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Feminist economics is a field that includes both studies of gender roles in the economy from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the content and methodology of the economics discipline. It challenges economic analyses that treat women as invisible or that serve to reinforce situations oppressive to women, and develops innovative research designed to overcome these failings. Feminist economics points out how subjective biases concerning acceptable topics and methods have compromised the reliability and objectivity of economics research, and explores more adequate alternatives.

The Origins of Feminist Economics

Feminist economics in its contemporary form began in the 1970s in response to the prevailing pattern of labour market and household studies. Up until the 1960s, women and women’s traditional activities had been subsumed into the ‘black box’ of the household within neoclassical economics. Neoclassical theory had been defined as the study of choices made in markets by rational, autonomous actors. A household was generally understood to be represented by its male ‘head’, whose preferences, it was assumed, determined household labour supply and consumption decisions. The household was assumed to enjoy a single utility level, and activities within the household were classified as ‘leisure’. Studies of paid labour generally focused on men only, and household production was (and is still) excluded from national accounts. Women, women’s traditional activities, and the well-being of women and children were invisible.

During the 1960s, issues of labour market discrimination by race and sex began to be debated. The idea that household activities might include unpaid work as well as leisure also gained ground. The New Home Economics school sought to extend rational choice theory to intra-household decisions. Often, however, work by economists on these issues simply defended traditional sex roles in the family, women’s segregation into a narrow range of paid occupations, and women’s lesser earnings in the paid labour market. In general, neoclassical economists of the time argued that the prevailing patterns resulted from rational choices, with variations between men and women due only to presumably innate differences between men and women in tastes and abilities, often expressed in different choices about human capital formation. As well, circular reasoning was used: women’s lesser market earnings were used to explain their specialization in household work, and women’s household responsibilities were used to justify their lesser market earnings. While these works recognized women’s existence, they were not feminist in that they served to rationalize rather than explore and question women’s assignment to second- class status and financial dependency.

A key distinction feminist economists make is between sex, understood as the biological difference between males and females, and gender, the social beliefs that society constructs on the basis of sex. While traditional economists saw household and labour market outcomes as reflecting only sex differences, feminist economists raised the question of how much these outcomes might, instead, reflect misleading stereotypes and rigid social constraints. Some works called into question, for example, the ideas that specialization in household work would be an optimizing choice for a woman (given rising divorce rates) or that it would necessarily yield greater household well-being than other, more egalitarian, arrangements (Ferber and Birnbaum 1977; all references given in this article are examples from larger literatures). Others emphasized the role of discrimination in limiting women’s labour market opportunities (Bergmann 1974) or the interplay of household and workplace power relations (Hartmann 1976).

In actuality, as the equal rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s loosened many of the legal restrictions and social norms that had artificially narrowed women’s educational and job choices in a number of countries, women moved increasingly into the labour market and into formerly all-male occupations. Surveys of women’s economic history, economic status, and progress towards gaining economic equality have since been undertaken for many countries and regions, along with surveys of policies related to gender equity. Recognition of the importance of social beliefs and power structures in creating gendered economic outcomes has remained a hallmark of feminist economics.

The Critique of Mainstream Economics

While feminist were originally dissatisfied with mainstream economic scholarship because it neglected and distorted women’s experiences, by the late 1980s feminists were also advancing a more thoroughgoing critique. Many feminist economists were finding that traditional formal choice-theoretic modelling and a narrow focus on mathematical and econometric methods were a Procrustean bed when it came to analysing phenomena characterized by connection to others, tradition, and relations of domination. Feminists began to raise questions about the mainstream definition of economics, its central image of ‘economic man’ and the exclusive use of a particular set of methodological tools.

Essays on this theme were brought together in a 1993 volume, Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Ferber and Nelson 1993). In this volume it was suggested that economics be defined by a concern with the provisioning of life in all spheres where this occurs rather than only in markets. Investigations were undertaken into how a particular set of professional values, emphasizing culturally masculine-associated factors such as autonomy, separation, and abstraction, had come to take precedence over culturally feminine-associated factors such as interdependence, connection, and concreteness. The contributors argued that, rather than taking the former as a sign of ‘rigour’ in the discipline, the truncation of methods created by masculinist bias had weakened the discipline’s ability to explain real-world phenomena. Questions were raised about mainstream economics not because it was too objective but because it was not objective enough.

A conference held in Amsterdam in 1993 further developed this theme, and contributed innovative discussions on economic methodology (Kuiper and Sap 1995). While many feminist economists continue to make use of traditional mainstream tools, on the whole the field has come to be characterized by the inclusion of a broader range of concepts and methods. Theories of human behaviour that include a balance between individuality and relationship, autonomy and dependence, and reason and emotion are being developed (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 2003). The use of historical studies, case studies, interviews and other qualitative data, as well as greater attention to issues such as data quality and replication in quantitative work, are being explored (Bergmann 1989; Nelson 1995). Feminist economists tend to find that such serious efforts to create and promote more adequate forms of economic practice lead to new insights across the board, whether or not the topic being studied is explicitly gender-related.

The Formation of a Field

With the publication of a number of books and articles, and gatherings at early conferences, feminist economics coalesced into an organized field in the early 1990s. The International Association for Feminist Economics was formed in 1992, and its journal, Feminist Economics, commenced publication a few years later (Strassmann 1995). The field was first described in a journal of the American Economic Association in 1995 (Nelson 1995), an encyclopedia of feminist economics was published in 1999 (Peterson and Lewis 1999), and a review of developments during the first ten years of feminist economics was published in 2003 (Ferber and Nelson 2003).

International and wide-ranging in scope, feminist economics now includes work on a number of subjects, including topics in microeconomics, macroeconomics, history, and philosophy.

Labour, Households and Care

True to its roots, feminist economics continues to develop analyses of gender roles in labour markets and households. Many studies of women’s paid labour supply, labour market discrimination, and the origins of occupational segregation have been undertaken. Some feminists make use of mainstream theories or econometric models to examine the wage gap between men and women and its possible explanations. Other feminist economists raise questions about the ability of such tools, used alone, to shed light on the underlying causes of inequality, and encourage increased investigation into the social, political and institutional structures of gender and labour markets (Bergmann 1989; Rubery 1998; Figart et al. 2002).

Studies of unpaid work within households have sought to obtain quantitative measures of this labour and to increase the attention paid to unpaid work in the design of policies (Waring 1988; Ironmonger 1996). The issue of valuing this work remains controversial among feminists. Some feminists endorse the use of replacement cost or opportunity cost methods of assigning dollar values to unpaid household labour. Others argue that these methods lead to understatement because the wages used in such imputations have been kept artificially low by discrimination. Still others believe that this issue serves to draw attention away from women’s lack of access to real money and power.

Issues of intra-household distribution and decision-making have been investigated by many feminist economists. The dramatic effect of skewed intrahousehold distribution by sex in countries such as China, India and Pakistan has been brought to public attention (Sen 1990). Bargaining models (McElroy and Horney 1981) have been developed as one way of bringing women’s agency within households to the fore. Issues concerning marriage, divorce, fertility and the wellbeing of children have been investigated from feminist perspectives. A number of feminist economists go beyond choice-theory-based bargaining models to examine legal, social, and psychological issues related to intra-household decision-making and well-being (Sen 1984, ch. 16; Agarwal 1997; Wheelock et al. 2003).

Much of women’s traditional work in sex-segregated occupations (such as nursing and childcare) and within households can be described as ‘caring work’. Caring work presents a challenge to mainstream economics since the traditional image of ‘economic man’ is of an autonomous, self-interested individual who neither requires care nor has any inclination to provide it. The conceptual and empirical study of work with dependency, emotional or other-regarding components has recently become a field of active investigation for many feminist economists (Folbre 1994; Himmelweit 1999; Folbre and Nelson 2000; Bettio and Plantenga 2004).

Feminist economists have developed critiques of theories and policies that assume that economic agents are unencumbered prime-age workers, and that delve into the economic problems of elderly women, parents of young children, and lone mothers who are faced with simultaneous responsibilities for income generation and family care (MacDonald 1998; Albelda et al. 2004).

Development, Macroeconomics and National Budgets

Feminist economists have also made innovations in the analysis of national and global economies. Studies of the effects of including unpaid production in GDP (Wagman and Folbre 1996) and the analysis of government budgets according to their effects on gender equity (Budlender et al. 2002) have become well-developed fields.

Feminist economists have challenged the definition of economic development in terms of industrialization and GDP growth, drawing attention instead to issues of growth in human well-being and capabilities (Elson 1991; Benería 2003; Agarwal et al. 2003). Many have studied the changes in women’s status that have come about during transitions from socialism and during other forms of macroeconomic restructuring (Aslanbeigui et al. 1994).

The effects of macroeconomic policies of structural adjustment and the liberalization of global trade and finance have been looked at from a feminist point of view (Çagatay et al. 1995; Grown et al. 2000). For example, programmes that prescribe macroeconomic belt-tightening through cutbacks in health care often have their most immediate impact on women, as women are expected take on, unpaid, the work of providing services no longer provided by governments. Men and women may also be affected differently, depending on the degree to which they work in subsistence or traded sectors. Women’s employment in subcontracting firms has also received considerable attention (Kabeer 2000; Balakrishnan 2002).

History, Philosophy and Teaching

As well as investigating the history of women’s economic activities (Humphries 1990) and the history of economic thought in relation to women (Folbre 1991; Pujol 1992), feminist economists have looked at the history of women and feminists within the economics discipline itself (Dimand et al. 1995). The most recent national studies indicate that women are still under-represented in the top ranks of academic economics (Booth et al. 2000), receiving tenure less frequently than men even when factors such as publications and family are controlled for (Ginther and Kahn 2004). Sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and inhospitable environments are among the barriers yet to be overcome in some departments and universities (Ginther and Kahn 2004).

Feminist economists have also engaged in philosophical discussion concerning the epistemological and methodological foundations of economics in dialogue with postmodernist, post-colonialist, critical realist and other perspectives (Barker and Kuiper 2003). Feminists have also explored comparisons of aims and methods with various heterodox schools of economics including institutionalist economics (Waller and Jennings 1990), social economics (Emami 1993), radical economics (Matthaei, and Post Keynesian economics (Danby 2004).

Regarding the teaching of economics, feminist economists have investigated how the content of economics courses can be made less biased concerning women (Feiner 2004), how courses can be enriched by feminist re-evaluation of theories and methods, and how pedagogy can be adapted to better reach students with diverse backgrounds and learning styles (Shackelford 1992; Aerni and McGoldrick 1999).

Feminism and Other Concerns

Feminist economists have also analysed how such factors as race and caste (Brewer et al. 2002) and sexual preference (Badgett 2001), in interaction with gender, affect economic outcomes.

Feminist economists’ scepticism about the adequacy of the image of ‘economic man’ has also stimulated new thinking in areas other than gender relations. The analysis of relations of power and of care, first generated by study of women’s work and family relations, has been extended to the subject of interpersonal relations among people economy-wide (Nelson 2005). Feminist explorations into ecological economics examine how natural processes, like women, have been treated as invisible and freely exploitable in traditional economic thought (Perkins 1997).

See Also