The gendering of a discipline
Padmini Swaminathan
The context
For almost all students of economics, Adam Smith is the father of economics with Smith’s publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 being considered a watershed moment. Unlike others before him, Smith increased the scope of political economy to address wider societal concerns, all of which in some way or other impinge on an economy’s ability to function efficiently and productively. Over the years, the father and his brand of economics taught across the globe have come in for criticism from various quarters, not least from ‘feminist’ economists. These critiques have contributed in no small measure to enriching the discipline apart from making it ‘relevant’. This article seeks to elaborate simultaneously on the themes of what constitutes the concerns of ‘feminist economists’ as well as why the ‘relevance’ of what passes for the subject-matter of ‘mainstream’ economics has increasingly been called into question not just by ‘feminist economists’ but by others as well.
It would be pertinent to begin with how a teacher, Duncan K. Foley, of a course on the ‘Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy’, ended up writing a book titled Adam’s Fallacy in 2006. The theme of ‘self-interest’ is foundational in economics and forms the basis of what generations of students of economics have come to believe as constituting the cornerstone for the functioning of competitive capitalist markets, for fostering progressive technical change and for producing material wealth. While Foley does not call himself a ‘feminist economist’, nevertheless, the converging point of Foley and of feminist economists lies in their critique of the notion and application of self-interest. The “Economic Man’ in neo-classical economics is an autonomous individual who behaves selfishly in the market place; indeed his self-interest is what drives him to compete with other similarly placed selfish individuals enabling the capitalistic system of growth to flourish. What feminist economists have questioned is the contrasting behaviour, namely altruism, assumed for these same individuals when it comes to analyzing their behaviour in the family.
‘Rational behaviour or rational choice approach’ is another tenet that characterizes mainstream economics; a maximizing trait that is assumed to inform choices that individuals make not just in the market place but also within marriage. And so we are informed by ‘New Home Economics’ scholars such as Gary Becker (1991) that the feminist critique of the sexual division of labour is misplaced since the gender labour specialization wherein the woman specializes in (unpaid/unrecognized) household work while her husband works in paid labour in the market is in fact an optimal arrangement since it is efficient and beneficial to both and the household!
All economic research dealing with women or gender is not necessarily feminist economics; a feminist point of view implies a critique of male supremacy, a desire to change it and a conviction that it is changeable. Seen from this perspective, Becker’s ‘rational choice approach’ applied to division of labour in the household instantly reveals the reinforcement of family arrangements that have historically and generally been disadvantageous to women – invisibilizing their social and economic role in the household, even as this role very often militates against their acquiring the relevant social capital and experience to be productive and efficient, if they so choose and opt to be in the market place.
How does the economy and how do economists count women out and render women and their economic role invisible?
Feminist historians (for example, Margo Anderson, 1992) and feminist economists (for example, Nancy Folbre, 1991) have demonstrated very meticulously the origins of statistics as a form of knowledge, traced the history and politics underpinning the manner in which statistics on women and gender are collected; their research reveals the androcentric focus of census categories that years of struggles have failed to dislodge. India, having been a colony of the British, inherited the British classical political economists’ preoccupation with the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. While political correctness over time demanded the dropping of the term ‘unproductive’, its replacement by the term, ‘nonmarket production’ – characterizing largely a wife’s work in the home – implicitly defined ‘nonmarket’ as unproductive. Folbre (1991) describes how the prominent neo-classical economist Alfred Marshall was instrumental in restricting the “Domestic Class” category in the 1891 Census of England and Wales to those employed in paid domestic work. “The most important of all female occupations… is altogether omitted from the reckoning, namely, the rearing of children and the management of domestic life” (Ibid: 473). Nearer home, the women’s movement and the feminist economists among them are still battling this colonial hangover.
In an article outlining how the Indian Census has failed to capture the economic role of women because of the specific connotation of ‘work’ (as constitutive of only remunerative work) used by Census in its zeal to be internationally comparable, Maithreyi Krishnaraj (1990) demonstrates how this definition has resulted in masking the substantive economic activities performed by women with adverse consequences for women and their well-being. Krishnaraj lists out seven categories of work performed by women in rural and urban India. These are (i) wage and salaried employment; (ii) self-employment outside the household for profit; (iii) self-employment in cultivation and household industry for profit; (iv) self-employment in cultivation for own consumption; (v) other subsistence activities in allied sectors like dairying, other livestock rearing such as poultry, goats, pigs, etc., and fishing, hunting and cultivation of fruit and vegetable gardens; (vi) activities related to domestic work, such as fetching fuel, fodder, water, forest produce, repair of dwellings, making cow dung cakes, food preservation, etc., and (vii) domestic work such as cooking, cleaning, care of the children, the aged and the sick. According to Krishnaraj, the present Census definition of work as ‘for pay or profit’ covers only (i) to (iii).
Twenty-plus years since the above article by Krishnaraj, calculations based on data on employment provided by NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) 66th Round, in 2009-10, revealed that our data systems continue to return large numbers of women workers as “unpaid workers”, which category reiterates the listing provided in (iv) to (vii) above. From a feminist economist perspective what needs to be emphasized is not just the disproportionate burden of unpaid work shouldered by women, but equally important, the significance of this work to the economy. Households do not simply supply labour to the economy; rather, in contexts where economic growth has failed to be inclusive, as in the case of India, more and more households are forced to fend for themselves by resorting to different kinds of activities. These activities subsidize the economy since, in their absence, a higher real wage would be necessary to maintain the same standard of living for employees and their families, with consequences for cost structures and wage-profit rates.
Feminist alternatives to mainstream economics
Feminist economists are not themselves a homogenous category. In a useful piece that engages with the question: Is there a Feminist Economic Methodology?, Ingrid Robeyns (2000) makes a distinction between two kinds of feminist economic work, namely, gender economics and feminist economics, which distinction we find very relevant to comprehend the way the discipline of economics today engages with questions of gender. Robeyns points out how feminist research and research on gender have the same domain of study, namely, unearthing the difference a phenomenon makes for men versus women. Feminist research however goes further to explore and make explicit the “existing hierarchies, authorities, norms, traditions and conventions”, and “questions how current (scientific) practices support the status quo, both in society as well as more narrowly in the scientific community.” (Ibid: 10)
We concur with Robeyns when she asserts that gender economics (unlike feminist economics research) uses gender in its thin version: a version where research does not generally go beyond counting women or splitting up figures according to sex.
This thin version that is compatible with mainstream economics does not question or make explicit the implicit power differences between men and women and/or the structures and constraints that enable these power differences to occur and persist. Feminist economics, on the other hand, use a thicker conceptualization of gender which of necessity implies that feminist economists engage in inter and multi-disciplinary discussions.
As illustration, we demonstrate how beginning from a thin version (gender economics) we move on to a thicker version (feminist economics) to highlight the complex set of issues that undergrid data that reveal sex differences in attainments in education, for example. In India, the analysis of literacy levels of the ‘worker’ population from different census reveals a disturbing contrast between male and female workers. While on average, almost 71 percent of the male workers are literate [against 63 percent literacy among males in the population in general], only 36 percent female workers are literate [against 45 percent literacy among females in the population in general]. In other words, while ‘development’ may have increased the work participation rate for females, it has not translated into a greater proportion of literate women becoming workers as has happened in the case of males. What is also of concern is that, this national picture of relatively greater illiteracy among female worker population is repeated in socially and economically developed states such as Tamil Nadu. This statistic connotes our thin version of gender.
In light of the above, the thicker version (feminist economics) asks scholars to also factor in the theme of why employment and education is moving in opposite directions as far as females are concerned in their debates around issues of relatively large numbers of women workers being crowded in low paying jobs and in tasks designated as unskilled. Examination of this phenomenon requires scholars to go beyond systematic gender analysis and select the most appropriate methodology dependent on the context and research question to be answered (in this case why more literate women are not in paid employment) and come up with plausible explanations. Feminists have thus far failed in sensitizing mainstream data collection bodies (largely manned by mainstream economists) to undertake surveys specifically aimed at capturing data that could provide some explanations; micro level studies using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods have revealed a plethora of reasons ranging from lack of childcare support for educated married women, inability of spouse to shoulder household responsibility because of the non-responsibility of his work organization towards social lives of its employees, patriarchal nature of household that frowns upon women working in a context where the male is able to provide decently for needs of the household, etc. The bottom-line here is that mainstream economics and economists consider the above questions as falling outside their domain – as belonging to the domains of sociology and/or women’s studies.
As yet, feminist economics has not had much influence on mainstream practice but as a feminist economist I see it as a lost opportunity for economists to not only gain interesting insights and knowledge, but also to make themselves and their research relevant for the study of the lives of children, men, and women.
Mapping ‘work’: economic significance of ‘unpaid’ work
Feminist scholarship across the globe has a long and rich engagement with the theme of unpaid work, emphasizing in particular how it contributes not just to the economy of households but subsidizes the overall economy as well.
In countries such as India, the themes of poverty and of large numbers of persons working in unorganized sectors and as informal workers complicates the scenario since the disentangling of what constitutes ‘work’, how to characterize such ‘work’ and what value to accord to such ‘work’ is as yet not resolved. Notwithstanding this, what is sorely needed is the recognition of the enormous burden of unpaid work shouldered by large sections of our population, particularly women, whether in rural or urban areas, whether literate or not, whether young or old.
Classrooms consisting of students from diverse backgrounds can contribute significantly to building knowledge and awareness of the gendered nature and burden of unpaid work. It can begin with simple mapping of unpaid work. Students can use as units of analysis the following: their own households, households of their friends, relatives, neighbourhoods, in settings such as a village, different locations within a city, etc. What needs to be captured is the nature of work performed by different members of a family (including school going children and the elderly) on an average day; which part of this work is remunerated, who gets the remuneration, etc. The next step would be to pool together this information and analyze it using categories such as male/female; rural/urban; further classified by age; by marital status; by levels of literacy, etc.
The above data will contribute immensely to students’ understanding of how unpaid work not only contributes to the economy of the household but in fact subsidizes the general economy since in its absence the earning members of the household would have to be paid higher wages for services that they now receive free through such unpaid work.
References
- Anderson, M. 1992. The History of Women and the History of Statistics, Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring, 14-36
- Becker, G. 1991. A Treatise on the Family, enlarged edition, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press
- Folbre, N. 1991. The Unproductive Housewife:Her Evolution in 19th century Economic Thought, SIGNS:Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 16, No. 3, Spring, 463-484
- Krishnaraj, M. 1990. Women’s Work in Indian Census: Beginnings of Change, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25, Issue No. 48-49, December 1, 2663-2672
- Robeyns, I. 2000. Is There a Feminist Economic Methodology? 3rd version, October 14. Downloaded from net on January 14, 2016
The author is Professor and Chairperson of the School of Livelihoods at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. A former Director of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, she also held the Reserve Bank of India Chair in Regional Economics at the same institute. Her publications cover the areas of industrial organization, labour economics, and gender studies. She can be reached at pads78@yahoo.com.
