: the differential impact of colonialism on women and men, the gender division of labor and the reasons behind differences across continents, male and female migration, the concentration of women in domestic unpaid work, and others.

Boserup’s empirical work and theoretical underpinnings posed a challenge to traditional development economics influencing subsequent research in the 1970s. Her book’s strength lay in the hitherto ignored empirical realities it uncovered. It made women visible and pointed out the many differences in women’s work across countries and regions—and the structural factors affecting them. One of the book’s main points was that women, despite their strong involvement in the economy, had been ignored by colonial and postcolonial development policies. Boserup argued that women had to be integrated into the process of development. This message was meant to open avenues for women without posing any challenges to orthodox economic thinking about development or to development policy itself. It gave rise to the Women in Development (WID) approach of the 1970s founded on the thesis of women’s supposed marginalization and need for integration (Miller and Razavi 1995).

Feminist critics of traditional development theory and policy (Benería and Sen 1981, 1982) countered this approach. They argued that, far from being marginal, women were indeed integrated into development but at the lower ends of unequal political and economic systems, in invisible and disadvantageous spheres that often place them outside what is normally seen as “the economy” and “development.” This critical approach argued that what had to be questioned was development itself, and its processes of capitalist accumulation and class differentiation that reproduce inequalities of wealth and income, building on and deepening historical divides based inter alia on gender, race, caste, or ethnicity. By foregrounding capitalist accumulation and class differentiation as key concepts in describing the economy, this critique challenged the dis-equalizing nature of the economic system. This is usually left unchallenged by orthodox economics, although a rich vein of feminist anthropology had by the 1970s already produced descriptions of the relations between different forms of property, inequality, and gendered divisions of labor (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Reiter 1975).

Another key concept came from the work of feminist anthropologists and other social scientists who developed the concept of reproduction as a determining factor in women’s lives (Edholm, Harris, and Young 1977). This work had a profound influence on feminist development economists. The fruitful interaction was based on a recognition that reproduction is at the core of gender inequality across societies. Women’s concentration in the domestic sphere within households and their responsibilities for childbearing and rearing, for caring for people’s daily subsistence needs, and for the ill and infirm (biological and social reproduction) cut across countries and regions. Reproduction is crucial in shaping the division of labor, gender norms in their multiple expressions, and institutions oppressive to women. Importantly, reproduction shapes women’s role in production and their role in the economy (Benería 1979). The interaction between production—with corresponding processes of capital accumulation and class formation—and reproduction is crucial in explaining inequalities and differentials in the processes of development. As Sen (1995, 12) argued,

women stand at the crossroads between production and reproduction, between economic activity and the care of human beings… . They are workers in both spheres—those most responsible and therefore with most at stake, who suffer most when the two spheres meet at cross-purposes, and those most sensitive to the need for better integration between the two.

The concepts of production and reproduction thus comprised the core of an alternative feminist view on women and development that questioned “development” itself and the model that sustained it, including the orthodox economic model that prevailed in most countries. It was not only a question of integrating women in development. The system that sustained the relations of production and reproduction could be acted upon and be changed to promote gender equality.

Changes in the conceptualization and accounting of work

An important spin-off from the feminist focus on reproduction was the emergence of a challenge to how economics conceptualized work. Important contributions to feminist thinking of the late 1970s and early 1980s were about the invisibility and undercounting of women’s work in national accounting and labor statistics (Benería 1981; Waring 1988). Women’s unpaid work became an important focus of feminist analysis, regarding both the meaning of work itself and the absence of women in conventional statistics on labor force and national income. Despite its toll on women, which Palmer (1995) called the “reproduction tax” on women, domestic work and other nonmarket tasks done by women were not recognized and classified as part of the economy. An initial reluctance, even hostility, on the part of economists and other social scientists as well as of institutions to accept the need to estimate unpaid work was countered by women, who saw it as a basic issue worth struggling for. Feminist analysis also had its counterparts in activism as in the “wages for housework” campaigns of the 1970s and in continuing advocacy at the International Labour Organization and national governments over time-use data (Jain and Banerjee 1985). These ideas found their way into feminist advocacy in different forums, not least of all the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. Advocacy to “recognize, reduce and redistribute” unpaid care work (Elson 2017) continues. Over the years, it has been one of the successful battles fought on many fronts. The “accounting for women’s work project” has led to the implementation of time-use studies in a growing number of countries and with some regularity and creation of household satellite accounts that highlight the importance of unpaid care work (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Floro, this volume).

In this process, the central importance of reproduction for feminism saw a transformation in its analytical use, increasingly focusing on the care economy. Folbre’s book Who Pays for the Kids (1994) was important in the shift at the theoretical and empirical level. It was preceded and followed by much work on the extension and depth of the care economy. For instance, the analysis of care work, including the influential concept of the “care diamond” (care provision by the household, the market, civil society, the state) and its implications, has been central to a great deal of feminist economics across countries of the Global North and South from the 1980s till today (Jain and Banerjee 1985; Carrasco, Borderias, and Torns 2011; Floro and Komatsu 2011; Esquivel 2012; Razavi 2012; Pearson 2019). Using estimates of the time spent on care work, and the unequal distribution of this work between women and men, it has been a continuation and large expansion of the Accounting Project of the 1980s and 1990s and it has contributed to the generation of data on all aspects of the care economy, with many implications for policy at the micro and macro levels. In the context of more rural economies of the Global South, feminist economists have shown that domestic work includes unpaid activities such as care of kitchen gardens and animals, as well as fuel, water, and fodder collection (Sen and Sen 1985). Such activities are not only outside traditional economic accounting of work and labor force statistics but also differentiated by the economic (including landholding) status of the household, highlighting thereby the intersections of gender, economic class, and caste. Wide variations across regions in traditionally measured female work participation rates decline dramatically when women’s unpaid work is counted. For example, regular estimation of such domestic work through India’s national statistical system has created a robust time-series of paid and unpaid work (Bhattacharya 1985; Mukherjee 2012).

Reproduction and sustainable development

The feminist focus on the “crossroads of production and reproduction” led in two linked but distinct directions—environmental concerns about the sustainability of growth and development, and a paradigm shift in population policies—in both of which feminist analysis, advocacy, and activism have played a critical role. Once again, as with their interactions with anthropologists in the 1970s, feminist economists reached across disciplinary boundaries to create common ground with ecologists and with health specialists. The urgency of these attempts was catalyzed by growing concerns about the links between uncontrolled economic growth and such challenges (to name only a few) as pollution, soil and water degradation, desertification, loss of forests, resource depletion, ozone holes, and, not least of all, the rising temperatures of the atmosphere and the oceans leading to climate change. Feminists engaged with these challenges in numerous ways, developing new concepts and analysis. Their work combined critiques of the rapacious misuse and overuse of nature in the course of capitalist accumulation with the importance of reproductive labor for ecological sustainability.

Feminist ecological economics grew rapidly in the years after the 1992 Rio Summit, with contributions from many. Jochimsen and Knobloch (1997) connected industrial production, ecological processes, and care work through the limited autonomy, asymmetry, and dependence characteristic of the latter. Bennholdt-Thomsen (2001) and Halme, Jasch, and Scharp (2002) built on feminist economic ideas to argue for the ecological sustainability of subsistence production and home-based services. Perkins (2007) argued that feminist ideas of unpaid work and caring labor contained the seeds of how to transition to equity-enhancing economic systems with lower material throughput. Agarwal (1994) and Deere and León (2001) linked gender inequalities in assets and property, especially land, to unsustainable use of resources and the problems of reproduction. They undertook analysis to show that the crises in livelihoods and survival brought on by the current phase of capitalist globalization and neoliberal agendas have especially difficult consequences for women, including through its damaging impacts on subsistence environments. Women are not only more vulnerable to these effects because of unequal access to resources and incomes but also under increasing pressure to ensure subsistence and survival as ecological stresses erode traditional methods to assure household livelihoods (Sen and Grown 1987; Randriamaro 2014).

As with the re-conceptualization of work, researchers interacted with advocates and activists. By way of illustration, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) linked feminists across the Global South and North, included many scholar-activists, and played a key role during the E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Core concepts and frameworks
• Part II Methods, methodology, and measurement
• Part III Resources for provisioning
• Part IV Institutions and policies
• Part V International governance and social provisioning
• Index