Feminist economics

• 1. Introduction

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  Feminist economics begins with a provocation: the entire system we use to measure economic reality is built on a foundation it refuses to see. In 1988, Marilyn Waring published If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, a book that exposed how national accounting systems treat the unpaid work of billions of people as though it never happened. Julie A. Nelson, writing in the foreword to a 2014 anthology about Waring's influence, put it plainly: Waring showed exactly how the unpaid work traditionally done by women has been made invisible within national accounting systems, and the damage this causes. The questions that followed from that book have shaped an entire discipline. Who counts in economics? What counts as work? And what do we lose by leaving so much out? Betsy Warrior posed a version of these questions even earlier, in a 1969 text later published in the Houseworker's Handbook, arguing that women's domestic labor is the very foundation of all economic transactions and survival, yet remains unremunerated and excluded from GDP. Those two provocations, separated by nearly two decades, sit at the heart of what feminist economics is trying to do.

• 2. Founding a Discipline

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  Ester Boserup's 1970 book Woman's Role in Economic Development delivered the first systematic examination of how agricultural transformation, industrialization, and structural economic changes affected women specifically. Her evidence revealed the negative outcomes these changes produced for women, and her work helped establish the broad claim that women and men weather macroeconomic shocks in different ways. Employment equity measures followed in developed nations across the 1970s through 1990s, though they proved only partially effective at closing wage gaps even in countries with strong equity traditions. Support for the emerging field built through institutional channels. The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession formed in 1972. Gender-based critiques of traditional economics appeared in academic literature through the 1970s and 1980s. The Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era network emerged in subsequent years, and in 1992 the International Association for Feminist Economics formed, followed by its journal Feminist Economics in 1994. By the 1990s, feminist economics had become recognized enough as a subfield to generate publication opportunities for its practitioners. The founding intellectual document is still widely regarded as Waring's 1988 book, though the field's roots reach back to Warrior's 1969 argument and to Jane Jacobs' thesis of the Guardian Ethic, which sought to explain why nurturing and healing tasks, traditionally assigned to women, were systematically undervalued compared to commercial activity.

• 3. What Economics Left Out

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  Paula England provided one of the earliest feminist critiques of traditional economics, challenging four assumptions that the field took as given: that interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible, that tastes are fixed and come from outside the system, that actors are selfish, and that household heads act altruistically. These four challenges opened a wider front. Feminist economists argued that mainstream economics was not a neutral, objective science but a discipline shaped by particular social beliefs, what Geoff Schneider and Jean Shackelford described as a belief system influenced by ideological factors. Diana Strassmann pressed further, arguing that all economic statistics rest on underlying narratives and that economic research cannot escape being inherently qualitative, regardless of how it labels itself. The field also challenged the omission of power from economic models. Neoclassical texts treated the sale of labor as a mutually beneficial exchange while making no mention of the power inequities that tend to give employers power over employees and that create particular difficulties for women in the workplace. Amartya Sen argued that the systematically inferior position of women inside and outside the household in many societies makes gender a force of its own in development analysis, and that examining economics without it can be misleading. The July 2002 issue of Feminist Economics journal dedicated an entire issue to gender, color, caste, and class, treating these not as peripheral concerns but as central categories of economic analysis.

• 4. Remaking the Economic Actor

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  The neoclassical model of a person, Homo economicus, describes someone who interacts in society without being influenced by society, whose only relevant information is price. Feminist economists challenged this from multiple directions. Nancy Folbre documented how legal rules and cultural norms affect market outcomes in ways distinctly disadvantageous to women, including occupational segregation that produces unequal pay. Folbre also showed that cooperation plays a role in economic life alongside competition. George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, in work that feminist economists cite, developed models of efficiency wages grounded in notions of fairness; in their models, agents experience jealousy, care about personal relationships, and act on fairness considerations rather than purely market forces. The model drew on empirical sociology and psychology rather than abstract theory. Feminist economists also pointed out something the standard model excludes entirely: agency is not equally available to all people. Children, the sick, and the frail elderly cannot act as autonomous economic agents, and caring for them compromises the agency of their caregivers as well. This is a decisive departure from Homo economicus. Institutional economics offered feminist economists one framework for improvement, examining the role of institutions and evolutionary social processes in shaping behavior, with an emphasis on the complexity of human motives and the importance of culture and power relations.

• 5. Measuring What Was Invisible

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  Norway included unpaid household work in its GDP in the first half of the twentieth century, then removed it in 1950 to achieve compatibility with the new international standard of national accounts, a system sponsored mainly by the United Nations but implemented by organizations including the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank. That system explicitly excludes unpaid household services from its production boundary. Feminist economists pushed back. In 2011, a study drawing on time-use surveys from 26 OECD countries found that residents devoted an average of roughly two to four hours per day to unpaid household work. When married mothers combined unpaid household work with paid work, they accumulated 84 hours of work per week, compared to 79 hours for unmarried mothers and 72 hours for all fathers. In the United States, estimates of the economic value of unpaid work range from 20 to 50 percent of GDP, suggesting a value in the trillions of dollars annually. In the United Kingdom, the figure may reach as high as 70 percent of GDP. Nancy Folbre examined children specifically as public goods and the non-market labor of parents as a contribution to human capital development, arguing that this oversight partially results from failing to examine non-market activities at all. Ailsa McKay argued for a basic income as a tool for promoting gender-neutral social citizenship rights, in part to address the invisibility of care work in existing structures. The 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing restated a commitment to the measurement and valuation of unpaid work, with particular attention to care work performed by women.

• 6. Trade, Globalization, and Women

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  Specialization in a single cash crop for export left many African countries extremely vulnerable to price fluctuations, weather patterns, and pests. In countries such as Kenya, men generally controlled earnings from cash crops while women were still expected to provide food and clothing for the household, along with labor to produce those same cash crops. Women suffered significantly from the transition away from subsistence food production toward specialization and trade. Diane Elson, Caren Grown, and Nilufer Cagatay examined how gender inequalities shape international trade and how trade in turn reshapes those inequalities. Lourdes Benería argued that economic development in the Global South depends substantially on improved reproductive rights, gender-equitable laws on ownership and inheritance, and sensitivity to the proportion of women in the informal economy. Nalia Kabeer, drawing on fieldwork from Bangladesh, examined social clauses that would enforce global labor standards through trade agreements; she argued that while some of these jobs may appear exploitative, they can still present opportunities for workers to avoid more exploitative situations in the informal economy. Kumudhini Rosa's study of workers in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and the Philippines, cited by Suzanne Bergeron, showed women in free trade zones using their wages to build women's centers offering legal and medical services, libraries, and cooperative housing. Bergeron argued that traditional accounts of globalization overemphasize the power of capital flows and the uniformity of globalization experiences, depicting the process as dominant, unified, and intentional in ways that are inherently masculinized and misleading.

• 7. Care at the Center

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  Sabine O'Hara argued that care is the basis for all economic activity and market economies, concluding that everything needs care, not only people but animals and things. Riane Eisler proposed social wealth indicators to make the contributions of what she identified as three excluded sectors visible: the household economy, the natural economy, and the volunteer community economy. These are the sectors where most care work is done, and none of their contributions appear in GDP. Randy Albelda showed that responsibility for care work shapes the time poverty experienced by single mothers in the United States. Sarah Gammage examined the effects of unpaid care work performed by women in Guatemala. The Equality Studies Department at University College Dublin, including work by Sara Cantillon, found inequalities of domestic arrangements within even affluent households. Margunn Bjørnholt and Ailsa McKay argued that the 2008 financial crisis and the response to it revealed a crisis of ideas in mainstream economics and called for a reshaping of the economy, economic theory, and the economics profession. Their argument held that this reshaping should take as its starting point the socially responsible, sensible, and accountable subject, and should fully acknowledge care for each other as well as for the planet. Bina Agarwal and Pradeep Panda found that a woman's property status, specifically owning a house or land, directly and significantly reduces her chances of experiencing domestic violence, while employment status makes little difference, pointing to the specific material conditions that shape women's well-being and safety.