feminist economics

Feminist economics is a school of economic thought and political action that gained important visibility during the 1990s, although its origins can be dated back to the mid-19th century. Since then, feminist economics has developed its own concepts, analytical frameworks, and methodologies. With gender as a central category, it seeks a more integral and humane comprehension of the economy and of the processes of inclusion and exclusion taking place in it. In addition, feminist economics has grown into a political practice that aims at improving the functioning of the economic system so that all people can have access to a dignified life on the basis of equality.

Mainstream research agendas in law, economics, and political science usually treat the premises of neoclassical economics as universal and indisputable truths. They regard the free market and competition as guarantees of both efficiency and productivity, a good reason for this model to prevail over any other, both in academia and in political institutions. These arguments are often based on extremely complex and technical discourses and methodologies that make it difficult for nonspecialists to participate in the discussion and offer alternative views. Researchers outside the mainstream lack the platforms to com- municate and/or disseminate competing views and a solid commu- nity or power structure to support them. This is true even after the 2008 economic and financial crisis, with its devastating social effects, opened a window of opportunity for the reevaluation and criticism of neoclassical economic principles and the development of an alterna- tive research agenda based on the principles of equality and solidarity.

Feminist economics is not a single body of ideas, but a “range of stances” (“abanico de posicionamientos”) (Carrasco 2014: 25). Those stances meet in their common understanding of the economy as a method of “social provisioning” (Nelson 1993, 1996; Jennings 1993; Bakker and Gill 2003; Power 2004, 2013). They also place gender as a central category of analysis. On the one hand, FE is a theoretical and empirical framework that challenges the androcentric foundations of the main school within the discipline as well as the principles of certain unorthodox schools that keep alive a “short-sighted produc- tivism” (Picchio 2009: 28). The centrality that the fulfillment of social needs has for FE implies a questioning of those approaches that con- tinue to focus on market performance, growth, or production. Those goals make invisible the processes and resources that are essential for the social reproduction of life and are not mediated by monetary valu- ations. Thus, the general objective of FE is to transcend a reductionist, biased, and hierarchical vision and to create new economic concepts that place people’s daily life in the center. On the other hand, FE is an ethical-political framework for social transformation and for the construction of an economy that functions on the basis of justice and equality. For this purpose, we suggest specific and immediate actions (in politics, firms, and households) as well as alternative long-term goals.

The term “feminist economics” was first used at the beginning of the 1990s, although the economic analysis of the many inequalities between women and men started much earlier and adopted vari- ous forms. As shown by feminist studies carried out by specialists in the history of economic thought, the concern about the situation of women in the economic sphere was already evident in the 17th and 18th centuries (Pujol 1992; Gardiner 1997; Folbre 2011). However, economic issues only became prominent during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, within the framework of the first wave of feminism, when women’s claims of inequality became more explicit in relation to labor issues, property rights, and inheritance laws. Some of the key authors of that period were Jane Marcet, Harriet Taylor, and Millicent Fawcett of the classical British school; Charlotte Perkins Gilman on labor economics; Mary Paley Marshall and Clara E. Collet of the neoclassical school; Beatrice Webb on the ethics of economic models; Margaret G. Reid on family economy; and Anna Wheeler and Rosa Luxemburg on socialist thought.

For orthodox Marxism, the issue of women was an important topic from the beginning, although a subordinated one. Neoclassical eco- nomics dealt with women’s participation in the labor market, human capital, and the division of domestic work since the 1950s (Benería 2018). Some decades later, during the second wave of feminism (1960s and 1970s), some crucial progress was made on feminist theorization under the slogan “the personal is political.” This had a major impact on all social sciences. Also during those decades, a fundamental crisis took place within modern science as a consequence of acknowledging the epistemological relevance of the historical and social perspective (Hodgson 2007). This had a particular influence on economic sociol- ogy and other heterodox economic schools (Nelson 2010; Dequech 2008; Bögenhold 2010). These two theoretical trends (both in fem- inism and economics) had a clear effect on the takeoff of FE as a separate school of thought, which subsequently developed an import- ant methodological, conceptual, and empirical body of work. In this “awakening,” the need to increase criticism of neoclassical economics was also a driving force. Neoclassical economics had taken a growing interest in family analysis after the development of human capital theory and new family economics. Those two developments legit- imated gender inequalities inherent in the sexual division of labor. Intense critique of labor economics was also undertaken in cru- cial debates on, for example, “comparable worth” and “pay equity” and in challenges to androcentric prejudices found in the main neoclassical hypotheses (Mangum 1988; Ferber and Nelson 1993; Nelson 1996).

Gradually, FE began to gain prominence. Some important mile- stones were the creation in 1992 of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFEE) and the publication of seminal contri- butions like [Conceptualizing the Labor Force: The Underestimation of Women’s Economic Activities  (Benería 1981),  If Women Counted Feminist Economics 141 (Waring 1990), Beyond Economic Man (Ferber and Nelson 1993), and the first volume of the journal Feminist Economics in 1995.] However, all this had little influence on the teaching and research activities in economics departments.

In the case of FE, this exclusion may be even more evident, as proved by the poor dissemination of feminist economic ideas beyond its immediate confines. This, however, has not hindered FE from devel- oping significant methodological and epistemological critiques and from becoming one of the schools most clearly opposing the prop- ositions, approaches, and results of neoclassical economics. These critiques have also defined an increasing number of new topics and methods, opened FE to non-Anglo-Saxon sources and references, and broadened the geographical and historical scope of the field. This expansion of FE has given shape to a broad variety of approaches from a heterogeneous mix of different economic schools (Marxist, radical, post-Keynesian, institutionalist, and ecological) and feminist perspectives (liberal, radical, Marxist, ecofeminist, and decolonizing). It has thus become a wide and inclusive frame of reference that is not only acceptable but highly desirable because it bestows richness and versatility on the debates.

Within this diversity, it is possible to identify several starting points common to all the approaches, according to what Power (2004, 2013) and Benería, Berik, and Floro (2016) have called “methodological con- vergence.” These key points are:

• a more integral comprehension of the processes that support life and social provision, as well as of the processes of inclusion and exclusion, and an understanding of gender as a fundamental category;
• the need to value unpaid domestic work and care-giving; The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
• the use of human well-being as a measure of economic success;
• the implementation of intersectional analysis, taking into consid- eration the different social layers that define people’s lives and identities; the belief in the importance of social action and in the need to incorporate ethical judgments in economic analysis.

FE can also be considered a political practice, which not only brings to light the inequalities generated by the global functioning of the economy, but seeks their transformation and the development of new scenarios where people will have access to a dignified life in conditions of justice and equality. 

common features of the neoclassical paradigm, it is possi- ble to mention the following ones:

• a mechanistic and determinist epistemology rooted in method- ological individualism;

• the artificial creation of an autonomous realm in which economic relationships are separated from nature and social relationships;

• the concept of optimizing rationality, based on individual inter- ests and on the separation of ends and means; and
• the imposition of growth and progress as the ultimate objectives and universal principles of social evolution.

According to this perspective, society will automatically achieve harmony and economic balance among its members provided that individuals are allowed to selfishly pursue their maximum benefit through exchange and competition in the free market. In fact, the ultimate purpose of neoclassical thought is to understand the prob- lems related to choice and exchange occurring in these organized and impersonal markets, especially those concerning individual well- being (utility) or the achievement of maximum profitability. With regard to methodology, it is based on the elaboration of formal mod- els that aim at representing those economic processes in a simplified way, abstracting from human behavior in order to develop mathemat- ical representations that make it possible to establish causal relations among different variables and make predictions. A clear example of this abstraction is the figure of homo economicus eminist economics makes a fundamental critique of the logic of self-interest. This logic has been glorified throughout the history of economic thought without taking into consideration that markets, which are socially constructed, depend on values contrary to selfish interest, such as civility, trust, and the acceptance of laws. In fact, market societies have never been purely guided by markets because they have always rested on the social reproduction of citizens and workers within the family, thanks to the unpaid domestic labor and care work that social reproduction implies. In addition, from a gender perspective, selfish interest has been historically considered “appropriate” behavior only for men. Women have been assigned al- truistic behavior, which is ultimately what allowed them to maintain social reproduction. For instance, Jevons and Marshall emphasized self-interest over group interest, but excluded women from the compe- tition because, should they participate in it, they might abandon their moral obligations towards their families (Folbre 2011). Self-interest is also applied to the sexual sphere, where lust—essential for popula- tion growth and family formation processes—has been reserved for men. Folbre (2011) also argues that this selfishness-altruism polarity has determined the very way in which markets and households have been structured. It also shapes the pattern of what is and is not work, which is linked to the sexual division of labor (Gálvez 2016).

It is necessary to point out that questioning self-interest does not mean that FE is against the idea of the individual or, more specifi- cally, against the need for autonomy. What FE does question is the concept of “independence,” because life is always life in common: people need each other and need care at all stages of their lives, and especially at certain moments of the life cycle. This takes us to a fundamental critique of homo economicus, defined as a self-sufficient, selfish, and rational individual, who is active, has perfectly defined preferences, is not influenced by society, and interacts on the basis of self-interest in an ideal market where prices are the only necessary means of communication. This agent is faced with unlimited desires and limited resources and is always successful in optimizing his/her choices. This figure is used as a universal metaphor of the human being, even if its qualities are those that our culture traditionally as- sociates with hegemonic masculinity, while it lacks everything that is traditionally associated with femininity: feeling, body, dependence, community, abnegation, tenderness, nature, unpredictability, passivity, and connection (Marçal 2016). In other words, this figure symbolizes the privileged subject of the dominant economic system (white, bour- geois, male, adult, heterosexual, with no functional diversity, urban, and Western), transforming the rest of the population into the “other.” More specifically, it is an effective way to exclude women as politi- cal-economic subjects.

The insistence on this agent’s preferences and free choices has very clear gender connotations that may aggravate the discrimina- tion women suffer in various spheres—what feminist philosophy has called the “patriarchy of consent” (Puleo 2000). Free choice is a myth not only because information is imperfect, but especially because not everyone has the same freedom of agency when it comes to choos- ing, given that it is limited by material preconditions and determined by differentiated socialization processes (Nussbaum and Sen 1993).

Ultimately, people’s real opportunities are defined by their different and unequal positions, which make them enter the market in very different ways and make their preferences adaptive (Elster 1983). In other words, values, norms, and preferences are not given, and it is possible to explore how they coevolve in different economic contexts in time. The capabilities approach—inspired by the propositions of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and revised by FE authors such as Ingrid Robeyns (2003)—is a crucial input because it focuses on the conditions that make it possible for people to be effective in doing and being. It represents a critical response to the neoclassical approach, which is based on the economy of well-being. It also critiques any position that is focused only on income and expenditure, according to the utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number.

With regard to the neoclassical method, feminist economics consid- ers it rigid and axiomatic and argues that it narrows the possibilities of the object of study. Obviously, mathematical formalization is not a problem in itself. The problem is that, in order to use it, these models transform ideas about human behavior into axioms, omitting relevant social details on the pretext of “looking at what really matters.” The process of abstraction is understood as a full guarantee of objectivity and scientific validity. FE argues that this method is by no means “pris- tine.” From the statement of the hypothesis, through the measurement and valuation of the data, to the analysis of contrasts, all stages are strongly influenced by preexisting value judgments, social context, and the ideology of the subject in charge of the study. Therefore, the production of knowledge is neither objective nor neutral, but biased and value-laden. In addition, concepts built on methodological indi- vidualism are stratagems of exclusion, which avoid the use of qualita- tive methodologies and contact with other disciplines.

In the last few decades, we have witnessed the development of a new form of “economic imperialism” (Lazear 2000). It has transferred neoclassical fundamentals to multiple spheres of social analysis in the belief that certain basic terms, such as opportunity cost, maximizing behavior, stable preferences, and market balance, may, with slight changes, be used to understand all forms of human behavior. There have been attempts to address economic inequalities between men and women from this perspective, although androcentric prejudices have remained unaltered and have even been reinforced through the inclusion of women via an assimilation strategy known in feminist literature as “add women and stir” (Harding 1986; Hewitson 1999).

There are two basic types of neoclassical analyses addressing gen- der issues, according to Harding (1986): “equity studies,” which con- sider the absence or underrepresentation of women economists, and “feminist empiricism,” which treats women as objects of study. With regard to this second field, research on women’s economic position has come to occupy a relevant position, given the growing participa- tion of women in the labor market and the greater importance given to laws promoting equal opportunities.

One of the first contributions to the second field was the “new fam- ily economics,” developed by Gary Becker in the 1970s, together with human capital theory. Becker’s contributions necessarily led to an em- phasis on the relevance of family decisions and to an acknowledg- ment of domestic work when explaining labor supply models (Becker 1981). From this perspective, investments in human capital made by individuals are necessarily preceded by investments made by their communities (mainly through public investment in education) and their families. However, families were analyzed as individuals who, just like homo economicus, seek their self-interest outside the house- hold, while they behave altruistically inside to reduce the possibility of conflict. New family economics took on these ideas, together with some notions on specialization and comparative advantage borrowed from international trade theory. The family was thus transformed into an economic unit that makes rational decisions seeking its self-inter- est in the most efficient way. Every member specializes in activities in which they have a comparative advantage: men in the labor market, women in unpaid domestic work and care for family members.

Becker’s model of gendered specialization was then used to ra- tionalize and legitimize discrimination against women in the labor force. If women had lower salaries than men, this was due to the fact that they had invested less in human capital (education and experi- ence). Obviously, women’s lower salaries reduced their differentiated opportunity cost (of not working for money income) in relation to men, and made their decision to specialize in unpaid domestic and care work seem rational. The argument was, therefore, circular: women earned less because they were specialized in domestic work, and they specialized in domestic work because they earned less in the market. The sexual division of labor was thus scientifically justified by failing to consider two important factors: 1) it was a completely static approach that ignored long-term changes in the needs of people and families, and 2) it imposed a penalty, in terms of loss of autonomy, on people who specialized in domestic work should the harmonious family unit split up (Blau, Ferber, and Winkler 2001). This Beckerian “voluntary” discrimination model later evolved towards statistical dis- crimination models in contexts of imperfect or asymmetric informa- tion, but the androcentric assumptions remained intact, hindering any progress in the ultimate comprehension of gender discrimination (Jacobsen 1994; Humphries 1995). It is precisely this androcentrism that FE has tried to break with, creating substantial epistemological, methodological, and political fractures.