feminist economics 2

When analyzing the impact on employment, it is important to pay attention to “gendered production networks.” According to Kabeer (2004), those networks coincide with:

• the relocation of manufacturing and work-intensive services to poorer economies;
• the development of certain export-oriented activities constituted as feminized trade;
• the care crisis and international migration movements at a global level (reorganizing global care chains).

These processes, particularly the last one, are related to the care defi- cit that has been caused by the expansion in education, the outsourc- ing of the economy, and important changes in attitude, in parallel with women’s participation in employment in Western countries.

Feminist Views on Women’s Economic Autonomy

Feminism has historically encouraged women to have autonomy and to design their own life projects, independent of their origins and families. This is something that calls for discourse based on individ- ual rights and ownership of one’s body as the only way to guarantee women’s rights and demystify altruism, which has traditionally been associated with femininity. Women’s incorporation in higher education and in the labor market has been an essential factor. Labor rights and union struggle, including the fight against direct and indirect discrimination in the labor mar- ket, and, with increasing strength, the fight for the right to reconcile labor and family life, which has questioned the idea of the “care-free worker,” have also been fundamental factors in the historical feminist quest. Along the way, feminism has flirted with the cultural changes of the neoliberal period, a game that has proved undesirably use- ful, because the neoliberal model has created a context of increasing precariousness and commodification of life (Fraser 2013). Women’s integration in the labor market has not implied automatic liberation, even if, from a historical and comparative perspective, it has served to challenge rather than consolidate patriarchal structures. Many of the current debates are connected with the historical discussion on the relationship between patriarchy, capitalism, feminism, and workers’ struggle.

With regard to non-salary incomes, FE demands the dismantling of the myth of the democratization of finance that has led to finan- cialization and to the attempt to infuse women with an entrepre- neurial identity through neoliberal discourse, such as “display your own creativity” or “be your own boss.” The promotion of microcredits has been the spearhead of this attack, which was violently directed against women, and presented as both a magical recipe to overcome poverty for those on the periphery and an escape route for those at the center. But people who were thus activated could not find a job afterwards Microcredits have been harshly criticized for becoming a mechanism to channel into the formal fi- nancial structure monetary sums that had previously been outside They have increased women’s work over- load, considering that they are carrying out both paid and unpaid work. They have vitiated women’s support and solidarity networks by making everyone responsible for everyone within the group. They have neutralized criticism of strong gender discrimination within the labor market. Jain and Elson identified a fundamental credit bias linked to women’s growing but unfavorable participation in the financial markets: women are almost always debtors, instead of cred- itors, and they are at a clear disadvantage. The overrepresentation of African-American and older women among the victims of subprime mortgages has been denounced by, among others, Gálvez and Torres (2009).

A social and solidarity economy is also presented as an alternative to women’s economic autonomy. It develops markets that are not profit-driven, but are based instead on the principles of solidarity, common good, reproduction, self-management, the priority of col- lective well-being, and reorganizing work according to its social con- tent. However, a specific effort is required reduce the sexual division of labor and to socialize and revalue care. A social and solidarity economy is also associated with the creation of community exchange spaces, such as barter and time banks, and it is actually a response to neoliberal commodification strategies 

In brief, the critiques and proposals of feminist economics can be summarized as follows:

1. The dominant understanding of the economy is determined by patriarchal epistemology and by a historically based social construction that is organized according to the main power relationships. This is reflected in the basic androcentric bias of economic discourse.
2. A feminist break with the dominant conception of the economy is proposed. This break will affect criteria for validating knowledge, subject-object relationships, and the purpose of the study of “eco- nomics.” This break will also make visible what is deemed “non- economic” and thus has been made invisible.
3. Feminist economics also requires an epistemological break from the understanding of gender as a simple “variable” in economic analyses. Gender should be understood as a central category in the analysis and, consequently, as a defining element of the global functioning of the economy. For this purpose, it is necessary to introduce a vision of gender at the intersection of multiple power and inequality axes, such as class, race, ethnicity, age, and func- tional diversity.
4. From this double break, it will be possible to build new concepts around the very notions of economy and well-being and to move towards a reduced emphasis in economic analysis on markets and an increased focus on living standards and social provisioning.
5. This widened perspective on the economy and on gender calls for new transdisciplinary methodologies adapted to the new object of study through the establishment of partial and contextualized points of view. Feminist economics rejects that opposite approach in which methodology has determined what is relevant to study.
6. The objective of defining this new object of study and implement- ing this new methodology is not only analytical. It also implies an ethical-political commitment that opposes inequalities and that favors a debate on the kind of life we human beings want to live, the coexistence model we want to develop, and the way we can organize our life in common to build a future where realism can be combined with justice in recognition and access.

There are new challenges on the horizon that feminisms in general and FE in particular need to confront: the new technologies and the changes that the fourth industrial revolution may impose on the way we relate to work and employment, as well as the changes this will bring to our lives and to political participation; new consumption patterns and the formation of identities according to the new mystique of femininity; the interrelation of gender with women’s roles as employees, carers, consumers, and agents of political change; increasing inequality among women and the problem of building feminist collective agency; and the need for multiculturalism in contrast with the universal narrative. Faced with these new scenarios, it is necessary to create spaces for dissidence and political courage, and to contradict the limited and limiting com- mon sense that says that everything fair and good is impossible.