Keywords

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly worsened the challenges that women face in participating in the economy and in public life on an equal basis with men. The Impact of COVID-19 on Women–a policy brief released by the United Nations–observes that the pandemic will likely reverse many of the limited gains made in achieving gender equality in the past decades (UN Women, 2020a). The worsening of gender disparities in the economic domain, which has been observed worldwide, has been particularly acute in the case of developing countries such as India. In the case of India, the downward slide in women’s economic participation started well before the pandemic. The participation of women in the workforce in India which was among the lowest in developing countries had come down from 34% in 2006 to 23.4% in 2019 (Kingo, 2020). With the onset of the pandemic the rate of female labour force participation in the country further plummeted to an abysmal 16.1% (Kumar, 2021). This was well below the global average which was 46.9% (Catalyst, 2021).

This paper presents a broad overview of some of the main underlying factors inhibiting women’s economic participation in India, it outlines some of the ways the pandemic has impacted the workforce participation of women in the country and it suggests certain interventions to address this challenge.

Overview of Economic Barriers Facing Women

Despite impressive progress made in enhancing the participation of women in the public domain over the past many decades, the pandemic has once again brought into sharp relief those structural barriers that continue to impede the economic participation of women. Underlying these barriers has been the gender division of labour which is a fundamental feature of patriarchal societies where women have been unjustly burdened with the responsibility of attending to the unpaid work of caregiving and household management which includes managing and carrying out the various functions that go into maintaining a household such as feeding, cleaning and cooking.

Every society has had to have an arrangement for taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves and to perform the routine, mundane drudgery-prone tasks that need to be carried out on a daily basis. While both care work and domestic work are necessary, they demand that the individuals performing them at least partially put aside their individual wishes and aspirations for the sake of caring for and serving others. The caregiver has to often spend many years tending to the needs of those who are recipients of their care which places limits on their freedom to follow their own aspirations and goals or pursue activities of their own choosing. Similarly domestic work involves a high degree of drudgery and monotony which deprives the individual of opportunities to engage in work that is creative and stimulating in nature. In a just society, these functions would be divided equally among its members irrespective of gender and those who perform them will be appreciated and compensated. However, patriarchy resolved this paradox through what feminists call a ‘gender division of labour’. An entire segment of society belonging to a particular gender—women—were assigned the functions of serving and caring for others which was made to be the centrepiece of their gender role and their prime-most duty to society. As feminist economists have observed, there is no biological basis for assuming that women are uniquely or exclusively equipped for performing these functions. The only functions that women can perform which men cannot are giving birth to a child and breast-feeding. All the other forms of domestic work and care work can be performed by any human being irrespective of sex.

Since these functions were ostensibly duties ordained for women by nature, their performance of them was not considered to require compensation or gratitude. These forms of work remained unremunerated and by extension unvalued. Thus a woman’s efforts are not recognised as ‘work’ but rather are seen as her duty which she is required to perform in pain of punishment. Indeed, unmet expectations related to women’s care responsibilities remains one of the main causes of domestic violence faced by women (Oxfam, 2019). The oppression of women was thus naturalised and built into the structure of society.

Although over the past century the participation of women in the public domain and in the economy has vastly improved, yet the influence of patriarchal structures continues to persist throughout the world including in India. In cases where women have entered the workforce, they are expected to still be responsible for managing the household and providing unpaid care. While they can delegate such work, women are still considered the one responsible for managing it. When the tension between responsibility for the home and the work place becomes unmanageable, women are often expected to prioritise their domestic responsibilities given the gender stereotype that maintains that a woman’s primary responsibility is to her home.

One of the implications of the fact that a woman’s work largely remains unpaid in contrast to men is that often even the productive economic activity that women engage in are not recognised or remunerated. Women carry out a range of productive economic activities in the handicraft and handloom industries as unpaid family workers’ that remain unrecognised. When men carry out these same activities, they get paid for it. For example, in a home-based enterprise, the woman of the home might be engaged in offering much of the labour but it is usually her husband who sells the product or service since as a man it is easier for him to navigate and negotiate with the market. When government surveys are conducted, he would be recognised as the owner of the enterprise while his wife would be referred to as a housewife with no recognition of her contribution, no matter how skilled and valuable it be. Not only are women’s economic contributions of this kind often not recognised, her productive role is not respected. It is seen as an extension of her household duties. Even in the case of women entrepreneur-led businesses in the cottage industries, handicrafts and handloom production, women usually get neither credit nor the forward and backward linkages with factor markets and forward linkages with the product markets (Narasimhan, 2020).

When women do enter the workforce, their labour tends to be undervalued and they are paid less for the same work that a man would do. Women also end up having significantly lower reservation wages which is the minimum wage at which they are willing to work. A 2019 Oxfam report found that in India women earn on an average 34% below men (Oxfam, 2019). The work that women did, tended to be lower status and there were fewer women who made it to leadership positions at the top levels of organisational hierarchies.

The influence of women’s gender role leads to occupational segregation within the labour market. Women get clustered into certain occupations which usually involve providing services similar in nature to their functions of caregiving and household work. Nursing, primary school education, primary health care work and hospitality are some examples of such sectors. These occupations usually tend to be low-paying, relatively low-status jobs (Banerjee, 2019).

Gender Norms and Unpaid Care Work

The social and cultural structures of society are geared towards pushing women into stereotypical occupations that are extensions of housework and away from other kinds of career choices which would be considered unconventional for a women. Due to the need to accommodate their domestic and care-related responsibilities, women are also more likely to move towards work that have a flexible schedule, are temporary or part-time and less likely to be considered for highly competitive or demanding jobs in the formal sector that require the commitment of long hours and fixed schedules. Recent political debate on ‘wages for housework’ has also betrayed the mindset of caging women in the domestic arena (Khaitan, 2021). Surveys have found that employers in the formal sector prefer not to hire women. This in part explains why a mere 6% of the women in the labour force in India are employed in the formal sector. When women become mothers they are even less likely to be hired by prospective employers due to a phenomenon that economists refer to as ‘the motherhood penalty’. Mothers are ‘hired and promoted less often, and generally receive lower salaries’ due to a perception that they are ‘less competent and committed’ (Patnaik, 2021).

Labour Processes and Labour Relations in the Informal Sector

The majority of the woman in the workforce are employed in the informal sector carrying out work which in the words of one observer ‘lacks the dignity of labour, social security, decent and timely wages and in some cases, even the right to be called a ‘worker’’ (Banerjee, 2019). The fact that the large majority of working women in India are in the informal sector and that there is a poor coverage of women-centric issues in the labour laws of the country leaves working women in India with little or no social protections or legal protections. This despite the fact that they are more exposed to various forms of harassment, violence, hazardous work conditions, unsafe living and work conditions and the lack of housing and sanitation. A woman street vendor, for example, has to work for 12 to 14 h on the streets in unsafe conditions under the constant threat of being harassed by other vendors, passers-by or petty officials and without access to clean and safe toilets, even when she is pregnant or going through her menstrual cycles. Rampant sexual harassment of women workers in the informal sector has been reported (Ahmad, 2020).

Need for Formalisation of Informal Sector

A solution that has suggested for women in the informal sector is to formalise their work. However, this ‘solution’ presents its own set of challenges. In cases where a woman is self-employed, such women-owned enterprises are run with very limited capital and the expenses involved in formalisation of their enterprises can make their very enterprise unviable. Such an effort can also entangle them in complicated legal procedures which they lack the ability, time or resources to address. In many cases, it can make them prey to overregulation and to exploitation by low-level officials seeking bribes in exchange for permits. In cases where the woman is working for an employer, the formalisation of her work can make it less likely for prospective employers to hire her due to the higher costs and increased regulations that come with formalisation. In any case, labour laws can be manipulated to suit the interests of the employer, undermining the very purpose of formalisation.

Gender Blindness in the Design of Policies

There are various types of structural barriers that inhibit a women’s participation in the economy. Patriarchal attitudes and mindsets can make what is an easy and simple task for a man into a formidable challenge for woman. Such mindsets can be seen when women deal with male officialdom that does not take them seriously and denies them access to what is owed to them. It can be seen among male peers who feel threatened by or resentful towards the woman who relate to them as equals in the workplace. It could be within the family where a working woman is expected to give up her work in order to take care of additional care work or to avoid competing for status with men in the household.

In many cases these structural barriers arise from gender blindness in the design of policies. Policies related to the design of transportation systems are a case in point. Mobility is one of the most fundamental requirements for a woman to be economically independent. This requires that policies that design public transport in rural and urban areas be responsive to the unique trip-chaining patterns of women which caters to their life experiences of facing greater insecurity outside the household and having to reconcile their work and caregiving responsibilities. This is not the case with the way systems are presently designed.

Another example of such gender blindness in policies can be seen with the recently-issued four labour laws. These laws fail to acknowledge women as workers in their own right (Mazumdar & Neetha, 2020). Feminists have criticised these laws for completely ignoring issues of vital concern to women such as the gender pay gap and sexual harassment at the workplace which require grievance redressal mechanisms.

Urgent Need for Gender-Disaggregated Data

What obscures women’s presence in the economy for policy makers and legislators is the non-availability of accurate gender-segregated statistics. In the absence of gender-segregated data not only are their particular challenges not made visible, their very status as ‘workers’ is put into jeopardy. For example, on the issue of migration, the fact that there was no data on women labour migration meant that gender was not incorporated in development approaches to internal migration (Mitra, 2019). Similarly, in the agricultural sector women contribute greatly at every stage of the farming process. Yet a farmer is perceived to be the person who owns the land and in patriarchal societies men continue to be predominantly the ones to own and inherit land. Thus, the farmer is always assumed to be a male member of the household. Women farmers are not identified as farmers. One consequence of this is that the women farmers who commit suicide due to accumulated debts do not get counted in the list of farmer suicides. Their families do not receive the compensation that the State otherwise provides in such cases.

This phenomena of the invisibilization of both the contributions that women make and the challenges that they face is the reason feminists call for policies and legislations to be gender sensitive. Yet, even where policies are designed with the interests of women expressly incorporated into them, the bureaucracy of the State composed mostly of men steeped in patriarchal mindsets can pose impediments to their implementation. Attitudes of dismissiveness, paternalism and nonchalance towards women and their issues among middle level or local level officials are widespread—especially to those from poor, rural and marginalised communities.

In many countries around the world including in India women face legal barriers to their economic participation. These barriers are reinforced by discriminatory attitudes and social norms. A World Bank study found that throughout the world women have only three quarters of the legal rights that men possess (World Bank, 2021). Even if they do have the rights, a host of other challenges make it difficult for them to access justice. The daunting challenge legal systems pose to women is well described by Okoro and Prettitore (2020):

(W)omen frequently lack the financial resources and social networks to navigate justice systems. Social norms, which often are more restrictive than laws, may prevent them from taking legal action. And even when they do act, gender-biased public officials may undermine them. And women who must already balance family care with formal and informal jobs may lack the time to go to court. (para. 7)

With particular reference to the economic domain, women face structural impediments that limit their ability to own, access, and control productive assets. Ownership of assets has a significant bearing on an individual’s ability to generate income, have access to credit and cope with and respond to shocks. Even in cases where legally, women can inherit property, due to cultural mindsets in most cases properties and land are passed down to male members of the family. On the other hand, in cases of crisis, it is a women’s assets such as jewellery and small animals that are the first to be sold.

In the last few decades, feminist movements have pointed out that efforts that seek to advance the conditions of women in the public domain will have limited impact if they do not recognise how gender intersects with these other marginal identities of caste, race, class, tribe, ethnicity and religious identity. Patriarchy is intrinsically connected with other social structures. Menon and Vora (2018) interviewed legendary feminist activist the late Kamla Bhasin who describes this interconnectedness of social structures which she learned to appreciate early on in her career as a development practitioner:

As I worked at the grassroots in Rajasthan, I increasingly found that amongst the poor, women were poorer. Amongst Dalits, women were more Dalit. Amongst the excluded, women were more excluded. …We cannot talk about class without recognising how it affects men and women differently in a gender unequal society. Similarly, we can’t get rid of patriarchy without getting rid of caste or race because all these structures are connected. (para. 7)

Recognising and addressing intersectionality of gender with other identities has implications for the economic participation of women as well. In her study on the Maharashtra government’s decision to ban bar dancing in 2005, Sameena Dalwai points out that while feminist groups opposed this ban due to the loss of livelihoods to around 75,000 women, for Dalit feminists the issue was the perpetuation of the dominance of a ‘Brahminical patriarchy, and its hegemonic ideas of women’s chastity and sexuality’ (Dalwai, 2019, p. 20). Bar dancers were mainly lower caste women who came from traditional dancing communities in North India who can be seen as ‘performing their castes’. The fact that these women were earning well upset the traditional caste, class and gender boundaries which provoked a moralistic backlash from the State as a defender of upper caste values (Dalwai, 2016).

The Gendered Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

For women in India, the various obstacles that they faced in participating in the economy prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were steeply exacerbated with its onset and the consequent government-imposed lockdowns which went on for many weeks. The loss of jobs on account of the pandemic has hit women much harder than men. According to a McKinsey report, women’s jobs were 1.8 times more vulnerable to the crisis than men’s jobs. Globally, although women make up 39% of the workforce, they account for 54% of overall job losses (McKinsey & Company, 2020). According to one study, women were seven times more likely than men to lose their jobs during the lockdown phases. Among those who lost their jobs, women were 11 times more likely to remain jobless than their male counterparts (Abraham et al., 2021).

Those sectors which are disproportionately represented by women as a result of occupational segregation have witnessed massive job losses during the pandemic. These include health care, hospitality and education. Not only are the jobs held by women more vulnerable, they also hold a greater share of the professions most at risk during the pandemic such as frontline health care workers, nurses and the providers of social services. By one estimate up to 70% of frontline healthcare workers such as nurses, ayaabais (housemaids), sanitary workers and doctors most exposed to the virus are women putting them at greater risk of infection (Patel, 2020).

In most cases where women have been compelled to drop out of the workforce during the pandemic, they have been driven to do so by a significant increase in unpaid domestic care work. According to a recent survey, the pandemic increased the time women spend on family responsibilities by 30% in India. It wasn’t surprising that India’s position in the 2021 Global Gender Gap Index published by the World Economic Forum slipped 28 places compared to 2020 to rank 140th out of 156 countries. In addition to caring for children, the sick and the elderly at home, women ended up being responsible for children who are staying home due to the closure of schools and day care centres. Shedding light on this phenomenon, a recent report by UN Women (2020b) observed:

Data from the rapid assessment surveys also shows that, in all countries, women are more likely to see increases in both unpaid domestic and unpaid care work since the spread of COVID-19. In addition, they are also more likely than men to say they are in charge of performing all three activities: unpaid childcare, unpaid adult care and unpaid domestic work. On the contrary, men tend to concentrate on tasks like shopping for the household, making repairs and playing with children, which are overall less time-consuming. (para. 11)

Of those who have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic, women far outnumber men. A larger number of small and nano enterprises run by women have shut down during this period. Women are also among those who are most vulnerable as a result of the social and economic impact of this crisis. Those who fall under the most vulnerable category include women-headed households, people with disabilities, pregnant women and homeless people, lonely elderly, socially stigmatised transgender community, sex workers, prisoners, and inmates in overcrowded shelter homes, and makeshift tents. Those in the informal sector that employs a vast majority of women, were particularly vulnerable and badly hit. Daily wage labourers, head-loaders, construction workers, street vendors, domestic workers, small-scale manufacturing workers in recycling, scrap and garment industries, and others who managed their survival by earning daily wages had nothing left due to unemployment and confinement to their homes for over a month (Ratho, 2020). The status and condition of women among the millions of migrants who under very trying conditions walked to their homes during the pandemic remains unclear and undocumented due to the absence of gender-segregated data.

The pandemic has also sharpened male biases and prejudices that hold back women from participating in the public domain. Due to the high incidence of male unemployment caused by the pandemic, women were discouraged from competing with men for work because, as mentioned earlier, the man is seen as the primary bread winner and the woman is at best a supplementary earner. According to a global World Values Survey, more than half the respondents in many countries in South Asia and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) agreed that men have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce (McKinsey & Company, 2020). This phenomenon is seen both in rural and urban settings. In villages, with men returning from the cities after the lockdown, women were discouraged from participating in public employment schemes so that men could take their place.

The pandemic also exposed the new vulnerabilities of women which had repercussions for their ability to join the workforce or run their own enterprises. During this crisis, digital inclusion became critical for people to access critical health services, government welfare schemes, opportunities for education, civic participation, employment, and financing. Access to smartphones, a computer and an internet connection became a critical necessity for survival with crucial services related to health, vaccinations, livelihoods, education and security being offered mainly through digital means. At such a time, only 14.9% of women in the country were reported to be using the internet. The low penetration of the internet among women was attributed to the low levels of digital literacy, the relatively expensive costs of acquiring a smart phone and internet access and preference being given to male members of the family for internet access.

For women, the loss of employment opportunities and income were only part of the challenges that this health crisis brought. The basic well-being and security of millions of women was placed under severe duress during this period. The increased stress in the domestic setting caused by factors including the loss of livelihoods and income contributed to the sharp rise in domestic, sexual and gender-based violence during the pandemic which turned into a shadow epidemic. In cases where husbands lost their jobs and became unemployed, the risk of domestic violence was seen to be much higher.

With families losing their livelihoods and being pushed into debt traps, the cases of the girl child being given away in marriage and their consequent underage pregnancies shot up dramatically. Similarly, poverty led to the loss of food and nutrition security which again disproportionately impacted women. The increasing malnutrition and hunger among girls and women during the pandemic–which has gone largely unnoticed–is perhaps the cruellest manifestation of this discrimination. Girls and women eat the last–and the least–in the home. With the loss of income, families cut down on sources of nutrition such as vegetables and milk and the worst hit by this are women. The pandemic also caused an increase in girl and maternity-related deaths due to the lack of access to medical facilities that have been overwhelmed by addressing the needs of COVID-19 patients. Finally, this crisis led to the large scale drop-outs of girls from school education. Currently more than 10 million girls are out of school due to the closure of schools and colleges after the lockdown (Trivedi, 2021). Given that the digital divide is far more pronounced in case of girls and women, only a small percentage of girls have access to online education platforms. Being forced out of the education system in turn has exponentially increased their vulnerability to child-marriage, human trafficking and forced child labour (International Labour Organization, 2020).

The combined effect of job losses, the loss of income and the loss of physical, social and psychological well-being has been truly devastating for India’s women pushing them into a condition of far greater precarity than men.

The Path Forward

Addressing the issue of unpaid care work and domestic work that women are burdened with as part of their gender identity is fundamental to addressing the issue of declining female labour force participation. This is especially relevant in the post-COVID-19 scenario where the burden of unpaid care work has significantly increased. Recognising the significance of this issue, political parties during state elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Assam included in their electoral promises cash transfers to married women as a payment recognising the value of their care work and domestic work. However, feminists criticised this policy stating that it would lead to further consolidating the existing gender stereotype which places the burden of this work on women (Khaitan, 2021). They also pointed out that with patriarchal structures unaltered within the family, the money would still be under the control of men in the household. Overcoming this challenge, required in part that care work and domestic work be valued and recognised for its immense contribution to social, economic and psychological well-being of society as a whole. Boys and men should be encouraged and incentivised to take on an equal share of this work between boys and girls or women and men within the family. The decision about how to divide the work of the home should be the result of an open consultative process within the family and not an imposition based on gender. As the economist Ashwini Deshpande put it, ‘there is a domestic sphere and the public sphere and all adult individuals have the capability to do [activities pertaining to] either and it should be their choice’ (as cited in Khaitan, 2021, para. 27). Similarly, while the tremendous value of care work and household work needs to be appreciated, technological means must also be employed to reduce drudgery-prone and hazardous tasks.

The State has a vital role to play in providing the infrastructure that can reduce this burden of unpaid work for women and creating a safe and wholesome environment for them to work. This would include the provision of better housing, toilets, electricity, sanitation, access to running water, clean fuel and more efficient and safe transportation systems. It would also include programmes that ensure food and nutrition security, provide childcare facilities, ensure maternal and child health, helpline facilities and shelter homes for protection from domestic violence.

On the other hand, when policymaking is not gender-sensitive, the State can also add to a woman’s burden of care work and domestic work by adopting fiscal austerity measures that cut down on the State provision of care services, that lead to the rise in prices of essential commodities through implementing regressive forms of taxation and the fall in household income due to pay cuts or job losses. These have a direct impact in increasing a woman’s burden of unpaid care work and their management of households dealing with the implications of less income and rising prices.

To ensure that policies are gender sensitive, feminist economists have called for the integration of the gender perspective into government policies and the design of government programmes at the inception stages (Dewan, 2019). When policies are considered, it will be necessary to take into view their impact on the most vulnerable sections of society such as women working in the informal sector who neither have access to social protection nor is their identity as a ‘worker’ legally recognised. While the gender perspective is integrated in plans and programmes, it will need to increasingly be considered in tandem with class, caste, tribal and religious identity to gain a more granular understanding of the ways patriarchy and other social structures come together to place barriers in the path of women’s economic participation.

Gender-sensitive policy making will require that women’s legal identity be established as a ‘worker’ and her contribution and the issues she faces will need to receive increasing attention through the gathering of gender-segregated data. This includes the unpaid economic work that women do.

Apart from reducing the burden of unpaid care work that women shoulder, responding to the COVID-19-induced drop in female labour force participation will require that more work opportunities be opened for women. In this regard, an unprecedented contraction of the Indian economy as a consequence of the pandemic and the lockdowns has meant that demand for goods and services has steeply reduced due to which job opportunities in the private sector have significantly reduced. The State offers various schemes that provide employment and opportunities for entrepreneurship. Given the depressed state of the market, schemes aimed at encouraging women entrepreneurship and skill development are not likely to bear fruit in the immediate future due to the lack of demand. In such a scenario, the most promising option for female labour force participation in rural areas is from Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Generation Act (MGNREA) which provides wage employment. To ensure the greater participation of women in this programme, creche facilities need to be provided. In urban areas in the absence of a similar employment-guarantee scheme, an expansion in the employment of women under government programmes and departments is called for (Mitra & Sinha, 2021).

The role that women themselves can play in taking charge of their own development through grassroots action has received much attention from social scientists and development practitioners. For women, especially those among the most marginalised such as rural poor or those in urban informal settlements, experience from the world over has shown that the formation of collectivities allows them to achieve greater well-being. Where individual action has little or no chances of making a difference, movements towards the formation of collectives have shown to raise the income levels of women, give them access to credit, enhance their self-respect and sense of agency––giving them more confidence in challenging structural inequalities and oppressive social norms–– and increase their ability to represent their concerns and influence outcomes in their relations with the agencies of the State, the market and within the home. Although the history of collectives has been littered with failures and mistakes, Agarwal (2010, p. 65) argues that collectives continue to provide a powerful means for ‘rural poor especially women to become agents of their own empowerment’. However, to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, she suggests that they incorporate ‘significant elements of a human rights-based approach to development, especially equity, accountability, participation and the empowerment of vulnerable groups’ (Agarwal, 2010, p. 65).

At the macroeconomic level, ensuring that women participate more fully in the economic life of society would require that economic models be based on equity and justice and not on a narrow emphasis on economic growth. As is widely recognised among economists, policies that place singular emphasis on economic growth to enhance Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exacerbate the exploitation of labour of whom women are the most vulnerable segment. In the Indian context, with the progressive dilution of labour laws guided by the adoption of neo-liberal policies, firms and employers have been able to extend work hours, reduce wages, cut down on the provision of social securities and require workers to work in increasingly hazardous conditions. Women who provide the ‘reserve army of labour’ can be hired without a contract or job security. They are willing to work for lower wages, are willing to do work involving monotony and drudgery; they can be given work that is hazardous and they are less likely to fight back oppression or to form unions. This model of the economy, which valorises economic growth, encourages men to work longer hours in pursuit of greater productivity since this would make them more competitive in a highly insecure job market. This in turn implies that women end up having to shoulder an even greater share of the work at home.

Thus, the participation of women in the economic life of society clearly requires the transformation of policies, social structures, institutions and cultural traits that are based on, or shaped by, patriarchal assumptions. Through a long-term process of sustained action and reflection the learning will need to be generated about weeding out such unjust systems, patterns of thought and behaviour and building a more gender-just society. Yet, justice requires not just that women be given an equal part in participating in the present economy–which is itself in crisis for being unjust and unsustainable. The unconscionable levels of disparity between the rich and the poor and the rapid deterioration of the environment and the Earth’s climate that are the fruits of a consumption-driven model of economic growth indicate that a fundamental rethinking of the way economic life is organised and arranged is urgently needed. The dominant economic thinking which is based on the conception of homo economicus—a utility-maximising, self-interested and perfectly objective individual who corresponds to a masculine stereotype is being vigorously questioned. In a world which is rapidly transforming and where the challenge is to move towards higher degrees of interconnectedness and diversity, to establish justice, to overcome the challenge of anthropocentric climate change or the unmanageable levels of disparity between the rich and the poor, increasingly economic researchers will have to find new ways of organising economic activities that have more just, environmentally-friendly and unifying outcomes. Such efforts will need to draw upon humanity’s heritage of learning to build relationships with an other-regarding and altruistic orientation which are based on love, trust, cooperation and mutual support. It is arguable that millennia of experience have prepared women to make their unique contribution to such an effort. Thus, to build a more united and just world, women would need to not only be invited to participate more fully in the current economy but also to contribute their perspective to rebuilding the economy on a more humane and just basis.