The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics 2020048834, 2020048835, 9780367074142, 9780367759896, 9780429020612

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF FEMINIST ECONOMICS

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics presents a comprehensive overview of the contributions of feminist economics to the discipline of economics and beyond. Each chapter situates the topic within the history of the field, reflects upon current debates, and looks forward to identify cutting-edge research. Consistent with feminist economics’ goal of strong objectivity, this Handbook compiles contributions from different traditions in feminist economics (including but not limited to Marxian political economy, institutionalist economics and ecological economics) and from different disciplines (such as economics, philosophy and political science). The Handbook delineates the social provisioning methodology and highlights its insights for the development of feminist economics. The contributors are a diverse mix of established and rising scholars of feminist economics from around the globe who skillfully frame the current state and future direction of feminist economic scholarship. This carefully crafted volume will be an essential resource for researchers and instructors of feminist economics. Günseli Berik is Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, USA. Her research and teaching are in the fields of development economics, gender and development, feminist economics, and political economy of ethnicity, gender and class. She served as Editor of Feminist Economics from 2010 to 2017 and as consultant for the ILO, UNDP, UNRISD, UN Women, and the World Bank. Recently, she worked with the UNDP and UN Women in the development of new gender equality and women’s empowerment indices. Ebru Kongar is Professor of Economics at Dickinson College, USA. Her research focuses on the gendered time-use and labor market outcomes of macroeconomic developments, such as deindustrialization, offshoring and the Great Recession in the US economy. She is Associate Editor of Feminist Economics and a Research Associate at the Gender Equality and the Economy Program of Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF FEMINIST ECONOMICS

Edited by Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Berik, Günseli, editor. | Kongar, Ebru, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of feminist economics / edited by Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048834 (print) | LCCN 2020048835 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Feminist economics. Classification: LCC HQ1381 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1381 (ebook) | DDC 330.082— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048834 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048835 ISBN: 978-0-367-07414-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-75989-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02061-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures x List of tables xi List of contributors xii Prefacexvii Introduction1   1 The social provisioning approach in feminist economics: the unfolding research Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar PART I

3

Core concepts and frameworks

23

  2 Feminist challenges to development economics Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen

25

  3 Feminist political economy Smriti Rao and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

34

  4 Feminist institutional economics Ellen Mutari

43

  5 Conceptualizing patriarchal systems Nancy Folbre

53

v

Contents

  6 Feminist ecological economics Patricia E. Perkins

62

  7 The capability approach Ingrid Robeyns

72

  8 Human rights and feminist economics Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz

81

  9 Care work Katherine A. Moos

90

10 Three faces of agency in feminist economics: capabilities, empowerment, and citizenship Naila Kabeer

99

11 Beyond separative and soluble selves Julie A. Nelson

108

12 Intersectional identities and analysis Nina Banks

118

PART II

Methods, methodology, and measurement

127

13 Feminist use of quantitative methods Joyce P. Jacobsen

129

14 Feminist use of qualitative/interpretive methods Peregrine Schwartz-Shea

138

15 Time allocation and time-use surveys Maria S. Floro

148

16 Measurement of well-being Irene van Staveren

157

PART III

Resources for provisioning

167

17 The feminization of the labor force and five associated myths Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa

169

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Contents

18 Gender discrimination in the US Labor market Heidi Hartmann and Jessica Milli

179

19 Contingent work and the gig economy Deborah M. Figart

189

20 Labor markets and informal work in the global south Alma Espino and Daniela de los Santos

198

21 International trade and women workers in the global south Nidhiya Menon and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers

207

22 Rural women’s livelihoods and food security in Africa Dzodzi Tsikata and Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey

216

23 Global migration and care chains Sarah Gammage

225

24 Sex work and trafficking Francesca Bettio

234

25 Women’s work in post-reform China Xiao-yuan Dong and Fiona MacPhail

243

26 Market reform in transition economies Mieke Meurs

254

27 Environmental resources and gender inequality: use, degradation, and conservation Bina Agarwal

264

28 Poverty İpek İlkkaracan and Emel Memiş

274

29 Family formation in the US and Western Europe Elaine McCrate

284

30 Gender division of labor among couples Lisa Giddings

293

31 Intrahousehold decision-making and resource allocation Cheryl Doss

303

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Contents

32 Assets, wealth, and property rights in the global south Carmen Diana Deere and Abena D. Oduro

312

33 Intimate partner violence Jacqueline Strenio

321

34 Reproductive health and economic empowerment Kelly M. Jones and Anna Bernstein

330

PART IV

Institutions and policies

339

35 Gender and economic growth Stephanie Seguino

341

36 Care and the macroeconomy Elissa Braunstein

351

37 Gendering the analysis of economic crises Jill Rubery

360

38 Degrowth Corinna Dengler

369

39 Care regimes in the European Union Janneke Plantenga

378

40 The fragmented state of work-family policies in the US Randy Albelda

390

41 Care policies in the global south Valeria Esquivel

400

42 Collective bargaining and unions in the US Tanima Ahmed and Ariane Hegewisch

409

43 The quest for inclusion in economics in the US: fifty years of slow progress Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe

viii

420

Contents PART V

International governance and social provisioning

431

44 Group-based financial services in the global south: examining evidence on social efficacy Ranjula Bali Swain and Supriya Garikipati

433

45 The sustainable development goals: reflections from a feminist economics perspective Shahra Razavi

441

46 Global social policy Corina Rodríguez Enríquez

450

47 Gender budgeting Diane Elson

459

48 Smart economics Elisabeth Prügl

468

49 International labor standards and tripartism David Kucera

477

50 Cooperatives Simel Eşim

486

 

495

Index

ix

FIGURES

17.1 Long-run perspective on female labor force participation rates 17.2 Labor force participation rates, 1990–2018, women, men, and total rates 18.1 Timeline of national laws and policies for equal pay, equal educational and employment opportunity, and women’s reproductive rights, 1960–2019 25.1 Labor force participation rates of men and women (%), 1990–2018 25.2 Distribution of women’s and men’s employment by sector, 1991, 2008, and 2018 25.3 Distribution of women’s and men’s employment by employment status, 1991, 2008, and 2018 28.1 Time poverty rates of employed women and men by poverty status (%) 28.2 The incidence of time poverty in Turkey by weekly hours of employment (%) 39.1 Total employment rate (20–64), female-male employment rate, and EU 2020 target, 2017 39.2 Percentage of inactive population (20–64) because of family/caring responsibilities, 2017 39.3 Total amount of post-natal parental leave available to the family in EU Member States, in months, 2017 39.4 Overall amount of well-paid leave available to the family in EU Member States (benefits at least two-thirds of salary), in month, 2017 39.5 Children using formal care as a percentage of all children under age 3, 2018 39.6 Relationship between overall well-paid leave (maternity, paternity, parental leave) and percentage of children using formal care, 2018 42.1 Trend of unionization, 1989–2018. A. Union coverage as a percentage of female, male, and total workers. B. Union coverage by year 42.2 Union coverage by gender, race, and ethnicity, 2018 42.3 Union pension plan advantage of the workers by gender, 2016–2018

x

171 171 184 247 248 249 279 280 379 380 381 382 383 384 410 411 416

TABLES

14.1 Philosophy, methodology, method: Revealing the options on the qualitative side of the binary 143 16.1 Gender Inequality Index (GII) 159 16.2 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) 160 16.3 Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) 162 16.4 The Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) 164 16.5 Gender Equality Index (GEI) 164 19.1 Share of the US labor force in contingent and alternative work arrangements (and female share by category in 2017) 191 25.1 Average time spent on activities by married men and women in 2008 and 2017 (hours/day) 245 25.2 Characteristics and labor market outcomes of urban hukou holders and migrants, 2010 250 25.3 Labor market outcomes of men and women in the rural sector, 1991–2015 251 26.1 Potential and realized poverty rates 259 26.2 Women’s work and supports, selected countries 260 28.1 Change in time-poverty rates through job creation and access to early childhood education and care services (ECEC) in Turkey 280 29.1 Changes in women’s mean age at first marriage and mean age at first birth across different welfare regimes 285 36.1 Growth and social reproduction 355 40.1 Work-family policies and inequality measures in 11 OECD countries 392 42.1 Union coverage and membership by gender, race, and ethnicity, 2016–2018 412 42.2 Characteristics of the workforce and the workers covered by unions, 2016–2018413 42.3 Union wage advantage for full-time workers by gender, race, and ethnicity, 2016–2018415 43.1 Economics bachelor’s degrees conferred by race, ethnicity, and gender (%) 423 43.2 Economics doctorate degrees conferred by race, ethnicity, and gender (%) 424 43.3 Faculty rank by race, ethnicity, and gender, 2001 425 43.4 Faculty rank by race, ethnicity, and gender, 2017 426 xi

CONTRIBUTORS

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment, Global ­Development Institute, The University of Manchester, UK. Tanima Ahmed is Adjunct Professorial Instructor at American University and Consultant at the South Asia Gender Innovation Lab, World Bank, Washington, DC, USA. Haroon Akram-Lodhi is Professor of Economics and International Development Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. Randy Albelda is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Radhika Balakrishnan is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Faculty Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, USA. Ranjula Bali Swain is Research Director at the Center for Sustainability Research and Misum, Stockholm School of Economics, and Professor of Economics, Södertörn University, USA. Nina Banks is Associate Professor of Economics and an affiliated faculty member in Africana Studies at Bucknell University, USA. Lourdes Benería is Professor Emerita at Cornell University, where she taught from 1987 to 2010, and was Director of the Gender and Global Change Program and of the Latin American Studies Program, USA. Günseli Berik is Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, USA. Anna Bernstein is Research Associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank in Washington, DC, USA. Francesca Bettio is Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Siena, Italy.

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Contributors

Elissa Braunstein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Colorado State University, as well as Editor of Feminist Economics. Daniela de los Santos is a sociologist and works as a researcher in the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies, Uruguay. Corinna Dengler is a feminist ecological economist and research assistant at the Department of Economics and Ethics at the University of Vechta, Germany. Carmen Diana Deere is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies and Food and Resource Economics at the University of Florida, and Distinguished Professor at FLACSO-Ecuador. Xiao-yuan Dong is Professor at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, and Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. Cheryl Doss is Professor and a feminist economist based in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, UK. Diane Elson is a feminist economist and is Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, UK. Simel Eşim is a feminist economist currently leading the cooperatives and wider social and solidarity economy portfolio at the International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Alma Espino is Professor at the Institute of Economics of the Faculty of Economic Sciences and Administration (FESA), University of the Republic (UDELAR), and coordinator at the “Development and Gender Area” at the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (CIEDUR), Uruguay. Valeria Esquivel is Employment Policies and Gender Specialist at the Employment Policy Department of the International Labour Organization, based in Geneva, Switzerland, and ­Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. Deborah M. Figart is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Stockton University in ­Galloway, New Jersey, USA. Maria S. Floro is Professor of Economics and co-Director of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics at American University, Washington, DC, USA. Nancy Folbre is Professor Emerita of Economics and Director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Sarah Gammage is Director of Policy and External Affairs in Latin America for the Nature Conservancy. ­ iverpool Supriya Garikipati is Associate Professor in Development Economics, University of L Management School, UK.

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Contributors

Lisa Giddings is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA. ­ conomics Heidi Hartmann is Distinguished Economist in the Program on Gender Analysis in E at American University and Founding President of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC, USA. Ariane Hegewisch is Program Director for Employment and Earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, in Washington, DC, USA. James Heintz is the Andrew Glyn Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Jane Humphries is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Oxford University and Fellow of All Souls College. She currently holds a Centennial Professorship at the London School of Economics, UK. İpek İlkkaracan is Professor of Economics at İstanbul Technical University, İstanbul, Turkey. Joyce P. Jacobsen is President and Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith ­Colleges in Geneva, NY, USA. Kelly M. Jones is Assistant Professor of Economics and a faculty member of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics at American University, Washington, DC, USA. Naila Kabeer is Joint Professor of Gender and International Development at the Department of International Development and Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, UK. Ebru Kongar is Professor of Economics at Dickinson College, USA, and Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. David Kucera is Senior Economist at the International Labour Organization in Geneva, ­Switzerland, as well as Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. Fiona MacPhail is Professor of Economics at the University of Northern British Columbia, in Prince George, Canada. Elaine McCrate is an emerita member of the Economics and Women’s Studies faculty at the University of Vermont, USA. Emel Memiş is Associate Professor of Economics and affiliated faculty in the Women Studies Program at Ankara University, Turkey. Nidhiya Menon is Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, USA. Mieke Meurs is Professor of Economics and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at American University in Washington, DC, USA.

xiv

Contributors

Jessica Milli is the Research Director at the Association for Enterprise Opportunity in ­Washington, DC, USA. Katherine A. Moos is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Research Associate of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute, USA. Ellen Mutari is Professor of Economics at Stockton University in New Jersey, USA. Julie A. Nelson is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Abena D. Oduro is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Ghana in Legon, Ghana. Patricia E. Perkins is Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Janneke Plantenga is Professor of Economics at the Utrecht University School of Economics, the Netherlands. Elisabeth Prügl is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, as well as Co-director of the Institute’s Gender Centre. Smriti Rao is Professor of Economics, Assumption University, and Resident Scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, USA. Shahra Razavi is Director of the Social Protection Department at the International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Ingrid Robeyns is Professor in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht ­University, the Netherlands. Corina Rodríguez Enríquez is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific Research and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Public Policies in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jill Rubery is Professor of Comparative Employment Systems and Director of the Work and Equalities Institute, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK. Carmen Sarasúa is Professor of Economic History at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, as well as Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea is Professor Emerita, Political Science, University of Utah, USA. Stephanie Seguino is Professor of Economics, University of Vermont, USA, Fellow of the Gund Institute for the Environment, and Research Associate, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.

xv

Contributors

Gita Sen is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Ramalingaswami Centre at the Public Health Foundation of India. Jacqueline Strenio is Assistant Professor of Economics and affiliated faculty in the Gender, ­Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, USA. Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey is the Programme Officer for Feminist Africa journal at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Ghana. Dzodzi Tsikata is Professor of Development Sociology and Director of the Institute of ­African Studies at the University of Ghana, Ghana. ­ elations Yana van der Meulen Rodgers is Professor in the Labor Studies and Employment R Department, and in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, at Rutgers ­University, USA. Irene van Staveren is Professor of Pluralist Development Economics at the Institute of Social Studies, the Netherlands. Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe is President of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race, USA.

xvi

PREFACE

We are delighted to have finalized the Handbook of Feminist Economics project we began in ­summer 2018. We set off with the goal of taking stock of the accumulated wisdom on feminist economics from the social provisioning perspective to feminist economics, delineated by Marilyn Power in 2004. Power’s short piece inductively identified common starting points in emerging feminist economics scholarship and traced their roots to institutionalism, political economy, and the capability approach. We consider the social provisioning approach (SPA) as the alternative to methodological individualism and its associated features in mainstream (neoclassical) economics. We asked the contributing authors to review heterodox frameworks and the empirical analyses feminist economists have developed, as well as the scholarship deriving from the SPA, and to identify future research directions in this alternative strand of feminist economics. The Handbook was substantially completed before the Covid-19 crisis. The crisis has starkly brought to the fore the centrality of the SPA, as it illustrated the importance of paid and unpaid care work, the intersectional identities and inequalities in shaping livelihoods and wellbeing outcomes, and heightened awareness of ethical values in guiding research and policy. Restrictions of movement across and within borders highlighted the vulnerability of lives and livelihoods of low-income workers everywhere. Covid-19 also revealed the intertwined nature of environmental and human health and the need to heed integrity and health of ecosystems to avert future pandemics. Moreover, the ensuing public health and economic crisis underscored the failures of the economic system in meeting people’s healthcare and livelihood needs. The International Association for Feminist Economics’ (IAFFE’s) posting of the statement of universal provisioning in early May 2020 and the emerging Covid-impacts research are testimony to the coalescence of feminist economists’ voices around the social provisioning methodology. The brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others catalyzed broader awareness of racism globally and in economics. The unfolding protests and discussion pushed to the forefront scholarship that was on the margins, and underscored the foundational nature of having an intersectional lens and analysis of systems of power—once again confirming the centrality of nonmainstream approaches. The Handbook authors comprise emerging feminist economists as well as established scholars who have led the development of the feminist economics project. We sought to reflect the diversity of backgrounds and disciplinary expertise among feminist economists. We envisioned

xvii

Preface

a 50-chapter Handbook, each chapter at a maximum of 5000 words, to convey the state of the scholarship in this alternative strand of feminist economics in an accessible manner. The Handbook process was arduous, interrupted by intense caregiving demands each of us faced in and since 2019 and another round of disruptions in March 2020 with the Covid-19 crisis. We are grateful to our contributors, who were responsive to our queries and feedback as they submitted one or more revisions. In particular, we salute the remarkably timely turnaround and earnest efforts of authors to comply with the word limit. We would also like to thank the excellent formative feedback of Routledge reviewers of our book proposal, both colleagues—Randy Albelda, Carmen Diana Deere, Valeria Esquivel, Nancy Folbre, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, Irene van Staveren—and anonymous reviewers. The Handbook project was first proposed to us by Emily Kindleysides at the Berlin IAFFE conference in 2015. By the time we started the project, we were in the hands of Natalie Tomlinson, Lisa Lavelle, Kristina Abbotts, and Christiana Mandizha who expertly and patiently supported the project. We thank them and the invisible team tasked with producing the Handbook. We are grateful for the support and care of our families that have enabled us to complete the project. We hope that the contributions in the Handbook will advance nonmainstream feminist scholarship that is relevant to understanding economic issues that affect the lives of diverse groups of women, men, and children around the globe. Our hope is that this scholarship will coalesce to a greater degree with other heterodox approaches to transform the economics discipline, data generation, and policy, and guide the making of an alternative economy that prioritizes the well-being of people and the planet. Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar August 25, 2020

xviii

Introduction

1 THE SOCIAL PROVISIONING APPROACH IN FEMINIST ECONOMICS The unfolding research Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar Introduction From its self-identified inception with the formation of the International Association for ­Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in 1992 and the publication of its journal Feminist Economics in 1995, feminist economics has remained a pluralistic project, encompassing mainstream and nonmainstream feminist economists and feminist scholars from diverse disciplines. Pluralism has served the development of a large body of scholarship, and it may be both expedient and valuable to not interrogate what it means to do feminist economics. Notwithstanding the varieties of feminist economics, in this Introduction, we aim to bring clarity to differing starting points in feminist economic scholarship. We start by affirming the goals of feminist economics as stated on the webpage of Feminist Economics. “The goal of Feminist Economics is not just to develop more illuminating theories, but to improve the conditions of living for all children, women, and men” (www.feministeconomics.org). We believe that improving the conditions of living for all requires dismantling of institutional structures and policies that reproduce or exacerbate gender and intersecting inequalities and addressing the climate crisis. We contend that the social provisioning approach (SPA) in feminist economics outlined by Power (2004) provides useful methodological starting points to analyze and improve the conditions of living for all. In the SPA, economic activity encompasses unpaid work as well as paid work; human well-being is the yardstick of economic success; power differentials, agency, and the processes that generate economic outcomes are part of the analysis; economic outcomes and processes are shaped by gender, which intersects with other social identities; and scholars of feminist economics make explicit their ethical stance in analysis (Power 2004). The contributors to this Handbook discuss the limitations of mainstream (neoclassical) and heterodox (e.g. institutional, radical political) economics for feminist economics inquiry, and many go further to examine the critical feminist economics scholarship that has been produced on the basis of the SPA. While SPA shares features with heterodox economics perspectives, heterodox economics encompasses theories beyond methodological starting points. Moreover, many contributors to the Handbook may not consider their work heterodox, and many mainstream feminist economists may find

3

Günseli Berik and Ebru Kongar

their approach consistent with the SPA. Our goal is to delineate the social provisioning methodology and highlight its insights for the development of feminist economics. The Handbook comprises five parts. Part I evaluates the key concepts and frameworks that draw upon the SPA and have been influential in the development of feminist economics. The goal of this section is to flesh out the methodological convergence flagged by Marilyn Power as “emerging,” and to provide a resource for future feminist economics debates. Part II reviews the methodologies and methods used and debated in feminist economics. Part III focuses on inequalities in provisioning activities at both the household and market levels and the institutions that enable/constrain the ability to secure decent livelihoods. This research showcases the insights that can be gained from situating analysis of gender inequalities in provisioning in macroeconomic and international contexts. Parts IV and V evaluate the policies and strategies for a genderequitable and sustainable future. This Introduction aims to contextualize the chapters of the Handbook in the vast feminist economics scholarship, with very few citations to research outside the Handbook due to space constraints.

The SPA in feminist economics As Power (2004, 7) notes, social provisioning is a classical, not a neoclassical, concept. Specifically, the formative influences on the SPA are the conceptual frameworks of Marx, Veblen, and Sen, namely political economy, institutionalist economics, and the capability approach. The “social” in the SPA highlights the interdependence and cooperation of people in securing their livelihoods on a daily and intergenerational basis and reflects the view of economy as embedded in society. The SPA invites a historically specific analysis that is attentive to social structures and agency of individuals, differentiated by gender, class, caste, race, and other socially assigned identities, who shape economic outcomes through social relations of conflict and cooperation. According to the SPA, promotion of well-being is the end goal and the measure of success of political-economic efforts. Well-being is often conceptualized in terms of capabilities, rather than level of incomes, which are the means to achieving capabilities. Provisioning activities, which take place in a variety of sites (such as the household and the labor market) and through a variety of social relations (such as kinship, market exchange, and citizenship), enable well-being. Incomes are generated not only by wage labor, self-employment, and asset ownership but also by entitlements from the state through citizenship or residency and the community. Incomegenerating activities are interdependent on unpaid activities at the household and community level. Community-level supports include nonmarket (in-kind) sources of provisioning, such as common property resources and solidarity networks. How, and how well, provisioning needs are met depend on the institutional context and the structure of the economy. Macroeconomic policies constrain/enable the prospects for provisioning via markets and social policies that support families in balancing paid and unpaid work, and provide safety nets against unemployment and other shortfalls in provisioning. Collective agency is necessary to reduce inequalities in provisioning, generate resources to meet equitable expansion of capabilities, and change institutional structures of society to support sustainability of life. Globalization and historic systemic changes have drastically altered ways of making a living. These developments include transition from a socialist to a capitalist organization of the economy in the late 20th century in Eastern Europe, Soviet Republics, and China; the emergence of the gig economy; and the unfolding adverse effects of climate change, which are determinative of changes in both the nature of work and people’s well-being. International policy frameworks and organizations constrain/enable the prospects for change toward a fair economy, where no social group is left or pushed behind in their ability to secure livelihoods. By 2020, the language 4

The SPA in feminist economics

of international policy frameworks is thoroughly gender inclusive, but it takes a critical feminist perspective to evaluate the transformative possibilities and limits of this gender inclusivity.

Core concepts and frameworks The broad scope of the SPA in feminist economics underscores the interdisciplinary nature of the scholarship and the desire to not cut off analysis arbitrarily at the perceived (and often rigidly enforced) disciplinary boundary. Economics as a discipline contracted since its emergence in the 19th century to one defined by methodology, becoming identified and formalized as the theory of individual choice. Along the way, not only was the “social” purged from economics but also questions related to the household were shunted into “home economics,” until they were moved into the choice-theoretic framework in the 1960s. Feminist economics critiqued what came to be defined as economics and sought to take back economics. As Nelson (1995) argued, the criteria used to judge “good economics” are masculine-biased, and the remedy to reduce bias is to broaden models, topics, methods, and pedagogy of economics.

Political economy, institutional economics, and feminist ecological economics Feminist critique of mainstream economics draws on Marxist political economy and institutional economics, while simultaneously bringing a feminist lens to these traditions (Hartmann 1979; Albelda 1997). In the early 1980s, feminist critiques introduced the concepts of capital accumulation and reproduction to examine the class- and gender-differentiated outcomes of development processes and policies in the Global South (Benería and Sen, this volume). Simultaneous with Black feminist thought, these critiques laid the groundwork for thinking about intersectionality and transforming economies from the perspective of the most disadvantaged. Feminist political economists emphasized the role of power relations in shaping economic outcomes and placed the economic system that generates inequalities as the subject of feminist analysis. Contemporary feminist political economy builds on and transforms the political economy tradition: it puts reproductive labor at the center of analysis, integrates an intersectional understanding of social groups and broader concerns about “classes of labor” beyond a homogenous working class, and emphasizes human well-being over the expansion of material goods (Rao and Akram-Lodhi, this volume). Analysis of institutions that shape economic outcomes has been the focus of institutional economics that descended from the work of Thorstein Veblen. This perspective has been formative in shaping feminist institutional economics, which examines how gender norms and gendered institutions shape (and are shaped by) gender inequalities in labor markets and the household (Mutari, this volume). Folbre (this volume) proposes a broader analysis of institutional structures that deliver collective power and systematic economic (dis)advantages to members of socially assigned groups. She presents “intersectional political economy” as a conceptual framework to incorporate and analyze multiple forms of group inequalities as part of a patriarchal (capitalist) system that may also be racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and nationalist. She reclaims explanatory power to patriarchal institutions and emphasizes the economic-interest dimension of contemporary struggles against multiple inequalities. The economic system is also the central focus of feminist ecological economics that critiques the unstable and unsustainable workings of the capitalist economy. The core ideas of feminist ecological economics reflect the SPA, as it links gender and ecology in relation to economic activity and examines the relationships between biophysical reproduction and reproductive 5

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labor (Perkins, this volume). Perkins (also Dengler, this volume) argues that a feminist analysis of provisioning is incomplete without considering and valuing un-marketed services of ecosystems and biophysical reproduction. She emphasizes that environmental well-being is intricately linked with human health, and both have long time frames that are in conflict with the short time horizons of profit-making in the capitalist economy.

Capability and human rights approaches A substantial body of feminist economics scholarship has focused on the concept and measurement of well-being, critiquing reliance on per capita GDP as a misleading measure of current and future welfare. GDP per capita leaves out nonmarket activities, reinforces the focus on economic growth, and incorporates output that is harmful to human and environmental health (Waring 1988). As a result, since the 1990s heterodox feminist economists have increasingly embraced the capability approach (CA), developed by Sen and Nussbaum, and the human rights approach. These approaches provide the normative elements that are central to the evaluation of well-being, economic policies, and social arrangements. Robeyns (this volume) argues that the CA substantially overlaps with the principles of the SPA. The CA incorporates unpaid labor as a fundamental economic activity. It conceptualizes unpaid care labor as both a capability—the capability to care and be cared for as ends of a good life—and a resource (an activity) to enable capabilities. Since the units of moral concern or normative evaluation in the CA are individuals, it does not subsume women’s well-being under assumptions of pooled or equally shared household income. Moreover, by acknowledging the social influences that enable or constrain access to resources and shape opportunities and individual choices, the CA provides a superior underpinning compared to the choice-theoretic framework of mainstream economics. Finally, the conceptual shift from means (income) to (nonmonetary) capabilities allows attention to “conversion factors”—differing ability to convert the same income level into capabilities by gender, race, ethnic, class groups. Thus, by providing accounts of what well-being means for different groups and what it takes to reduce inequalities in capabilities, the CA helps construct a case for public policy. More recently, heterodox feminist economists have applied the human rights approach (HRA) that emphasizes promoting all human rights (economic, social, civil, and political rights) for everyone, everywhere. While the HRA substantially overlaps with the CA, it has additional advantages (Balakrishnan and Heintz, this volume): it is a widely accepted international framework, under which some capabilities are identified as a matter of human rights, and delineating rights makes governments (as “duty bearers”) responsible to respect, promote, and fulfill them. The HRA uses the yardstick of realization of economic and social rights (versus capabilities) in evaluating success of economic policies. The principle of non-discrimination and equality underscores government responsibility to address disadvantages based on identity and to ensure substantive equality, beyond establishing a legal framework of equal opportunity. Balakrishnan and Heintz illustrate how the HRA was used by international bodies and nongovernmental groups to hold EU governments accountable for failing to prevent the rollback of rights and for undermining their realization through shrinking budgets after the 2008 financial crisis.

Unpaid care work Feminist economists have long argued for expanding the definition of the economy to include unpaid work in the household. Early Marxist-feminist authors problematized the role of unpaid care work, referred to variously as “housework,” “domestic labor,” or “reproductive labor.” They 6

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argued that women’s work primarily served men while also supporting reproduction of the capitalist economic system (Hartmann 1979). By the 1980s the strand of feminist scholarship that examined economic system-level questions using Marxist labor theory of value subsided, though questions on the importance of unpaid care work remained front and center: examples are women’s unpaid work as shock absorbers in weathering the structural adjustment programs in the Global South (Elson 1991) and the cause of the persistent gender wage gaps and other labor market inequalities (Hartmann and Milli, this volume). By the new millennium, “care work” or “caring labor” took center stage in feminist economic writings with the decline in housework performed in the Global North and narrowing of the scope of domestic labor to the care of children. These developments gave rise to two related feminist debates: whether care, defined narrowly as “nurturant” or “direct” care, should be considered “work” and whether paid substitutes for this type of care labor are commensurate in quality to unpaid care (Moos, this volume). The third-party principle addressed the first question, and a case was made that paid and unpaid forms of care could be commensurable. However, this narrow definition of care is North-centric, since in much of the Global South people continue to meet their livelihoods through a range of unpaid domestic tasks that goes beyond direct care work (Esquivel, this volume). As illustrated in this Handbook, most feminist economic analyses are attentive to care work in its paid and unpaid forms.

Agency In contrast to the optimizing agent of mainstream economics who is devoid of power, heterodox feminist economics places power relations at the center of inquiry. It includes power differentials in shaping economic outcomes as part of economic analysis. For example, in examining gender wage discrimination the analysis incorporates broader institutional constraints, such as gender norms, workplace rules, laws, collective action by employers, and power dynamics in the home. Feminist economists have also examined conditions under which women can be empowered to reduce gender inequalities. Focusing on ways of enhancing women’s agency in the Global South, Kabeer (this volume) provides a conceptual overview of both conditions for and consequences of women’s agency. At the individual level, gaining access to land ownership, wage employment in the formal sector, and increasing representation in political office can potentially challenge the hierarchies in these domains and lead to women’s empowerment. While formal wage employment is more consistently associated with expanding women’s choices than the alternatives of informal wage work or self-employment, Kabeer points out that it may not be sufficient for women’s empowerment, if women do not perceive their circumstances to be unjust or are unable to exercise agency due to overwhelming patriarchal constraints. Collective agency is necessary to challenge such constraints. According to Kabeer, women’s empowerment requires individual internal transformation for women to make choices that do not conform to or reproduce inequalities. She highlights how organizations of informal women workers seek to build this “power within.” These organizations raise women’s awareness about the value of their work and their rights as women, as workers, and as citizens. They make demands (mostly addressed to the state) for not only the typical goals of collective agency (e.g., wages, working conditions, social security) but also safety from domestic violence and their reproductive health. Feminist economists also adopt a broader notion of human identity than that foundational to mainstream economics. Nelson (this volume) revisits the “separative-soluble” dichotomy of human behavior that underlies mainstream economics, whereby the economic agent bears characteristics of a “separative” self, and his implicit and imaginary feminine counterpart is a 7

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“soluble” self. Nelson illustrates the distortions of this dichotomy in economics scholarship. She argues for challenging the dichotomy, dissociating the masculine-feminine categories from judgments of worth and working toward an “individuals-in-relation” human identity that displays a combination of behaviors and motivations—not only autonomy and self-interest but also connectedness and altruism. This relational identity is consistent with the concept of agency delineated by feminist scholars, which includes commitment to social justice, ethical norms, and fairness (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2003). Moreover, in contrast to the economic agent of the mainstream, the agent implicit in the list of central capabilities in Nussbaum (2003) is embodied and interdependent, needs to care and be cared for, and seeks to improve the conditions of their lives within social and institutional constraints.

Intersectionality In contrast to the universal, generic homo economicus, contemporary heterodox approaches articulate an intersectional lens (Folbre; Robeyns; Rao and Akram-Lodhi, this volume). Attention to intersection of gender with other socially constructed identities is important for explaining diverse livelihood prospects of people and their capabilities. While there is increasing commitment among feminist economists to conducting intersectional economic analysis, such analysis does not always materialize. One constraint on intersectional statistical analysis is the lack of data or small sample sizes (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2016, 66–67). Another issue is limited researcher interest in applying an intersectional lens, which at times is shaped by the nature of the research question. Banks (this volume) confronts this issue and calls for applying an intersectional perspective to feminist economics research practice. She argues that feminist economic analysis has much to gain by moving away from a homogenous understanding of women and centering the analysis on the experiences of marginalized groups. Doing so highlights distortions with dominant understandings of history and contemporary accounts of economic experiences that are generalized from, for instance, white women to all women in the US. It also means prioritizing the concerns of women who experience overlapping forms of oppression in policy and strategy, as articulated in the DAWN perspective in the early 1980s (Sen and Grown 1987), in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda as “Leave no one behind” (Razavi, this volume), and recently as “Push no one behind” (Elson 2019).

Methods, methodology, and measurement As Nelson (this volume) argues, the separative-soluble dichotomy is entrenched in the dominant model and methodology choices in economics. Mainstream economists view themselves as detached, neutral observers of phenomena, pursuing value-free, rigorous empirical methodologies based on mathematical models. Feminist philosophers have critiqued this masculine-biased view of science, and feminist economists have challenged the mainstream’s devaluation of alternative methods of data generation and methodology (Nelson 1995; Berik 1997). They critique the discipline’s hierarchy of methods, identification of rigor with quantitative methodology, and emphasis on rigor over social relevance. Application of a broader range of research methods is expected to provide insights on phenomena that are not possible with quantitative data sets, such as the processes that lead to economic outcomes (Berik 1997). Broadening research methods is also necessary to take the analysis of intersectionality beyond the interactive terms of gender, race, and other social categories in statistical analysis. Archival research, for instance, helps document the work history of racially marginalized women, recover their voices, and disrupt the dominant narrative (Banks, this volume). 8

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In a discipline that trains students only in a range of analytic techniques appropriate for quantitative data, however, feminist economists are at a distinct disadvantage in practicing pluralism of methods: they have to take research methods courses in other departments or partner with researchers in other disciplines in collaborative research, or retrain themselves later in their careers (Banks, this volume). In addition, there are professional/disciplinary disincentives to venturing far from the dominant methodology. Evaluating the feminist impact on empirical methodology in economics, Jacobsen (this volume) argues that since the 1990s feminist economists appear to have converged around feminist standpoint empiricism. This consensus has been accompanied by rising homogeneity of feminist economists’ focus on what is measurable, therefore “regressionable,” using the same few large data sets that have gender-differentiated variables. Tejani’s (2019) review of articles published in Feminist Economics confirms the preponderance of and rise in the share of articles that rely on econometrics between 2006 and 2015. Jacobsen observes that in the first decades of the 21st century the main change toward empirical pluralism is increasing reliance on experiments, but the method (and the associated behavioral economics) is closely linked to neoclassical assumptions. According to Jacobsen, machine-learning techniques are potentially useful for intersectional analysis, and the occasional application of “mixed-methods,” which complements quantitative survey data with qualitative evidence, is a welcome development for feminist economic inquiry. Schwartz-Shea (this volume), however, calls for caution in pursuing mixed-methods research. Qualitative evidence can be generated based on the positivist philosophical tradition that seeks to explain causal mechanisms of phenomena or an interpretivist tradition that emphasizes meaning-making. Feminist economists have to be aware of different philosophical underpinnings of research methods. Schwartz-Shea’s review of applications of qualitative methods by feminist economists highlights not only the valuable insights from such research but also its limited scope: use of mainly interviews, and mainly direct quotations, that are then directly used to support or challenge basic assumptions of economic theory. She identifies either a positivist-qualitative path or an interpretivist-qualitative one (with its steeper learning curve for most feminist economists) as feasible and valuable for broadening research practice. Debates in heterodox feminist economics over the value of quantification in general, and monetary valuation in particular, run deep and are often not explicit (Berik 2018). At least since the 1930s, much has been written on how to make visible unpaid household work and its contributions to the economy in both models and statistical conventions. There is considerable agreement among feminist economists on the need for generating time-use data to track wellbeing and design policy. As Floro (this volume) emphasizes, time-use data are necessary in order to keep track of unpaid household and care work, time-related poverty, demonstrate the cost of care work for caregivers, and analyze determinants of unpaid care work, which is in turn relevant for alleviating time-based constraints and improving livelihoods through macroeconomic policy (see also Moos; İlkkaracan and Memiş, this volume). Despite the value of time-use data, time-use surveys (TUS) are not harmonized across countries in terms of collection, frequency, and method, which constrains cross-country analysis (Charmes 2019). However, a number of international policy frameworks and initiatives that call on data to evaluate progress or implement policy are expected to help harmonization of TUS: Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 5.4, which aims to recognize, reduce, redistribute unpaid care work (Razavi, this volume); the new definition of work that encompasses unpaid care and domestic labor, adopted by the ILO in 2013 (Floro, this volume); and the implementation of gender budget analysis (Elson, this volume). 9

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As regards estimating the monetary value of unpaid work, proponents argue that valuation of care work is necessary for making women’s work visible and generating household satellite accounts that show the value of this work relative to the GDP (Suh and Folbre 2016). Opponents are concerned about using a market yardstick in conceptualizing what is valuable and what is not. For instance, feminist ecological economists seek to develop nonmonetary, “­discourse-based valuation” methods for valuing and protecting care work and ecosystems (Perkins, this volume). This perspective sees no political value in relying on monetary or nonmonetary measures or combining and engaging with different valuation methods in the struggle for a future where care work and care for the environment are valued. Another area of rapid development is gender-aware measurement of country well-being in the form of international composite gender indexes. Van Staveren (this volume) stresses the value of these indexes in generating knowledge, highlighting women’s disadvantage relevant for evaluating distributional impacts of policy, and monitoring variation in women’s relative and absolute well-being over time and between countries. As with TUS data, regular reporting of gender indexes has catalyzed data-generation efforts on different dimensions of gender inequality. Van Staveren’s evaluation focuses on several prominent indexes—some focusing on capabilities, others on access to both resources and capabilities, yet others tracking institutional constraints on gender equality. These indexes are policy-relevant, as they are used to evaluate the impact of gender inequality on various well-being outcomes and economic growth.

Resources for provisioning In the SPA the economy is not limited to market activities, nor to a particular behavior, such as constrained optimization. Feminist economics examines gender inequalities in a range of activities that generate people’s livelihoods, including wage labor and unpaid care activities that are necessary to replenish the labor power of wage workers and to care for children, elderly, and infirm family members. Since the 1970s much of feminist research focused on analyzing labor market inequalities—occupational segregation and gender wage inequalities. Feminist economists have also examined gender inequalities in assets and incomes from casual or temporary paid work or subsistence production. The male-/class-/race-biased treatment of gender inequality in New Household Economics also invited feminist critique and led to the development of feminist research on intra-household inequalities in work, decision-making, and resource allocation.

Paid and unpaid work A heterodox feminist economics lens on the late 20th century and new millennium highlights a number of trends: proletarianization of women, variously referred to as increase in women’s labor force participation (LFP) or “feminization of labor”; rapid and extensive commodification of goods, services, and common property resources; rise of neoliberal ideology that emphasizes individual, privatized, market solutions to all social and economic problems, and the implementation of this ideology in the form of austerity macroeconomic policies. In early 21st century raising women’s LFP has become a win-win policy goal promoted by governments and diverse international organizations. Women’s employment gains, especially when accompanied by narrowing gender wage gaps, have also been celebrated by feminists for the imminent achievement of gender equality that they represent. This optimistic view is accompanied by advice to women on how to “lean in” to overcome the remaining obstacles. However, as Humphries and Sarasúa (this volume) discuss, there are several reasons to be 10

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cautious about the magnitude and the optimistic interpretation of the feminization of the labor force and the narrowing gender wage gaps. First, feminization of labor is partly a statistical artifact of undercounting of women’s paid work in early manufacturing in Europe and the US, which in turn exaggerates the 20th-century rise in women’s LFP (Humphries and Sarasúa, this volume). Moreover, the rising LFP is a class- and race-specific story, since some groups of women—for instance, Black women in the US—have always been more likely to participate in paid work, even sometimes as the primary/ sole breadwinners (Banks, this volume). A second caution concerns the nature of jobs. Women’s ability to participate in paid work activities is constrained by their disproportionate unpaid work burden due to the persistence of traditional gender roles, limited public support for care work, and power relations in the household. As a result, women tend to be concentrated in secondary, part-time, and other types of nonstandard work in labor markets (Hartmann and Milli; Figart, this volume) and in informal work (Espino and de los Santos, this volume). In turn, women’s lower earnings and inferior status in the labor market reinforce the female caregiver-male breadwinner division of labor in the household. As feminist political economists have long argued, women’s lower earnings and unpaid work benefit not only capitalists but also men who do not have to perform the unpaid work themselves and who maintain economic power over women (Hartmann 1976, 1979). As employers and as workers, men have historically excluded women from labor markets and the skilled trades (Hartmann 1976). Hartmann and Milli (this volume) argue that the legacy of these struggles and gender norms is embedded in contemporary institutional arrangements in the US that shape women’s labor market disadvantages. Discrimination against mothers in hiring persists and employed women continue to face various forms of discrimination and bias. As they broaden the analysis beyond the standard statistical methodology heterodox feminist labor market analyses yield distinct insights on the scale of the discrimination problem and the dynamics of change (Hartmann and Milli, this volume). The theory that underlies the standard approach represents a large share of the wage gap as the product of women’s choices, and use of the yardstick of equal work makes it difficult to establish and address discriminatory pay (Humphries and Sarasúa, this volume). Moreover, in contrast to mainstream economic theory, heterodox feminist economists view gender wage gaps as a driver of competitiveness, likely to persist, rather than narrow with increasing demand for female labor. Under the impact of globalization, technological change and deregulation, in the Global North there has been increase in the share of nonstandard types of work, including gig work (Figart, this volume). Recent growth of the gig economy reflects a shift in social provisioning away from the norm and reality of the male breadwinner. The contemporary gig jobs in the Global North share many characteristics with the informal jobs that generate the livelihoods for the majority of working population in the Global South (Espino and de los Santos, this volume). Both are characterized by low pay, income insecurity, and lack of social protection. Women of color, in particular, tend to predominate in lower tiers of informal and gig jobs, where they face worse conditions than their male counterparts. In the Global South, since the 1980s, under trade liberalization and export expansion lowwage work for women has increased in labor-intensive export-oriented manufacturing and agricultural sectors (Menon and Rodgers; Tsikata and Torvikey, this volume). While expansion of job opportunities for women has thus meant access to earnings (or higher earnings compared to existing alternatives), the jobs women hold tend to be at the low end of occupational and pay scale, temporary, casual, and home-based, with wide and persistent gender wage gaps. Across rural Africa, a growing share of the population combines subsistence agriculture with seasonal and casual wage work (Tsikata and Torvikey). Due to land titling and land commercialization, 11

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women’s access to land relative to men has become more insecure as women lost customary rights and access to common property resources. Since women farmers have access to smaller plots than men, they are more food insecure, less likely to become contract farmers, and therefore more concentrated in seasonal and casual nonagricultural work to secure a living. Concurrent labor reforms resulted in the expansion of precarious jobs for women in agro-processing, trade in produce, and casual work in EPZs. Privatized solutions to the care crisis in the Global North have also fueled global migration of women from the Global South since the 1980s. Migrant women became part of “global care chains” as they outsource the care of their own children to Southern others in order to care for families of Northern others under temporary and insecure terms of work (Gammage, this volume). Expanded flows of global migration have also enabled and concealed migration or trafficking of sex workers. Bettio (this volume) argues that, in contrast to the mainstream economic analyses that emphasize full agency of sex workers in a competitive market, the sex industry represents a segmented continuum of markets, with variation in working conditions, exposure to violence, and other risks, rather than a sharp distinction between a free and a forced market segment. In this postmodern vision, sex work is a form of paid labor, often self-employment, and unless it is used to describe actual trafficking where women have no agency, trafficking is a misnomer that conceals the choice and agency that most sex workers exercise. A third note of caution with the feminization of labor story, according to Humphries and Sarasúa, is that it glosses over periods of reversals and rapid growth. Trends can reverse: the Great Depression marked a reversal in female LFP in the US and Europe, and the World War II episode in the US was a major break from the trend. Similarly, evolution of export sectors in the Global South in the new millennium has brought a “defeminization” due to technological change that renders the more routine, labor-intensive jobs redundant and limited women’s access to training for the new jobs (Menon and Rodgers, this volume). While women in the Global North played a buffer role over business cycles in the late 20th century, increasingly they enter the labor force during crises, despite worsening pay and working conditions (Rubery, this volume). Thus, the business cycle can facilitate the long-term integration of women into wage labor. Economies that underwent transition from centrally planned, socialist to capitalist forms of social provisioning in the late 20th century also provide a reversal story (Dong and MacPhail; Meurs, this volume). China and economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union experienced decline in women’s LFP along with rise in gender inequality in wages and unpaid care work, whereby the contours of gender inequality converged to those in capitalist economies. These outcomes were due to dismantling of enterprise-based or publicly provided nurseries and subsidized childcare services and resurgence of pre-socialist patriarchal norms that are manifested in a return to women’s traditional female-homemaker role (and son preference in China). Focusing on the post-reform 2008–2017 period in China, Dong and MacPhail argue that gender disadvantage is compounded by rural hukou disadvantage (that defines people’s rights and access to services), albeit the hukou rules are now relaxed. Thus, migrant women and rural women experience greater difficulties in China’s labor market. Meurs argues that work-life policies after market reforms in transition economies encouraged a familial-care regime, providing women with long parental leaves, therefore limited women’s ability to provide for themselves and their families through paid work. A bright spot in China is that recently the gender wage gap is closing in the context of the changing structure of jobs that create demand for women’s labor and the legacy of socialist egalitarian ideology (Dong and MacPhail). A less-studied resource for livelihood generation is common property resources (CPR). Agarwal (this volume) focuses on forest CPR as an important but increasingly degraded source 12

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of subsistence in the Global South, in particular South Asia. Since women are more dependent on forest resources than men, they experience more adverse impacts of the decline and degradation of forests. Specifically, women’s greater responsibility for daily provisioning and gender inequality in access to a wide range of resources make them more vulnerable to health, nutrition, and income deprivations. The major potential consequence of gender inequality in access to market resources combined with women’s disproportionate unpaid care work is higher income poverty rates of women compared to men. However, demonstrating this outcome has been difficult, given the lack of gender-differentiated income data. İlkkaracan and Memiş (this volume) show how feminist economists have contributed to the evolution of the concept of gendered poverty away from household income poverty and headship status toward capability deprivations and time poverty that can be measured at the individual level. They argue that a combined income- and timepoverty measure would be the best guide to policy to address gender inequality in deprivations.

The household: a site of provisioning, cooperation, and conflict As McCrate and Giddings (this volume) highlight, family formation and divisions of labor vary across time and space and by race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation. Marriage provides economic benefits for married couples, and its denial to same-sex couples in the US prior to its legalization has been economic deprivation for same-sex couples and their families (Badgett 2010). McCrate shows that since 1990 cohabitation without marriage has been on the rise among different-sex couples in the Global North, accompanied by rise in same-sex marriages. She argues that these developments cannot be satisfactorily explained by mainstream theory of family formation, which explains specialization into traditional gender roles in terms of economic gains from comparative advantage. The gender pay gap is not the basis of comparative advantage for same-sex couples, and until the legalization of same-sex marriage in some countries, it was riskier for a partner to specialize in unpaid labor. Giddings shows that heterosexual couples practice a greater degree of specialization than same-sex couples. However, given inadequate work-life balance policies, same-sex parents also tend to specialize, as the one with lower earnings drops out of the labor force after entering parenthood (Rothblum 2017). Nor does mainstream theory explain the rising trend of different-sex married couples where women earn more than their husbands. Feminist economic analyses critique the mainstream concept of the household as either an individual or a harmonious collection of individuals for whom the benevolent household head makes all the decisions. These critiques led to the development of bargaining models that opened up discussion of power differences in the household based on the relative fallback position of each partner. However, the new models continued to rely on mainstream assumptions, such as perfect information, which led Sen (1990) to propose a less-formal bargaining framework. Accordingly, the household is a site for cooperation and conflict between individuals who may be motivated by self-interest as well as concern for others and the common good (Sen 1990; Doss; Giddings, this volume). As in standard bargaining models, employment, earnings, and assets are key resources to strengthen women’s relative bargaining power and to improve women’s well-being outcomes. In addition to their fallback positions, Sen posits that relative bargaining power of each spouse is also shaped by the value each attaches to their own wellbeing and their perceived contributions to the household. Gender norms are also relevant to women’s ability to exercise bargaining power (Agarwal 1997). Feminist economists not only agree that women’s ability to provide for themselves and their families through paid work and on an equal footing with men is a desirable goal but also 13

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acknowledge that not all paid work can strengthen women’s bargaining power. They are also cautious about recent discourses that equate women’s LFP with women’s economic independence (Humphries and Sarasúa, this volume). Access to land is another means for both strengthening women’s fallback position in the household and securing farm income or subsistence in rural areas. Feminist scholarship on gender inequality in asset ownership has recently grown with increasing availability of cross-country survey data on individual ownership. Based on emerging evidence, Deere and Oduro (this volume) show that, compared to men, women in the Global South are less likely to own assets, such as land and housing, and they own assets of lower value. Among different-sex couples, within-household allocation of resources (Doss; Deere and Oduro, this volume) and of labor (Giddings, this volume) become more gender equitable when women’s access to and control over resources increases and when the institutional and legal setting gives women more outside options. Such is the case when women’s average earnings in the economy increases or unilateral divorce laws are adopted. The bargaining approach considers joint or sole decision-making by women in important decisions, such as where to live and spending on children, as indications of women’s bargaining power in the household. Deere and Oduro indicate that there is strong evidence of positive association of ownership and better outcomes for women and children, which operates via women’s greater decision-making. These outcomes include changes in composition of household expenditures (increase in food expenditures, decline in alcohol and tobacco spending, and better nutrition and schooling for children) or labor allocation, such as relative increase in women’s leisure. Whether these decisions reflect women’s preferences or whether women prefer to make decisions alone or jointly are harder questions to investigate due to data limitations (Doss, this volume). Women’s relative bargaining power in the household is key to her attaining the capability of bodily integrity and of bodily health. Women’s employment and earnings, either in absolute terms or relative to their spouse, and their educational attainment are protective against IPV (Strenio, this volume). Asset ownership has less conclusive deterrent effect on IPV, which is contingent on the type of asset, its relative value, and the context (Strenio; Deere and Oduro, this volume). Institutional setting and gender norms also affect the risk of IPV, often by impeding translation of employment or income into increased relative bargaining power at home. As with the ability to escape IPV, women’s control over their reproductive health is linked to their access to economic resources (Jones and Bernstein, this volume). In addition, institutional and legal changes, for instance, public support for poor women’s access to family planning, investments in public health sectors, increased paid parental leave, can improve women’s reproductive health.

Institutions and policies Macroeconomy as a structure of constraint Macroeconomic policies shape both people’s ability to provision—whether and the extent to which people have access to income—and the scope of social protection and care policies that are necessary for the economic system to reproduce itself in a stable manner. They can promote what Sen (1999) considers instrumental freedoms that enable individuals to fully participate in economic life, such as to have a social safety net in times of crisis. Macroeconomic policies can also support design of industrial policy that creates economically, ecologically, socially sustainable production structures. Feminist macroeconomics emerged with research into the class- and gender-differentiated effects of structural adjustment programs in the Global South and their counterpart neoliberal policies in the North since the 1980s (Elson and Çağatay 2000). Common adverse effects of these policies are relative increase in unpaid and paid workloads of low-income women, but 14

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also failures to achieve policy goals, because the macroeconomic models that drive policy do not incorporate unpaid economic activities. For example, government budget cuts shift some provisioning activities to the unpaid economy that is not accounted for in aggregate economic performance measures. Thus, budget deficits may be reduced while well-being is undermined. Similarly, policy may fail to expand marketed output because models ignore unpaid care burdens. Since the 1980s another strand of feminist scholarship has examined gender differences in labor market outcomes over business cycles in the Global North (Rubery, this volume). Over time feminist macroeconomics moved from examining gender effects of macroeconomic policies to evaluating how macroeconomic aggregates (such as trade) and macroeconomic processes (such as economic growth) are shaped by gender (in)equality. Seguino (this volume) shows that heterodox feminist efforts to model the impact of gender on macroeconomic outcomes evolved from considering gender wage gaps to gendered care work. While mainstream macroeconomic models show positive effects of gender equality in education and LFP on growth, Seguino underscores the contingency of the gender equality-growth relationship: nonmainstream feminist macroeconomics is attentive to not only the gender inequality dimension under consideration but also the structure of the economy, the time horizon, the availability of employment, and working conditions in paid work. Braunstein (this volume) emphasizes the importance of modeling care and social reproduction: production and maintenance of the labor force are central to all macroeconomic concerns, yet they continue to be neglected in macroeconomic theory. Braunstein outlines the structuralist feminist modeling efforts to incorporate care work in macroeconomics. She argues that, in order to transform macroeconomic theory, feminist macroeconomists have to engage with mainstream macroeconomists in terms of standard macro concepts of GDP growth and interpret care as an input in macro models. Feminist economists argue against austerity, but are they pro-growth? According to Seguino, economic growth reduces social conflict as it creates fiscal resources that are conducive to addressing gender and other inequalities. This, along with the need to raise the living standards in the Global South, provides the feminist rationale for boosting economic growth. According to this perspective, desirable expansionary macroeconomic policies would be those that promote both gender equality and growth. Recently, feminist macroeconomics has identified such a winning combination. Simulations show that, compared to public physical infrastructure spending, social infrastructure (education and health) spending reduces gender inequality in unpaid work (by providing care services that support families), creates more jobs for women (given the current occupational structure), and has a larger multiplier effect. Moreover, social infrastructure spending is expected to favorably affect long-run economic growth by increasing the labor productivity of the next generation and providing a greener path to growth (İlkkaracan 2016). While Dengler (this volume) acknowledges that growth generates resources for feminist policies, she calls on feminist economists to reflect on the desirability of growth: growth reproduces inequalities, is closely linked with devaluation of unpaid care work and nature, and is the source of ecological crisis that disproportionately adversely affects marginalized social groups. Accordingly, Dengler argues for more engagement between feminist economics and degrowth discourse in order to shift away from growth as the goal of economic policy.

Care policies, social policies, and social protection Feminist economists have emphasized socializing care as the main instrument for promoting gender equality in earning a living. When Folbre (1994) asked “Who pays for the kids?” she drew attention to the need to develop public services for care—for children, the elderly, people with disabilities—and to invest in care infrastructure through tax revenues and government 15

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spending. Earlier, Davis (1981) had questioned whether it is feasible to fund socializing care in a capitalist economy. Notwithstanding the feasibility question, which is a political matter, public provision of affordable good-quality care services is the only solution to the care crisis that does not result in privileged women taking advantage of paid care givers. An alternative to socializing care is degrowth strategies that emphasize decommodification of care and providing care collectively in communities (Dengler, this volume). A caveat here is that, unless carefully designed, neither socializing nor decommodifying care can alter women’s disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work. With the exception of Nordic economies, institutional arrangements that support women’s participation in paid work, such as affordable good quality childcare arrangements, paid parental leave, and flexible work arrangements, are either nonexistent or inadequate. At the EU level, the care policies that aim to balance paid work and family care have been implemented since the 1990s with the goal of increasing women’s LFP (Plantenga, this volume). The US is an outlier, a laggard in recognizing the reality of dual-earner couples/families and the need to address unpaid care work as a policy issue (Boushey 2016). As a result, the US policy landscape is fragmented, forcing families to find individual solutions (Albelda, this volume). Given the high levels of income inequality by class, marital status, and race in the US, working-class women, single mothers, and mothers of color have less access to and usage of both paid leave and childcare. Esquivel (this volume) argues for a broader definition of care policies for the Global South, where most jobs are informal and do not offer employer-provided benefits. In the Global South, public spending on physical infrastructure, such as clean water and roads, as well as social infrastructure would decrease women’s unpaid work burden. Evaluating the recently adopted care policies in Latin America, Esquivel highlights their transformative elements that are able to simultaneously guarantee rights, agency, autonomy, and well-being of both care receivers and care givers. In addition to work-family policies, anti-discrimination and pay equity policies are necessary to address labor market inequalities (Hartmann and Milli, this volume). And strengthening union rights is necessary to support enforcement of these laws (Kucera; Ahmed and Hegewisch, this volume) and to improve income security for gig workers (Figart, this volume). While historically unions have had a weak record on organizing women workers, they are more likely to deliver both a lower gender pay gap and workplaces with anti-harassment and work-family balance policies. As Ahmed and Hegewisch note, women’s share among union members globally is on the rise. Women in unions in the US have higher earnings, and the union advantage in earnings is especially high for Hispanic women and Black women. Women and men workers covered by unions also are more likely to have benefits, such as pension/retirement plans, compared to workers not covered by a union. As for social-protection systems, these systems embody gender inequalities both through lower contributions of women to social insurance and women’s greater need for social protection due to their greater risk of income poverty. Rodríguez Enríquez (this volume) argues that feminist research and debates on conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in the Global South and unconditional ones (i.e., universal basic income (UBI)) provide key elements for transforming social policy and protection systems. Both CCTs and UBI aim to ensure some basic income guarantee for everyone. These features are now part of the global feminist policy agenda for social protection. This agenda emphasizes human rights principles (including the right to care, attention to different needs of social groups), places care at the center of social protection (e.g., is responsive to care needs of migrant care workers), recognizes both women’s employment patterns and unpaid work, and calls for mobilization of resources to build social protection institutions. 16

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Economics From its inception as a discipline in the 19th century economics has been dominated by male practitioners of European descent as well as having a masculine-biased and Eurocentric content. The content biases in economics are not surprising since knowledge construction is a social process that reflects the lived experiences, beliefs of the researchers, and the political values and norms of their societies (Strassmann 1993; Seiz 1993). Despite efforts to increase diversity among economists since the 1970s, women scholars (CSWEP 2019) and scholars of color (Sharpe, this volume) remain underrepresented in the economics profession in the US. As recently documented by Wu (2017) and the AEA survey (AEA 2019), underrepresentation of women, people of color, women from the Global South, and other marginalized groups both contributes to and reflects the gendered and racialized hostile environment in the economics profession. The problem is a long-standing one: scholars of color and other marginalized groups at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and class have experienced exclusion, harassment, and other forms of marginalization in academia at least since the early 1980s (Lorde 1984). Feminist economists have long argued that the remedy for the masculine-biased content and hostile culture of economics is to diversify the composition of those who produce economics knowledge. Participation of diverse groups in research is expected to generate not only more objective scholarship but also research that is more likely to address shortfalls in wellbeing of socially marginalized groups (Sharpe, this volume). However, simply bringing in more women and people of color is insufficient to transform mainstream economics. What is needed is diversity of perspectives that challenge methodological individualism. New initiatives such as Diversifying and Decolonizing Economics seek to increase diversity of both the background of practitioners and the approach. Pluralism in approach would bring historical and institutional perspectives to the examination of contemporary race/gender/class inequalities (https:// d-econ.org/mission/). Yet, the dominant homogenous core of mainstream economics makes the diversity challenge more difficult than in other disciplines (given the incentives and pressures to conform to disciplinary norms) and underscores the urgency of intellectual collaboration across heterodox perspectives.

International governance and social provisioning In the new millennium feminist economic ideas have been integrated in global agendas of the UN entities and the international financial organizations such as the World Bank. This outcome has been the culmination of gender-aware scholarship and programs that since the 1970s have emphasized the wider societal benefits of promoting gender equality (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2016, Ch. 1). Examples in this volume include Deere and Oduro, who emphasize that gender equality in asset ownership promotes women’s and children’s well-being, and Agarwal, who shows that gender equality in governance benefits environmental (forest) conservation. Since the 1980s a number of policies and approaches are introduced featuring women as key agents to bring about such synergies, albeit these win-win outcomes are by no means assured. The earliest win-win strategy, microfinance, has been widely promoted to grow women’s self-employment (entrepreneurship) as a solution to poverty and to empower women. Mostly focusing on South Asia, Bali Swain and Garikipati (this volume) find little evidence of a significant impact of microfinance on reducing income poverty. While there is some evidence that women borrowers’ role in household decision-making improved, they note that microfinance has not transformed gender norms to empower women. Other studies highlight that even minor gains in agency or economic security from microcredit are important for women 17

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who have limited alternatives to earn a living (Kabeer, this volume). Another approach to reduce poverty is to institute conditional cash transfer schemes (CCTSs) in the Global South that designate income-poor women as recipients of transfers that aim to reduce immediate and intergenerational income poverty. The policy relies on women’s agency as mothers to succeed. There is strong evidence that this policy works in improving child well-being and alleviating immediate hardship but reinforces traditional gender norms and division of work (Rodríguez Enríquez, this volume). Similarly, policies that seek to reduce income poverty by promoting women’s employment may reduce official poverty rates but aggravate gender disparities in time poverty (İlkkaracan and Memiş, this volume). Several contributors in this volume acknowledge integration of feminist ideas in international frameworks but are skeptical of their transformative potential. For example, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes inequality and unsustainable patterns of consumption and production as universal problems and seeks structural change of economies to overcome them (Razavi, this volume). In the Agenda, “gender equality and women’s empowerment” is both a comprehensive stand-alone goal in SDG 5 and a cross-cutting issue in most of the other 16 goals. However, Razavi observes that the SDGs do not incorporate enforceable mechanisms to hold governments accountable (unlike the IMF conditionalities or UN Security Council Resolutions); the neoliberal tenets of investment, finance, and trade policies are unchanged; and austerity further constrains resources needed to implement the Agenda. Thus, while the Agenda incorporates a feminist agenda for social protection floors, care policies, and social investments, there is no strategy for funding them, other than relying on private finance, which tends to shy away from investments with long time horizons (see also Rodríguez Enríquez, this volume). Elson (this volume) reaches a similar conclusion with respect to the transformational potential of gender budget analysis that has been increasingly endorsed and promoted internationally. While gender budgeting entails the design and implementation of fiscal policy to support gender equality, Elson argues that governments and the IMF often use it to evaluate specific programs and not the macroeconomics of the whole budget. As a result, gender budget analysis rarely reveals how austerity policies increase gender inequality and does not necessarily translate into budget changes. The World Bank’s “Smart Economics” agenda, which emphasizes the compatibility of gender equality with economic growth, is another international framework that raises feminist skepticism. Prügl (this volume) points out that the Bank selectively incorporates feminist ideas in its neoliberal economic policy approach, thereby giving a feminist face to neoliberalism. Transnational corporations also espouse Smart Economics as they devote resources and bring visibility to gender equality in education and entrepreneurship while promoting their bottom line. While there are grounds for concern that Smart Economics co-opts feminist ideas and undermines prospects for crafting alternative economic paths, Prügl argues that Smart Economics also creates openings for feminist politics. Internationalization of production in the late 20th century has strained international and national institutions that support worker rights and promote decent working conditions. In the context of labor deregulation that weakened unions and limited controls on capital mobility, improving working conditions and pay in labor markets has become a policy challenge. Kucera (this volume) describes the ILO’s role and its latest conventions designed to promote gender equality and rights of women workers, such as homeworkers and domestic workers. He also reviews how global enforcement of labor standards, in particular union rights, in exportoriented production, became a contentious issue in several debates, including among feminists. While the proposal to link countries’ right to trade (export) to their upholding a minimum set 18

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of labor rights was not implemented on a global scale, Kucera argues that union rights are a key instrument for promoting gender equality. Collective agency for a large swathe of workers is unlikely to take the form of traditional unions, however (Kabeer; Espino and de los Santos, this volume). Developing the “social and solidarity economy” is a recent international initiative to strengthen livelihoods and the collective agency of classes of labor and informal workers. The largest segment of the social and solidarity economy is cooperatives, which represent a long-standing business ownership and enterprise model that is based on social and environmental values beyond the pursuit of profit. Eşim (this volume) highlights women-only cooperatives as a source of employment and social interaction, especially where gender norms restrict women’s presence in public spaces. Yet Eşim’s review of the workings of agricultural, financial, retail cooperatives indicates the challenges they face in becoming viable enterprises that can empower women: they mostly engage in traditionally female economic activities, face limited markets, become dependent on external financial and institutional support, and women tend to be absent from leadership (at times, even membership). These international policy frameworks and priorities articulate an unprecedented level of gender awareness and promise in promoting equitable well-being. But, as emphasized by contributors to this volume, the neoliberal policy regime, enforced by international financial institutions, is a constraint to restructuring economies in a manner to generate decent livelihoods and to implement policies to reduce intersecting inequalities. Their promise can only be realized through bottom-up mobilization, including workers’ collective agency and political organization of marginalized social groups. Elson (2019) and Balakrishnan and Heintz (this volume) emphasize the usefulness of the human rights approach for organizing and building coalitions against the current neoliberal policy regime that undermines human rights.

Concluding note In this Handbook we feature feminist economics contributions, many of which showcase research consistent with the starting points of the social provisioning approach (SPA). This scholarship has evolved into a diverse, interdisciplinary body of research with an international focus. Contributors to the Handbook take stock of current feminist economics scholarship on wide-ranging topics and identify directions for furthering feminist economics as an intellectual project. As feminist economics is pluralistic, it encompasses alternative feminist economics perspectives. Many contributions are heterodox feminist in orientation and highlight the value of these perspectives for feminist economics. There are contested or divergent heterodox feminist positions yet to be debated as well as substantial overlaps to affirm. There is scope for and urgency to overcome dualisms, generate more interpretive research, and incorporate greater attention to intersectionality and ecological wellbeing in analysis. We expect the shared commitment to centering well-being, care, and social reproduction in analysis will bridge intellectual divides and foster collaborations to construct an economics for equitable and ecologically sustainable well-being. As the mission statement of Feminist Economics makes clear, feminist economics also emphasizes the social relevance of research. As such, feminist economics is a guide to remove structural obstacles that constrain disadvantaged groups’ ability to generate livelihoods and develop capabilities and to promote well-being of all and the planet. We argue that the core principles of the SPA and heterodox feminist economics are useful in guiding collective agency in these goals. The path forward includes reorganization of economies and societies in a way that expands what Sen (1999) refers to as instrumental freedoms for all. The changes include putting care for 19

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human beings and the environment at the center of policy and transforming institutions that reinforce and exacerbate inequalities. As Folbre (this volume) notes, principled strategic coalitions across groups are necessary in challenging different structures of collective power that collectively oppress groups by gender, race, ethnicity, class, and other intersecting social identities.

References Agarwal, Bina. 1997. “Bargaining and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51. Albelda, Randy. 1997. Economics and Feminism: Disturbances in the Field. Michigan: Twayne Publishers. American Economic Association (AEA). 2019. “AEA Professional Climate Survey: Main Findings.” www. aeaweb.org/resources/member-docs/climate-survey-results-mar-18-2019. Badgett, Lee. 2010. “The Economic Value of Marriage for Same-sex Couples.” Drake Law Review 58 (4): 1081–116. Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2016. Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Berik, Günseli. 1997. “The Need for Crossing the Method Boundaries in Economics Research.” Feminist Economics 3 (2): 121–25. ———. 2018. “To Measure and to Narrate: Paths Toward a Sustainable Future.” Feminist Economics 24 (3): 136–59. Boushey, Heather. 2016. Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Charmes, Jacques. 2019. “The Unpaid Care Work and the Labour Market. An Analysis of Time-use Data Based on the Latest World Compilation of Time-use Surveys.” ILO Working Paper, Geneva, ­Switzerland: ILO. Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). 2019. “The 2019 Report on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.” www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=11672. Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House. Elson, Diane. 1991. “Male Bias in Macroeconomics: The Case of Structural Adjustment.” In Male Bias in Development Process, edited by Diane Elson, 164–90. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ———. 2019. “Push No One Behind.” Journal of Globalization and Development 9 (2): 1–12. Elson, Diane, and Nilüfer Çağatay. 2000. “The Social Content of Macroeconomic Policies.” World Development 28 (7): 1347–64. Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Pays for the Kids? London: Routledge. Hartmann, Heidi. 1976. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.” Signs 3 (2): 139–69. ———. 1979. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital & Class 3 (2): 1–33. İlkkaracan, İpek. 2016. “A Feminist Alternative to Austerity: The Purple Economy as a Gender Egalitarian Strategy for Employment Generation.” In Economics and Austerity in Europe: Gendered Impacts and Sustainable Alternatives, edited by Hannah Bargawi, Giovanni Cozzi, and Susan Himmelweit. London and New York: Routledge. Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 94–101. New York: Kitchen Table Press. Nelson, Julie. 1995. “Feminism and Economics.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (2): 131–48. Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice.” Feminist Economics 9 (2/3): 33–59. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. Rothblum, Esther. 2017. “Division of Workforce and Domestic Labor among Same-Sex Couples.” In A Global Look at the Interplay Between Paid and Unpaid Work, edited by Rachel Connelly and Ebru Kongar, 283–303. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Seiz, Janet. 1993. “Feminism and the History of Economic Thought.” History of Political Economy 25 (1): 185–201. Sen, Amartya. 1990. “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts.” In Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development, edited by Irene Tinker, 195–223. New York: Oxford University Press.

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The SPA in feminist economics ———. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Sen, Gita, and Caren Grown. 1987. Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press. Strassmann, Diana. 1993. “The Stories of Economics and the Power of the Storyteller.” History of Political Economy 25 (1): 147–65. Suh, Jooyeoun, and Nancy Folbre. 2016. “Valuing Unpaid Child Care in the U.S.: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey.” Review of Income and Wealth 62 (4): 668–84. Tejani, Sheba. 2019. “What’s Feminist About Feminist Economics?” Journal of Economic Methodology 26 (2): 99–117. Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Wu, Alice. 2017. “Gender Stereotype in Academia: Evidence from Economics Job Market Rumors Forum.” Working Papers 2017–09, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing.

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PART I

Core concepts and frameworks

2 FEMINIST CHALLENGES TO DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen

Introduction Those of us who were students as the second wave of feminism was making its way into academia remember well the absence of gender analysis in the courses we were taking, and generally in the programs in which we were involved. In the late 1960s, courses on development proceeded as if colonialism and the historical evolution that followed worldwide did not have differential implications for or impacts on women and men. It was quite usual for them to ignore colonization itself! Likewise, development theory did not pay any attention to gender differentials, at least in the field of economics. The history of “underdevelopment” only seemed to have a male workforce and male actors in general. With exceptions in the field of anthropology, women’s lives, work, and contributions and the impacts on them of development policies and programs were ignored. A major turning point in this gender-blind scenario came, however, with the publication of Ester Boserup’s book Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970). This chapter argues that the work of feminist economists (and their colleagues in other disciplines) since the publication of Boserup (1970) has challenged theories and policy prescriptions of mainstream development economics in fundamental ways. Concepts and analysis developed by feminist writers are rooted in the material and ideological basis of gender power and inequality, and its implications for the distribution of income, wealth, and work in economy and society. At the same time, feminists have explored the links between gender and other bases of power and inequality such as, inter alia, economic class, race, and ethnicity. Although feminist development economics began with the idea that women are marginalized from the economy, a view that still finds its champions in mainstream development discourse, it has evolved beyond that to challenge core concepts in both micro- and macroeconomics. This chapter discusses three of these challenges in particular and shows how the work of feminist economists has advanced development theory and policy. We focus on (i) changes in the conceptualization and accounting of work, (ii) the links between reproduction and sustainable development, and (iii) feminist approaches to globalization and macroeconomics. There are of course a number of other areas also where feminist economics has made major contributions, as argued by other chapters in this volume. Development economics is at its core a practical field driven by the compulsions of policies and programs. This has naturally affected how feminists have contributed to the field. In 25

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developing the arguments in this chapter, we highlight the synergies among feminist theoretical and empirical work, advocacy, and activism. These links advanced analysis by grounding it in the lived realities of women, and fed concepts and analysis into advocacy and activism in fruitful ways.

The early years of feminist development economics A Danish economist who had worked with the UN and had traveled extensively as a researcher in the Global South, Boserup (1970) wrote an informative description of many aspects of development with regard to women. The book soon became a basic starting point for those who were interested in what became the “women and development” field. Focusing on Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the topics in the book were many: the differential impact of colonialism on women and men, the gender division of labor and the reasons behind differences across continents, male and female migration, the concentration of women in domestic unpaid work, and others. Boserup’s empirical work and theoretical underpinnings posed a challenge to traditional development economics influencing subsequent research in the 1970s. Her book’s strength lay in the hitherto ignored empirical realities it uncovered. It made women visible and pointed out the many differences in women’s work across countries and regions—and the structural factors affecting them. One of the book’s main points was that women, despite their strong involvement in the economy, had been ignored by colonial and postcolonial development policies. Boserup argued that women had to be integrated into the process of development. This message was meant to open avenues for women without posing any challenges to orthodox economic thinking about development or to development policy itself. It gave rise to the Women in Development (WID) approach of the 1970s founded on the thesis of women’s supposed marginalization and need for integration (Miller and Razavi 1995). Feminist critics of traditional development theory and policy (Benería and Sen 1981, 1982) countered this approach. They argued that, far from being marginal, women were indeed integrated into development but at the lower ends of unequal political and economic systems, in invisible and disadvantageous spheres that often place them outside what is normally seen as “the economy” and “development.” This critical approach argued that what had to be questioned was development itself, and its processes of capitalist accumulation and class differentiation that reproduce inequalities of wealth and income, building on and deepening historical divides based inter alia on gender, race, caste, or ethnicity. By foregrounding capitalist accumulation and class differentiation as key concepts in describing the economy, this critique challenged the dis-equalizing nature of the economic system. This is usually left unchallenged by orthodox economics, although a rich vein of feminist anthropology had by the 1970s already produced descriptions of the relations between different forms of property, inequality, and gendered divisions of labor (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Reiter 1975). Another key concept came from the work of feminist anthropologists and other social scientists who developed the concept of reproduction as a determining factor in women’s lives (Edholm, Harris, and Young 1977). This work had a profound influence on feminist development economists. The fruitful interaction was based on a recognition that reproduction is at the core of gender inequality across societies. Women’s concentration in the domestic sphere within households and their responsibilities for childbearing and rearing, for caring for people’s daily subsistence needs, and for the ill and infirm (biological and social reproduction) cut across countries and regions. Reproduction is crucial in shaping the division of labor, gender norms in their multiple expressions, and institutions oppressive to women. Importantly, reproduction 26

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shapes women’s role in production and their role in the economy (Benería 1979). The interaction between production—with corresponding processes of capital accumulation and class ­formation—and reproduction is crucial in explaining inequalities and differentials in the processes of development. As Sen (1995, 12) argued, women stand at the crossroads between production and reproduction, between economic activity and the care of human beings. . . . They are workers in both spheres— those most responsible and therefore with most at stake, who suffer most when the two spheres meet at cross-purposes, and those most sensitive to the need for better integration between the two. The concepts of production and reproduction thus comprised the core of an alternative feminist view on women and development that questioned “development” itself and the model that sustained it, including the orthodox economic model that prevailed in most countries. It was not only a question of integrating women in development. The system that sustained the relations of production and reproduction could be acted upon and be changed to promote gender equality.

Changes in the conceptualization and accounting of work An important spin-off from the feminist focus on reproduction was the emergence of a challenge to how economics conceptualized work. Important contributions to feminist thinking of the late 1970s and early 1980s were about the invisibility and undercounting of women’s work in national accounting and labor statistics (Benería 1981; Waring 1988). Women’s unpaid work became an important focus of feminist analysis, regarding both the meaning of work itself and the absence of women in conventional statistics on labor force and national income. Despite its toll on women, which Palmer (1995) called the “reproduction tax” on women, domestic work and other nonmarket tasks done by women were not recognized and classified as part of the economy. An initial reluctance, even hostility, on the part of economists and other social scientists as well as of institutions to accept the need to estimate unpaid work was countered by women, who saw it as a basic issue worth struggling for. Feminist analysis also had its counterparts in activism as in the “wages for housework” campaigns of the 1970s and in continuing advocacy at the International Labour Organization and national governments over time-use data (Jain and Banerjee 1985). These ideas found their way into feminist advocacy in different forums, not least of all the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. Advocacy to “recognize, reduce and redistribute” unpaid care work (Elson 2017) continues. Over the years, it has been one of the successful battles fought on many fronts. The “accounting for women’s work project” has led to the implementation of time-use studies in a growing number of countries and with some regularity and creation of household satellite accounts that highlight the importance of unpaid care work (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Floro, this volume). In this process, the central importance of reproduction for feminism saw a transformation in its analytical use, increasingly focusing on the care economy. Folbre’s book Who Pays for the Kids (1994) was important in the shift at the theoretical and empirical level. It was preceded and followed by much work on the extension and depth of the care economy. For instance, the analysis of care work, including the influential concept of the “care diamond” (care provision by the household, the market, civil society, the state) and its implications, has been central to a great deal of feminist economics across countries of the Global North and South from the 1980s till today (Jain and Banerjee 1985; Carrasco, Borderias, and Torns 2011; Floro and Komatsu 2011; Esquivel 2012; Razavi 2012; Pearson 2019). Using estimates of the time spent 27

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on care work, and the unequal distribution of this work between women and men, it has been a continuation and large expansion of the Accounting Project of the 1980s and 1990s and it has contributed to the generation of data on all aspects of the care economy, with many implications for policy at the micro and macro levels. In the context of more rural economies of the Global South, feminist economists have shown that domestic work includes unpaid activities such as care of kitchen gardens and animals, as well as fuel, water, and fodder collection (Sen and Sen 1985). Such activities are not only outside traditional economic accounting of work and labor force statistics but also differentiated by the economic (including landholding) status of the household, highlighting thereby the intersections of gender, economic class, and caste. Wide variations across regions in traditionally measured female work participation rates decline dramatically when women’s unpaid work is counted. For example, regular estimation of such domestic work through India’s national statistical system has created a robust time-series of paid and unpaid work (Bhattacharya 1985; Mukherjee 2012).

Reproduction and sustainable development The feminist focus on the “crossroads of production and reproduction” led in two linked but distinct directions—environmental concerns about the sustainability of growth and development, and a paradigm shift in population policies—in both of which feminist analysis, advocacy, and activism have played a critical role. Once again, as with their interactions with anthropologists in the 1970s, feminist economists reached across disciplinary boundaries to create common ground with ecologists and with health specialists. The urgency of these attempts was catalyzed by growing concerns about the links between uncontrolled economic growth and such challenges (to name only a few) as pollution, soil and water degradation, desertification, loss of forests, resource depletion, ozone holes, and, not least of all, the rising temperatures of the atmosphere and the oceans leading to climate change. Feminists engaged with these challenges in numerous ways, developing new concepts and analysis. Their work combined critiques of the rapacious misuse and overuse of nature in the course of capitalist accumulation with the importance of reproductive labor for ecological sustainability. Feminist ecological economics grew rapidly in the years after the 1992 Rio Summit, with contributions from many. Jochimsen and Knobloch (1997) connected industrial production, ecological processes, and care work through the limited autonomy, asymmetry, and dependence characteristic of the latter. Bennholdt-Thomsen (2001) and Halme, Jasch, and Scharp (2002) built on feminist economic ideas to argue for the ecological sustainability of subsistence production and home-based services. Perkins (2007) argued that feminist ideas of unpaid work and caring labor contained the seeds of how to transition to equity-enhancing economic systems with lower material throughput. Agarwal (1994) and Deere and León (2001) linked gender inequalities in assets and property, especially land, to unsustainable use of resources and the problems of reproduction. They undertook analysis to show that the crises in livelihoods and survival brought on by the current phase of capitalist globalization and neoliberal agendas have especially difficult consequences for women, including through its damaging impacts on subsistence environments. Women are not only more vulnerable to these effects because of unequal access to resources and incomes but also under increasing pressure to ensure subsistence and survival as ecological stresses erode traditional methods to assure household livelihoods (Sen and Grown 1987; Randriamaro 2014). As with the re-conceptualization of work, researchers interacted with advocates and activists. By way of illustration, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) linked feminists across the Global South and North, included many scholar-activists, and played 28

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a key role during the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and thereafter. More recently, in the advocacy linked to the international agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Women’s Major Group, which is an umbrella organization with official status at the UN (Sen 2018; Razavi, this volume), is recognized as being the most articulate and effective. The period leading up to the Rio Summit in 1992 witnessed tensions between feminists and environmental activists, especially those influenced by ideas about a ticking “population bomb,” a threatening ecological doom for the planet. Stronger population control measures in the Global South were being advocated by influential environmentalists, with little heed to the mixed history of such measures in terms of health and human rights. Feminist economists and their allies in the health field challenged these approaches, drawing on the conceptual breakthroughs that had been made about reproduction. Researchers came together, crossing disciplinary boundaries, to examine the extent to which population growth among poor people can be held to blame for unsustainable development, rather than overconsumption by the well-off and the overproduction intrinsic to capitalist processes (Arizpe, Stone, and Major 1994). Activists from both sides participated in a remarkable series of debates on the issue at the nongovernmental forum for the Rio Summit that led to considerable clearing of the air and a shift toward more nuanced advocacy by environmentalists and greater sensitivity to the human rights of women (Sen 1994). These dialogues played an important role in consolidating respect, protection, promotion, and fulfillment of women’s human rights as central to population policies. One can trace their origins to the feminist critique of unbridled capital accumulation and evolution of the concept of reproduction. The resulting paradigm changes away from population control policies and toward gender equality and sexual and reproductive health, and rights were consolidated at the UN International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994 (Correa, Germain, and Sen 2016). Women’s responsibilities for biological and social reproduction require that laws and policies should fulfil their human rights, not violate them. Although the feminist agenda has faced well-funded backlashes from conservatives opposing its gender equality premises and implications, feminist scholars, advocates, and activists have held the line on the key concept of reproductive rights, expanded the public imagination, and opened debates on sexuality and sexual rights; they forged new alliances with young people and with other movements for social and economic justice (Correa, Germain, and Sen 2016).

Globalization, crisis, and macroeconomics Feminist economics placed a challenge to globalization from its beginning by questioning neoliberalism and its results in terms of gender in/equality (Elson and Pearson 1981; Lim 1983). Numerous empirical studies since then have illustrated the feminization of the labor force worldwide, the way capital moved to low-cost countries and employed cheap female labor, and the significance of employing women for export promotion and growth (Elson and Pearson 1989; Standing 1989; Kabeer 2000; Seguino 2000; Fussell 2000). To be sure, the neoliberal period has been a very dynamic period in the world economy, and an optimistic evaluation of this process can be made in terms of many indicators (World Bank 2011). Statistics on health, education, and employment standards regarding women can be shown to have improved across the globe. Life expectancy, mortality rates, enrollment rates in education at all levels, and labor force participation can be shown to have increased substantially. Thus, the World Bank sees that “globalization has the potential to contribute to greater gender equality” because trade openness, technological change, and increased access to information “have lifted some of the constraints to greater equality” (2011, 271). Indeed, although recognizing that “the rising tide has not lifted everybody,” the World Bank presents a very positive evaluation of globalization and its 29

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impact on gender equality based on increased access to economic opportunities, stronger incentives for action, and shifting gender roles and norms. Hence, it is implied that the market, in its neoliberal version, can be relied on to achieve gender equality and improve women’s lives. At the same time, the World Bank (2011, 81) recognizes that, in the reproductive area, housework and care are still a woman’s domain; hence, neoliberalism has been less empowering for women with regard to gender equality in reproduction. In addition, in this account, no attention is paid to the negative aspects of globalization, such as rising extreme aspects of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, the persistence and even increase in the precariousness of work, labor exploitation, and widespread unemployment and poverty. The intensity and far-ranging increase in social inequality worldwide have a gender aspect as well. Gender inequality is the result of, at least, the intersection of gender and social class. Thus, to the extent that social inequality is increasing, it will have an effect, even if difficult to measure, on gender inequality. Informality and precariousness have different manifestations for men and women, but they are a reality to be taken into account. Desperate migration lines to the Global North are a reminder of the negative effects of class polarization and of the failures of neoliberalism to mitigate even the most extreme forms of inequality. The economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s represented another test for the process of globalization. Initiated first in Latin American countries and later manifested in Asia, they represented a big test for neoliberal policies pushed by the “Washington Consensus.” Structural adjustment policies (SAPs) were austerity programs that fell heavily on the population; it did not take much time for feminists to realize that they fell even more heavily on women. Austerity programs represented a loss in employment and a decrease in family budgets, with the corresponding intensification of work at home and adjusting family strategies for survival. This gave rise to engendering macroeconomics (Elson 1991; Çagatay 2003). We had assumed concepts and policies used in macroeconomics as being gender neutral, but, as Elson (1991) argued, a closer examination reveals them to be imbued with a male bias. Since then, macroeconomics with a gender lens has grown to the point of being able to combine it with the economics of care (Esquivel 2012; Floro 2019; Heintz and Folbre 2019). Austerity programs typified also the policy reactions to the 2008 economic crisis that hit the North and the South. Although its effects varied depending on countries, they had in common a differential impact by gender (Antonopoulos et al. 2014). As in the earlier crises in Latin America, they increased unemployment, decreased exports and squeezed household’s budgets, creating negative multiplier effects across sectors (Ghosh 2014). With women bearing the burden of household needs and care of children in a disproportionate way, it made more obvious the need to invest in the care sector in order to deal with the care economy, create more jobs, and struggle for gender equality in care giving (Antonopoulos et al. 2014). Hence, while SAPs were crucial to understand that macroeconomics was not neutral with respect to gender, the austerity policies beyond 2008 have been important to underline the need to integrate the care economy in macroeconomic policy. In the same way, the experiences of SAPs and austerity programs had an effect on women’s mobilization and advocacy worldwide (Benería and Feldman 1992). In both cases, feminist economics expanded with the conceptualization of lines of action and battles to fight.

Conclusion The concepts of capital accumulation and reproduction are central to the contributions that feminist economics has made to economic development theory and policies. That core idea was developed in a brace of papers we wrote in 1981/82 (Benería and Sen 1981, 1982). We 30

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have tried here to look back to those ideas to see how they have stood the test of time and how relevant they continue to be today. Using illustrations from three sub-fields of feminist ­economics—work, sustainability, and macroeconomics—we have highlighted some of the significant analytical advances that have been made through time. Thus, changes in the conceptualization and accounting of work made explicit the connections, first, between reproduction and production and, second, between the care economy and the wider economy reflecting capital accumulation. In the same way, the crossroads of production and reproduction led in two linked but distinct directions—environmental concerns about the sustainability of growth and development, and a paradigm shift in population policies—in both of which feminist analysis, advocacy, and activism have played a critical role. Finally, in the analysis of globalization and macroeconomics, we have argued that, in order to promote and evaluate progress in gender equality, it is essential to connect it with capital accumulation and issues of distribution, exploitation, and class formation connected to macroeconomics variables. We have also found that, in the intervening years, feminist economics has continuously pushed against the constraints and limitations of the discipline of economics. To do this, it has reached across disciplinary boundaries—anthropology, environmental studies, and public health have been illustrated here. It has also come out of the ivory tower of an academic discipline, drawing on and contributing to feminist policy advocacy and activism. These interactions have borne fruit, grounding feminist economics in the development field and in the realities of women’s lives and the fragility of their livelihoods. In doing this, feminist economists have challenged the status quo of traditional development economics and expanded its terrain to link processes of capitalist accumulation to the challenges of unpaid work, human and social reproduction, worsening gender and class inequality, and ecological unsustainability. Their ideas have thus spread far beyond the somewhat narrow sub-fields of traditional economics, making them useful in ways that many feminist economists may not themselves have fully realized.

References Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One’s Own. Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Antonopoulos, Rania, Kijong Kim, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias. 2014. “Investing in Care in the Midst of a Crisis: A Strategy for Effective and Equitable Job Creation in the United States.” In G ­ ender Perspectives and Gender Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis, edited by Rania Antonopoulos, 49–72. New York: Routledge. Arizpe, Lourdes, Priscilla Stone, and David Major, eds. 1994. Population and the Environment: Rethinking the Debate. New York: Westview Press. Benería, Lourdes. 1979. “Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of Labor.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (3): 203–25. Benería, Lourdes. 1981. “Conceptualizing the Labor Force: The Underestimation of Women’s Economic Activities.” The Journal of Development Studies 17 (3): 10–18. Benería, Lourdes, Gunseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2015. Gender, Development and Globalization. New York: Routledge. Benería, Lourdes, and Shelley Feldman, eds. 1992. Unequal Burden. Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work. New York: Westview Press. Benería, Lourdes, and Gita Sen. 1981. “Accumulation, Reproduction, and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter): 279–98. ———. 1982. “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications.” Feminist Studies (Spring): 157–76. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika. 2001. “What Really Keeps Our Cities Alive, Money or Subsistence?” In There Is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization, edited by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas, and Claudia von Werlhof, 217–31. New York: Zed Books.

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Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen Bhattacharya, Sudhir. 1985. “On the Issue of Under-Enumeration of Women’s Work in the Indian Data Collection System.” In Tyranny of the Household: Investigative Essays on Women’s Work, edited by Devaki Jain and Nirmala Banerjee, 195–214. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing. Boserup, Ester. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen and Unwin. Çagatay, Nilufer. 2003. “Engendering Macro-Economics.” In Macroeconomics: Making Gender Matter, edited by Martha Gutierrez, 22–41. London: Zed Press. Carrasco, Cristina, Cristina Borderias, and Teresa Torns. 2011. El Trabajo de Cuidados. Historia, Teoria y Política. Madrid: Catarata. Correa, Sonia, Adrienne Germain, and Gita Sen. 2016. “Feminist Mobilizing for Global Commitments to the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls.” In Women and Girls Rising: Progress and Resistance Around the World, edited by Ellen Chesler and Terry McGovern, 51–68. New York: Routledge. Deere, Carmen Diana, and Magdalena León. 2001. Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Edholm, Felicity, Olivia Harris, and Kate Young. 1977. “Conceptualising Women.” Critique of Anthropology 3 (9/10): 101–30. Elson, Diane. 1991. “Male Bias in Macroeconomics; the Case of Structural Adjustment.” In Male Bias in the Development Process, edited by Diane Elson, 164–90. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ———. 2017. “Recognize, Reduce and Redistribute Unpaid Care-work: How to Close the Gender Gap.” New Labour Forum 26 (2): 52–61. Elson, Diane, and Ruth Pearson. 1981. “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing.” Feminist Review 7 (1): 87–107. Elson, Diane, and Ruth Pearson, eds. 1989. Women’s Employment in Multinationals in Europe. London: Macmillan Press. Esquivel, Valeria. 2012. “Cuidado, economía y agendas políticas: una mirada conceptual sobre la ‘organización del cuidado’ en América Latina.” In La Economica Feminista en América Latina, edited by ONU Mujeres, 141–89. Santo Domingo: ONU Mujeres. Floro, Maria S. 2019. “A Feminist Economist’s Reflections on Economic Development.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Development Economics Theories and Policy Debates, edited by Machiko Nissanke and Jose Antonio Ocampo, 247–75. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, Springer Nature. Floro, Maria S., and Hitomi Komatsu. 2011. “Labor Force Participation, Gender and Work: What Time Use Data Can Reveal?” Feminist Economics 4: 33–67. Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Pays for the Kids: Gender and the Structures of Constraint. New York: Routledge. Fussell, Elizabeth. 2000. “Making Labor Flexible: The Recomposition of Tijuana’s Maquiladora Female Labor Force.” Feminist Economics 6 (3): 59–80. Ghosh, Jayati. 2014. “Financing Crises and Their Gendered Employment Impact: Emerging Trends and Past Experiences.” In Gender Perspectives and Gender Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis, edited by Rania Antonopoulos, 17–48. New Yok: Routledge. Halme, Minna, Christine Jasch, and Michael Scharp. 2002. “Sustainable Homeservices? Toward Household Services That Enhance Ecological, Social and Economic Sustainability.” Ecological Economics 51 (1–2): 125–38. Heintz, James, and Nancy Folbre. 2019. “Endogenous Growth, Population Dynamics, and Returns to Scale: Long-Run Macroeconomics When Demography Matters.” Care Work and the Economy Working Paper Series 19–01, Program on Gender Analysis in Economics, American University, Washington, DC. doi:10.17606/cg00-k58 Jain, Devaki, and Nirmala Banerjee, eds. 1985. Tyranny of the Household: Investigative Essays on Women’s Work. New Delhi, India: Vikas Publishing. Jochimsen, Maren, and Ulrike Knobloch. 1997. “Making the Hidden Visible: The Importance of Caring Activities and Their Principles for Any Economy.” Ecological Economics 20 (22): 107–12. Kabeer, Naila. 2000. The Power to Choose: Bangladesh Women and Labor Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London and New York: Verso. Lim, Linda. 1983. “Capitalism, Imperialism and Patriarchy: The Dilemma of Third World Women Workers in Multinational Factories.” In The Making of Social Movements in Latin America, edited by Arturo Escobar and Sonia E Alvarez, 134–49. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Miller, Carol, and Shahra Razavi. 1995. “From WID to GAD: Conceptual Shifts in the Women and Development Discourse.” UNRISD Occasional Paper No. 1, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva, Switzerland.

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3 FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY Smriti Rao and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

Introduction: defining feminist political economy Feminist political economy is a body of work that has emerged from feminist critiques of classical political economy, which encompasses the theories of Marx, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Polanyi, and Veblen. The classical political economy approach is summarized by four basic questions posed by Bernstein (2017): (i) who owns what, (ii) who does what, (iii) who gets what, and (iv) what do they do with it? In the classical tradition, the “who” may be a group or an individual, and the context is predominantly production for pay or profit. In the feminist reshaping of this tradition, these questions are asked for both market and nonmarket contexts, and, as will be explained, for both production and social reproduction. This chapter reviews the Marxist-feminist strand within feminist political economy (hereafter FPE). As the largest and most influential body of work within FPE, this literature has two core characteristics. First, it explores the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and class, where class is defined as the relationship of a person/group to the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus. Second, most contemporary feminist political economists view capitalism not just as an economic system but as an institutional order that shapes the culture, polity, as well as the economy, through its tendency to prioritize the accumulation of surplus, which is the “front story” of capitalism (Fraser 2014, 102). Feminist political economists have developed a critique of this drive to accumulate, arguing that it cannot be reconciled with a feminist vision that prioritizes life-making, in the broadest sense of that term (Bhattacharya 2017). Feminism shares with Marxist political economy an ethical position against concentrations of power and an emphasis on processes of social construction that are specific to particular historical and social contexts (Federici 2012). Despite these commonalities, the “unhappy marriage” between 20th-century Marxism and feminism (Hartmann 1979) drove many feminists away from Marxist political economy by the 1980s and, given the even greater hostility of mainstream economics to feminism, away from economic analyses more generally (Luxton 2006). There has been a recent resurgence of FPE (Arruzza 2016; Bhattacharya 2017). This resurgence is in part a response to rising inequality, as global markets were liberalized and social safety nets were rolled back in the 1990s and 2000s. It is also a response to the Great Recession and its aftermath, as owners of capital were able to monopolize the gains from any economic recovery, 34

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leaving workers to grapple with austerity and a backlash against feminism in countries as diverse as the US, Turkey, and India. Neither liberal feminism nor critical feminisms disengaged from economic analyses seemed able to provide a satisfactory explanation of this material context and the state’s exercise of power on behalf of capital (Fraser 2016). With its skepticism about capitalism’s capacity to provide solutions to the problems of gender, economy, or nature, FPE has a renewed analytical and political relevance.

The basics of Marx’s critique of political economy Marx’s political economy begins with the distinction between labor and labor power in the process of production. When labor power is a commodity, its purchase allows the buyer, usually the owner of capital, to extract its use-value, human labor. In Marx’s conceptualization, the value of labor power (VLP) represents the historically specific standard of living of the working class. Even when the capitalist does pay the worker a wage that is equivalent to the VLP, however, Marx argued that the capitalist is still able to gain from this transaction. Labor itself produces more value than is embodied in the VLP, producing what Marx called “surplus value.” Since the capitalist buys the right to consume labor power, he owns the product of the labor and thus is the first appropriator of this surplus. In the Marxist framework, when someone other than the producer of surplus appropriates it, class exploitation occurs. The tendency toward capital accumulation, that is, an increase in the surplus appropriated by capitalists, characterizes capitalism as a system. Marx himself concentrated on two ways in which such accumulation occurred: firms seek to increase absolute surplus by either lengthening or intensifying the workday at a given technology, and/or they aim to increase relative surplus by adopting technological changes to increase labor productivity. Workers, meanwhile, push back against these attempts, creating a specifically capitalist form of class conflict. For capitalists, keeping wages from growing faster than productivity is important to sustain accumulation through exploitation. Capitalists can achieve this goal by lowering workers’ bargaining power through technological, legal, and ideological changes, as well as through violence. Processes of automation, legal restrictions on unions, and ideologies that emphasize hard work as a central virtue can all serve this goal. One such capitalist strategy is the use of gender or racial discrimination to develop a “reserve army of labor”—a group of easily hired but also fired workers who could be used to bring down wages and weaken labor resistance. Early FPE viewed women workers, particularly those from middle-income groups, as constituting such a reserve army of labor (Humphries 1983). Marx did describe some of the ways in which women workers faced different conditions than men within the wage labor force, including the systematically lower wages they were paid. He also argued that the structure of the family and the position of women were not immutable across time but shaped by particular material conditions. He pointed out the difference between the working-class family, in his time one in which all members of the family, including women and children, were wage laborers and the bourgeois family, where being a wife or a mother usually implied being outside the wage labor force (Marx 1976, 577). This argument emphasized that class differentiates gender and is congruent with later feminist understandings of gender as the social construction of biological difference (Scott 1988). Marx briefly discussed an alternative form of accumulation, which he called “primitive accumulation,” where surplus is extracted by the outright expropriation of resources through explicit violence, as in the case of colonialism, or less overtly violent but coercive changes in property rights law, as in the case of the enclosure movement in Europe (Marx 1976). A growing body of Marxist scholarship argues that accumulation by expropriation or dispossession, far 35

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from being primitive, continues to be an important aspect of capitalist accumulation in the early 21st century and is beginning to explore how it is gendered (Hartsock 2008; Moore 2017). In Marx’s view, the drive to accumulate capital rested on a host of contradictions that could not always be managed, resulting in periodic crises that interrupted accumulation, each time increasing unemployment and poverty for the working class. His critique was thus twofold: that capitalism was based on exploitation rather than freedom and that it was an inherently unstable system. The implication, less fleshed out in his work, was that an alternative institutional order that allowed the collective appropriation of surplus by those who produced it might be more compatible with human flourishing.

The feminist critique of Marx’s political economy There are several notable problems with Marx’s analysis from a feminist perspective. First, Marx had a limited interest in the two-way relation between changing forms of accumulation and gendered power relations. Second, Marx never explored the production of labor power itself. For Marx, the term “social reproduction” referred to the entire complex of social, cultural, and political processes required to reproduce capital–labor relations. This definition, however, omitted the labor of life-making required to produce and sustain the labor force, despite such labor being a vital condition of existence for capitalism. In most parts of the world it is women and girls who perform this labor, much of it unpaid. But Marxism was a theory of “empty places” with no explanation of why it was indeed women who performed the bulk of this work (Hartmann 1979). The omission of women’s unpaid labor from Marxist analysis meant that Marxists had little analysis or critique of the gender division of labor (Molyneux 1979).

Second-wave feminism and Marxism Early feminist political economists expanded the definition of social reproduction to include (i) the daily sustenance of the workers; (ii) the intergenerational reproduction of the labor force, including biological reproduction and the care of dependents; and (iii) the work involved in transmitting the norms, culture, and skills required to reproduce workers as a class (Benería 1979). One of the most important contributions of FPE is to fill the gap left by 19th- and 20thcentury Marxism’s unwillingness to grapple with the details and dynamics of social reproduction and its links to production. As participants in the social movements of the 1960s, women who brought feminist questions into Marxism found some initial answers in the works of Engels (Vogel 2013). Engels (1978) argued that every economic system had to have counterpart institutions of reproduction that needed to be examined from a materialist perspective. He argued that the origins of gender inequality and male control over women’s reproductive power under capitalism lay in the establishment of the institution of private property. However, since the proletariat was effectively propertyless under capitalism, proletarian women would come to achieve equality with men, which would become universal for all women, with the establishment of socialism and the abolition of private property. Unfortunately, within the working class and in the socialist countries of the 20th century, gender inequalities in wages and access to political power persisted, convincing feminists that the success of the socialist project would not automatically end the oppression of women (Molyneux 1979). Yet when feminists raised questions about the unequal distribution of power by gender, most Marxists dismissed these questions as trivial, as a secondary contradiction (when compared to class conflict), or as dangerous, because they had the potential to divide the working class (Beechey 1987). 36

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The standard Marxist explanation for the persistence of discrimination against women was that it helped capitalists to push down average wage rates for the working class as a whole and was thus functional for capital. But this analysis seemed to subsume gender inequality under class inequality and, as radical feminists argued, take the onus off men as a group by emphasizing the antagonism with capital (Barrett 1980). One alternative for feminists trying to reconcile Marxism with feminism was to see patriarchy and capitalism as two equally important but different modes of production, in what came to be known as the “dual systems” approach (Hartmann 1979). However, given the variations in the forms of gender inequality experienced by women across the world, feminists of color in the Global South and North found the positing of a monolithic patriarchal system problematic (Benería and Sen 1981; Davis 1981). Specifying the internal dynamics of such a patriarchal mode of production proved difficult, and laying out a systematic relationship between the patriarchal and capitalist modes of production proved to be even more challenging (Rowbotham 1981; Beechey 1987). A second stream of feminist theorizing in the 1970s focused more narrowly on unpaid domestic labor and its relationship with what Marxists called “productive labor,” defined as being productive of surplus (Himmelweit and Mohun 1977). Since the VLP presumes production of goods and services by unpaid domestic labor, feminists argued that domestic labor is also productive of surplus and deserving of a wage (Dalla Costa and James 1972). Those who performed this labor were seen as super-exploited by capital or by the (male) heads of their households (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Folbre 1982; Cohen 2018). Most feminist political economists today do not see unpaid domestic labor as directly productive of surplus but rather as indirectly subsidizing capital (Vogel 2013), or as a form of accumulation by appropriation (Moore 2017). One of the major weaknesses of the domestic labor debate was that it remained limited to heterosexual, (nuclear) kin-based, White middle-class households in the Global North, even as evidence mounted that most households in the world look quite different (Whitehead 1984). By the 1980s, these difficulties, the relative indifference to feminist issues on the part of the largely male Marxist community, as well as the decline in left social movements and analyses more generally pushed many of the participants in these debates away from Marxist-feminist analyses (Luxton 2006). However, the dual systems and domestic labor debates laid the foundations for the rich empirical work on unpaid labor, care work, and time-use that has now become central to feminist economics (Moos, this volume).

Contemporary FPE The recent revival of FPE, led by the proponents of social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya 2017), is an attempt to understand the material underpinnings of gender inequality in 21st-century capitalist societies. Feminists within the economics profession and in wider civil society have forced the discipline to begin to confront the realities of gender inequality. Da Corta (2009) points out, however, even when there is a critique of inequalities the nature of the analysis matters. FPE explores the relationship between gender inequalities and processes of capital accumulation, arguing that feminist policies need to be explicitly pro-labor, grounded in an analysis of how labor itself is produced by the work of social reproduction. The resurgence of FPE has occurred in the context of increased skepticism that capitalism as a system can deliver solutions to the multiple crises of finance, food, fuel, and climate we confront today, all of which seem to be related to the prioritization of capital accumulation over all else. 37

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The Great Recession provides multiple examples of such a prioritization of capital accumulation over considerations of gender or racial equality. To give just one, despite impressive pre-crisis commitments to gender equality on the part of the European Union, in the aftermath of the Great Recession austerity policies across Europe prioritized finance capital over social spending, shifting the costs of an accumulation crisis into the realm of social reproduction. Official commitments to gender equality were quickly shed as austerity took hold, with the most severe burdens of increased work time and lost income then falling upon single workingclass mothers and elderly women pensioners (Karamessini and Rubery 2014). Feminist political economists argue that a feminist analysis of this outcome, and indeed of the Great Recession more generally, would be incomplete without a recognition of the nature of class as well as gender relations in the global economy. Feminist political economists today are attempting to more systematically place race, ethnicity, gender, and class on an equal analytical footing (Ferguson 2014). Since capitalism has no mechanism for automatically ensuring the reproduction of workers, they argue that successful capital accumulation depends upon the maintenance of the gendered, generational, or racialized divisions of labor that ensure that the work of social reproduction is performed (Katz 2001). This means that class exploitation requires gender as well as other non-class forms of oppression (Arruzza 2016). Feminist political economists thus employ intersectionality as a methodology within the theoretical framework of Marxism (Ferguson 2016). Contemporary FPE extends Benería’s (1979) definition of social reproduction to include the paid labor of social reproduction, performed for wages by nannies, maids, cooks, and so forth, and other means of replenishment of the labor force, such as through immigration (Vogel 2013). FPE thus examines the considerable work of social reproduction that is performed outside the context of the kin-based household as well. FPE then focuses on the contradictions between the imperatives of life-making, which drive the labor of social reproduction, and those of capitalist accumulation. One such contradiction arises from the fact that while the performance of unpaid labor could help lower average wages, those who perform unpaid labor are then less able to enter the wage labor force, reducing labor supply. The promise of “lean-in” (to capitalism) feminism is that paid work under capitalism can undo gender inequalities, while markets can solve the problem of the care deficits generated when women enter the (paid) labor force. In the Global North, technological advancements have helped to reduce unpaid domestic labor, allowing women’s labor force participation rates to rise (Vogel 2013). For highly paid women workers in the North, some of the care work that remains has been commodified, allowing them to relieve their double burden to some extent. But FPE analyses emphasize that this labor is now performed by non-White, often immigrant, relatively low-waged women workers who then bear the most intense forms of the double burden. This displacement of care deficits onto more marginalized women then affects their well-being and the social reproduction of the working class in their home economies/regions (Katz 2001; Ghosh 2018). The apparent liberation of highly paid women workers in the North thus rests upon the intersecting inequalities of race, citizenship, and income that ensure the supply of low-wage nannies and maids. An FPE counterpoint to “lean in” feminism would be one that seeks to disrupt these gendered/racial labor market hierarchies, while also constraining the mobility of capital (Ghosh 2018). Thus, while there is a great deal of scholarship focused on the question of whether wage work decreases gender inequalities, feminist political economists follow Marxist-feminists of the second wave (Elson and Pearson 1981) in arguing that the answer varies by class, as well as race, ethnicity/caste, or geographical context (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Naidu and Ossome 38

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2018). Redressing these intersecting inequalities requires social and economic policies that are broadly pro-labor while also targeting specific racial and gendered disparities. To avoid purely functionalist explanations of the role of social reproduction or gender inequality, feminist political economists also emphasize social reproduction and non-class hierarchies as (relatively neglected) sites from which resistance to capitalism can emerge. Thus, a spate of women’s strikes across the world from 2016 to 2018 involved organizing within households, as opposed to just workplaces, and drew on resistance to injustices of gender and race, as well as class (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). The aforementioned are examples of contexts where wage labor is dominant. But in many parts of the Global South, we encounter forms of capitalism in which the standard capital–­ wageworker relationship is not as dominant as it is in the North, with very high shares of informal sector–­independent producers such as marginal farmers or tradespeople (Charusheela 2010; ­Harriss-White 2012; Ferguson and Li 2018). These producers often pursue a complex set of diversified livelihood activities, occasionally entering wage work, both agricultural and nonagricultural, and engaging in spells of circular migration. The difficulties in classifying their occupations using standard Marxist categories have led to Bernstein (2017, 15) terming them “classes of labor.” Feminist political economists thus have to grapple with forms of capitalism where owners of capital are able to extract surplus not just directly from wage workers but through interest and rent, or “formal subsumption” to capital (Marx 1976, 1021). Far from vanishing with the expansion of capitalism, precarious forms of labor, and the kinds of un-freedom that they are associated with (debt-bondage in particular), appear to be pervasive in the 21st century (Guérin 2013). FPE scholars have to think more deeply about how gender relations in postcolonial contexts intersect with forms of accumulation by dispossession/expropriation and fragmented livelihoods that do not conform to classical Marxist divisions between the wage-laboring proletariat and capitalists (Mezzadri and Fan 2018). There are at least two aspects of these emerging analyses that are worth mentioning here. The first is a revived interest in the concept of the “relative surplus population” and how it is gendered. Marx had argued that discrimination against women helped create a reserve army of labor. In the Global North, the generally high labor force participation of women indicates that women are not necessarily part of a cyclical reserve army. In the Global South, many women small-scale petty commodity producers have been marginalized but not incorporated into the wage labor force, again suggesting that they may not act as a reserve army of labor (HarrissWhite 2012). Marx’s argument about a reserve army was part of a boarder discussion of capitalism’s tendency to create groups of long-term unemployed and underemployed that he termed the “relative surplus population” (Humphries 1983). This is a category broader than that of the cyclical reserve army and makes room for the possibility that not all members of the relative surplus population may ever enter the wage labor force (Ferguson and Li 2018). New research is thus exploring how gender relations might shape the different components of this relative surplus population (Naidu and Ossome 2018). A second important development is the move away from assumptions about male-headed nuclear household structures in earlier FPE analyses. This follows feminists’ definitive critique of unitary household models in both neoclassical and Marxist economics, exposing the pervasiveness of intra-household conflict and showing how household relations vary by class and race (Deere 1990; Safri and Graham 2010). Scholarship on the Global South also reminds us that, unlike in much of the North, the household can be a site of activities that directly produce surplus, as well as a site of social reproduction. There is a rich literature on gender and peasant production (O’Laughlin 2008), and on the continuing significance of home-based piece-work as capitalists outsource to informal sector activities taking place within households (Raju 2013). 39

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Last but not least, in a world where the consequences of climate change have become increasingly apparent, FPE scholarship has become central to new work that tries to understand how capital accumulation in our “Capitalocene” era has accelerated the human–nature divide. Moore (2017) argues that feminist analyses of the ways in which capitalism has channeled women’s unpaid labor into surplus value production can be extended to the analysis of capitalism’s appropriation of natural resources. This approach is contrary to 20th-century official Marxism that saw capitalism as progressive, because of, and not in spite of, the technological progress and mastery over nature that it brought. Rapid industrialization was a goal of 20th-century socialism. New work in feminist political ecology (Elmhirst 2011) has more in common with the eco-feminism of Mies (­Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1999), or the argument about “commoning” that Federici (2018) makes. These are FPE arguments that prioritize the logic of reproduction over that of accumulation and reject the assumption that capitalist accumulation is a necessary step to something better. FPE’s long history of critiquing mainstream Marxist positions, and of recognizing value created in spheres otherwise treated as unproductive, makes it an important resource for scholars attempting to respond to the ecological crises that confront us.

Conclusion The renewed FPE project we summarize here is far from complete. It has not solved all the theoretical difficulties encountered by second-wave Marxist-feminists (Ferguson 2014), nor has it fully overcome the relative indifference to feminist debates within the still male-dominated field of Marxist political economy (Cohen 2018). And yet, the stark inequalities of our age do seem to be shot through by the capital–labor divide, while also being sharply gendered, in ways that call for an FPE approach. Without an understanding of the effects of capitalist accumulation upon our culture, politics, and economy, we believe feminists will be unable to fully analyze gender inequality. Meanwhile, as Cohen (2018) points out, the feminist insight about the importance of social reproduction is often what gives Marxist political economy its radical edge, even if the feminist originators of this analysis, who were often women, are rarely cited or acknowledged. Despite the difficulties of reconciling Marxism and feminism, we see this engagement as intensely productive. In thinking of class and gender relations as mutually constitutive, along with race/ethnicity/caste/sexuality; in employing a more complex and fluid understanding of both gender relations (i.e., identities) and class relations (beyond peasant versus wage worker) than 20th-century Marxists did; and in thinking of production alongside social reproduction in ways that include the role of nature, we see FPE as pointing the way to a richer feminist theory and politics, one that can produce gender-aware analyses of contemporary global capitalism.

References Arruzza, Cinzia. 2016. “Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and Its Critics.” Science & Society 80 (1): 9–30. Arruzza, Cinzia, Thithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%. New York: Verso. Barrett, Michele. 1980. Women’s Oppression Today. London: Verso. Beechey, Veronica. 1987. Unequal Work. London: Verso. Benería, Lourdes. 1979. “Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of Labour.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (3): 203–25. Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2015. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as If All People Mattered. New York: Routledge.

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Feminist political economy Benería, Lourdes, and Gita Sen. 1981. “Accumulation, Reproduction and Women’s Role in D ­ evelopment: Boserup Revisited.” In Women’s Work, edited by Eleanor Leacock and Helen Safa, 141–57. Massachusetts: Begin and Garvey. Bennholdt -Thomsen, Veronica, and Maria Mies. 1999. The Subsistence Perspective. London: Zed Books. Bernstein, Henry. 2017. “Political Economy of Agrarian Change: Some Key Concepts and Questions.” RUDN Journal of Sociology 17 (1): 7–18. Bhattacharya, Thithi. 2017. “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class.” In Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Thithi Battacharya, 55–72. London: Pluto Press. Charusheela, S. 2010. “Engendering Feudalism: Modes of Production Revisited.” Rethinking Marxism 22 (3): 438–45. Cohen, Jennifer. 2018. “What’s ‘Radical’ About [Feminist] Radical Political Economy?” Review of Radical Political Economics 50 (4): 716–26. Da Corta, Lucia. 2009. “The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: Dinosaur or Phoenix?” In The Comparative Political Economy of Development: Africa and South Asia, edited by Barbara Harriss-White and Judith Heyer, 18–46. New York: Routledge. Dalla Costa, M., and James, S., eds. 1972. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House. Deere, Carmen Diana. 1990. Household and Class Relations: Peasants and Landlords in Northern Peru. ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Elmhirst, Rebecca. 2011. “Introducing New Feminist Political Ecologies.” Geoforum 42 (2): 129–32. Elson, Diane, and Ruth Pearson. 1981. “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing.” Feminist Review 7: 87–107. Engels, Frederich. 1978. “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 734–41. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Federici, Sylvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero. San Francisco, CA: PM Press. ———. 2018. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. San Francisco, CA: PM Press. Ferguson, James, and Tania Murray Li. 2018. Beyond the ‘Proper Job’: Political-economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man. Working Paper 51, PLAAS. Cape Town: UWC. Fergus on, Susan. 2014. “A Response to Meg Luxton’s ‘Marxist Feminism and Anticapitalism.’ ” Studies in Political Economy (Autumn): 161–68. ———. 2016. “Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms: Toward an Integrative Ontology.” Historical Materialism 24 (2): 38–60. Folbre, Nancy. 1982. “Exploitation Comes Home: A  Critique of the Marxian Theory of Family Labour.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 6 (4): 317–29. Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode for an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review 86: 55–72. ———. 2016. “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review 100: 99–117. Ghosh, Jayati. 2018. “Gendered Labor Markets and Capitalist Accumulation.” The Japanese Political ­Economy 44 (1–4): 25–41. Guérin, Isabelle. 2013. “Bonded Labour, Agrarian Changes and Capitalism: Emerging Patterns in South India.” Journal of Agrarian Change 13 (3): 405–23. Harriss-White, Barbara. 2012. “Capitalism and the Common Man: Peasants and Petty Production in Africa and South Asia.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 1 (2): 109–60. Hartmann, Heidi. 1979. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital and Class 3 (2): 1–33. Hartsock, Nancy. 2008. “Globalization and Primitive Accumulation: The Contributions of David H ­ arvey’s Dialectical Marxism.” In David Harvey: A Critical Reader, edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory, 167–90. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Himmelweit, Susan, and Simon Mohun. 1977. “Domestic Labour and Capital.” Cambridge Journal of ­Economics 1: 16–31. Humphries, Jane. 1983. “The ‘Emancipation’ of Women in the 1970s and 1980s: From the Latent to the Floating.” Capital & Class 7 (2): 6–28. Karamessini, Maria, and Jill Rubery. 2014. “Economic Crisis and Austerity.” In Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, edited by Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 314–52. New York: Routledge.

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Smriti Rao and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi Katz, Cindy. 2001. “Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction.” Antipode 33 (4): 709–28. Luxton, Meg. 2006. “Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction.” In Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-liberalism, edited by Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson, 11–44. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital Vol. 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1867). Mezzadri, Alessandra, and Lulu Fan. 2018. “ ‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China.” Development and Change 49 (4): 1034–63. Molyneux, Maxine. 1979. “Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate.” New Left Review 116 (3): 27–54. Moore, Jason W. 2017. “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (2): 237–79. Naidu, Sirisha C., and Lyn Ossome. 2018. “Work, Gender, and Immiseration in South Africa and India.” Review of Radical Political Economics 50 (2): 332–48. O’Laughlin, Bridget. 2008. “Gender Justice, Land and the Agrarian Question in Southern Africa.” In ­Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question, edited by Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristobal Kay, 190–213. London: Routledge. Raju, Saraswati. 2013. “The Material and the Symbolic: Intersectionalities of Home-Based Work in India.” Economic and Political Weekly 48 (1): 60–68. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1981. “The Trouble with Patriarchy.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 364–70. London: Routledge. Safri, Maliha, and Julie Graham. 2010. “The Global Household: Toward a Feminist Postcapitalist ­International Political Economy.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (1): 99–125. Scott, Joan. 1988. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–75. Vogel, Lise. 2013. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. New York: Brill. Whitehead, Ann. 1984. “ ‘I’m Hungry Mum’: The Politics of Domestic Budgeting.” In Of Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination Internationally and Its Lessons, edited by Roslyn McCullagh, Carol Wolkowitz, and Kate Young, 93–116. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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4 FEMINIST INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS Ellen Mutari

Introduction Since the early 1990s, feminist institutional economics (FIE) has articulated a distinct approach within the umbrella of feminist economics. FIE emerged from explicit recognition of connections between original institutional economics (OIE) and the new wave of feminist economic theorizing (Mayhew 1999). OIE’s heterodox approach differs from those of the dominant paradigm in mainstream economics in assumptions about human nature, methodology, and even the fundamental nature of what constitutes an economy. Mayhew (2018) summarizes the contemporary OIE theoretical standpoint as focusing on three claims: 1 2

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human beings are enculturated, meaning human nature, group identities, and preferences are not universal but shaped by prevailing cultures, institutions, and social norms; economic methodology should embrace empiricism, which examines the lived economic experience and theorizes on the basis of observation, over logical deduction from oversimplified assumptions; and societies, and thus economies, consist of socially constructed institutions that evolve over time in response to internal and external factors such as technological change and conflict between social groups.

These claims reflect OIE’s strong roots in US philosophical and sociological traditions such as pragmatism, and the influence of the German Historical School. While OIE descended from the work of Veblen, Commons, and others (Mayhew 2018), it has continued to evolve as a theoretical perspective—as befits its association with evolutionary processes. Feminist institutionalist economists generally embrace OIE’s core analytical framework. This is because OIE eschews many of the androcentric biases in mainstream economic theory that were critiqued by the pioneers in feminist economics (for examples of these critiques, see Pujol 1992; England 1993; Nelson 1993). Some of the early work in feminist institutionalist economics (FIE) excavated the implicit and even explicit feminist credentials of OIE’s founders, particularly Veblen (Jennings 1993; Peterson 1998; Stanfield, Stanfield, and Wheatley-Mann 1998). At the same time, feminist institutional economists have extended the OIE framework

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to address frequently neglected questions and topics related to women’s lives, such as care work (Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz 2015) and unequal employment outcomes (Peterson 2012). FIE has continued to claim the importance of methodological pluralism and the malleability of human nature—even as other self-identified feminist economists, according to Tejani (2019), have returned to conventional assumptions and methodologies in their work. It shares many of the core precepts originally associated with feminist economics when the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) was founded in 1992. These precepts have been articulated by Power (2004, 2013) as a social provisioning framework. Power, in fact, utilizes an empirical approach to defining feminist economics by surveying the work of scholars of feminist economics and inducing generalizations. Her articulation of feminist economics is heterodox and pluralist, highlighting commonalities with classical political economy traditions dating back to Marx and Veblen. These political economy influences have shaped feminist scholarship in other heterodox economic traditions, such as Marxian and social economics, as well as FIE (Emami 1993; Mutari 2001; Rao and Akram-Lodhi, this volume). Power (2013) shows that feminist economics starts with a broad definition of economic life as constituted by social provisioning processes; these include nonmarket processes in the public and nonprofit sectors as well as domestic labor and other activities motivated by caring and other non-pecuniary motives. Feminist economics, according to Power, draws upon the capabilities (or human development) framework by viewing human well-being—rather than efficiency and economic growth—as the primary goal for a successful economy. Human agency means that economies are evolving social constructs that are frequently marked by unequal access to power. What follows from a goal of human well-being and the recognition of human agency in shaping economic outcomes is a commitment to ethical responsibility—by both scholars who study economic life and economic actors who live it. Finally, Power notes that feminist economists have moved toward intersectional analyses that transcend binary gender dichotomies. In this chapter I identify five clearly articulated areas where feminist institutional economists have built upon OIE by integrating insights from gender theory and this social provisioning framework: (1) the importance of institutions and culture in shaping gendered economic outcomes and gendered social practices; (2) the multiplicity of human motivations beyond individual self-interest and the malleability of human nature—including gender norms—across cultures; (3) the broad definition of economies as systems for social provisioning, with market transactions as a subset of the range of economic practices; (4) the emphasis on evolutionary change in hegemonic and subordinate gender relations sparked by group conflict and driven by human agency; and (5) the methodological commitment to empiricism over deductive reasoning, reflecting anti-Cartesian epistemologies. Nevertheless, there are aspects of feminist economics and the social provisioning perspective outlined by Power that have been less easily reconciled with OIE, particularly the contentious issue of the basis for value judgments within institutional methodologies. Instead, social economics, which is beyond the scope of this chapter, may resonate more closely with this element of the feminist project since it centers on ethical decision-making, just distribution, and the fostering of human dignity (Emami 1993; van Staveren 2001).

Gendered identities and social institutions The base principle of feminism since the 1970s has been the assertion that the characteristics and behavior associated with women and men—that is, gender—are socially constructed. Humans learn femininity and masculinity through a process of enculturation. The culturally embedded markers of femininity and masculinity both are products of and help constitute 44

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a particular gender order. Gendered identities intersect with class, race, ethnicity, and other socially constructed categories to create hegemonic and subordinate identities. These markers vary across cultures and throughout history. While the dominant culture often treats gender as a binary construct, dichotomizing and ranking the feminine and the masculine, gender is more correctly viewed as a spectrum. The fluidity of gender is a key starting point for understanding FIE’s affinity for OIE. Institutions, the foundational concept of OIE, are defined by Mayhew (1999, 479) as “recurring patterns of behavior and perception” and “shared cultural norms that evolve.” As noted by Dugger (1996, 36), economic “processes produce goods and services, but they also produce people.” For institutional economists, including feminist institutionalists, enculturation is a social process that focuses on groups rather than individuals (Mayhew 2018). In the methodological individualism of neoclassical economics, gender roles and behavior derive from innate characteristics or from exogenously determined tastes and preferences (norms), or they may be rational responses by individuals to exogenous factors: Norms may reside in the consciousness of an individual. Economists who try to calculate preference schedules are treating norms this way. But norms are more fundamentally properties of a community, society or organization. That is to say, they are features of a collective life. (Pearse and Connell 2016, 34) Pearse and Connell (2016) are therefore critical of strains of feminist economics that reduce gender to a set of variables associated with individuals (2016; see also Figart 1997). Gammage, Kabeer, and van der Meulen Rodgers (2016) maintain that gender is structural— intertwined with gendered policies, laws, institutions, and other social practices that constitute a gender order. Feminists, according to these authors, have engendered institutional economics by exploring these dynamics. The people produced by economic social practices are not only female and male. Hopkins and Duggan (2011, 43), in their survey of the comparative economics systems literature, pose a critical question grounded in intersectional analysis: “which sets of economic institutions—which economic systems—benefit which women and which men?” Such institutions are a source of power, defined by Peterson as “the ability to make and implement decisions involving control over others” (1992, 174). The institutions structuring a social order can be either enabling or constraining for specific groups, depending on how they allocate power (van Staveren 2001; Figart, Mutari, and Power 2002; Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Seguino 2009; Gammage, Kabeer, and van der Meulen Rodgers 2016). Elson (1999) shows how labor markets institutionalize and reinforce gender. She notes that job characteristics are frequently associated with feminine or masculine stereotypes and pay systems replicate the social devaluation of women’s work. Wages, from a FIE perspective, are gendered and racialized social practices that constrain or enable the options of particular groups; employers, consciously or unconsciously, set wages that are appropriate for prevailing social norms regarding job holders (Figart, Mutari, and Power 2002). For example, economic policies that emerged in the US during the 20th-century institutionalized gendered and racialized social practices that treated African-American women differently from White women. While “women” (implicitly White women) were ideally full-time homemakers and caregivers, African-American women were expected to be employed. African-American women’s most common forms of employment—agriculture and domestic service—were excluded from protective labor legislation (Mutari, Power, and Figart 2002). Even the construction of an industrial working class was grounded in gendered social practices that defined a family wage as a male 45

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prerogative, transforming factory work from wage slavery (according to 19th-century racialized discourse) into male breadwinning. The male-breadwinner-heterosexual family structure was the hegemonic norm, coexisting with the subordinate social norm of co-breadwinning in ­African-American families (Mutari 2018). FIE therefore illuminates the feedback effects between gender relations and historical processes such as industrialization, the transition to and from state socialism, or globalization (Hopkins and Duggan 2011). Because social structures, institutions, and practices change, feminist institutional economists are wary of any universal generalizations about human motivations and behavior. A  second point of congruence with OIE, therefore, is the sociability and malleability of human nature. Human beings are social beings; their identities and behavior are developed in relationship ­with other people (Jennings 1992; Waller 1999). While human beings share some common ­tendencies—or, in Veblen’s language, instincts—social institutions can support or inhibit the development of particular human traits. Habits become learned dispositions in specific institutional settings. These instincts or potential habits included tendencies toward workmanship [sic], emulation, predation, curiosity, and, significantly for FIE, a parental bent (Mayhew 2018, 10). The parental bent was defined broadly by Veblen to incorporate a variety of other-regarding behaviors (Wrenn and Waller 2017, 496). OIE’s articulation of a parental bent is compatible with feminist economics’ focus on the human capacity for altruism, caring, cooperation, and gift exchange, as well as the economic value of unpaid household/caring labor (England 1993; Nelson 2006; Wrenn and Waller 2017). FIE scholars have been critical of contemporary institutions and economic ideology for devaluing caring and rewarding individual autonomy, contributing to a care deficit (Wrenn and Waller 2017). Davis and McMaster (2015), for example, suggest that the analysis of care using instrumental rationality within mainstream health economics contributes to the marginalization of care within healthcare systems. Neoclassical theory, by implication, is performative (Mutari 2018). This term means that economic theory does not simply describe reality, but rather it shapes the nature of the economy—and economic actors themselves. Due to the influence of mainstream theory, institutions are socially constructed around self-interested behavior. These institutions reinforce self-interested rationality over other potential human capabilities, including those associated with the female side of gendered binaries.

Rigidity and change in social provisioning Feminist economics and OIE have both utilized the definition of an economy as a set of institutions for social provisioning. Provisioning as the core of economic life originated within OIE but was adopted and adapted by many feminist economists, according to Power (2004). Dugger (1996) attributes the initial articulation of economics as the study of social provisioning to Gruchy (1987). Gruchy’s definition was intended to contrast with Robbins’ (1935) definition of economics as a science of human behavior determining how to allocate scare means toward some ends. The term “provisioning” was sometimes coupled with “material” as material provisioning. Nelson (1993, 32), however, points out that the concept of provisioning is not limited to the material elements of well-being since for human survival “nonmaterial services, such as childcare and supervision, as well as attendance to health concerns and the transmission of skills, become just as central as food and shelter.” Similarly, Mayhew (1999, 480) defines social provisioning to include “the process of trying to assure culturally appropriate levels of food, housing, clothing and care.” A single-minded focus on material provisioning reflects a narrow 46

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perspective in economic thinking shaped by industrial manufacturing (Nelson 2006; Mutari 2018). By replacing the concept of material provisioning with social provisioning, feminist and institutional economists (as well as social economists) drew a further contrast with methodological individualism. Social provisioning thus encapsulates the FIE framework in two ways: (1) it enlarges the sphere of the economy beyond activities pursued out of pecuniary motivations and (2) it emphasizes the social, or collective, nature of economic behavior. Market exchange is only one form of economic activity. Jennings (1993, 119), in her early efforts to encourage feminist economists to embrace institutional thought, suggested that institutional economists accept neither the priority of ‘the economic’ as universal nor the market as the sole provisioning domain. Further, they see the cultural prioritizing of markets as reinforcing existing status hierarchies and are critical of measurements of social worth in market prices. This assertion resonates with feminists in a variety of disciplines who, since the early 20th century, have championed the economic value of domestic labor and social reproduction. One concrete manifestation has been challenges to gross domestic product and other economic indicators as limited measures of social value and well-being (Figart 2017). Recognizing the limited scope of markets goes beyond the economic value of the domestic sphere. Collective self-provisioning, buttressed by networks of reciprocal relationships, was far more common throughout much of history than the cold calculus of rational exchange. Coercion was also embedded in economic relationships in ways that continue to influence access to resources and initial endowments. By ignoring historical institutional change, mainstream models reify markets and thus inhibit prospects for further change. A social provisioning framework is premised on socially constructed economic institutions that are periodically restructured by humans engaged in collective behavior or agency—the fourth area where feminism and institutionalism share a common perspective. Veblen (1898) asserted that economics should be an evolutionary science, and OIE is a framework that centers on the evolution of economic institutions. Change is not continuous because there are dynamics of cumulative causation that tend to rigidify existing institutional structures. This process of cumulative causation may mean that institutions lag behind changing social goals (Mayhew 2001). Some institutional economists, like some Marxian economists, focus on technological change generating socioeconomic conflict as a key precipitator of institutional transformations (Mayhew 2018). Institutional change can also be prompted by tensions between changing social values and existing institutional structures or by ongoing group conflict over power and access to resources (Figart 2017). Yet because OIE emphasizes a non-teleological view of historical change, the ultimate resolution of such conflicts can take multiple forms. Understanding how change occurs is critical to gender analysis. However, intersectionality approaches depart from narratives that unilaterally emphasize technology, class conflict, or capitalist accumulation as drivers of institutional change. Gender is not just transformed by economic and technological factors; conflict over gendered social practices can themselves initiate transformations in economic life (Connell 2009; Pearse and Connell 2016; Mutari 2018). Social practices, in this view, continuously recreate (and, at times, transform) the gender order: Hegemonic norms about masculinity and femininity may disguise a proliferation of practices. Departures from norms may go unnoticed, co-existing invisibly alongside more conformist behavior.  .  .  .  [T]here is scope for bringing about change within 47

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norms as the exercise of agency in the translation process subtly alters their meanings, an endogenous and often hidden process of change. (Gammage, Kabeer, van der Meulen Rodgers 2016, 6) Peterson (2012), in her presidential address for the Association for Evolutionary Economics, for example, examined gendered language such as “Mancession” used to describe the economic downturn of 2007–2009. Men’s unemployment, due to their concentration in cyclically sensitive industries, was viewed as triggering a crisis for the gender order in which masculine identity was grounded in wage-earning. Analysts feared further disruption of the male-breadwinner/ female-caregiver norm. Peterson reveals the power of this cumulative causation within the gender order to influence policy discussions—despite the economic reality of women’s increased labor force participation and attachment and their continued disproportionate share of carework burden. Economic policy was thus shaped by contested social practices.

Methodological considerations The four areas of overlap between OIE and FIE elaborated previously also influence how economics is practiced by scholars. A shared epistemological framework regarding how knowledge is generated is the final area of congruence. Since institutional economists eschew efforts to uncover universal laws or a teleological trajectory for human history, empirical methodologies are utilized in lieu of abstract generalizations deduced from assumptions. The latter approach is associated with Cartesian views of science as the objective pursuit of universal, value-free truths. Reason, mind, logic, and rationality (socially constructed as masculine) are dichotomized from a separate realm of emotions, subjectivity, and connection (feminine). Feminist social scientists therefore have criticized Cartesian approaches to science as androcentric for emphasizing the masculine; the emergence of feminist economics was grounded in this insight (Nelson 1993; Dolfsma and Hoppe 2003; Nelson, this volume). FIE, like OIE, treats knowledge as socially constructed. All knowledge is partial knowledge, because it reflects the standpoints of the particular social group constructing it (Waller and Jennings 1990; Mutari 2018). Formative work in FIE examined the historical context in which these Cartesian dualisms were generated. Waller and Jennings (1990) and Jennings (1993) focus on the emergence of a dichotomy or dualism between the public and private spheres in Western cultures, starting in the 17th century. First, the state emerged as a public sphere, with the economy relationally defined as a private sphere. Classical economists asserted the freedom of this private sphere from state interference. Yet, as paid labor increasingly shifted from home to factory, this male sphere of work came to be viewed as a public sphere in contrast with the family. Jennings (1993) identified this as a contradiction in the way that neoclassical economics treats the public–private split, revealing the subjective nature of this socially constructed framework. The public–private split enables mainstream economic theories to assert the existence of private individuals who exist outside of cultural processes (Waller and Jennings 1990; Waller 1999). Preferences, in this framework, can be treated as fixed and unchanging (Dolfsma and Hoppe 2003). In contrast, feminist methodologies that eschew Cartesian dualisms are “contextual, reflexive, and qualitative” (Tejani 2019, 99). Implementation of such methods can be challenging; Austen, Jefferson, and Thein (2003) narrate the obstacles they faced in a pilot attempt at an iterative approach to measures of women’s social and economic progress. Surveying the articles published in Feminist Economics over 20 years, Tejani (2019) observes that despite an avowed commitment to methodological pluralism, empirical work remains conventionally quantitative, emphasizing regression analysis. Consulting with the journal’s editors, she observes that their 48

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receptivity to qualitative methods has been stymied by the professional rewards structure for economists, especially junior economists, globally. My review of explicitly feminist institutionalist work for this essay indicates a different trend. FIE remains committed to qualitative work. However, much of this focuses on theory and the history of economic thought, rather than qualitative empirical work. Despite these important areas of overlap of OIE and FIE, there is one potentially significant area of divergence. Power (2004) suggests that ethical judgments are an inevitable aspect of feminist economic analysis as a liberatory practice. There is no feminism without the assertion that the social values currently shaping prevailing institutions harm women. Due to intersectionality, feminism addresses other social inequities as well. Such agency rests on value judgments. In contrast, the place of ethical judgment has been a contentious subject within OIE (see, e.g., Bush 1987; Mayhew 1987, 2018; Tool 1990; Waller 1999, 2017). OIE generally eschews the language of distributional justice. With no concept of human nature, it is a challenge to determine what constitutes human flourishing. Institutionalism emphasizes collective determination of social goals (or the public good); these goals vary according to the cultural context. This non-teleological process poses challenges for making normative claims (Mayhew 2018). The primary framework for institutional economists seeking to make value judgments about prevailing social institutions is the instrumental value theory proposed by Bush (1987) and Tool (1990). These theorists adapted what has been termed the “Veblenian dichotomy” between two types of valuation: (1) instrumental, which assesses institutions according to their contribution to provisioning processes, given a particular level of cultural knowledge and technology, versus (2) ceremonial, which focuses on status attainment. For Tool (1990), instrumental values rationally prioritize efficiency and equity; by implication, ceremonial values are irrational. As an allied concept, Bush and Tool critique invidious distinctions, which are hierarchies based on status, not productive contributions. Bush and Tool argue that progressive institutional changes are those that replace unwarranted ceremonial values with instrumentally warranted practices. Yet institutional change is not necessarily progressive. Vested interests can undermine democratic processes and policy analysis, reinforcing the status quo and neglecting the common good (Waller 2017). Policy-oriented work within FIE argues that gender hierarchies reflect such invidious distinctions and can be critiqued using this framework (Peterson 1992, 1998; Champlin and Knoedler 2005; Figart 2017). For example, Figart (2017) suggests that if market production and domestic production are equally productive, indicators that prioritize one over the other are unwarranted. Such applications of instrumental valuation are fruitful efforts to rescue OIE from relativism and articulate ethical principles for policy analysis. There are potential limits to grounding feminist ethical claims in instrumental valuation. First, the Veblenian dichotomy echoes the gendered binary that FIE has criticized. Instrumental valuation is tinged with a gendered binary between material production (gendered male and viewed positively) and intangible expressions of affect or emotion (gendered female and viewed as unproductive). It prioritizes rationality, technological advancements, and control. Veblen’s dichotomy is linked to his class distinction between an unproductive leisure class and productive engineers, technocrats, and workers. Like many concepts in economics, his distinction reflects the culture and the economy of his time, the US in the late 19th century with manufacturing as the core sector. Nelson (2006) proposes that many mainstream economic concepts imply a machine metaphor for the economy, where scarce resources are transformed into goods and services. This metaphor, Nelson argues, neglects the less tangible aspects of social provisioning. Similarly, instrumental valuation emphasizes the efficient attainment of outcomes or ends, rather than addressing the processes of economic life. 49

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In contrast with their controversial place within institutional economics, values and ethics are the foundational subject within social economics (Emami 1993; Mutari 2018). Power (2004, 2013) notes the affinity between feminist economics and the capabilities framework, one strand of social economics. Fukuda-Parr, Heintz, and Seguino, for example, propose that social evaluations based on the enhancement of capabilities capture elements of well-being that are missed by approaches emphasizing material consumption (2013, 16). This element of the feminist economics project can complement the insights garnered from FIE if we view alternative economic theories as offering different tools for answering different questions—rather than as warring paradigms that must annihilate each other in order to survive.

Conclusion Institutionalist theory is an important part of a pluralist tool kit for feminist economists. Many of the core principles of feminist economics overlap with FIE: the definition of an economy as a set of socially constructed institutions and social practices that structure social provisioning processes and evolve. Economic knowledge is itself a social construction, reflecting the standpoint of the dominant culture, including gender binaries. Feminist institutional economists have continued to pursue methodological pluralism, even as feminist economics’ empirical research has drifted away from its founding principles. There are, however, limits to simply adopting and applying the OIE framework to feminist questions. FIE has yet to reconcile the precepts of institutional economics with the ethical and social values suggested by capabilities frameworks and social economics. However, this need not be a problem. Feminist economists have long drawn upon insights from multiple theoretical approaches. While the synthesis of feminist and institutional frameworks has yielded a rich stream of methodological and empirical insights, the pluralist nature of feminist economics means that we need to maintain a more complete toolbox.

References Austen, Siobhan, Therese Jefferson, and Vicki Thein. 2003. “Gendered Social Indicators and Grounded Theory.” Feminist Economics 9 (3): 1–18. Berik, Günseli, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, and Stephanie Seguino. 2009. “Feminist Economics of Inequality, Development, and Growth.” Feminist Economics 15 (3): 1–33. Bush, Paul D. 1987. “The Theory of Institutional Change.” Journal of Economic Issues 12 (3): 1075–116. Champlin, Dell P., and Janet T. Knoedler. 2005. “Whither, or Wither, the Good Society?” Journal of ­Economic Issues 39 (2): 455–63. Connell, Raewyn. 2009. Gender in World Perspective, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Davis, John B., and Robert McMaster. 2015. “Situating Care in Mainstream Health Economics: An ­Ethical Dilemma?” Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 749–67. Dolfsma, Wilfred, and Hella Hoppe. 2003. “On Feminist Economics.” Feminist Review 75: 118–28. Dugger, William M. 1996. “Redefining Economics: From Market Allocation to Social Provisioning.” In Political Economy for the 21st Century: Contemporary Views on the Trend of Economics, edited by Charles J. Whalen, 31–43. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. Elson, Diane. 1999. “Labor Markets as Gendered Institutions: Equality, Efficiency, and Empowerment Issues.” World Development 27 (3): 611–27. Emami, Zohreh. 1993. “Challenges Facing Social Economics in the Twenty-First Century: A Feminist Perspective.” Review of Social Economy 51 (4): 416–25. England, Paula. 1993. “The Separative Self: Androcentric Bias in Neoclassical Assumptions.” In Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, 37–53. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Figart, Deborah M. 1997. “Gender as More than a Dummy Variable: Feminist Approaches to ­Discrimination.” Review of Social Economy 55 (1): 1–32.

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Feminist institutional economics ———. 2017. Stories of Progressive Institutional Change: Challenges to the Neoliberal Economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Figart, Deborah M., Ellen Mutari, and Marilyn Power. 2002. Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labor Market Policy in the United States. London: Routledge. Fukuda-Parr, S. James Heintz, and Stephanie Seguino. 2013. “Critical Perspectives on Financial and ­Economic Crises: Heterodox Macroeconomics Meets Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 4–31. Gammage, Sarah, Naila Kabeer, and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2016. “Voice and Agency: Where Are We Now?” Feminist Economics 22 (1): 1–29. Gruchy, Allan G. 1987. The Reconstruction of Economics. New York: Greenwood Press. Hopkins, Barbara E., and Lynn S. Duggan. 2011. “A Feminist Comparative Economic Systems.” Feminist Economics 17 (3): 35–69. Jennings, Ann L. 1992. “Not the Economy: Feminist Theory, Institutional Change, and the State.” In The Stratified State: Radical Institutionalist Theories of Participation and Duality, edited by William M. Dugger and William T. Waller, Jr., 117–49. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. ———. 1993. “Public or Private? Institutional Economics and Feminism.” In Beyond Economic Man: ­Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, 111–29. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mayhew, Anne. 1987. “Culture: Core Concept Under Attack. Journal of Economic Issues 21 (2): 587–603. ———. 1999. “Institutional Economics.” In The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, edited by Janice Peterson and Margaret Lewis, 479–86. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. ———. 2001. “Human Agency, Cumulative Causation, and the State: Remarks upon Receiving the Veblen-Commons Award.” Journal of Economic Issues 35 (2): 239–50. ———. 2018. “An Introduction to Institutional Economics: Tools for Understanding Evolving ­Economies.” The American Economist 63 (1): 3–17. Mutari, Ellen. 2001. “ ‘ . . . As broad as our life experience’ . . .: Visions of Feminist Political Economy, 1972–1991.” Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (4): 379–99. ———. 2018. “Metaphors, Social Practices, and Economic Life: Association for Social Economics ­Presidential Address.” Review of Social Economy 76 (1): 1–18. Mutari, Ellen, Marilyn Power, and Deborah M. Figart. 2002. “Neither Mothers nor Breadwinners: ­African American Women’s Exclusion from U.S. Minimum Wage Policies, 1912–1938.” Feminist ­Economics, Special Issue on Gender, Color, Caste and Class 8 (2): 37–62. Nelson, Julie A. 1993. “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics.” In Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, 23–36. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. Economics for Humans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pearse, Rebecca, and Raewyn Connell. 2016. “Gender Norms and the Economy: Insights from Social Research.” Feminist Economics 22 (1): 30–53. Peterson, Janice. 1992. “Women and the State.” In The Stratified State: Radical Institutionalist Theories of Participation and Duality, edited by William M. Dugger and William T. Waller, Jr., 173–93. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. ———. 1998. “Veblen and Feminist Economics: Valuing Women’s Work in the Twenty-First Century.” In Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Doug Brown, 117–28. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. ———. 2012. “The Great Crisis and the Significance of Gender in the U.S. Economy.” Journal of Economic Issues 46 (2): 277–90. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. ———. 2013. “A Social Provisioning Approach to Gender and Economic Life.” In Handbook of Research on Gender and Economic Life, edited by Deborah M. Figart and Tonia L. Warnecke, 7–17. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Pujol, Michèle A. 1992. Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Robbins, Lionel. 1935. An Essay of the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stanfield, James Ronald, Jacqueline B. Stanfield, and Kimberly Wheatley-Mann. 1998. “The Theory of the Leisure Class in Relation to Feminist Thought.” In Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Doug Brown, 142–57. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

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Ellen Mutari Tejani, Sheba. 2019. “What’s Feminist About Feminist Economics?” Journal of Economic Methodology 26 (2): 99–117. Tool, Marc R. 1990. “Culture Versus Social Value? A Response to Anne Mayhew.” Journal of Economic Issues 24 (4): 1122–133. van Staveren, Irene. 2001. The Values of Economics: An Aristotelian Perspective. London: Routledge. Veblen, Thorstein. 1898. “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12 (4): 373–97. Waller, William. 1999. “Institutional Economics, Feminism, and Overdetermination.” Journal of Economic Issues 33 (4): 835–44. ———. 2017. “Public Policy Adrift: Veblen’s Blind Drift and Neoliberalism.” Forum for Social Economics 46 (3): 223–33. Waller, William, and Ann Jennings. 1990. “On the Possibility of a Feminist Economics: The Convergence of Institutional and Feminist Methodology.” Journal of Economic Issues 24 (2): 613–22. Wrenn, Mary V., and William Waller. 2017. “Care and the Neoliberal Individual.” Journal of Economic Issues 51 (2): 495–502. Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz, Anna. 2015. “The Concept of Care in Institutional and Feminist Economics and Its Impact on Public Policy.” Journal of Economic Issues 49 (2): 405–41.

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5 CONCEPTUALIZING PATRIARCHAL SYSTEMS Nancy Folbre

Introduction Efforts to conceptualize the noun “patriarchy” and the adjective “patriarchal,” long central to feminist theory, have often elicited mixed responses. Some feminist scholars have discouraged use of these terms in favor of a more descriptive emphasis on gender inequality, while others have subsumed them within class processes, as a dimension of feudal and/or capitalist modes of production (Young 1981; Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1989; Federici 2004). Yet others have described patriarchy as a stand-alone system (Mies 1986) or as a central component of a dual or hybrid system, such as patriarchal capitalism (Eisenstein 1978; Folbre and Hartmann 1989). The latter approaches emphasize analogies between something called “patriarchy” and something called “capitalism.” The pairing of patriarchy and capitalism, whether as single systems or a dual system, relegates structural inequalities that cannot be closely linked to class or gender to a distinct level of analysis, often treated as a result of cultural identity rather than economic interests. This dividing line between culture and economics, identity and interests, is misplaced. Strong group allegiances help define collective interests and facilitate collective action in pursuit of them. Often, membership in a powerful group represents something that strongly resembles an economic asset. Struggles for recognition of group identity and the redistribution of economic resources often go together (Fraser 1995). The African-American activist and politician Abrams (2019) insists that “identity politics” has economic goals. The global emergence of nationalist and racist movements with distinctly misogynist agendas testifies to complex, intersectional forms of distributional conflict. I believe that feminist theory can contribute to the development of what I call “intersectional political economy,” a theoretical framework that can not only help explain inequalities based on gender, age, and sexuality but also address other dimensions of inequality, with attention to their variation, complexity, articulation, and interaction. Such a framework has been suggested by critical perspectives on racism advanced by feminists of color, postcolonial scholarship on the persistent effects of imperial power, and the critique of heteronormative institutions (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Collins 1991; Chibber and Warren 2016; Marchia and Sommer 2017). Feminist economists have called for attention to “multiple identities” and “multiple discriminations,” and examination of color and caste in conjunction with class and gender (Brewer, 53

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Conrad, and King 2002; Ruwanpura 2008). Power (2004) lists intersectionality as one of the five key principles of feminist political economy. These concerns, however, have not been fully integrated into a larger analysis of complex systems and institutional structures: their implications for understanding structures of inequality and reinterpreting the meaning of “patriarchal systems” remain underdeveloped. In this chapter, I summarize an approach to intersectional political economy that I develop more fully in my book, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (2020), describing distinct sets of institutions as structures of collective power that deliver exploitative advantages to some members of socially assigned groups based on factors such as gender, age, sexuality, race/ethnicity, citizenship, and class. These structures co-evolve, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes altering one another and inevitably amplifying the importance of political coalitions based on different dimensions of inequality. This approach draws from the Marxian tradition of emphasis on collective identity and conflict but looks beyond ownership of the means of production and extraction of surplus value to emphasize a broader set of social institutions that shape individual and collective bargaining power, leading to unequal distribution of the gains from cooperation. Like Power (2004), I emphasize the importance of work that takes place outside capitalist production and exchange; unlike her, I draw parallels between forms of exploitation based on different dimensions of group membership. Following precedents set by Kandiyoti (1988) and Agarwal (1997), I generalize household bargaining models to society as a whole. This approach departs substantially from early bargaining models that focused on the allocation of time or money between husbands and wives, where fallback positions were determined largely by the consequences of divorce (Manser and Brown 1980). It treats social institutions themselves (including norms) as the outcome of bargaining processes, which in turn affect collective and individual bargaining power. For instance, restrictions on access to education, employment, or citizenship reduce the fallback positions of individuals belonging to restricted groups as well as the groups themselves. Group members have incentives to mobilize collectively to challenge such restrictions. Simultaneous membership in many different groups complicates the bargaining process in a variety of ways. Many individuals experience a mixture of advantage and disadvantage, and the priorities they choose and the alliances they form can have momentous consequences. Rational calculation may play a limited role in a complex strategic environment where payoffs are hard to predict, reliable signals of collective allegiance are difficult to ascertain, and consistent moral principles are required to successfully coordinate efforts for emancipatory social change.

Foundational concepts People belong to many different kinds of groups. However, there is an especially important distinction between interest groups, which people voluntarily choose to join, and socially assigned groups, which are imposed upon them (for an earlier version of this argument, using slightly different nomenclature, see Folbre (1994)). This distinction highlights a complex spectrum of possibilities: some affiliations are more easily changed than others. Even where possible, it is difficult—and also costly—for people to alter their gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, citizenship, or class. Group identities generate group interests and vice versa. The ability to coordinate decisions with others is often advantageous, offering significant gains from cooperation, and successful pursuit of joint goals reinforces group allegiance. Feminism insists that women share some collective interests as women; this insistence does not preclude—indeed, it helps explain—why women and men share some collective interests as members of families, sexually stigmatized groups, racial/ 54

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ethnic groups, nations, classes, and so on. Within these general categories, some sub-groups enjoy significant economic advantage: men, heterosexual and cis-gendered men and women, Whites, citizens of affluent countries, and capitalists, among others. Collective power can be derived from a variety of sources, including physical strength and technological prowess, but it is typically created, maintained, and augmented by social institutions. Collective conflict can lead to violence and also entails processes of bargaining, negotiation, and institutional change influenced by the threat of violence. Institutional power can take political, economic, and ideological forms, and attention to all three provides a useful heuristic for analyzing a metaphorical game with both cooperative and noncooperative dimensions. Political institutions and legal infrastructure define the rules of the game. Property rights and control over economic resources shape the relative power of the players. Ideologies incarnate in norms, preference, and perceptions influence the way people interpret the game and provide a guide to action when possible outcomes are unclear. Women, for instance, can internalize their subordinate status in unequal societies (Sen 1989). Political, economic, and ideological institutions are often bound together in mutually reinforcing ways that constitute structures of collective power. Some economists keenly attuned to the importance of institutions locate gender inequality in an intersectional perspective (Waller and Jennings 1990; Dugger 1996). However, they stopped short of developing a clear picture of institutional structures. The concept of a structure of collective power emerges from a simple question: who benefits the most? The form that institutional structures take—including the relative importance of their legal, economic and ideological components—is less important than the distribution of the advantages or disadvantages they deliver. A vast body of historical research by feminist scholars points to specific laws and policies, patterns of control over resources, and ideological constructions that have given elder heterosexual men power over women and children (Benería 1979; Bergmann 1986; Lerner 1986; Therborn 2007). The historical record also reveals institutional structures that have generated huge advantages for Whites relative to people of color, citizens of rich nations relative to citizens of poor nations, capitalists relative to wage earners, and heterosexuals relative to those of nonconforming sexualities, among many other divisions whose salience is determined by specific historical and cultural circumstances. How is collective advantage best conceptualized? Both neoclassical and Marxian theorists have focused on economic dimensions such as wealth, income, and labor but defined these in ways that obscure their relevance to inequalities in the private or “natural” domains of family life and sexual interaction. Feminist economists have long challenged this androcentric definition (Benería 1979; Hartmann 1979; Power 2004). Many feminist economists go beyond analysis of gender inequalities in market income, vulnerability to poverty, and financial assets to examine inequalities in the accumulation of human capital, the distribution of the cost of caring for dependents, access to political and cultural influence, enjoyment of leisure time, and rights to autonomy that include protection from violence and stigma (Folbre 1994, 2012; Power 2004; Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Berik and Kongar 2013; Connelly and Kongar 2017). Like the definition of economic advantage, the definition of economic activities requires reconsideration. Conventional neoclassical and Marxian economists have focused, respectively, on market exchange and production for profit. Yet innovations are apparent at the edges of both paradigms. Many economists from the neoclassical tradition recognize nonmarket household production as an activity that both contributes to living standards and elicits distributional conflict and institutional contestation (McElroy 1990). The growing Marxist-feminist literature on social reproduction brings unpaid household work to the fore (Bhattacharya 2013). 55

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Another economic activity that deserves more explicit consideration is organized violence. While many economists ignore its economic relevance, it is often motivated explicitly or implicitly by the desire for economic gain, and it typically has consequences for the distribution of economic resources. The credible threat of physical violence is often sufficient, in and of itself, for a group to claim an unfair share of the gains from cooperation. Coming from a neoclassical direction, Hirshleifer (2001) argues in his classic essay “The Dark Side of the Force,” that agents trade only when both parties believe that theft would be more costly. Thus, if a powerful group confronts a less powerful group, it may simply appropriate its resources or subjugate it, rather than choosing to exchange with it. This general point is consistent with organized violence against women and other subordinate groups. The classical Marxist analysis of primitive accumulation emphasizes the ways in which coercive appropriation sets the stage for capitalist development. Feminists such as Mies (1986) and Federici (2004) highlight the role of force and violence, rape and sexual harassment, in the subordination of women. Coercive institutions have enforced women’s specialization in the work of caring for others. Such work puts women at a disadvantage, even though it represents a vital aspect of the larger process of social provisioning (Power 2004). Society as a whole and employers in particular benefit from the creation and maintenance of human capabilities, aptly described as processes of reproduction and/or social reproduction (Benería 1979; Picchio 1992; Elson 2012; Bhattacharya 2013). On a global level, more than half of all labor (defined as performance of activities that could in principle be delegated to another person) takes place outside the money economy (ILO 2018). Different forms of economic activity are often concentrated in different sites: processes of provisioning, reproduction, and social reproduction are primarily located in families and communities rather than in markets or firms. They are central to the functioning of welfare states, which only partially socialize the costs of basic health, education, and income protection over the life cycle (Folbre and Wolf 2012). The difficulty of privately capturing the diffuse social benefits of investments in human capabilities helps explain why such investments are costly. Specialization in care for dependents, for instance, often makes caregivers themselves economically vulnerable (Folbre 2018). Broader interpretations of economic advantage and economic processes add depth to the analysis of group-based inequalities other than gender. By expanding attention beyond the capitalist workplace, they point to the many ways in which powerful groups take advantage of others, whether through the threat of violence, control over the provision of health and education, or through environmental degradation. Categorization of institutional structures in terms of their implications for collective advantage and disadvantage highlights the effects of overlap and intersection: many individuals find themselves in contradictory positions, their allegiances determined more by ideological prescription than by attention to costs and benefits that are difficult to accurately assess.

Cooperative conflict and bargaining The concept of cooperative conflict developed by Rawls (1971) and Sen (1989) builds on the notion that agents (whether individuals or groups) may benefit from cooperation but nonetheless bargain over the distribution of its gains (see Doss, this volume). This concept has important, but somewhat neglected, implications for institutional evolution that echo a Marxian narrative in which the successful advance of the forces of production (i.e., the potential for gains from cooperation through economic growth) is countered by increasingly problematic social relations of production (i.e., exploitation-related conflict). Economic 56

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growth and economic inequality may influence each other in different ways at different times. The term “cooperative conflict,” however, is misleadingly benign (Mills 1999). “Coerced cooperation” often represents a more apt description: individuals and groups in weak fallback positions (i.e., with few viable alternatives) are economically vulnerable. Indeed, exploitation can be broadly defined as unfair distribution of the gains from cooperation (including market exchange) that results from illegitimate forms of institutional power that can take political, economic, or cultural forms (and often involve all three). Sociologist Tilly (1999) makes a similar argument regarding “durable inequalities” that are reproduced over time, but he makes less explicit use of bargaining logic; like Wright (2010) he stops short of endorsing the notion that exploitation can take place outside class relations. Yet the potential to use bargaining power to capture a disproportionate share of gains from cooperation characterizes structural disadvantages based on many different forms of socially assigned group membership. In some cases, exploitation may generate economic gains that offer some benefits to exploited sub-groups through a process of trickle-down. Their share of output—the size of a slice of a metaphorical pie—may remain small, but their cooperation may contribute to increased output, or a bigger pie. But the results can also be counterproductive, as when exploitative power creates incentives to block changes that would increase the size of the pie but also reduce the share going to exploiters. For instance, increases in women’s participation in paid employment may not only increase family market income but also weaken the relative bargaining power of men in the family (Braunstein and Folbre 2001). Shifts in the relative size of these countervailing effects can either strengthen or weaken resistance to institutional change. In metaphorical terms, men may be accustomed to a big slice of a small pie (one that is entirely home-cooked) but may prefer a smaller slice of a bigger pie (such as a share of their wives’ higher earnings) even if it means they must do some of the actual baking. Similar dialectics between inequality and growth, and between exploitation and efficiency, characterize collective dynamics based on other dimensions of group identity. For instance, slaveholders in the US South made it illegal to educate slaves, because they feared the empowerment effect would be greater than the productivity effect; many Whites in the US today may be reluctant to fund high-quality education for children of color because they fear labor market competition with their own children; many citizens of affluent countries fear open borders despite the potentially large efficiency gains from greater labor mobility. Economic interests are determined not simply by costs and benefits but by their distributional outcomes—how the net benefits are likely to be shared. When such tensions exist in multiple social dimensions, members of groups enjoying any form of advantage over others may resist change, making it difficult to mobilize opposition to the increased concentration of global wealth in the hands of a small class elite. On the other hand, the global process of wealth concentration that is now reaching unprecedented extremes may well lead to intensified class allegiances, in a delayed vindication of the 19th-century Marxian vision. Intersectional political economy provides a template for understanding cycles of historical change through attention to the larger array of group allegiances and alliances. For instance, it suggests that patriarchal institutions may first have emerged in the second millennium BCE because they contributed to the military and economic success of groups that adopted them (Lerner 1986). The Old Testament contains many examples of the systematic enslavement and rape of young women. Patriarchal property rights were sometimes weakened by changes in class or racial/ethnic institutions, as when Spartan men in ancient Greece, preoccupied with the military effort to subjugate Messenians, ceded their wives sufficient authority to manage their estates (Hanssen and Fleck 2009). 57

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The development of strong group identities based on non-gendered dimensions of collective identity, such as race, ethnicity, or class, can cross-cut gender inequalities, giving some women some authority over men in subordinate groups. On the other hand, the persistence of patriarchal institutions helps bind men together, blunting the impact of inequalities among them. Such intersections and overlaps obviously evolved in different ways in different historical and cultural contexts. For much of human history, societies characterized by patriarchal institutions appear to have dominated or subsumed those with more egalitarian relations between women and men. The competitive advantages of patriarchal structures were likely greatest where both production and military prowess were labor-intensive and mortality rates were high but remained significant as a means of keeping the costs of reproduction and social reproduction low for men. Patriarchal institutional structures weakened only when technological change was accompanied by opportunities for women to mobilize against them and gender-based gains were often distributed quite unequally among women in different positions according to class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of collective identity. For instance, access to modern contraceptives for some women has been accompanied by the forced sterilization of others. Capitalist institutions emerged in a patriarchal context in which legal and cultural institutions gave adult men substantial bargaining power over women and children. Their effects were often contradictory, empowering women in some respects, but disempowering them in others. While individual wage employment offered young women the potential for economic autonomy, it provided no reward for reproductive labor. Indeed, it led to steady increases in the relative cost of caring for dependents, motivating both fertility decline and welfare-state policies designed to supplement family commitments, such as public investments in education, health, and social safety nets. Both national and racial/ethnic interests motivated institutional changes that softened at least some of the disruptive effects of capitalist expansion on family well-being even as they reinforced women’s normative obligation to care for others. For instance, the Social Security Act of 1935 in the US provided married women with retirement benefits and economic insurance against widowhood, while excluding many African-American families from eligibility. Likewise, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 offered minimum wage protections to most workers but explicitly excluded workers in domestic service and home care, predominantly women of color. Women continue to bear an unfair share of the costs of producing and maintaining human capabilities, both within families and within emerging care industries such as health, education, and social services, where earnings are typically low relative to educational requirements. Their continued specialization in the work of caring for others reduces their collective bargaining power not only because of the emotional commitments it fosters but also because it creates social value that is difficult to privately claim. Reproductive labor cannot be fully “capitalized” because future generations are not contractually bound to repay the investments made in them and because the development of human capabilities creates positive spillovers for society as a whole. The potential for long-run crisis that emerges from this perspective echoes the Marxian theory of historical materialism, drawing parallels between class consciousness, gender consciousness, and other politically potent forms of group allegiance that can alter the balance of power between the empowered and the disempowered. However, rather than focusing on a crisis internal to capitalist institutional structures that creates an opportunity for structural change, it redirects attention toward the development of alliances among groups that must overcome their differences in order to promote socially and ecologically sustainable economic development. Women’s collective success in undermining patriarchal institutions is often a function of the extent and intensity of divisions created by other exploitative institutions. Women sometimes collude with men in the establishment and defense of institutions that reinforce other forms 58

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of institutional advantage, undermining the legitimacy of moral claims to gender equality. For instance, many highly educated and predominantly White women in the US benefit from the outsourcing of care services to low-wage domestic, childcare, and elder-care workers, many of whom are migrants and women of color. On the other hand, women who recognize and resist the imposition of patriarchal institutions often perceive the parallels with other exploitative institutional structures. They are sometimes able to build alliances across group lines by emphasizing the potential benefits of more egalitarian and democratic forms of cooperation. A better understanding of the evolution—and devolution—of structures of collective power could help strengthen such alliances.

Some implications for research and strategy Global capitalist institutions claim to promote impersonal processes of voluntary exchange in decentralized markets. Their fans insist that they promote economic growth and liberate women by offering them the opportunity to work for a wage outside the home (Lagarde and Ostry 2018). This insistence ignores both the increasing concentration of global wealth and the potential for extreme exploitation in wage employment. It also ignores the ways in which capitalist logic devalues forms of production that do not generate a private profit, leading to the depletion of both human and natural resources. On the other hand, it is misleading to argue that capitalist institutions are the only cause of gender inequality or that their expansion has not contributed to women’s political empowerment. Patriarchal institutions long predated wage employment and have been, in some respects, weakened by economic opportunities for women outside the home. Global capitalist development has been associated with a significant decline of patriarchal family law (Therborn 2007). It has also contributed in some ways to a weakening of nationalist and racist ideologies, although these, like efforts to restrict and roll back women’s rights, are now resurgent. The feminist perspective outlined here suggests that the adjective “patriarchal” is a better construct than the noun “patriarchy” because it points toward more fractal hierarchical systems with somewhat unpredictable nonlinear dynamics. The same may be said for the advantages of using the adjective “capitalist” rather than the noun “capitalism,” a term that implies a single form of structural hegemony with inexorable laws of motion. The system we inhabit consists of many articulated structures of collective power; we do not need to name every single one to provide a complete description, just to clarify that a patriarchal system can also be a capitalist system, which can also be a racist or nationalist system, and so on. Intersectional political economy directly counters divide-and-conquer strategies by acknowledging short-run tensions among groups but calling for principled collaboration to achieve long-run benefits. It points to the many important gains achieved by feminist mobilization, celebrating possibilities for small but cumulative successes as well as ruptural transformations (Wright 2010). At the same time, it asserts the need to enforce principles of economic justice that reach beyond gender, age, and sexuality, challenging all institutional structures that reproduce unfair advantage.

References Abrams, Stacey E. 2019. “E Pluribus Unum? The Fight Over Identity Politics.” Foreign Affairs, April. Accessed February  24, 2019. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-02-01/stacey-abrams-responseto-francis-fukuyama-identity-politics-article. Agarwal, Bina. 1997. “ ‘Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51.

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Nancy Folbre Benería, Lourdes. 1979. “Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of Labour.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3: 203–25. Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2015. Gender Development and Globalization: Economics as If All People Mattered. New York: Routledge. Bergmann, Barbara. 1986. The Economic Emergence of Women. New York: Basic Books. Berik, Gunseli, and Ebru Kongar. 2013. “Time Use of Mothers and Fathers in Hard Times: The US Recession of 2007–09.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 208–37. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2013. “What Is Social Reproduction Theory?” Socialist Worker October  9, 2013. Accessed October 3, 2018. http://socialistworker.org/2013/09/10/what-is-social-reproduction-theory. Braunstein, Elissa, and Nancy Folbre. 2001. “To Honor and Obey: Efficiency, Inequality, and Patriarchal Property Rights.” Feminist Economics 7 (1): 25–44. Brewer, Rose M., Cecilia Conrad, and Mary King. 2002. “Gender, Color, Caste, and Class.”  Feminist Economics 8 (2): 3–17. Chibber, Vivek, and Rosie Warren, eds. 2016. The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. New York: Verso. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Connelly, Rachel, and Kongar, Ebru, eds. 2017. Gender and Time Use in a Global Context: The Economics of Employment and Unpaid Labor. New York: Springer. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black ­Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum: 139–67. ———. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Dugger, William M., ed. 1996. Inequality: Radical Institutionalist Views on Race, Gender, Class, and Nation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Eisenstein, Zillah. 1978. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Elson, Diane. 2012. “Social Reproduction in the Global Crisis.” In The Global Crisis and Transformative Social Change, edited by Peter Utting, Shahra Razavi, and Rebecca Varghese Buchholz, 63–80 New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Federici, Sylvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. “The Political Economy of Human Capital.” Review of Radical Political Economics 44 (3): 281–92. ———. 2018. “Gender Inequality and the Care Penalty.” In Oxford Handbook of Women in the Economy, edited by Laura Argys, Susan Averett, and Saul Hoffman, 749–67. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. New York: Verso. Folbre, Nancy, and Heidi Hartmann. 1989. “The Persistence of Patriarchal Capitalism.” Rethinking Marxism 2 (4): 90–96. Folbre, Nancy, and Douglas Wolf. 2012. “The Intergenerational Welfare State.” Population and Development Review 38: 36–51. Fraad, Harriet, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff. 1989. “For Every Knight in Shining Armor, There’s a Castle Waiting to Be Cleaned: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Household.” Rethinking Marxism 2 (4): 9–69. Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a Post-Socialist Age.” New Left Review 212: 68–68. Hanssen, Andrew F., and Robert K. Fleck. 2009. “Rulers Ruled by Women: An Economic Analysis of the Rise and Fall of Women’s Rights in Ancient Sparta.” Economic Governance 10: 221–45. Hartmann, Heidi. 1979. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital & Class 3 (2): 1–33. Hirshleifer, Jack. 2001. The Dark Side of the Force. Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory. New York: Cambridge. International Labor Office (ILO). 2018. Care Work and Care Jobs. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1988. “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” Gender and Society 2 (3): 274–90.

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Conceptualizing patriarchal systems Lagarde, Christine, and Jonathan D. Ostry. 2018. “Economic Gains from Gender Inclusion: Even Greater than You Thought.”International Monetary Fund Blog Post, November 28, 2018. Accessed February 25, 2019. https:// blogs.imf.org/2018/11/28/economic-gains-from-gender-inclusion-even-greater-than-you-thought/. Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press. Manser, Marilyn, and Murray Brown. 1980. “Marriage and Household Decision-Making: A Bargaining Analysis.” International Economic Review 21 (1): 31–44. Marchia, Joseph, and Jamie M. Sommer. 2017. “(Re) defining Heteronormativity.” Sexualities 22 (3): 1–29. McElroy, Marjorie B. 1990. “The Empirical Content of Nash-Bargained Household Behavior.” Journal of Human Resources 25 (4): 559–83. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books. Mills, Charles W. 1999. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Picchio, Antonella. 1992. Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the Labor Market. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.”  Feminist ­Economics 10 (3): 3–19. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruwanpura, Kanchana. 2008. “Multiple Identities, Multiple-Discrimination: A Critical Review.” Feminist Economics 14 (3): 77–105. Sen, Amartya. 1989. “Cooperation, Inequality, and the Family.”  Population and Development Review  15: 61–76. Therborn, Goran. 2007. Between Sex and Power. New York: Routledge. Tilly, Charles. 1999. Durable Inequalities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Waller, William, and Ann Jennings. 1990. “On the Possibility of a Feminist Economics: The Convergence of Institutional and Feminist Methodology.” Journal of Economic Issues 24 (2): 613–22. Wright, Erik O. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. New York: Verso. Young, Iris. 1981. “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory.” In Women and Revolution, edited by Lydia Sargent, 43–69. Boston, MA: South End Press.

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6 FEMINIST ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS Patricia E. Perkins1

Introduction Feminist ecological economics links gender and ecological perspectives both theoretically and practically, providing justification and impetus for considering gender, intersectionality, and ecology together in relation to economic activity. Such analysis reveals the material links between biophysical reproduction and social reproduction, and their importance for economies, despite their generally being undercounted and/or externalized. Feminist ecological economics analysis also generates important and timely insights about how economies might be structured differently to prioritize equity, ecological and political sustainability, and interspecies or ecosystemic well-being (Salleh 1997, 2009; Gibson-Graham and Miller 2015). Feminist ecological economics is closely related to ecofeminist economics, which is somewhat more critical since it is built on extensive ecofeminist analysis of the links between feminism and ecology. Both fields problematize and critique economies and economics from intersectional feminist standpoints. These fields are also intertwined with feminist political ecology, postcolonial feminisms, the subsistence approach theory, materialist ecofeminism, Indigenous feminisms, gender and development, feminist commons theory, and feminist degrowth theory (see Mellor 2002; Nixon 2015; Dengler; Beneria and Sen; Tsikata and Torvikey; and Agarwal, this volume). An example of the interconnections among gendered social and work roles, ecosystem services, and the goods and services which sustain societies (O’Hara 1997a) is provided by the water/care/unpaid work nexus. Water, a necessity of life, is particularly important in the lives of most women worldwide, who are made responsible via socially prescribed gender roles for cleaning, health-, child-, and elder-care, food processing and cooking, and in many places for agriculture. All of these work roles require water as an input. In neoclassical economic terms, water is a factor of production for these goods and services. It also is a tool or means for doing the work: more water and easier water access make the work easier, so there is a tradeoff between water use efficiency and work time/worker productivity. (Provision of water and related services is also racialized, classed, underpaid, and linked everywhere to poverty and marginalization.) Although water falls from the sky for free nearly everywhere people live (Gebara 1999), it is often commodified, diverted, priced, and used by some to control those who are less powerful. 62

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When water infrastructure is inadequate or breaks down due to floods, droughts, or disruption of traditional livelihood systems, women end up spending more of their time organizing, seeking, and supplying water for households and communities. This means they have less time for teaching, skills transmission, care, and efficient provision of food and other necessities of life, so social reproduction can be adversely impacted along with biophysical reproduction. When water supplies are polluted by such toxins as lead, pesticides, and so forth—side effects of economic production activities—women’s and children’s bodies are often disproportionately affected (requiring more care), sometimes with genetic, intergenerational impacts on people as well as the ecosystems that humans depend upon. Yet women, experts on these relationships through their socioeconomic roles, often have less voice and agency in political decisionmaking due to taboos, lower education access, and time restrictions, so governance is deprived of their knowledge and perspectives. By systematically and often violently constraining women’s working and social lives, underpaying them, and limiting their options, economic systems worldwide are built upon vast amounts of women’s unpaid labor, which has been estimated as equal in value to one-half or more of GDP (Swiebel 1999, 8; Ferrant, Pesando, and Nowacka 2014; van de Ven, Zwijnenburg, and De Queljoe 2018; Bonnet, Vanek, and Chen 2019). In parallel, the economic contributions of ecosystem services and inputs are usually undervalued and unsustained by market systems managed by governments. Feminist ecological economics focuses on the spiraling feedbacks of these relationships, the causes and effects of this systematic externalization of both ecosystem inputs/services and the gendered, often unpaid work in economic systems. Climate chaos and extreme weather events caused by greenhouse gas emissions, resulting from economic activities whose costs and benefits are very inequitably distributed, heighten the urgency of using intersectional feminist perspectives to address ecosystem and socioeconomic system interrelationships together.

Feminist ecological economics and provisioning This chapter’s brief overview of feminist ecological economics is organized according to five central aspects of provisioning which are the starting point for a non-mainstream feminist economics (Power 2004): the centrality of unpaid and caring labor; human and environmental well-being; human agency (oriented toward social justice); ethical judgments, especially regarding valuation; and the relationships among gender and other identities, power, and the environment. The close linkages among these five aspects help to structure a political and theoretical strategy for grounding sustainable economies in feminist methodologies and justice initiatives. This strategy builds on the work of many ecofeminist economists who have been working in this terrain since at least the early 1990s.

Unpaid and caring labor Care work, largely done everywhere by women, reproduces and sustains human society physically and socially. Ecosystems, through their own reproduction, make possible human life and are also affected by human economies. Centering care highlights the crucial and gendered relationships between care work and reproduction of human society, as well as the time-intensity, unpredictable demands, and urgency of care work (Mies 1986; Folbre 1995; Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997; Folbre and Nelson 2000; Halme, Jasch, and Scharp 2002; Jochimsen 2003; Folbre and Bittman 2004; Federici 2009, 2012; Bauhardt and Harcourt 2018). Because care needs occur in “biological time,” not clock time (Mellor 1997a, 129; Brennan 1997), and since 63

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its quality and effectiveness depend on personal relationships, experiential knowledge, and volition, care work is difficult to control, commodify, or price (Akbulut 2017). Multi-tasking and overlapping productive activities also complicate the valuation of care and other community and household work, as Marilyn Waring noted (Waring 1988, 2018). Similarly, complex ecosystem functions such as pollination, water purification in wetlands, multi-use forests, and soil maintenance are not easily incorporated into market-based valuation systems or protected through corporate or regulatory means. This may be a cause of their economic externalization—or, in other words, a reason why economic systems fail to recognize, and therefore are in grave danger of harming, some of the most efficient, elegant, and appropriate relationships upon which human and more-than-human life depends. A more clear-eyed feminist view is that gendered power relations—manifested, for example, in violence against women, control over women’s bodies, pay inequity, discriminatory land and property ownership rules, and ever-inadequate environmental protections—are expressly designed to ensure that vital reproductive care work by women and ecosystems continues to be provided to economies controlled by men, with little need for profit-reducing compensation. The climate crisis both motivates and makes possible a fundamental restructuring of societies to put ecological, care-based flourishing at the heart of human activity (rather than, for example, economic growth) in order to protect “the real bottom line: ecological integrity” (Salleh 2009, 306).

Human and environmental well-being Human links with the biosphere involve far more than people’s use of minerals, water, animals, and plants as economic resources. When we see humanity as part of the web of life, it is easier to understand how our own health and well-being are intricately interwoven with those of the more-than-human world. Ecofeminist authors and activists have long explored these connections (e.g., Carson 1962; Warren 1987, 1997; Mellor 1992, 1997b; Zein-Elabdin 1996; Colborn, Dumandski, and Myers 1996; Nelson 1997; Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1999; Hawthorne 2002; Perkins 2007). Women’s reproductive health, environmental hazards, all living beings, and future generations are connected in “socio-environmental time” (Adam 1998, 11). The long time frames in which environmental processes and hazards unfold must be recognized in responsible social and political praxis that usually takes place on much shorter timescales (Mellor 1997a, 137–38). Indigenous practices of seeing the human present in relation to past and coming generations illustrate the wisdom of situating current human decisions and actions in a time frame long enough, and an interspecies vision broad enough, to contextualize human hubris (McGregor 2008; Whyte 2014; LaDuke 2014; Awâsis 2014). To protect human and environmental well-being, ecofeminist perspectives envision sensitive, responsible, respectful relationships as foundations for human collective action, emphasizing precautionary policies and democratic processes (Code 2006, 32).

Human agency, power, and social justice Justice is central to two expanding areas of feminist ecological economics research: calls for ecological economics, and indeed all of economics, to integrate a justice-oriented frame in order to be more relevant, responsible, and sustainable (Nelson 2008; Spencer, Perkins, and Erickson 2018; Ruder and Sanniti 2019); and climate justice, which means addressing the climate crisis’s disproportionate impacts on those least responsible for causing it, especially women (Terry 2009; Buckingham and Kulcur 2009; Bäthge 2010; Nelson 2012; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Nagel 64

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2015; Buckingham and Le Masson 2017; Cohen 2017). Climate chaos exacerbates the longstanding intersectional gender-based economic inequities that are highlighted in gender and development research (Godfrey and Torres 2016; Whyte 2017; Singer 2019; Perkins 2019b). Feminist economists from around the world who have studied gender and development emphasize the close and inequitable relationship among gender roles, property access, life possibilities, and political agency, which penalize and subjugate women in comparison with men, and the many ways that ecological crises and climate change differentially threaten women (Boserup 1970; Elson 1998; Shiva 1988; Agarwal 1992, 1994, 2007; Braidotti et al. 1994; Harcourt 1994; Benería 2003; Quiroga Martinez 2005; Muthuki 2006; MacGregor 2010). This research has generated an expanding literature focusing on “climate justice as gender justice” (Röhr, Stiefel, and Winterfeld 2008; Terry 2009) and highlighted the pressing need for attention to genderbased economic inequities such as those related to education, poverty, land and housing access, health, and political exclusion, which exacerbate the impacts of climate change over time and across generations (Perkins 2019a). Ecofeminist contributions to the climate-justice movement grounded in long-standing gendered economic injustices, women’s environmental activism, and the centrality of sustainable provisioning have growing political resonance. This urgency is based on recognition that addressing the climate crisis requires multiple, rapid, creative, and efficient initiatives at local and community levels as well as top-down policy changes.

Ethics of valuation Feminist ecological economists have developed various methods for protecting and valuing care work and ecosystem services through collective, contextual, and socially or communally mediated political processes. Valuation and decision-making must involve the considered weighing of views from all members of the society (one person, one vote), not just those with stakes in the market economy (one dollar, one vote). Ecofeminists have contributed to the literature on deliberative or “discourse-based valuation”: valuation derived through a facilitated discussion process that includes those affected by the political decision for which the valuation is being done (O’Hara 1997b; Perkins 2001; Squires 2008; Fortnam et al. 2019). Such processes can allow for the views and contributions of groups, not just individuals, and of nature (through the inclusion of scientific and traditional ecological knowledge) by building shared understandings about ecosystem functions and their importance. This process implies blending equityenhancing identity-grounded discussions with political-economic decision-making (LaDuke 2014, 238; Agarwal 2000; Nelson 2013). Examples include participatory processes for valuing marine-protected areas, HIV/AIDS healthcare services, biodiversity conservation, and river basin management (Kenter et al. 2016). Money itself, the principal means of economic valuation, is created and guaranteed at present by banking systems or governments to fulfill political and business priorities; why not instead allow money to be created by communities to recognize care as the source of wealth and to ensure sufficient provisioning for all (Mellor 2009, 2018)? Since money, economic priorities, and governance systems are all socially constructed, they can be reshaped, through equitable participation, in order to redistribute income and wealth more fairly, speed decolonization, protect the rights of diverse populations, and facilitate manifold ecologically appropriate local socioeconomic systems (MacGregor 2014; Whyte and Cuomo 2016; Whyte 2016; Nelson and Power 2018; Dengler and Seebacher 2019; Waring 2018). That humans can occupy ecosystems without destroying them is demonstrated by Indigenous governance systems that protected ecosystems and human livelihoods over thousands of years. These protective practices often employed such means as participatory discourse, extensive 65

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leadership training led by elders, multidirectional political and cultural constraints on power and greed, and balanced gender roles (McGregor 2004; Whyte 2014; Simpson 2017; Starblanket and Stark 2018). Examples include North American Northwest Coast salmon fishery-based economies, which flourished for more than 2,000 years (Trosper 2009), and Aboriginal farming and fishing economies, which extended for dozens of thousands of years in Australia (Pascoe 2014). Indigenous women’s activist leadership worldwide is transforming the political landscape related to extraction, fossil fuels, pipelines, and environmental protection in general, highlighting the necessity of “rematriation” of land to Indigenous peoples. Not only are Indigenous peoples the rightful owners, they also possess a spiritual connection to the land along with governance traditions and institutions capable of sustainably protecting it (Hernández-Castillo 2010; Kuokkanen 2011; Awâsis 2014; Siwila 2014; Nixon 2015; Kermoal and Altamirano-Jiménez 2016; Green 2017; Chemhuru 2018). For example, the Indigenous resurgence in Canada helped to elect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 and continues to press for stronger environmental action at scales from the local to the global (Tomiak 2016; Whyte 2016; Perkins 2017). All these ideas—extending from ethical valuation through just livelihoods and provisioning for all to ecological socioeconomic sustainability—begin from an ethic of care, respect for diversity, participation, and ecosystem relationships.

Intersectionality The compounding effects of different aspects of identity beyond gender (such as race, class, Indigeneity, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation)—that is, intersectionality—are fundamental to feminist analysis (MacGregor 2010; Kings 2017). Some feminist economists such as Agarwal (2007) see gender inequality as distinct due to patriarchal traditions and the restricted access of the female half of humanity to property and political agency. Many studies show that not just women, but all who are othered, face material constraints embedded in economic systems. These constraints include land restrictions, hiring and wage discrimination, restricted education access, polluted living conditions, health and care injustices, which are not only inequitable but hamper economies overall (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slater, and Wangari 1996; Power 2004; Dunn 2009; Elmhirst 2011; Beuchler and Hanson 2015; Konsmo and Pacheco 2016; Bauhardt and Harcourt 2018). Feminist ecological research and activism in areas ranging from degrowth, commons, and climate justice to care and unpaid work emphasize that democracy and equity, acknowledging and addressing intersectionality, are fundamental for changing the unjust status quo (Tuana 2013; Ostrom 2014; Godfrey and Torres 2016; Kronsell 2017; Spencer, Perkins, and Erickson 2018). This work, led by ecofeminist activists and economists who recognize the political implications of their ideas, is oriented toward building social alliances to create democratic, equitable, sustainable futures for all.

Conclusion: toward just, sustainable futures Feminist ecological economics builds a cogent and compelling critique of the unstable and unsustainable capitalist status quo. Feminist ecological economists describe the economic importance of women’s environmental, home/care, and community work, the importance of ecological processes for women’s work and health, and the fundamental economic significance of the myriad unmarketed services provided by women and ecosystems. They document women’s crucial role in subsistence production, social and physical reproduction, and the protection and preservation of ecosystems, as well as their leadership in political struggles over ecosystems and 66

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commons. They bring an intersectional understanding of exclusion and highlight the importance of diversity in politics and economics. Motivated in part by the climate crisis, this work is contributing to an outpouring of new research and activism related to provisioning, care, nonmarket valuation, human and ecosystem well-being, quality of life indicators, links between health and the environment, local economic systems, trade and globalization, money and finance, decolonization, commons, degrowth, and many other areas—all elements of crucial and comprehensive strategies for building a fairer and more sustainable world.

Note 1 I write as a white female academic and environmental activist, now living on territory in Toronto, Ontario, which was violently taken from Indigenous peoples. I have also lived in the US, Brazil, and Mozambique, where colonialism and economic injustices also continue to distort social relations. These histories, and collaborations with partners and colleagues in many places, have influenced this chapter. It is impossible to adequately represent the wide range and creative diversity of global ideas related to feminist ecological economics—many other voices deserve to be read and heard.

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7 THE CAPABILITY APPROACH Ingrid Robeyns

Introduction Research by many feminist economists bears a set of common methodological features, which Power (2004) has identified as the social provisioning approach (SPA). This approach relates to earlier work by Nelson (1993, 1994), in which she argued that economics should ultimately be about social provisioning and only derivatively about exchange or markets. There are five core features to the SPA to feminist economics. First, economic analyses incorporate caring and unpaid labor as fundamental economic activities. Second, well-being is a measure of economic success. Third, analysis focuses on economic, political, and social processes and power relations. Fourth, ethical goals and values are an explicit and intrinsic part of the analysis. And finally, the analysis interrogates different lived experiences by intersectionality of gender, class, race-ethnicity, and other dimensions of human diversity. In this chapter, I argue that the synergy and overlap between the SPA and the capability approach (CA) is not only in the shared conceptualization of well-being. Rather, the CA endorses all five criteria of the SPA. I show how exactly the two frameworks coincide and explain how the CA can help to further develop the social provisioning methodology of feminist economics. Yet while I argue that the CA is helpful for feminist economists in many ways, there are also some possible pitfalls of which feminist economists engaging with the CA should be aware.

What is the CA? The CA is a comprehensive, multidimensional normative approach that postulates that when making analyses about people’s lives, we should ask what people are able to do and what lives they are able to lead—their “doings and beings,” which the CA calls their “capabilities.” The CA is concerned with aspects of people’s beings such as their health, the education they can enjoy, and the support from their social networks they can count on. The approach is also concerned with what people can or cannot do, such as being able to work, raise a family, travel, or be politically active. It cares about people’s real freedoms to do these things, as well as the level of achieved well-being that they will reach when choosing from the options that are available to them.

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The CA is a framework that includes specific conceptualizations of human well-being and freedom, which in turn can be used in the study of related concepts, such as poverty, social justice, or human development. A person’s well-being is assessed in terms of their “capabilities” or their “functionings.” A person can derive different capabilities from the resources at their disposal, whether or not they opt to realize them. The ones they actually realize are the person’s functionings. The combination of all capabilities a person has simultaneously access to is called the person’s “capability set,” which is a measure of their overall real freedom. Note that the use of the exact definition of “functionings” and “capability” differs somewhat in the literature. Most of the capability literature uses the term capabilities to refer to all doings and beings a person can potentially realize. In this conceptual scheme there is a corresponding capability for each functioning, and each person has a large number of capabilities (e.g., Nussbaum 2000, 2003). However, there is somewhat different terminology in Sen’s work, as I explained elsewhere (Robeyns 2017, 90–98). Yet, given that Nussbaum’s terminology is the more widespread and dominant terminology, I will follow Nussbaum’s in this chapter. The general capability framework can be fleshed out in different ways, leading to different specifications, depending on the problem it is meant to address and the conventions of the discipline in which it is used. It could therefore be helpful to make the distinction between the capability approach, which is the general framework that is used in a number of different disciplines for various purposes, and capability theories or capability accounts, which specify the general framework in order to use it for a particular purpose, such as to develop an account of well-being, poverty, or justice. Yet this distinction does raise the question what all capability applications share in common. Elsewhere I have presented a modular approach to answering this question (Robeyns 2017). This modular approach contains a list of items that all capability applications should share, as well as a set of items on which the scholar using the CA has some discretionary power, given the pluralism within capability accounts. What are the core characteristics shared by all capabilitarian accounts that are particularly important for applications within feminist economics? First, the CA ultimately values different aspects of reality than other normative frameworks. It claims that we should focus not on how much money or other resources a person has, nor on their happiness or their welfare (understood theoretically as preference-fulfillment and utility maximization, and empirically as disposable income), but rather evaluate their well-being and their substantive freedoms by assessing their functionings and capabilities. These should also be the substantive elements of other evaluative concepts, such as “development” or “fairness.” A second important commitment of all capabilitarian theories is the move from means to the ends of well-being. Instead of focusing on the resources at a person’s command valued for being a means to achieve what the person has reason to value in life, the focus of evaluation is directly on the ends, hence the freedom to achieve the doings and beings a person has reason to value, which is reflected by her capabilities. There are two important reasons why the CA urges us that we have to start our analysis from the ends rather than the means. A first reason is given by the notion of conversion factors: people differ in their ability to convert means into valuable opportunities (reflected by their capability set) or outcomes (their achieved functionings). A welfare analysis focusing merely on means or resources will not capture the different levels of welfare, well-being, and freedom to attain a good life that those resources enable to very diverse people (Sen 1985, 1993). Since ends are what ultimately matters when thinking about well-being and the quality of life, means can only work as fully reliable proxies of people’s opportunities to achieve those ends if all people have the same capacities or powers to convert those means into equal capability sets. However, the CA rightly assumes that there are very significant inter-individual differences in the conversion of 73

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resources into functionings, due to different social and environmental contexts, norms related to gender, race, class etc., as well as differences in physical and mental (dis)abilities and needs. The second reason why the CA requires us to start from ends rather than means is that there are some vitally important ends that do not depend very much on material means, and hence would not be picked up in our analysis if we were to focus on means only. For example, self-respect, supportive relationships in our families or in the workplace, good mental health, and friendship are all very important ends that almost all may value and desire; yet there are no crucial means to those ends that one could use as a readily measurable proxy. We need to focus on ends directly if we want to capture what is important. A third important commitment of all capabilitarian theories is its commitment to pluralism. The first type of pluralism is also captured by the term “multidimensional analysis,” and essentially posits that the key notions in the CA (i.e., well-being and freedom) and those concepts that build on those notions (such as poverty, riches, inequality, and distributive justice) can never be reduced to a single dimension, but will consist of a plurality of dimensions—such as being healthy, being educated, enjoying basic liberties, and so forth. The second type of pluralism— value pluralism—entails that the CA does not claim that well-being and freedom are the only things that matter—instead, often there are other important values and moral principles that are equally (or more) important, and that may sometimes more fruitfully be conceptualized outside the capabilitarian framework. For example, process values such as transparency or the absence of corruption, are not best captured in a capability language, but are also very important.

Well-being as the measure of economic success Based on this brief description of the CA, we can now ask to what extent it helps feminist economics to adopt, elaborate and apply the SPA. Since Power’s account is brief and only lists the five elements and does not develop them further, this is work that needs to be done. This chapter aims to show that the CA can be a great ally for this task. Let us first look at the feature of the SPA that stresses that well-being should be the measure of economic success. Power (2004, 5) explained this element of the SPA as follows: “Properly evaluating economic well-being requires attention not only to aggregate or average distributions of income and wealth, but also to individual entitlements and what Amartya Sen has identified as the heterogeneity of human needs.” Although it might be a matter of interpretation whether she is referring here explicitly to the notion of well-being as it has been developed in the CA or not, it is very easy to see that the CA can be used to develop this feature. The very motivation of the CA in economics was precisely to move away from monetary metrics (such as GDP per capita or equivalent household income) and move toward a focus on the ends of a good life directly (Sen 1985, 1993; Nussbaum 2000). Several reasons have been given in the capability literature for why we should focus on well-being directly, rather than on income or economic productivity. The first has already been discussed at length above—namely, that we should focus on the things that matter i­ ntrinsically— the ends—and only in a derivative sense on the means to those ends. The second reason why we should focus on well-being rather than monetary metrics is that due to human diversity, people need different amounts and different types of resources in order to reach the same levels of well-being. Economists concerned with the lives of the disabled have shown that disabled people in the UK need much higher levels of income in order to reach the same levels of well-being, due to the additional costs that their impairments cause (Kuklys 2005; Zaidi and Burchardt 2005). For mothers, high-quality childcare facilities and parental leave regulations may be more important to enhance their well-being than an increase in their wages. 74

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Hence, we need to start from the account of well-being, and ask what the relevant inputs are that are needed to reach high levels of well-being. In addition, the CA has something useful to offer to the SPA to feminist economics, since it gives us an account of well-being that is suitable for public policymaking and analysis in the social sciences. However, it also makes the additional point, which feminist economists must take at heart, that there are two dimensions to well-being—namely achieved levels of well-being, and the freedom to achieve well-being. If one designs policies where anti-paternalism considerations are weighty, such as the freedom to choose the type of work one wants to do to earn a living, then a focus on capabilities (and hence well-being freedom) is more appropriate than a focus on functionings (achieved levels of well-being). But there may also be policies for which a focus on achieved levels of well-being is more appropriate, such as making sure that every young adult has enjoyed high-quality education. In addition, for large-scale empirical analyses, we often do not have access to information on well-being freedom. We may then use information on well-being achievements to analyze people’s freedoms, since often group-inequalities in achievements can reasonably be taken to reflect inequalities in opportunities (Robeyns 2003; Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Seguino 2009).

Care and unpaid labor as fundamental economic activities The second feature of the SPA to feminist economics is that care and unpaid labor are recognized as fundamental economic activities. This concept of the economy fits well with the CA in at least two ways. First, care and unpaid labor can be conceptualized as things that matter to people directly, hence as being among the many ends of a worthwhile life. Being able to care for one’s close friends and family members, and being able to engage in certain forms of unpaid labor, may be important aspects of the good life that people seek. However, as feminists have argued for decades, care and unpaid labor have a mixed and ambiguous status: on the one hand it can be very valuable for those who are giving the care, yet on the other hand it is also an activity that comes with an opportunity cost (namely, how that time spent caring could have been spent otherwise), and hence its distribution is also a matter of social and economic justice. It is therefore important to keep the distinction between the real freedom to care (a capability) and the actual caring (a functioning) in mind. While the real freedom is in itself valuable, the actual caring may not be valued if there was no corresponding freedom, namely if there was no option not to care. Care may not be valuable for the caregiver if they were, effectively, forced to care. Second, for many other valuable ends of life, care and unpaid labor are important “resources”—those things that are needed in order for people to flourish in all valuable dimensions. Take, for example, good mental health, which no one will dispute is an important dimension of well-being and hence of our goals in life. High-quality care as well as supportive social networks are very important for our mental well-being. Hence, high-quality care (whether formal or informal) is an important resource or input of well-being. This is, again, a claim on which the CA and the SPA agree, and where they both try to enrich and redirect mainstream economic thinking. The implication of this conceptual framework is that care work is both a capability in its own right, but also a resource for other capabilities. That may be confusing to scholars who are trained to value parsimony in their modeling and theorizing. However, it is much closer to the lived experiences of people, as well as to a rich social theory: care work is a valuable resource to other capabilities such as strong social relationship and mental health, yet it is at the same time also a capability itself, that is, some people value it in its own right. 75

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Ethical goals and values as an intrinsic part of the analysis The third feature of the SPA to feminist economics is that ethical goals and values are an intrinsic part of the analysis. Here, too, the CA has resources to offer to feminist economics. While the CA is primarily a normative approach, one could use the notions of “functionings,” “capabilities,” and “conversion factors” also in explanatory research, for example if we want to know what the factors are that enable the expansion of the capability of becoming better educated (e.g., Walker and Unterhalter 2007). But this is hardly ever explicitly done in the capability literature. The main focus of scholarship on the CA is overwhelmingly normative in two senses: evaluative and prescriptive. The CA highlights its own normative commitments, yet also stresses that it is not possible to have any approach that deals with policymaking or institutional recommendations that is not normative. It is impossible to conduct any evaluations, or say that policy A is “better” than policy B if one does not commit to certain goals (the ends that matter) and to the values that one takes as central in the evaluation. Does “better” mean “more efficient” and if so, efficient in the realization of which goals? Economists are trained by seeing preference-satisfaction as the unquestioned goal, but one does not need to agree with this choice and could instead use capabilities. Indeed, there are long-standing debates in both philosophy and economics that question preferences-satisfaction as the relevant metric. Some of the worries with ­preference-satisfaction related to the inability of the notion of “preferences” to distinguish between those that reflect “needs” that require moral prioritizing, versus those preferences that reflect “wants” and which might not always require the attention of policymakers and others. Other worries with the use of preferences relate to processes of adaptation to the circumstances in which one finds oneself. This not only holds for the poor or oppressed who might resign to their situation, but also to the class of superrich. Preferences are a purely subjective category, and preference adaptation by the superrich implies that their subjective appreciation of their increased wealth also adapts over time, as they get used to being superrich. This is a reason why preference-satisfaction is a problematic account (or indicator) of well-being or welfare. The phenomenon of adaptive preferences is especially important for gender analysis, as women often have to deal with worse circumstances than men and with gendered social norms that induce them to accept those circumstances. If they adapt to those circumstances, a preference-based metric might not fully pick up the injustices or inequalities that are nevertheless relevant. The CA has another shared feature with the SPA feminist economics, and that is their interdisciplinary nature, while this feature is only implicit in Power (2004). Feminist economics is about economic questions, but relies on insights, tools and methods that stem from a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The same can be said for the CA, which is also radically multi-disciplinary. As a result, the research done in both schools is in majority done by scholars who have chosen to engage, and have had experience in engaging, with transdisciplinary conversations. This stands in sharp contrast to mainstream economics, which is a highly insular discipline (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015). It is tightly managed in a topdown fashion, and there is little engagement with (or simply acknowledgment of) the research done in other social sciences and history. This is in part due to the widely shared belief among mainstream economists that their methods are superior to those used by other disciplines. As a result, economists have a far greater sense of superiority than other social sciences and humanities. Feminist economists and capability scholars share a condemnation of such attitude as an epistemic harmful barrier toward doing better scholarship, by learning from, engaging with, and collaborating with other disciplines than one’s own. 76

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Intersectionality and human diversity The fourth characteristic of the SPA to feminist economics is to fully consider intersectionality and human diversity. Again, here too the CA can be at the service of feminist economics, since it has placed human diversity at the heart of its conceptual framework (Robeyns 2017, 113–15). The CA has two conceptual tools at its disposal to account for both inter-individual differences, those that may be rather randomly distributed, and inter-group differences, those that make people see themselves and/or are perceived by others, to be members of groups (such as based on gender, race, ethnicity, age, social class, caste, disability status, language, nationality). The first mechanism is the multidimensional nature of the CA, with its focus on the plurality of functionings and capabilities as important evaluative spaces. By including a wide range of dimensions in the conceptualization of well-being and well-being outcomes, the approach broadens the so-called “informational basis” of assessments, and thereby includes some dimensions that may be particularly important for some groups but less so for others. For example, in standard outcome assessments (such as income or time poverty), women as a group virtually always end up being worse off than men. But if the selection of outcome dimensions is broadened to include the quality and quantity of social relations and support, and being able to engage in hands-on care, then the normative assessment of gender inequality becomes less univocal and requires much further argument and normative analysis (Robeyns 2003). Second, human diversity is stressed in the CA by the explicit focus on personal and socioenvironmental conversion factors that make possible the conversion of commodities and other resources into functionings, and on the social, institutional, and environmental contexts that affect the conversion factors and the capability set directly. Each individual has a unique profile of conversion factors, some of which are body-related, while others are shared with all people from their community, and still others are shared with people with the same social characteristics and group membership.

Human diversity and power However, the centrality of the notion of human diversity to the CA has also led to capability scholars warning against some potential challenges and pitfalls—and they relate directly to the last element of the SPA, namely that analysis includes economic, political, and social processes and power relations. The CA may also include an analysis of these processes, depending on the precise goals of the study. But whether that will lead to a sufficiently rich and robust analysis of power relations, is not guaranteed. The reason for this is that, although all capability scholars agree that human diversity is a key notion in the approach, this can be filled in and fleshed out in many different ways, and some social theories are relatively naïve on power-differences in society and between groups. In earlier work I have argued that how human diversity is exactly understood, is extremely relevant for feminist scholars. Whether one endorses a feminist account or a more conservative account of “gender differences” makes a huge difference in the extent to which one will find the gender inequalities in functionings that are caused by the gendered division in paid and unpaid labor a matter of injustice (Robeyns 2008). Much of the intellectual (and policy) disputes between mainstream economists and heterodox economists, or between capability scholars and scholars using monetary metrics for evaluative purposes, will therefore not be on whether one should look at issues such as “gender” or “ethnicity,” but rather how rich or superficial the account of gender (and other social groups) is that one will be using, and whether it can account for power. For example, as many feminist economists have argued, the explanation of 77

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the gender division of labor by Becker (1984) and other economists from the Chicago School is devoid of the relevant features that a rich account of gender would add, including gendered social norms, power differences between men and women, and so forth (Folbre 1994). Thus, while both the SPA and the CA agree on the importance of human diversity, and while the CA has several conceptual tools to give central attention to human diversity, a worry remains that particular applications could be devoid of power relations between different groups in society. Discussions on this issue in the capability literature underline how important the choice of social theories and assumptions about power differences are for our analyses, and the SPA to feminist economics faces exactly the same challenges.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that the CA can play a central role in feminist economics, given that it constitutively meets all five key characteristics of the SPA. It should therefore not come as a surprise that the CA has been used by many feminist economists, and feminist scholars in other disciplines (e.g., Nussbaum 2000, 2003; Robeyns 2003, 2008; Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Seguino 2009; Addabbo, Lanzi, and Picchio 2010; Lewis and Giulari 2005; van Staveren 2013; Ghosh 2019). Nevertheless, from the success of the CA in feminist scholarship, it doesn’t follow that all uses of the CA are “feminist” or gender-sensitive. For example, some capability analyses do not include caring and unpaid labor in the analysis (whether for pragmatic reasons of data availability or because the research is gender-biased). Another problem is that feminist economics scholarship needs to rely on an account of social norms, including gender norms, and needs to (implicitly or explicitly) endorse an account of “gender,” and how that differs from “sexual difference.” If one makes a gender analysis but does this in combination with a poorly informed and naïve account of “gender” that does not take into account that gender entails issues of inequality, gendered social norms, and power differences, then the ensuing analysis will not be up to the highest standards of feminist scholarship. In short, using the CA in economics does not offer a guarantee that the ensuing analysis will be deeply informed by gender studies and feminist scholarship. Another limitation is that there are various reasons why, for certain questions, other normative frameworks are better suited for the task at hand. In particular, for some research questions there is a great overlap between the CA and the human rights framework (e.g., Sen 2005; Vizard 2006; Fukuda-Parr 2011; Vizard, Fukuda-Parr, and Elson 2011). The CA sometimes has advantages over the human rights framework: it can be used to cover a broader set of questions than those raised by the human rights declarations. For example, it can be used when the issue on the table is not one about rights that should be legally protected under all circumstances, as might be the case with free access to higher education. And it can be used in situations where there is a political taboo on talking about human rights. Yet there can also be circumstances in which it is, all things considered, better to use the human rights approach than the capability framework. For example, the human rights framework has been highly successful for some activist causes and it would be strategically unwise to change a successful framework if there is no strong need for doing so. And the human rights approach has a long history of being defended by a broad coalition of people (rather than a few scholars), which gives it additional authority (Vizard, Fukuda-Parr, and Elson 2011). The main take-home-message is that the CA entails the richness and the attention to human diversity that makes it attractive to feminist economics scholarship, but that one should never treat it as a blueprint that can easily be applied to all cases equally well. In this respect, the CA 78

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shares an important methodological commitment with feminist economics: to always keep a self-reflexive scholarly attitude and keep critically assessing, and if need be revising, the ontological, normative, and methodological presuppositions of our research. Scholars need to explicitly ask themselves which choices they make when evaluating institutions and practices; they need to integrate the best insights from other disciplines; and they need to work with sophisticated accounts of gender. All this requires a professional attitude in which the scholar is always critical about their research. And while this is demanding for scholars, the SPA and the CA both agree that it results in better knowledge.

References Addabbo, Tindara, Diego Lanzi, and Antonella Picchio. 2010. “Gender Budgets: A Capability Approach.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11 (4): 479–501. Becker, Gary S. 1984. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berik, Günseli, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, and Stephanie Seguino. 2009. “Feminist Economics of Inequality, Development and Growth.” Feminist Economics 15 (3): 1–33. Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraints. New York: Routledge. Fourcade, Marion, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan. 2015. “The Superiority of Economists.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 89–113. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko. 2011. “The Metrics of Human Rights: Complementarities of the Human Development and Capabilities Approach.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 12 (1): 73–89. Ghosh, Jayati. 2019. “The Uses and Abuses of Inequality.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 20 (2): 181–96. Kuklys, Wiebke. 2005. Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Applications. Berlin: Springer. Lewis, Jane, and Susanna Giullari. 2005. “The Adult Worker Model Family, Gender Equality and Care: The Search for New Policy Principles and the Possibilities and Problems of a Capabilities Approach.” Economy and Society 34 (1): 76–104. Nelson, Julie A. 1993. “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics.” In Beyond Economic Man, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, 23–36. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. “I, Thou, and Them: Capabilities, Altruism, and Norms in the Economics of Marriage.” American Economic Review (papers and proceedings) 84 (2): 126–31. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 33–59. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. Robeyns, Ingrid. 2003. “Sen’s Capability Approach and Gender Inequality: Selecting Relevant ­Capabilities.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 61–92. ———. 2008. “Sen’s Capability Approach and Feminist Concerns.” In The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures, Applications, edited by Sabina Alkire, Flavio Comin and Mozaffar Qizilbash, 82–104. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice. The Capability Approach Re-examined. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Sen, Amartya. 1985. Commodities and Capabilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. “Capability and Wellbeing.” In The Quality of Life, edited by Martha Nussbaum and ­Amartya Sen, 30–53. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2005. “Human Rights and Capabilities.” Journal of Human Development 6 (2): 151–66. Van Staveren, Irene. 2013. “To Measure Is to Know? A Comparative Analysis of Gender Indices.” Review of Social Economy 71 (3): 339–72. Vizard, Polly. 2006. Poverty and Human Rights. Sen’s ‘Capability Perspective’ Explored. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press.

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Ingrid Robeyns Vizard, Polly, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and Diane Elson. 2011. “Introduction: The Capability Approach and Human Rights.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 12 (1): 1–22. Walker Melanie, and Elaine Unterhalter, eds. 2007. Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and Social Justice in Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zaidi, Asghar, and Tania Burchardt. 2005. “Comparing Incomes When Needs Differ: Equivalization for the Extra Costs of Disability in the UK.” The Review of Income and Wealth 51 (1): 89–114.

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8 HUMAN RIGHTS AND FEMINIST ECONOMICS Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz

Feminist economics engages with issues frequently ignored and neglected in other approaches to economics. It places at center stage inequalities between socially constructed groups, based on gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors. It recognizes the importance of nonmarket activities, essential to the functioning of the economy and people’s well-being. It not only emphasizes the role of collective action and collective identities but also stresses the importance of individual agency. These same concerns are reflected in the human rights framework. Human rights constitute an alternative evaluative and ethical framework for assessing economic policies and outcomes, one that resonates with many of the issues central to feminist economics. The goals of social justice are expressed in terms of the realization of rights—both civil and political rights and also economic, social, and cultural rights. The idea that all human beings have fundamental rights is reflected in historical documents such as the Magna Carta (1774), the US Declaration of Independence (1776), and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights laid the foundation of the modern human rights system and has since been elaborated in numerous treaties, declarations, and reports, such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (1979) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (1966). Human rights have evolved through international processes of public reasoning, involving people from all parts of the world. The human rights approach allows for a complex interaction between individual rights, collective rights, and collective action. It offers feminist economics a widely accepted ethical language with which to assess economic policies without limiting the answers to a consideration of a handful of core variables, such as gross domestic product (GDP), and without neglecting ethical concerns, such as various types of inequality.

What is the human rights approach? While economic policy analysis often focuses on a select set of narrow goals, such as the growth of GDP or keeping inflation low, the human rights approach represents an alternative evaluative framework that stresses a broader range of objectives, emphasizing the substantive freedoms and choices people enjoy. Everyone has the same set of human rights, and these rights cannot be taken away. All rights must be considered a package; civil and political rights cannot be protected while economic and social rights are ignored. These rights are universal, inalienable, and indivisible. 81

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In the human rights framework the state is the duty bearer and has the primary responsibility for respecting, promoting, and fulfilling rights. This does not mean that the state must provide all the goods and services that support the realization of rights. Other institutions—including markets and civil society organizations—play a role. However, the state is obligated to take the necessary steps, through policy, legislation, and the judiciary, to support the realization of rights. Central to the human rights approach is the idea of substantive individual freedoms—what people can do and become in the course of their lives. In this regard, human rights and the capabilities approach share much in common. Sen (2004) argues that the human rights approach goes beyond a focus on capabilities themselves and emphasizes a process of public reasoning whereby some capabilities are elevated to the status of rights. Furthermore, the human rights approach emphasizes the corresponding duties and obligations essential for the realization of rights. Underpinning these freedoms is a collective responsibility, exercised through the state and through cooperation among states. Furthermore, the human rights approach recognizes the complexity of the relation between the state and the people: human rights protect individuals against state action that would violate rights, but state action is also required to realize rights. Collective action is often needed for people to claim their rights, participate in the realization of those rights, and hold governments to account. There are a number of reasons why the human rights approach is important for feminist economics. The human rights framework emphasizes the principle of non-discrimination and equality, addressing specific disadvantages and vulnerabilities based on identity. This concern extends beyond formal, legal equality. The human rights framework recognizes the need for substantive equality and that all aspects of people’s lives need to be taken into consideration when ensuring that everyone enjoys identical rights. It emphasizes not only equality of opportunity but also the equality of realized outcomes. By making non-discrimination a core principle with which to evaluate economic outcomes, the human rights approach provides a richer ethical framework than standard neoclassical economics with its emphasis on individual utility maximization. As mentioned earlier, within the human rights framework, every individual holds the same set of core rights, regardless of their identity based on gender, race, class, ethnicity, citizenship, or other status. Economic policy conducted at the aggregate level often misses the needs of women, racial and ethnic groups, and the disabled, among other social groups. The human rights approach ensures that even in the presence of collective rights such as the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of the individual are protected. Treaties like the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) provide a framework to protect the rights of those who for reasons of race and gender may be discriminated against. For instance, CEDAW prohibits discrimination against women in all its forms and obligates states to take steps “by all appropriate means and without delay” to eliminate this discrimination (CEDAW 1979, Article 2). It is clear that CEDAW does not only mean the absence of a discriminatory legal framework but also implies that policies must not be discriminatory in effect. CEDAW recognizes that formal equality alone is insufficient for a state to meet its affirmative obligation to achieve substantive equality between men and women (CEDAW 2004, General Recommendation 25, para 8). In addition to the principle of non-discrimination and equality, the human rights approach also broadens the scope for evaluating economic performance and assessing policy choices. Feminist economists have argued that economic performance should not be judged on market transactions and monetary valuations alone (Balakrishnan, Heintz, and Elson 2016). Other aspects of the economy, including unpaid work and nonmarket activities, are important (e.g., 82

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Folbre 2002). The human rights framework allows us to move beyond a narrow focus on GDP or income when evaluating economic outcomes. Instead, it stresses the realization of economic and social rights over time. The idea of advancement with regard to rights replaces GDP growth as the measure of social progress. Advances in social justice are achieved when the enjoyment of the rights to an adequate standard of living, education, health, work, and social security, among others, improves over time.

Human rights obligations and principles Meaningful rights require corresponding duties, and there are a number of principles and obligations that underpin the human rights framework. Governments must follow a number of principles in addition to non-discrimination and substantive equality: progressive realization; non-retrogression; accountability, transparency, and participation; and utilizing the maximum of available resources. These, and other, human rights principles and obligations have been spelled out more fully in the General Comments and General Recommendations issued from time to time by UN treaty monitoring bodies and by experts in international law, such as the groups of experts who produced the Limburg Principles on the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1986), the Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1997), and the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic Social and Cultural Rights (2012). Three core obligations within the human rights framework are the obligations to respect, fulfill, and protect rights. The obligation to respect requires states to refrain from interfering with the enjoyment of human rights. For instance, the right to housing is violated if the government engages in arbitrary forced evictions. The obligation to fulfill requires states to take appropriate legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial, and other measures toward the full realization of such rights. And the obligation to protect requires states to prevent violations of such rights by third parties. For instance, the government must take steps to ensure that private employers do not violate their employees’ rights. Furthermore, one of the central principles, reflected in Article 2.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), is that of progressive realization. This principle recognizes that the resources a government has are limited and that fulfilling economic and social rights takes time. However, the principle does require that states take incremental steps toward the full realization of rights. The obligation to progressively realize economic and social rights must comply with other principles and obligations, such as nondiscrimination and equality. Rights cannot be advanced for certain groups while leaving others behind. Related to the principle of progressive realization is that of non-retrogression. Non-­ retrogression implies that once a certain level of enjoyment of a right is achieved, that right cannot be taken away or the level of enjoyment reduced. There may be extraordinary situations, outside of a government’s control, when retrogression is unavoidable. But any action that leads to retrogression must be subject to extreme scrutiny. The Committee on Economic and Social Rights (1990) has stated in General Comment 3, Paragraph 9, that there is a strong presumption that actions by the government that lead to a deterioration in the enjoyment of economic and social rights require the most careful consideration and would need to be fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the Covenant and in the context of the use of the maximum available resources (CESCR 1990). While the state is the primary duty-bearer in the human rights framework, not all governments make choices consistent with the progressive realization of rights. Governments may 83

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directly violate rights or take actions that rollback the enjoyment of rights. For example, when police in the US disproportionately use violent tactics in communities of color, this represents a direct violation of rights. When governments adopt austerity measures, as happened during the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, this led to the erosion of certain rights. Critical to the human rights framework is the principle of accountability, transparency, and participation. Governments should be accountable, both to the international community and to their own people, for their compliance with the obligations under human rights treaties. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has emphasized that “rights and obligations demand accountability . . . whatever the mechanisms of accountability, they must be accessible, transparent and effective” (CESCR 2001, para 14). Central to transparency is the right to information, specified in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The CESCR has also indicated that the right of individuals to participate must be central to any policy or practice, including the conduct of economic policies, that seeks to meet the government’s obligation to ensure the equal right of all people to the enjoyment of their rights (2005, General Comment 16, para 37). For instance, CEDAW requires that women be able to participate on equal terms with men in decision-making about the budget. Article 7(a) calls for women to participate equally in the formulation of government policy and its implementation and to hold public office and perform all public functions (CEDAW 1979). Human rights cannot be realized without resources. At a minimum, the apparatus of justice requires public money to fund law makers, judges and the courts, police, ombudsmen, and so on. However, substantial progress toward a full realization of human rights makes demands on public finance well beyond what is required for the core administration of justice. Article 2.1 of the ICESCR states that a government should progressively realize rights “to the maximum of its available resources.” However, within the human rights framework, the definition of “maximum resources” needs further elaboration. Economic policy, and macroeconomic policy in particular, influences the amount of resources that a state has at its disposal. Furthermore, how resources are mobilized has consequences for the realization of rights. A tax policy that disadvantages women may generate public resources but violates the principle of non-discrimination. Often the idea of maximum available resources is interpreted conservatively, focusing on the allocation of government expenditures and taking the amount of resources as given. However, the concept of maximum available resources is more expansive and implies that governments must mobilize resources, not simply administer existing resources, in order to meet human rights obligations (Balakrishnan et al. 2011). Maximum available resources should be examined in terms of five types of policy: (1) government expenditure, (2) government revenue, (3) development assistance, (4) debt and deficit financing, and (5) monetary policy and financial regulation (Balakrishnan et al. 2011). The allocation of spending to particular areas that support the realization of specific rights—for example, health, education, and income protections and transfers to low-income households—must be considered and compared to areas of spending which do not necessarily support human rights— for example, military spending. When considering the resources available to realize rights, it is important not to limit the analysis of public expenditures to social spending, since the realization of some economic and social rights requires an examination of other areas of spending, such as public investment in basic economic infrastructure. The scope of human rights expenditure is therefore quite expansive, involving not just social service delivery but also agricultural, industrial, and employment policy. Consider a case in which efforts to realize children’s rights have been exclusively focused on spending on health and education and not on infrastructure investments, such as building roads and schools. Though the spending on health and education can have positive outcomes, 84

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the lack of spending on infrastructure may deny some children access to health services and schools, for instance when the children live far away from the nearest school building or clinic with few or no transportation options. The allocation of public resources represents one area that needs to be analyzed when considering whether a government’s policies are consistent with the principle of maximum of available resources. How the government generates resources and the amount of resources mobilized are also critical. Governments obtain revenue from several sources, including, taxation, royalties for natural resource exploitation, and profits from public enterprises, with taxation typically being the most important source of revenue. Human rights bodies and institutions have pointed to the importance of taxation in mobilizing the maximum available resources (Balakrishnan and Elson 2008). For instance, one of the Special Rapporteurs on the right to education noted that taxes are essential for any state to raise the revenue needed to finance health, education, infrastructure, or assistance for those too young or too old to work (Tomasevskï 1998). Philip Alston, a Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, commented on the links between taxation and the realization of rights as: Refusing to levy taxes, or failing to collect them, both of which are commonplace in many countries, results in the availability of inadequate revenue to fund human rights related expenditures . . . tax policy is where the action really is in terms of setting priorities. Tax policies reflect better than all of the ministerial statements and white papers the real priorities of a government. We can see clearly the activities that it chooses to incentivize, those that it opts to disincentivize, the groups that it decides to privilege, and the groups that it decides to ignore or even penalize. (Alston 2015, 1) Development assistance, debt and deficit financing, and monetary policies also affect the resources available to government to support the realization of rights. Concerns over the impact of high levels of government indebtedness on the fulfillment of rights led to the appointment of an Independent Expert on the Effects of Debt on Human Rights. The reports of the Independent Expert examine the implications of accumulated debt on the governments’ ability to meet their human rights obligations. However, it is also important to recognize that public borrowing potentially has a positive impact on human rights. Debt-financed public investments in education, health, nutrition, and infrastructure could help to realize human rights and, in the long-run, generate the revenues to service the loans by raising productivity and economic growth. Borrowing can also prevent retrogression when government revenues unexpectedly decline, for instance, in the face of a significant economic shock. Bohoslavsky (2018) has focused on the impact of economic reforms and austerity measures, implemented when countries have faced a fiscal crisis triggered by high levels of indebtedness, on women’s human rights. The report stresses the impact of economic reforms, including austerity and fiscal consolidation measures, on women’s human rights and underscores the importance of the value of unpaid work and its contribution to the economy (Bohoslavsky 2018). Many of these aspects of maximum available resources correspond to what some economists refer to as the fiscal space. The factors that define the fiscal space and the resources a government could potentially mobilize include expenditure reprioritization and efficiency; domestic resource mobilization through taxation and other revenue raising measures; official development assistance; and deficit financing. In addition, monetary and financial policies provide potentially powerful instruments for directing financial resources toward uses that support the 85

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realization of human rights. Monetary policy, conducted by central banks, also influences the resources available to realize rights—for instance, through its impact on the level of employment. However, the extent to which the mandate and practices of the central bank are consistent with human rights obligations is rarely considered. There is no reason why central banks should not be held accountable to the same human rights principles as other government or statutory bodies (Heintz 2012). Besides mobilizing resources to support the realization of rights to the maximum extent possible, another consideration is whether those resources are used in such a way as to yield the best outcomes. Efficiency is often defined in terms of the financial costs of the inputs required to produce a particular outcome—greater efficiency implies that more can be produced with a given amount of financial resources. Care must be taken when evaluating efficiency. Are all inputs adequately accounted for or are there important resources that are ignored but have been frequently recognized by feminist economists (such as contributions of unpaid household work or other nonmarket contributions)? For example, in the health sector, efficiency is typically judged in terms of the financial cost per treatment. This can be reduced by shortening the time that patients spend in hospital. However, patients still need further non-medical care. Therefore, efficiency, narrowly defined, may appear to improve as the cost of providing treatment for each patient drops, but there are substantial spillover costs for unpaid caretakers in households who may be forced to take time off paid work to care for a family member. Therefore, increasing “efficiency” by reducing spending on key inputs may not create true efficiencies but imposes higher costs on unpaid, family care at home, with disproportionate impacts on women.

Applying human rights to austerity policies following the 2008 economic crisis To show how the framework can be applied to economics, we focus on the case of the austerity policies adopted by many countries following the 2008 financial crisis, drawing on examples from Ireland, Spain, the UK, and Greece. The adoption of austerity policies can be assessed in the light of the human rights principles of progressive realization and non-retrogression, non-discrimination and equality, and accountability, participation, and transparency. This short illustrative analysis, though focused on the 2008 global crisis in Europe, can be applied to macroeconomic policy choices in general and demonstrates how a human rights framework can be used to evaluate the consequences of policy choices. In May 2012, in the wake of the global economic crisis, human rights considerations were drawn to the attention of governments of states that were party to the ICESCR. The letter from the Chair of the CESCR drew attention to concerns regarding the policy responses to the crisis, including austerity policies, that would have an adverse effect on rights. First, any emergency policy measure should be temporary; second, policy responses must be unavoidable and proportionate; third, the response cannot be discriminatory; and fourth, policy responses protect the minimum core content of rights and prevents the enjoyment of rights from falling below this essential level (Pillay 2012). The Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe set out a series of concrete recommendations for human rights-compliant responses to the crisis (Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe 2013). The report found evidence of retrogression in the realization of the right to work, right to an adequate standard of living, right to social security, right to housing, right to food, right to education, and right to health. Among the recommendations were that governments should conduct systematic human rights and equality impact assessments of social and economic policies and budgets. 86

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In an assessment of government policy in Ireland in response to the crisis in Europe, the then UN Independent Expert on human rights and extreme poverty, Carmona, expressed concern that Ireland did not undertake any meaningful efforts to engage in a national dialogue when formulating its budgetary responses to the crises and entering into the bailout agreement with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Carmona 2011). Failure to ensure participation and transparency in the design of national policies jeopardizes the government’s ability to fulfill its human rights obligations. In Spain, a coalition of NGOs took advantage of Spain’s appearance in May 2012 before the CESCR to present a shadow report providing detailed evidence of retrogressions in human rights due to austerity measures. The Committee echoed many of the concerns raised in the shadow report, probing in particular the human rights impacts of recent budget cuts, labor and health reforms, and housing foreclosures and evictions, as well as persistent discrimination against women and the Gitano (Roma) community. The UK did not face any sovereign debt problems, but nevertheless the coalition government that came to power in the UK in May 2010 introduced a so-called emergency budget in June 2010 that set out a strategy for rapid reduction of the UK budget deficit. Reductions in expenditure were to achieve 77 percent of the proposed deficit reduction and increases in tax revenue 23 percent. Elson (2012) considers the deficit reduction strategy in the light of CEDAW obligations, citing evidence produced by researchers at the House of Commons Library on the distribution between women and men of the £8 billion raised by the changes in direct taxes and benefits introduced in the June 2010 budget that finds that £5.8 billion will be paid by women and only £2.2 billion by men. Subsequent analysis of the combined impact of budget measures, including changes to taxes and cuts to social security benefits and public services, found that single women were particularly hard hit (UK Women’s Budget Group 2013). Of all countries affected by the economic crisis in the EU, Greece faced some of the most extreme consequences. By 2014, output was down about 26 percent; unemployment was at 25.8 percent, with youth unemployment at 49.6 percent; nominal wages had fallen by 23.5 percent (Weisbrot, Rosnick, and Lefebvre 2015). Access to health care was particularly impacted, as the bailout in 2010, orchestrated by the EU and the IMF, stipulated sizeable cuts in spending (Kentikelenis 2015). An anti-austerity government came to power in early 2015, and the new President of the Greek Parliament set up the Truth Committee on Public Debt, an independent committee of experts from 11 countries, to examine Greek government debt, including the extent to which it had been incurred in compliance with human rights principles. The Committee concludes that Greece was effectively coerced into violating fundamental human rights obligations through the bailout conditions and points out that sovereign creditors have an obligation not to coerce another party to violate its obligations. No state can legitimately claim to be discharging its own human rights obligations while at the same time actively pressuring another nation to violate its own obligations (Truth Committee on Public Debt 2015, 59). This examination of austerity policies from a human rights perspective deepens the critique by pointing out that not all policies adopted to ostensibly promote economic growth contribute to the realization of rights and may indeed undermine those rights. Moreover, it illustrates the tensions that exist between the duty to support the realization of rights and other obligations to powerful economic interests, such as creditors. A human rights perspective requires that the avoidance of retrogression in the realization of human rights must be at the forefront of strategies to deal with economic crises. In responding to economic downturns, governments also have an immediate obligation to ensure that there is compliance with the principle of equality and non-discrimination. 87

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Conclusion Feminist economics shines the spotlight on parts of the economy that are sidelined in much economic analysis. By doing so, it highlights a concern for social justice that goes beyond the standard welfare indicators used by economists. The human rights approach complements this expansion of the realm of economics by providing an ethical framework rooted in an approach to justice that is richer than that found in neoclassical economics. The human rights framework is clear about what economic policy is really for—it is about people’s lives, the freedoms they enjoy, and the choices they are able to make. As discussed in this chapter, the framework is not static—it is constantly evolving, because the conditions under which people realize their rights are always changing. Both human rights and feminist economics would benefit from greater interaction and deeper engagement to meet the economic challenges we face.

References Alston, Philip. 2015. “Report of Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on the World Bank.” UN Document A/70/274. Balakrishnan, Radhika, and Diane Elson. 2008. “Auditing Economic Policy in the Light of Obligations on Economic and Social Rights.” Essex Human Rights Review 5 (1): 1–19. Balakrishnan, Radhika, James Heintz, and Diane Elson, eds. 2016. Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice: The Radical Potential of Human Rights. London and New York: Routledge. Balakrishnan, Radhika, James Heintz, Diane Elson, and Nicholas Lusiani. 2011. Maximum Available Resources  & Human Rights: Analytical Report. New Brunswick: Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University. Accessed March 29, 2019. www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/docman/economic-andsocial-rights-publications/362-maximumavailableresources-pdf/file. Bohoslavsky, Juan Pablo. 2018. “Impact of Economic Reforms and Austerity Measures on Women’s Human Rights.” Accessed March 29, 2019. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ N18/229/04/PDF/N1822904.pdf?OpenElement. Carmona, Magdelena. S. (2011). Report of the Independent Expert on the Question of Human Rights and Extreme Poverty: Mission to Ireland. Human Rights Council, A/HRC/17/34/Add 2. Accessed January 25, 2021. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.34.Add.2_en.pdf. Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe. 2013. Safeguarding Human Rights in Times of Economic Crisis. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Accessed March  29, 2019. https://wcd.coe.int/com. instranet.InstraServlet?command=com.instranet.CmdBlobGet&InstranetImage=2664103&SecMode =1&DocId=2215366&Usage=2. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). 1990. “General Comment No. 3: The Nature of States Parties Obligations of the Covenant. (Art.2. par. 1).” Accessed March 29, 2019. http:// tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=INT%2fCESCR%2fG EC%2f4758&Lang=en. ———. 2001. “Substantive Issues Arising in the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Poverty and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” Statement adopted by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on 4 May 2001, E/C.12/2001/10. Accessed March 29, 2019. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/ cescr/docs/statements/E.C.12.2001.10Poverty-2001.pdf. ———. 2005. “General Comment No. 16: The Equal Right of Men and Women to the Enjoyment of All Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (art. 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights). E/C.12/2005/4.” Accessed December 11, 2019. http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/ treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=E%2fC.12%2f2005%2f4&Lang=en. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). (2004). “General Recommendation No. 25, on Article 4, Paragraph 1, of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, on Temporary Special Measures.” Accessed January 25, 2021. http://www.un.org/women watch/daw/cedaw/recommendations/General%20recommendation%2025%20%28English%29.pdf. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). 1979. “Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.” Accessed December 11, 2019. www.ohchr.org/en/ professionalinterest/pages/cedaw.aspx.

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Human rights and feminist economics Elson, Diane. 2012. “The Reduction of the UK Budget Deficit: A Human Rights Perspective.” International Review of Applied Economics 26 (2): 1771–190. Folbre, Nancy. 2002. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: The New Press. Heintz, James. 2012. “Central Banks: Do They Have Human Rights Obligations?” Rightingfinance.org. Accessed March 29, 2019. www.rightingfinance.org/?p=44. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). 1966. “Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.” Accessed March 29, 2019. www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/ Pages/CESCR.aspx. Kentikelenis, Alexander. 2015. “Is This the Moment Greece’s Suffering Starts to Ease?” New Scientist. Accessed March  29, 2019. www.newscientist.com/article/dn27034-is-this-the-moment-greecessuffering-starts-to-ease/#. Limburg Principles on the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. (1986). “ESCR-Net.” Accessed January 25, 2021. https://www.escr-net.org/docs/i/425445. Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. (1997). “University of Minnesota, Human Rights Library.” Accessed January 25, 2021. https://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/ instree/Maastrichtguidelines_.html. Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic Social and Cultural Rights. (2012). Accessed January 25, 2021. http://www.fian.org/fileadmin/media/publications/ 2012.02.29_-_Maastricht_Principles_on_Extraterritorial_Obligations.pdf. Pillay, Ariranga G. 2012. “Chairperson, Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” Document: CESCR/48th/SP/MAB/SW. Sen, Amartya 2004. “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (4): 315–56. Tomasevskï, Katarina. 1998. “Background Paper Submitted by Special Rapporteur on the Right to ­Education, Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” 19th Session (E/C.12/1998/18). UK Women’s Budget Group. 2013. “To Ensure Economic Recovery for Women, We Need Plan F.” Accessed March  29, 2019. www.wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/WBG-briefing_Sept2013_final.pdf. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1948. Accessed March  29, 2019. www.un.org/en/universaldeclaration-human-rights/. Truth Committee on Public Debt. 2015. “Preliminary Report, Hellenic Parliament.” Accessed March 29, 2019. www.cadtm.org/Preliminary-Report-of-the-Truth/. Weisbrot, Mark, David Rosnick, and Stephan Lefebvre. 2015. The Greek Economy: Which Way Forward? Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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9 CARE WORK Katherine A. Moos

Introduction Domestic and care work—both paid and unpaid—have been a central issue for feminist economics. In contrast to mainstream economic formulations that have justified the gender division of labor in the household and the allocation of unpaid labor to women in the name of efficiency and harmony, feminist economists have viewed this gender division of work as the lynchpin of gender inequality. A large body of feminist scholarship has examined the nature, causes, and consequences of women’s disproportionate responsibility for both unpaid and paid care work, the methodologies for measuring the contribution of unpaid care work, and the policies to balance unpaid care work and paid work. Feminist economists have situated the analysis of care work within broader institutions and with due attention to intersections of gender with class, race, nationality, and other social differences.

The economics of unpaid and paid household work Understanding unpaid care work as “work” has been important for the development of feminist economics as a research program. Reid (1934) pioneered the development of theories and methodologies in home and consumption economics in the US. She coined the phrase “thirdperson criterion,” arguing that because one can delegate cooking, cleaning, or childcare to a third person, these activities are work. Reid’s third-person criterion was further developed by Ironmonger (1996), who discusses the need for further analysis to distinguish between work and leisure activities and extends the work definition to activities that also create transferable outcome benefits. This extension allows that some activities—such as “travel to work” and “self-education”—can be considered work, even when they do not match the third-person criterion. Reid also made methodological contributions for quantifying the economic value of women’s unpaid housework, proposing four methods for the economic valuation of household production, one of them, the opportunity cost, being widely used today. Reid’s work greatly influenced the measurement efforts of household production in the US, and its incorporation to the national account system (Yi 1996). The definition of care work has evolved over time and involved attempts to delineate it from the category of domestic labor. Himmelweit (1995, 9) defines caring as activities in which “the 90

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relationship between a carer and her work is crucial.” This definition of care is similar to what Folbre (2018a) calls “direct care”—activities that involve a high degree of personal engagement such as the care of children, elders, or people with disabilities—or “nurturant” care work (Duffy (2011). “Indirect care” (Folbre 2018a) or “non-nurturant” care (Duffy 2011) refers to activities that require less intimate engagement of the care giver and the recipient of care, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Folbre’s typology includes a third category— “supervisory care”—which refers to the supervision of children or dependents while simultaneously doing other activities, often other household work, which Himmelweit (2007) calls “passive caring.” Domestic labor typically refers to housework—activities that could be classified as indirect or non-nurturant care. This chapter discusses care work as encompassing both direct and indirect care and unpaid and paid care work. Paid care work is shaped by gender and race inequalities. For this reason, feminist analysis of care requires an intersectional lens, as articulated by Crenshaw (1989) and Collins (1998). The naturalization of women’s caring capacity is used as a justification for why women are segmented into paid care work (Duffy, Albelda, and Hammonds 2013). Paid caregivers are likely to be women, racial-ethnic minorities, and/or immigrants (Duffy 2011; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). Women of color and immigrant workers predominate, especially in lower paid positions in education, healthcare, and the service sector. The migration of women from the Global South who work as low-wage care workers in the Global North has changed patterns of both paid care work and migratory flows (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). While in the 1950s, US-born Black women were 60 percent of domestic workers in the US, by the late 20th century their share had dropped to 20 percent as women from Mexico, the Philippines, and other Central American and Asian countries came to the US to work as domestic workers (Duffy 2011, 27–29).

Care work, gender, and women’s oppression Feminists have identified the gendered division of labor as a major source of gender inequality. While changing gender norms have resulted in some men in some countries taking more responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work, women still do more unpaid labor (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Kan, Sullivan, and Gershuny 2011). Unpaid caregivers who are dependent on wage-earners for access to income, pensions, and other resources can be economically and socially vulnerable. Unpaid caregivers’ relative disadvantage puts them in a subordinate position both in terms of intra-household bargaining and in the labor market (Folbre 2018b). Feminist economists have long argued that domestic labor has constrained women’s involvement in the labor market work, and women’s responsibility for domestic work is a major source of women’s oppression (Benería 1979; Benston 1969). The “care penalty” that caregivers face relative to non-caregivers, or “motherhood penalty” that mothers experience relative to childless women, is a major driver of pay disparities in formal employment (England, Budig, and Folbre 2002; Folbre 2018b; Jee, Joya, and Murray-Close 2019). Women’s dual responsibility for breadwinning and caregiving—particularly if there are no supportive policies—will result in overwork, exhaustion, and an unequal distribution of leisure time. Caregivers are more constrained due to their responsibilities at home and may accept informal or part-time employment because it is more flexible than and accommodating of their caregiving roles. Women who work outside the home typically experience short- or long-term work absences due to caring responsibilities (Duffy 2011). Although there has been, on average, a slow but continuous gender convergence of work time and the domestic division of labor in the Global North since the 1970s, women still do 91

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more unpaid care work than men (Kan, Sullivan, and Gershuny 2011). The gender division of unpaid work leads to a “second shift” for women who also work for pay (Hochschild and Maschung 2012 [1989]). There are significant disadvantages to women of carrying a disproportionate share of unpaid work. Women’s unpaid work burden leads to capability deprivations in terms of not being able to pursue education or participate in the labor force. Some women experience time poverty and thus do not have enough time for rest, sleep, social relationships, or other essential activities (Vickery 1977). Overwork in both paid and unpaid activities deteriorates women’s health, family stability, and well-being.

Unpaid domestic labor and a critique of capitalism In the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist-feminists emphasized the role of women’s domestic labor as the chief contributor to the daily and generational reproduction of workers and their capacity to work. Marxist-feminists argued that women were exploited by capitalists not only as wage workers but also as housewives. The argument that unpaid domestic labor produces surplus value that is appropriated by capitalists inspired the “domestic labor debates.” The proponents of the Wages for Housework campaign argued that, rather than fight for women’s access to paid work, women should be paid by the state—as the representation of capital—for domestic work (Federici 2012). From the point of view of orthodox Marxian economists, best articulated by Himmelweit and Mohun (1977), unpaid domestic labor does not produce surplus value (which is realized as profits) because it is outside of the direct relations of commodity production. Despite the lack of consensus surrounding the domestic labor debates, Marxist-feminists have continued to study the political economy of social reproduction, unpaid care work, and the patriarchal family as an economic institution and emphasized the economic, material, or political importance of unpaid work. Contemporary social reproduction theory (SRT) can be thought of as a successor of the domestic labor debates (Rao and Akram-Lodhi, this volume). While SRT emphasizes the importance of unwaged household work for reproducing the human capacity to work, it is equally focused on the political economy of labor and the state. It is concerned with workers’ ability to care for themselves and the present and future generation of workers, and investigates and problematizes the socially reproductive role of wages, employer-based benefits, and social welfare programs (Moos 2019).

Methodological implications In the System of National Accounts (SNA), unpaid care work is not conceptualized as “work” or an economic activity, and for that reason the output resulting from unpaid care work is not included. Feminist researchers have advocated to bring unpaid work “out of the statistical shadows” (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015, 181). This goal has been pursued by feminist scholars who believe in the merits of measuring all of women’s contributions to the economy, to counter society’s undervaluation of women’s contributions and address the adverse consequences of statistical invisibility of women’s unpaid work. These scholarly and methodological efforts, known as the “Accounting for Women’s Work” project, were inspired by Waring’s influential book If Women Counted (Waring 1988) and scholarly contributions of Benería (1992), and supported by the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, which raised awareness of the value of women’s unpaid work. Simon Kuznets, who contributed to the development of the SNA in the 1940s, considered unpaid domestic work as outside the “production boundary” while advocating for the inclusion of subsistence production. It was not until 1966 that the International Conference of Labor 92

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Statisticians recommended counting subsistence and unpaid family workers as part of the labor force. Even so, women’s subsistence production along with market work in informal activities tends to be under-recorded in labor force statistics due to gender norms and the proximity of these activities to care work. It was only in 2013 that the International Conference of Labor Statisticians recommended including unpaid care and volunteer work as part of the labor force (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015), while the SNA continues to classify the output of this labor force as outside the production boundary.

Time-use surveys and the valuation of unpaid household work The systematic study of time use is an important field within feminist and care studies, as it allows researchers to measure time inputs and impute a value for unpaid household work (Floro, this volume). Time-use data help highlight gender inequalities in the distribution of unpaid and paid work, as well as excessive hours of unpaid work performed by women, and obtain more accurate labor force statistics (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015). Time-use data, in turn, may be used to estimate the monetary value of care work. Two common methods for imputing a monetary value for unpaid household work are the replacement cost and the opportunity cost methods. Replacement cost methods estimate what it would cost to hire someone to accomplish specific tasks. Input-related methods can use the generalist or the specialist approach to impute the cost of unpaid labor. The generalist approach multiplies the total time spent in housework by the average wage of a domestic worker. The specialist approach multiplies the hours spent on each household task—cooking, cleaning, or taking care of children—by the average wage of each specialist, such as cooks, housecleaners, and babysitters. The opportunity cost method estimates the counterfactual of what people could have earned if they used their time for market work. The opportunity cost of performing unpaid work differs greatly depending on the education, skills, and earning potential of the individual. Using the opportunity cost method, the valuation of a home-cooked meal prepared by a heart surgeon is much higher than the identical meal prepared by a low-wage worker. A third, less-used method—the output-related method—produces estimates of the value of labor after deducting the cost of intermediate inputs from the market value of household-produced goods and services (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015). Some feminist economists have produced multiple estimates of the value of household labor using different methods—combining and comparing replacement and opportunity cost methods. Dong and An (2015) and Suh and Folbre (2016) have produced multiple estimates that are interpreted as lower and upper bounds of the value of unpaid household labor. This approach is useful for the comparison of estimates of the value of household production based on wage rates of workers of different quality and for robustness purposes. Efforts to measure unpaid household work have created extended estimates of the size of the economy, measured by gross domestic product (GDP). In the US, including the imputed value for unwaged household work from a satellite account increases the level of nominal GDP by 39 percent in 1965 and 25.7 percent in 2010 (Bridgman et al. 2012, 24). However, satellite accounts produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) underestimate the value of household work, particularly the hours spent on childcare, due to not fully considering supervisory care, the care of older children, the ratio of children to adults present in the household, or the caregiver’s educational attainment (Duffy, Albelda, and Hammonds 2013; Suh and Folbre 2016). Furthermore, some feminists have critiqued the valuation exercises arguing that they tend to focus only on the cost of domestic labor that is performed in the market in the Global 93

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North (Himmelweit 1995; Wood 1997). Therefore, they undervalue direct care, which has emotional and personal dimensions, and reinforce market and Global North biases in measuring value.

Policy implications In the late 20th century, increased women’s labor force participation in parts of the Global North changed patterns of paid and unpaid work. Women’s increased labor force participation, along with declining fertility, aging populations, the decrease in state provisioning for health and social services, and the increased cost of privatized and market-based care services, has resulted in a “crisis of care” (Benería 2008; Fraser 2017). These social, economic, and political trends, coupled with the persistent assumption that women will be the primary caregivers, have a number of policy implications, such as creating strain on social insurance programs and impediments to women’s labor force participation. In the Global North, increased female labor force participation has resulted in the purchasing of more market substitutes. Folbre and Nelson (2000) argued that the “commodification of care” does not necessarily crowd-out caring feelings; paid caregivers are motivated to care by both love and money. However, the quality of institutionalized or market-based care varies drastically, with some paid caregivers providing superior care than an unpaid family member could provide at home and others providing substandard, or even abusive, care. As more care is provided by profit-seeking firms, not-for-profit organizations, and state agencies, the difficulty in raising productivity in care services can result in lower wages for workers and higher costs for recipients. The care sector is affected by “Baumol’s cost disease”—rising costs as a result of increased labor costs in sectors that do not experience labor productivity gains; this puts downward pressure on the wages of care workers and/or increases prices or co-payments paid by care recipients. Himmelweit (2007) notes that care—defined as requiring an emotional and personal relationship—cannot easily experience productivity gains or greater efficiency without compromising quality. Since market substitutes for care can be inaccessible or unaffordable for many who need care services, Folbre and Nelson (2000) argue that a political commitment to care is necessary to ensure that it is affordable, accessible, and of high quality. The commodification of care and the care crisis in the Global North have restructured employment patterns of women on a global scale. Migration of women from the Global South (Latin America, eastern Europe) to the Global North (southern Europe, North America) to work in caring occupations has contributed to the feminization of international migration since the 1990s. This has created what Hochschild and Maschung (2012) call “global care chains” (see Gammage, this volume). Even though the wages offered to immigrant women in care occupations are low, the availability of jobs and pay differentials compared to available work in their countries of origin are enough to incentivize migration. The increasing inequality between the South and the North, plus the effect of neoliberal policies in the Global South, also affects migration decisions (Benería 2010). The migration of care workers has major implications for class, race, and nationality inequality in both receiving and sending countries. While migrant caregivers from the Global South provide an individual solution for care needs of middle- and high-income families in the Global North, many low-income families are unable to pay for care services on the market. In similar ways, many migrant workers hire other women—often from a subordinated socioeconomic or racial-ethnic group—to care for their children and families in their home countries (Duffy 2011). Feminist research has examined policies that would increase access to paid care and help people balance breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities. The socialization of care and 94

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generous paid parental leave for caregivers have been relatively successful in Nordic welfare states (Albelda; Plantenga, this volume). These policies enable women’s participation in the workforce while also encouraging an equitable distribution of caring labor between partners (Gálvez-Muñoz, Rodríguez-Modroño, and Domínguez-Serrano 2011). In countries with less generous social policy such as Lithuania, Slovenia, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, and Spain, women typically perform at least one hour more of unpaid work per day than men. This can result in women dropping out of the formal labor force or being stuck in a part-time, lower-paying or lower-status careers (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015). Boushey (2016) argues that a policy framework which aims to help workers achieve work– life balance must meet four criteria. The first category of policies involves provision of paid medical and family leave. The second one consists of policies such as flexible and predictable schedules, telecommuting, and limitations on how much employers can expect from workers outside of their official hours. The third category is public investments in care, including the expansion of access to care centers or paid caregivers for children, the elderly, and people with illness or disabilities. The final category relates to making sure that work–life policies are fair by expanding benefits and social protections for all workers within a firm and across the income distribution—not only managers or professionals—and ensuring that access to leave and other benefits is not a matter of employers’ discretion. Feminist macroeconomists argue that fiscal policy can be used to reduce the burden of unpaid household work on women (Çağatay 2003; Braunstein, this volume). For instance, gender-responsive budgeting can be a useful tool to integrate gender-oriented goals into fiscal policies and administration (Stotsky 2016; Elson, this volume). Fiscal incentives, such as tax credits and subsidies, and other forms of government spending can be used to encourage gender equality by expanding the care sector and supporting both paid and unpaid caregivers. The measurement and valuation of unpaid work is necessary to guide gender-responsive budgets and fiscal policies. Time-use statistics can provide researchers and activists significant information to advocate for gender-aware policies and budgets. In South Korea, time-use data have been used to illustrate how care costs are distributed among families and the public, and advocate for childcare and eldercare programs and policies (Yoon 2014). History has shown that policies that disregard the time and effort involved in care are harmful to women and their families. Pension reforms that raise women’s retirement age or increase the number of working years to qualify for benefits undercut women’s economic security in old age, as women are more likely to have interrupted their careers to care for family members (Rubery 2015). Cuts to social services are especially harmful to low-income women and women-headed households as they are the main beneficiaries of welfare programs (Albelda 2013; Périvier 2018). In the US, the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) cut social benefits and required single mothers to obtain paid work—unambiguously denying the value of raising children. The reform has had devastating effects for poor women and children in the US, albeit the impact was initially muted by a booming labor market (Albelda 2011). Cutting social benefits can be counter-productive from the perspective of women’s ability to engage in formal employment. When public spending for social services is cut, the demand for unpaid care services increases, putting additional pressures on women. The increase in the need for unpaid care can hamper women’s ability to obtain formal employment (Périvier 2018). Austerity policies—which reduce government spending in an attempt to address an economic crisis—typically have a deleterious effect on a country’s macroeconomic growth and ability to recover. They are especially harmful to women and families. In Europe and the US, cuts to the welfare state and austerity policies have had a direct effect 95

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on women’s employment opportunities, especially in publicly funded care and social services work. Cuts to public sector budgets have led to a decline in both the quality and the quantity of jobs for women, especially minority women (Albelda 2013; Christensen 2015; Rubery and Rafferty 2013). Taken together, the effects of budget cuts on women—the decline in access to public benefits, the increase in necessary unpaid care, and the decrease in employment or salaries—are extremely detrimental to women’s economic well-being (UK Women’s Budget Group 2019). Even when governments implement Keynesian-style demand management policies, women and families can be put at a disadvantage if care work is not prioritized. While more effective at easing a recession than austerity, stimulus packages are often designed to increase employment in male-dominated industries rather than female-dominated care sectors. During the economic crisis of 2008–2009, men in the US experienced greater initial job loss than women. However, the stimulus package focused on male industries and sectors, skewing the recovery to benefit men’s employment (Albelda 2013). Feminist debates on care policies have taken an international and expansive definition of care policies (Esquivel, this volume), and included discussion of the potential impact of a universal basic income (UBI) on both care provision and gender inequality (Rodríguez Enríquez, this volume). A UBI advocates for providing all people with regular cash payments, unconditional on work or other requirements. Contrary to proposals of a UBI just for adults, a UBI designed to support care work must go to everyone, including children. To evaluate the distributional consequences and implications of a UBI proposal in terms of financial security, buying power, and basic living standards, policymakers must consider the caring needs of parents, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities (Zelleke 2020; Folbre 2020). Feminist economists have argued for the need to integrate the agendas of meeting care needs and addressing climate change (İlkkaracan 2017). Writing from the perspective of social reproduction theory, Bhattacharya (2019) argues that public investments and job creation in the form of a Green New Deal must be based on meeting the care needs of working-class communities whose lives have been affected and displaced by neoliberal policies and must promote “life-making over profit-making.” Similarly, the Leap Manifesto (2019)—supported by a broad coalition of indigenous, environmental, labor, and faith-based organizations—calls on Canadian policymakers to address climate change, racial and gender inequality, and economic concerns, arguing that “Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors.” Bold and inclusive policies could reduce the burden of unpaid care work on women while meeting all of society’s caring needs.

Conclusion Care work is essential for human life, the creation of capabilities, and the continuation of social relations and economic processes. Yet without the interventions of feminist scholars, practitioners, and advocates, care work would be largely neglected by the economics profession and by policymakers. Only through decades of feminist research and advocacy is care work recognized, theorized, and measured. Only with these feminist insights can we advocate for policies that address the needs of paid and unpaid caregivers and care receivers—categories that encompass all of us at some point in our lives. Feminist research also emphasizes that the need for and provision of care work is intrinsically linked to gender, class, race, nationality, age, disability, and other socially assigned identities, and necessitates an intersectional feminist analysis. The feminist project can only be fully realized when care is central to our understanding of the economy and when policy is used to ensure equal access to and responsibility for care. 96

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References Albelda, Randy. 2011. “Time Binds: US Antipoverty Policies, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Single Mothers.” Feminist Economics 14 (4): 189–214. ———. 2013. “Gender Impacts of the ‘Great Recession’ in the United States.” In Women and Austerity, edited by Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 104–23. New York: Routledge. Benería, Lourdes. 1979. “Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of Labour.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (3): 203–25. ———. 1992. “Accounting for Women’s Work: The Progress of Two Decades.” World Development 20 (11): 1547–60. ———. 2008. “The Crisis of Care, International Migration and Public Policy.” Feminist Economics 14 (3): 8–12. Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2015. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Benston, Margaret. 1969. “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation.” Monthly Review 21 (4): 13–27. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2019. “Three Ways a Green New Deal Can Promote Life Over Capital.” Jacobin Magazine. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/green-new-deal-social-care-work. Boushey, Heather. 2016. Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bridgman, Benjamin, Andrew Dugan, Mikhael Lal, Matthew Osborne, and Shaunda Villones. 2012. “Accounting for Household Production in the National Accounts, 1965–2010.” Survey of Current Business 92 (5): 23–36. Çağatay, Nilüfer. 2003. “Engendering Macroeconomics.” In Macro-Economics: Making Gender Matter, edited by Marta Gutierrez. London: Zed Books. Christensen, Kimberly. 2015. “He-cession? She-cession? The Gendered Impact of the Great Recession in the United States.” Review of Radical Political Economics 47 (3): 368–88. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia 13 (3): 62–82. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8): 139–67. Dong, Xiao-Yuan, and Xinli An. 2015. “Gender Patterns and Value of Unpaid Care Work: Findings from China’s First Large-Scale Time Use Survey.” Review of Income and Wealth 61 (3): 540–60. Duffy, Mignon C. 2011. Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Duffy, Mignon C., Randy Albelda, and Clare Hammonds. 2013. “Counting Care Work: The Empirical and Policy Applications of Care Theory.” Social Problems 60 (2): 145–67. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russel Hochschild. 2002. Global Woman. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC. England, Paula, Michelle Budig, and Nancy Folbre. 2002. “Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work.” Social Problems 49 (4): 455–73. Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: PM Press. Folbre, Nancy. 2018a. Developing Care: Recent Research on the Care Economy and Economic Development. Ottawa, ON: International Development Research Centre. ———. 2018b. “Gender and the Care Penalty.” In Oxford Handbook of Women in the Economy, edited by Laura Argys, Susan Averett, and Saul Hoffman. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. “Basic Income for Whom.” Accessed January  2020. https://blogs.umass.edu/ folbre/2020/01/14/basic-incomes-for-whom/. Folbre, Nancy, and Julie A. Nelson. 2000. “For Love or Money—Or Both?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (4): 123–40. Fraser, Nancy. 2017. “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism.” In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya. London, UK: Pluto Press. Gálvez-Muñoz, Lina, Paula Rodríguez-Modroño, and Monica Domínguez-Serrano. 2011. “Work and Time Use by Gender: A  New Clustering of European Welfare Systems.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 125–57.

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Katherine A. Moos Himmelweit, Susan. 1995. “The Discovery of ‘Unpaid Work’: The Social Consequences of the Expansion of ‘Work’.” Feminist Economics 1 (2): 1–19. ———. 2007. “The Prospects for Caring: Economic Theory and Policy Analysis.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 31 (4): 581–99. Himmelweit, Susan, and Simon Mohun. 1977. “Domestic Labour and Capital.” Cambridge Journal of ­Economics 1 (1): 15–31. Hochschild, Arlie Russel, and Anne Maschung. 2012. [1989]. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. New York: Penguin Books. İlkkaracan, İpek. 2017. “A Feminist Alternative to Austerity.” In Economics and Austerity in Europe: Gendered Impacts and Sustainable Alternatives, edited by Hannah Bargawi, Cozzi Bargawi and S. Himmelweit. New York and London: Routledge. Ironmonger, Duncan. 1996. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” Feminist Economics 2 (3): 37–64. Jee, Eunjung, Joya Misra, and Marta Murray-Close. 2019. “Motherhood Penalties in the U.S., 1986– 2014.” Journal of Marriage and Family 81 (2): 434–49. Kan, M. Y., Oriel Sullivan, and Jonathan Gershuny. 2011. “Gender Convergence in Domestic Work: Discerning the Effect of Interactional and Institutional Barriers from Large-Scale Data.” Sociology 45 (2): 234–51. The Leap Manifesto. 2019. “A  Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another.” Accessed January 2020. https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/#manifesto-content. Moos, Katherine A. 2019. “The Historical Evolution of the Cost of Social Reproduction in the United States, 1959–2012.” Review of Social Economy. doi:10.1080/00346764.2019.1703031. Périvier, Hélène. 2018. “Recession, Austerity and Gender: A  Comparison of Eight European Labour Markets.” International Labour Review 157 (1): 1–37. Reid, Margaret. 1934. The Economics of Household Production. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Rubery, Jill. 2015. “Austerity and the Future for Gender Equality in Europe.” ILR Review 68 (4): 715–41. Rubery, Jill, and Anthony Rafferty. 2013. “Women and Recession Revisited.”  Work, Employment and Society 27 (3): 414–32. Stotsky, Janet G. 2016. “Gender Budgeting: Fiscal Context and Current Outcomes.” IMF Working Paper 16 (149): 1–50. Suh, Joo-yeoun, and Nancy Folbre. 2016. “Valuing Unpaid Child Care in the U.S.: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey.” Review of Income and Wealth 62 (4): 668–84. UK Women’s Budget Group. 2019. “Triple Whammy: The Impact of Local Government Cuts on Women.” Accessed January 2020. https://wbg.org.uk/analysis/reports/triple-whammy-the-impact-oflocal-government-cuts-on-women/. Vickery, Claire. 1977. “The Time-poor: A  New Look at Poverty.” Journal of Human Resources 12 (1): 27–48. Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted. A New Feminist Economics. New York: Harper and Row. Wood, Cynthia A. 1997. “The First World/Third Party Criterion: A Feminist Critique of Production Boundaries in Economics.” Feminist Economics 3 (3): 47–68. Yi, Yun-Ae. 1996. “Margaret G. Reid: Life and Achievements.” Feminist Economics 2 (3): 17–36. Yoon, Jayoung. 2014. “Counting Care Work in Social Policy: Unpaid and Child- and Eldercare in Korea.” Feminist Economics 20 (2): 65–89. Zelleke, Almaz. 2020. “A  UBI for Care?” Accessed February  2020. https://blogs.umass.edu/ folbre/2020/01/16/a-ubi-for-care/.

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10 THREE FACES OF AGENCY IN FEMINIST ECONOMICS Capabilities, empowerment, and citizenship Naila Kabeer Social provisioning, livelihoods, and agency The concept of social provisioning is intended to capture the intertwined relationships between the institutional arrangements and purposive activities through which people seek to reproduce themselves on a daily and intergenerational basis (Power 2013). The institutional arrangements that govern people’s livelihood strategies are constituted by the “structures of constraint” in different contexts (Folbre 1994). These embody the unequal distribution of rules, norms, resources, and identities within societies and determine how different groups of people are positioned within their social hierarchies by virtue of their cross-cutting identities of class, gender, race, caste, and so on. In the process, structures set limits on the capacity of different groups to engage in purposive activity. Unlike neoclassical understandings of agency as the free-floating capacity for rational choice, therefore, feminist approaches conceptualize agency as inextricably bound up with structure. The concept of human agency is central to a feminist analysis of livelihoods for two reasons. First, it is central to the analysis of social inequality because it draws attention to the ways in which structural constraints shape the distribution of livelihood options available to differently positioned groups of men and women. And second, it is central to the social justice agenda because it is the human capacity for agency that drives the processes of structural transformation. In this chapter, I review three interrelated ways in which agency has been conceptualized in feminist economics. First, I draw on the concept of capabilities and consider its contribution to the analysis of livelihoods. Second, I draw on conceptualizations of empowerment which link capabilities directly to questions of power. Finally, I turn to ideas about citizenship to consider agency as collective action and how it might be mobilized to promote women’s rights and gender justice.

Capabilities Capabilities refer to people’s ability to achieve various ways of “being and doing” which they have reason to value (Sen 1999; Robeyns, this volume). They reflect the interaction between the resources at their disposal and their ability to translate these resources into valued goals. Across the world, patriarchal structures serve to constrain women’s capabilities 99

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relative to those of men. While these constraints take different forms across the world, they have certain commonalities: gender inequalities in the distribution of critical resources; a socially ascribed gender division of labor which gives women disproportionate responsibility for unpaid reproductive work in domestic domain; the resulting curtailment of opportunities to participate in the economy and political life; and finally, hegemonic gender ideologies which construct women as inferior to men, undermining their sense of self and social worth. Capabilities are a way of talking about the capacity for purposive agency that goes beyond a focus on the actual choices people make to an assessment of the range of alternatives available to them. It allows us to appreciate the micro-level forms of agency exercised by those with limited alternatives, the different ways that oppressed groups seek “to turn things to their advantage and make the best of the options available to them” (Carswell and De Neve 2013, 67). For instance, men and women from some of the poorest tribal communities in India migrate seasonally to work as casual wage labor in brick kilns in more prosperous locations (Shah 2006). This is among the worst paid and most exploitative forms of labor in the economy. But these migrants do not regard brick kiln migration merely as a means of survival, nor do they view it as the irredeemable torture and drudgery that are portrayed in much of the literature (Shah 2006). Rather, they view it as an escape from problems at home and as an opportunity to explore new places and gain independence from parents and live out prohibited amorous relationships while being fully aware that they are regarded as a devalued and dispensable form of labor by wealthy industrialists who exploit them. Other examples can be found in Gilardone, Guérin, and Palier (2014), which examined the impacts of women’s access to microfinance in different contexts in Africa and Asia. Among the achievements that these women valued were their ability to settle former debts with local moneylenders, ending relations of quasi-exploitation, and their ability to “manage better,” to “beg” less, and thereby to gain greater respect in their communities. One of the women they interviewed in India described the feeling of security that access to loans had produced for her: “[she] told us that for the first time in her life she had the feeling of holding in her hand bank notes which actually belonged to her” (254).

Empowerment There are different ways of defining empowerment. What unifies them is that they shift the analysis of power from the perspective of dominant groups (“the power over”) to forms of agency exercised by the oppressed (Allen 1999). This is power in the positive sense of bringing about change: the power to transform the self (“the power within”); to achieve valued goals (“the power to”); and the new forms of power that come into existence through acting collectively with others, the “power with” (Kabeer 1994; Rowlands 1995). My own concept of empowerment builds on the capability approach but makes the interaction between agency and power structures more explicit (Kabeer 1999). It takes the idea of choice as its starting point, defining power as the capacity to make choices. It points out that while people who have always exercised a great deal of choice in their lives, to the extent of being able to impose their choices on others (Dahl 1957), are clearly powerful, they are not empowered in the sense in which I understand the term because they were not disempowered in the first place. Empowerment is inescapably bound up with the condition of disempowerment and refers to the processes by which those who have been denied the capacity to make choices gain this capacity. However, the notion of choice must be qualified to make it relevant to the analysis of empowerment. 100

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The consequences of choice The first qualification refers to the consequences of choice. It distinguishes between the choices that we routinely make in the course of everyday life, choices that reflect our socially ascribed roles, and more strategic choices that signify some shift in the power relations that underpin social inequalities. Empowerment takes the question of capabilities beyond the goals that people may have reason to value to ask whether their exercise of agency is seeking to question power relations or merely accommodate and hence reproduce them. Empowerment is thus concerned with the meanings and motivations that people bring to their choices, their recognition of injustice, as well as with what they are actually able to achieve. This has important implications for how we evaluate choice from an empowerment perspective. A sizeable body of research shows that women use resources at their disposal to invest in the well-being of their children, achievements that they have good reason to value (Doepke and Tertilt 2011). This explains why cash transfer programs around the world seeking to promote children’s health and education target women as their recipients. However, these manifestations of agency on the part of women remain within the socially sanctioned reproductive roles assigned to them in most societies. They signify the enhancement of valued practical capabilities but do little to challenge the social restrictions on women’s life choices and life chances. Yet we can also find evidence of a more critical consciousness on the part of some of the women involved in these programs. For instance, women who participated in a cash transfer program in Mexico expressed their dissatisfaction with the single-minded focus on their reproductive roles in the training sessions that they were required to attend (Adato and Mindek 2000). They wanted greater attention to livelihoods training in order to expand the very limited productive opportunities available to them. And significantly, they wanted the program to include a training component for men to discuss how they should treat women in their families, the problem of domestic violence, and the importance of health for all family members. Such attitudes and actions can be seen as expressing a nascent critique of the gender asymmetries of family life. Finally, the meaning and consequences of choice are likely to reflect the structures of constraint prevailing in different contexts. The same choices can have different implications. A woman who chooses to take up paid work, to marry someone of her own choosing, or not to marry at all is making a strategic choice in contexts where such choices are customarily denied to women. These choices will not carry the same consequential weight in contexts where they are taken for granted. There is therefore a certain degree of path-dependence to the pathways of women’s empowerment because of the structural constraints that women have to negotiate vary across contexts.

The conditions of choice The second qualification refers to the conditions under which people make choices: for choice to be meaningful, it should have been possible to have chosen otherwise. While the choices available to people are clearly bound up with the resources they have at their disposal, a concern with empowerment focuses on the transformative potential of these resources. We see the importance of differentiating between different kinds of resources in Kabeer et al. (2013) that sought to quantify the association between different categories of economic activity and a range of indicators of empowerment in Egypt, Ghana, and Bangladesh. These indicators included decision-making within the home, purchase of assets, voting behavior and sense of agency, and control over one’s own life. In all three contexts, formal waged employment was more consistently associated with these indicators than informal wage, self-employment or 101

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economic inactivity. In addition, ownership of land and housing also proved important predictors of these forms of agency. Qualitative analysis from the Dominican Republic found that women who took up wage labor on neighboring flower-growing farms while also working as unpaid family labor on their own farms began to claim part of the proceeds from the family farm as a form of wage as they came to realize the market value of their labor (Raynolds 2002). Similar claims were not made by women who worked only as unpaid family labor. However, while the material resources available to women shape the range of possibilities available to them, power relations can also operate through dominant ideologies that rule out certain possibilities or even render them inconceivable (Kabeer 2008). They can, for instance, rule out the possibility of protest in the face of gender injustice. It may be that women recognize the injustice of the social order but find the costs of protest to be too high if, for instance, it exposes them to violence by partners. Of course, this does not rule out more hidden forms of protest, what Scott (1990) terms the “weapons of the weak.” For instance, rural women in South Asia often use covert means to gain access to cash that they can control by undertaking income-earning activities without their husbands’ knowledge or by getting neighbors to raise livestock on their behalf (Agarwal 1997). Alternatively, the failure to protest may reflect women’s internalization of the inferior status ascribed to them by society so that they simply do not perceive it to be unjust. As Sen has remarked: “There is much evidence in history that acute inequalities often survive precisely by making allies out of the deprived. The underdog comes to accept the legitimacy of the unequal order and becomes an implicit accomplice” (Sen 1990, 126). In such contexts, processes of empowerment must encompass “the power within” by challenging these internalized structures of constraint. Such challenges can happen in unintended ways. For instance, migration by Bangladeshi women to take factory jobs in Malaysia provided them with the opportunity to critically evaluate the more restrictive interpretations of Islam prevalent in Bangladesh in the light of the greater freedoms permitted to women in a different Muslim country (Dannecker 2005). It opened their eyes to the fact that religion lent itself to multiple interpretations, some more oppressive than others. But, as discussed in the next section, challenges to internalized constraints can also occur as a result of purposive effort.

Citizenship and collective action Individual agency, however strategically deployed, rarely destabilizes wider structural inequalities. Individual women refusing to pay dowry for their daughters or to accept lower wages than men may be striking a blow against practices of gender inequality, but they do not change institutionalized gender injustice in marriage or in the market. They do not extend the social limits on what is possible for women in general (Hayward 1998). We therefore turn to collective forms of agency that set out to tackle the structures of gender injustice. The concept of citizenship provides an important framework for analyzing these efforts. Citizenship can be defined in passive terms as the legal definition of personhood in a society, the rights and responsibilities its members enjoy by virtue of their membership of that society (Lister 1997). It can also be defined in more active terms as the social practices through which members of a society interpret, enact and seek to expand legal definitions. While the status of citizenship spells out some of the constraints and possibilities that define membership of a society, citizenship as practice places the question of agency at the heart of contestations around citizenship. 102

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Contestations over citizenship have entailed contestations over who is included as a citizen and on what terms. Those whose privileges are upheld and reinforced by the rights and responsibilities inscribed in existing definitions can rely on the smooth operation of the status quo to continue enjoying their privileged status. For the rest, the important lesson from history has been that individual action generally has limited impact on entrenched privilege. Rather, it has been the collective struggles of marginalized groups that has helped to win them the rights of citizenship (Bowles and Gintis 1987).

The organization of collective action Patriarchal constraints have made the possibility of collective action to challenge economic injustice more challenging for women relative to men. Furthermore, the nature of this challenge varies between different groups of women, depending on where they are positioned in the economy and the possibilities for collective action associated with their position. It has been easier for women to engage in organized collective action in those sectors of the economy which have a strong trade union presence, but they have had to deal with historically entrenched male dominance in many of these unions. Where working women have found such dominance too difficult deal with, they have sometimes set up their own autonomous organizations. In Nicaragua, for instance, the failure of the male leadership of the main trade union federation to take women’s concerns seriously led its Women’s Secretariat to break away and set up the María Elena Cuadra (MEC), an autonomous movement for working and unemployed women in the country’s Free Trade Zones (Bickham Mendez 2005). A different set of challenges face women who are engaged in informal livelihood activities, running their own enterprises and farms or working as casual wage labor. While they make up the majority of working women in the Global South, there are few trade unions. Moreover, the dispersed nature of their activities, the irregularity of their earnings, their location at the intersection of multiple inequalities, the social and self-devaluation of their work, and, very frequently, their lack of awareness of any rights they might enjoy make the spontaneous emergence of self-organized collective action unlikely. A range of external organizations—women’s groups, development NGOs, legal and human rights organizations, church-groups, national and international advocacy networks—have facilitated these workers’ organizations. These organizations have often been registered as trade unions in order to emphasize the worker identity of their women members who are largely seen, and see themselves, purely in terms of their socially ascribed familial identities as mothers, wives, daughters. But they represent a different kind of organization than traditional trade unions. An early precedent for this course of action is found in the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India which was set up in 1971 by the women’s wing of the Textile Labour Association (TLA) to compensate for its failure to represent women workers who worked on a casual waged and self-employed basis within the industry (Hill 2010). Its attempt to register the new organization as a trade union was challenged by government officials on the grounds that trade unions were defined by collective bargaining between workers and employers; self-employed women, by definition, had no employer. SEWA argued successfully that selfemployed women needed a union precisely in order to engage in collective bargaining but with a wider range of actors, including employers, local government officials, police, and middlemen. One of its first actions as a registered union was to lobby for state-certified identity cards to give formal recognition to its members’ status as workers. In Brazil, organizations of domestic workers transformed themselves from associations into unions once their right to do so was recognized by their country’s constitution (Cornwall, 103

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Oliveira, and Gonçalves 2013). In South Africa, the Women in Farms Project first organized the country’s agricultural workers, mainly “colored” women, but subsequently registered them as a trade union, Sikhula Sonke, so that they could represent themselves in the country’s labor courts (Solomon 2013). Organizations of informal workers can take other forms as well. In rural areas of South Asia, where there is very little history of unionism, development NGOs have organized women into savings-based self-help groups as vehicles for collective action (Sanyal 2014; Kabeer 2012). Waste pickers in different parts of the world organize themselves into unions, co-operatives, companies, or associations depending on whether they prioritize mobilizing for collective rights or see themselves as service providers (Samson 2009).

Collective agency and “repertoires of contention” Organizations of informal women workers tend to eschew what they regard as the adversarial tactics associated with mainstream unions: closed shops, strikes, pickets, and collective bargaining. This reflects their fear that confrontational politics could jeopardize the livelihoods of women who lack the structural power of the traditional trade union movement, are generally crowded into poorly paid and precarious work, and have few resources to fall back on should they lose this work (Bhowmik and Patel 1997; Bickham Mendez 2005; Narayan and Chikarmane 2013). Instead, the “repertoires of contention” (Tilly 1978) associated with social movements have proved better suited to defending and promoting the rights of precarious workers. These include the politics of information, symbols, leverage, and accountability with a strong emphasis on negotiation, influence, persuasion, and alliance-building (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Despite the diversity of forms, contexts, and conditions of work that characterizes these organizations, certain common elements can be found in their efforts to promote the collective action of their membership. First, there is the central role given to building “the power within”: raising the awareness of members about the value of the work they do, building their sense of self-worth, and educating them about their rights as women, as workers, and as citizens. In rural South Asia, for instance, the regular meetings of self-help groups are partly devoted to livelihood matters, but they also provide members the opportunity to narrate their life stories, to share experiences of oppression, and to forge “chosen” relationships of solidarity beyond the social ascribed relations of family and kinship that have defined their lives (Kabeer 2012; Sanyal 2014). Second, these organizations pursue claims on behalf of their membership, which combine the traditional bread-and-butter issues prioritized by mainstream unions with domestic and reproductive concerns which they generally overlooked. In Nicaragua, the MEC conducts community-based workshops to discuss issues of domestic violence and reproductive health and to raise members’ awareness of the rights and entitlements guaranteed by the country’s constitution and laws. In South Africa, the early class orientation of the Women on Farms Project had led it to prioritize work-based rights in its training activities with agricultural workers. Over time, its close relationship with its membership led to a gradual broadening of its strategy to include an explicitly feminist agenda that tackled private aspects of their members’ lives (Solomon 2013). Sikhula Sonke addresses workplace issues faced by its members, such as unfair dismissal, unsafe working conditions, violation of minimum wage provisions, illegal deduction from wages, and intimidation of worker leaders. It is also active on the social issues that concern its members, such as housing insecurity, high levels of school drop-outs among their children, 104

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violence against women, and the legacy of male alcoholism (Schiphorts 2011). It takes a strong stand on domestic violence which is rampant on farms: union members agree to intervene in their communities whenever such violence occurred while men who want to join the union must sign a commitment to refrain from violence against women. A third common element in the strategies of these organizations is that their claims are often addressed to the state. This is because their membership is either self-employed or, if in wage employment, has indirect or informal relations with employers. Also, despite the flawed nature of the state in many countries, the state is seen as the only institution which has the mandate to address the claims of all its citizens, regardless of their status in the economy. An important effort has been to demonstrate the value of the work of their membership, since a great deal of informal work done by women is excluded from national level statistics and denied recognition by policymakers. SEWA ran an extended campaign to gain official recognition for the size and contribution of its members to India’s economy. It explained Indian census questions to its membership so that they could report their work status accurately. It collaborated with national research institutes, leading to the establishment of an Expert Group on Defining the Informal Sector by the Indian government and later to the ILO’s International Expert Group on Informal Sector Statistics. These efforts have led to redefinitions of work by the ILO to better capture informal activities. In some cases, the re-valuation of women’s work has occurred through broader movements for change. In South Africa, one result of women’s organizations’ efforts to “engender” democracy (Seidman 2007) was legislation passed by the post-apartheid state that recognized the social value of domestic work and recoded domestic workers as employees. This legislation has been described as the most extensive formalization and professionalization of paid domestic work anywhere in the world (Ally 2009). A final element in the strategies of these organizations is the significance they attach to claims of social security. As workers who have been largely overlooked by the state, the struggle for social security represents a struggle to gain recognition for their status as working citizens. In India, for instance, SEWA joined with the National Centre for Labour and other organizations to lobby for a universal system of social security to cover workers in the informal economy. The adoption of the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Bill, 2008, went some way toward meeting this demand by providing health insurance, life insurance, and old age pension benefits to informal workers. For those in precarious forms of work, with no guarantee of a regular flow of income, access to basic social protection may be a necessary precondition for taking the risks associated with the pursuit of longer-term structural change. Autonomous women’s organizations in Brazil came together in the 1980s to try to form a unified movement of rural women in order to take on the politically controversial struggle for women’s land rights (Deere 2003). They found that the right to social security was a unifying concern for all rural women, regardless of work status. They therefore organized to incorporate rural women into unions and to extend social security benefits, including paid maternity leave and retirement, to these women. Although women’s land rights had been formally incorporated in the 1988 Constitution, it was only in 2000 that the rural women’s movement began to actively lobby for these rights at the national level.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed different ways of conceptualizing agency within feminist economics, drawing on the perspectives of working women from the Global South. Feminist economics locates agency firmly within a structural understanding of constraints but simultaneously 105

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explores how it can be exercised to act on these structures. Each concept touches on valued forms of change in women’s lives. They are potentially, but not inevitably, interrelated and the direction of causality is not unidirectional. In some circumstances, progress on basic capabilities may enhance individual empowerment; in other circumstances, the willingness to take collective action might lead to improvements in basic capabilities; and in yet others, individual empowerment may help to build the courage to fight for social justice.

References Adato, Michelle, and Dubravka Mindek. 2000. “PROGRESA and Women’s Empowerment. Evidence from Six Mexican States.” In The Impact of PROGRESA on Women’s Status and Intrahousehold Relations, edited by Michelle Adato, Bénédicte de la Brière, Dubravka Mindek and Agnes Quisumbing, 46–87. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Agarwal, Bina. 1997. “ ‘Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51. Allen, Amy. 1999. The Power of Feminist Theory. Domination, Resistance, Solidarity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press Ally, Shireen A. 2009. From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bhowmik, Sharit, and Meena Patel. 1997. “Empowering Marginalized Workers: Unionization of Tobacco Workers by the Self-Employed Women’s Association.” In Speaking Out: Women’s Economic Empowerment in South Asia, edited by Marilyn Carr, Martha Chen, and Renana Jhabvala, 143–64. Dhaka: University Press. Bickham Mendez, Jennifer. 2005. From Revolution to the Maquiladoras. Gender, Labour and Globalisation in Nicaragua. Durham: Duke University Press. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 1987. Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought. New York: Basic Books. Carswell, Grace, and G. De Neve. 2013. “Labouring for Global Markets: Conceptualizing Labour Agency in Global Production Networks.” Geoforum 44: 62–70. Cornwall, Andrea, Creuza Maria Oliveira, and Terezinha Gonçalves. 2013. “ ‘If You Don’t See a Light in the Darkness, You Must Light a Fire’: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Rights.” In Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak, edited by Naila Kabeer, Ratna Sudarshan, and Kirsty Milward, 149–80. London: Zed Press. Dahl, R. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioural Science 2 (3): 201–15. Dannecker, Petra. 2005. “Transnational Migration and the Transformation of Gender Relations: The Case of Bangladeshi Labour Migrants.” Current Sociology 53 (4): 655–74. Deere, Carmen Diana. 2003. “Women’s Land Rights and Rural Social Movements in the Brazilian ­Agrarian Reform.” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (1): 257–88. Doepke, Mathhias, and Michèle Tertilt. 2011. “Does Female Empowerment Promote Economic ­Development?” Policy Research Working Paper 5714, World Bank, Washington, DC. Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Takes Care of the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. London: Routledge. Gilardone, Muriel, Isabelle Guérin, and Jane Palier. 2014. “The Weight of Institutions on Women’s ­Capabilities: How Far Can Microfinance Help?” In Capabilities, Gender Equality: Towards Fundamental Entitlements, edited by Flavio Comim and Martha C. Nussbaum, 244–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayward, Clarissa, R. 1998. “De-facing Power.” Polity 31 (1): 1–22. Hill, Elizabeth. 2010. Worker Identity, Agency and Economic Development. London: Routledge. Kabeer, N. 1994. “Empowerment from Below: Learning from the Grassroots.” In Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, 223–63. London: Verso Press. ———. 1999. “Resources, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment.” Development and Change 30 (3): 435–64. ———. 2008. “Paid Work, Women’s Empowerment and Gender Justice: Critical Pathways of Social Change.” Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Working Paper 1, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/53077/1/Kabeer_Paid-work_Published.pdf. ———. 2012. “Between Affiliation and Autonomy: Navigating Pathways of Women’s Empowerment and Gender Justice in Bangladesh.” Development and Change 42 (2): 499–528.

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Three faces of agency in feminist economics Kabeer, Naila, Ragui Assaad, Akosua Darkwah, Simeen Mahmud, Hania Sholkamy, Sakiba Tasneem, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2013. Paid Work, Women’s Empowerment and Inclusive Growth: Transforming the Structures of Constraint. New York: UN Women. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lister, Ruth. 1997. “Dialectics of Citizenship.” Hypatia 12 (4): 6–26. Narayan, Lakshmi, and Purnima Chikarmane. 2013. “Power at the Bottom of the Heap: Organizing Waste Pickers in Pune.” In Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak, edited by Naila Kabeer, Ratna Sudarshan, and Kirsty Milward, 205–31. London: Zed Press. Power, Marilyn. 2013. “A  Social Provisioning Approach to Gender and Economic Life.” In Handbook of Research on Gender and Economic Life, edited by Deborah M. Figart and Tonia L. Warnecke, 7–17. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Raynolds, Laura T. 2002. “Wages for Wives: Renegotiating Gender and Production Relations in Contract Farming in the Dominican Republic.” World Development 35 (5): 783–98. Rowlands, Jo. 1995. “Empowerment Examined.” Development in Practice 5 (2): 101–7. Samson, Melanie, ed. 2009. Refusing to be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organizing around the World. Cambridge, MA: WIEGO. Sanyal, Paromita. 2014. Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schiphorts, Freek B. 2011. “Defending Vulnerable Workers in South Africa after the Crisis: What Role for COSATU?” In A Crisis of Capitalism? A Crisis of Development, edited by P. Van Bergiejk, A. De Haan, and R. Van der Hoeven. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale ­University Press. Seidman, Gay W. 2007. Beyond the Boycott: Labour Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Sen, Amartya K. 1990. “Gender and Co-operative Conflicts.” In Persistent Inequalities, Women and World Development, edited by Irene Tinker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Shah, Alpa. 2006. “Labour of Love: Seasonal Migration from Jharkhand to the Brick Kilns of Other States in India.” Contribution to Indian Sociology 40 (1): 91–118. Solomon, Collette. 2013. “Understanding the Dynamics of an NGO/MBO Partnership: Organizing and Working with Farm Workers in South Africa.” In Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak, edited by Naila Kabeer, Ratna Sudarshan, and Kirsty Milward, 73–99. London: Zed Press. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

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11 BEYOND SEPARATIVE AND SOLUBLE SELVES Julie A. Nelson

Introduction One of the fundamental insights of feminist economics is that both gender categories and the boundaries of our discipline are socially constructed. While we may feel that our classification of someone as a man or a woman, or of a piece of scholarship as economics or sociology, depends on their naturally determined characteristics, this is not the case. Instead, such habits reflect the tendency of our human minds to gravitate toward the use of simple categories (Gelman 2005). We mentally put things into classes or categories, on the basis of beliefs about their presumed shared essential characteristics. These habits of categorization fundamentally shape how we perceive, analyze, and navigate our world. And, they are, for the most part, “folk beliefs” we learn through socialization into the cultures into which we are born and educated. Children learn at a young age, for example, to distinguish men from women, and in many societies binary gender is believed to be an eternal, nature-given, and inviolable division. Only when we reflect on the fact that some people are born intersex (i.e., with chromosomes, hormones, or genitals that do not fit into the binary definition) and/or become aware of transsexual and queer identities, may we come to see that the distinction is not actually so clear. Beyond classifying physical bodies, societies also label many traits and activities as feminine and consider others as masculine. Yet because people’s personalities and actions generally draw from both sides of this divide (Rippon et al. 2014), and the associations vary across different cultures, our habit of labeling is a matter of social construction as well. Similarly, students taking their first economics class learn that “this is what economics is.” Only when one pushes at the borders of the discipline or studies its history does it become apparent that what is “economics” versus what is “sociology,” “history,” etc. is a matter of continual discussion and debate (Nelson 1993a). It has been said that “One of the major feminist [economics] topic[s] is the critique of the dichotomy between the ‘separative’ and the ‘soluble’ views of the self ” (Marcon and Dorigo 2012, 7). The image of “economic man,” on which orthodox neoclassical economic theory is based, is both distinctly masculine and entirely a social construction. Homo economicus is imagined to be profoundly separate from other people, from his own body, and from nature. The “agent” of neoclassical theory is imagined to make rational choices in order to raise his own personal satisfaction to its highest possible level. That is, economic man is thought of as autonomous, rational, and self-interested, and to have only mental “wants” rather than bodily “needs.” Following a suggestion by Keller (1986), feminist economists call this the image of the masculine 108

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and “separative” (as in “extremely separate”) self. In contrast, women are often assumed to be naturally more dependent, emotional, and nurturing. Imagined as closer to bodies and nature, women may be seen as having no purpose in life beyond serving others. This is the corresponding socially constructed image of the feminine and “soluble” (as in “dissolving”) self. Yet these images are both mythical. All human beings are actually born from bodies, cared for in families, influenced by their cultures, and have emotions and needs. And all human beings are endowed with reason, individual identities, and agency. The dualism of separative versus soluble ways of being is clearly not something dictated by nature. This chapter explores the separative/soluble habit of thought and describes how analysis of our economic lives can be transformed, deepened, and made more rigorous when its simplistic categories are resisted.

Origin of the concept Theologian Keller (1986) coined the terms “separative” and “soluble” to describe diametrically opposed images of active, heroic masculinity and submissive, invisible femininity. Keller explored how these “false alternatives” run deep in Western philosophy, psychology, theology, and myth, and have become part of our collective unconscious. Having independently come to realize the relevance of Keller’s insights to economics, I, a feminist economist, along with feminist sociologist Paula England, began to apply Keller’s insights to economics in the early 1990s (Nelson 1992, 1993b, 1995, 1996; England 1993). For example, I wrote: In adopting [a separative] conception of human nature, economists have carried out the suggestion of Thomas Hobbes (as cited in Benhabib 1987), who wrote, “Let us consider men . . . as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other.” [However, h]umans do not simply spring out of the earth. Humans are born of women, nurtured and cared for as dependent children and when aged or ill, socialized into family and community groups, and are perpetually dependent on nourishment and a home to sustain life. . . . Men’s traditional facade of autonomy has always been propped up by the background work of mothers and wives; to believe that women are passive requires turning a blind eye to the activity of women’s lives. . . . What is needed is a conception of human behavior that can encompass both autonomy and dependence, individuation and relation, reason and emotion, as they are manifested in economic agents of either sex. (Nelson 1995, 136) England elaborated, “these assumptions exaggerate both the atomistic, separative nature of behavior in markets and the connective empathy and altruism within families” (England 1993, 37). This analysis, then, is not about “adding” an image of women to an existing masculinebiased model but about deeply investigating the model of “economic man,” rejecting both it and its “soluble” shadow counterpart as distorting and coming up with a new model of what can be called “individuals-in-relation” (Nelson 2010a).

Conceptual elaborations What could going beyond separative/soluble thinking mean for how society, and researchers, regards the gender binary? What new possibilities for imagining selfhood, methodology, and relationships are revealed?

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The gender binary and beyond As mentioned earlier, our human minds gravitate toward the use of simple categories. The male/female binary is one of the earliest-formed and most primitive building blocks of human thinking (Bem 1981; Knutson et al. 2007). Consider, for example, dogs versus cats: in Western cultures, most people will associate cats with femininity and dogs with masculinity. Our minds associate many things with gender that are obviously very far removed from any physical sexual difference (Prentice and Miller 2006). It may seem that to overthrow this polarity, we must overthrow the concept of gender itself, adopting a genderless position in which all differentiation is absent. Yet this need not, and arguably cannot (given the binary habits engrained in human cognition), be the case. We need not give up the gender binary entirely if we also remember that it is a construction and use it in a grown-up, thoughtful, provisional way. Consider a metaphor. As children playing “red light, green light” we internalize the rule that red means stop and green means go. But, if we think about it, we understand that this is a social convention, invented at some particular place and time. Were a foreign country to use different colors, we would adjust. We also understand, as adults, that this convention is subject to a number of caveats. If the red light is blinking, it means “stop, and then go.” Traffic lights can also be yellow, as well as red or green. If there is a police officer present, we ignore the lights. Similarly, we could learn to take the conventional male/female binary, as well as conventional associations of various bodies, traits, and activities with masculinity or femininity, more lightly. As drivers, we live with both the basic red/green rule and the knowledge that it is a social construction with many caveats. In the same way that we could accept that the gender binary both covers a lot of territory and that is inadequate—childish and even dangerous—to ignore its social origin or expect it to cover every case. Any definition of “man” or “woman” is imperfect. For example, if one talks about “women’s” experience of menstruation, one implicitly slights trans women, amenorrheic women, and females who are pre-adolescent or post-menopausal. Yet this does not mean that academics and social activists must avoid these terms. Understanding that language is imprecise, one can acknowledge (preferably explicitly, in scholarly work!) that the term “woman” is not a set and universal category, clarify how one is using it, and then get on to mobilizing knowledge and action to address important real-world issues.

A Tool: the gender-value compass As one tool for overcoming our usual dualistic and hierarchical patterns of thought, I created a diagram I called a “gender-value compass.” It retains the idea that we cognitively categorize many things as masculine (“M”) or feminine (“F”), yet expands instead of collapses the idea of gender. As applied to a cultural belief in the superiority of masculine-associated individualism and the corresponding denigration of feminine-associated emphasis on interpersonal relations, for example, I proposed: M+

F+

Individual

Connected

M−

F−

Separative

Soluble

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That is, when one is in danger of falling into the habit of thinking that whatever is associated with masculinity is central and important (symbolized by M+) while femininity is somehow of lesser value (F−), one might consider the possibilities opened by separating associations with gender (M or F) from judgments about positive or negative (or simply lesser) worth (+ or −). Overemphasizing autonomy leads to an image of isolated separativeness (M−), while overemphasizing connection leads to an image of the “undifferentiated slime” of solubility (F−). The fact that human beings are actually individuals-in-relation is illustrated by the positive complementarity of M+ and F+ (Nelson 1992, 2010a).

Economic methodology Economists’ own self-image, as well as our image of the “economic agent,” has tended to follow a separative ideal. Economists often think of ourselves as rigorous, tough researchers whose scientific stature and claims to objectivity are based on our use of the precise and (we imagine) value-free language of mathematics. Philosophers such as Harding (1986) and Keller (1985), however, have explained how the idea of the scientist as a detached, neutral observer of phenomenon, able to achieve objectivity in research simply by following certain (mathematical and formal) methods, arose from a highly masculine-biased image of science. Scientists—and especially social scientists—do not, in reality, stand entirely outside the phenomena we study, nor does the use of mathematics prevent us from formulating and interpreting the relation between our equations and economic reality in highly limited or biased ways. A  more adequate notion of rigor and objectivity considers science as an open-minded and systematic process that engages with the phenomenon to be studied and makes use of whichever tools are most helpful. It is also a profoundly social endeavor. That is, it is only by having others—and particularly others who do not share our viewpoints—examine our assumptions, procedures, and results, and seek to replicate our empirical studies, that we should have any confidence in our work’s reliability. The social nature of the attainment of reliability in economics is perhaps recently gaining recognition, at least in empirical work (Christensen and Miguel 2018). Building on these discussions from the history and philosophy of science, I applied them to economics in Nelson (1992, 1996). In response to economists’ fear that the only alternative to precise mathematical modeling and sophisticated econometrics is flaccid (verbal) vagueness, I presented the following methodology-related gender-value compass: M+

F+

Precise

Rich

M−

F−

Thin

Vague

That is, the danger of valuing only precision is that one ends up with thin analysis (M−), which explains little (or even nothing) about the actual phenomena one purports to study. Actual investigation is rarely something that one can do alone at one’s office desk, but rather it requires a richer understanding and a deeper engagement with both the phenomena studied and other researchers, and calls for pairing precision (M+) with richness (F+). Similarly, instead of contrasting “hard” (strong, M+) research to “soft” (weak, F−) research, one can recognize that strength and flexibility (F+) together make for resilient, durable research. Research results that are only “hard” may be brittle (M−) and collapse under the slightest criticism. 111

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Selves and their possible relationships The types of relationships people might have with each other can also be elaborated on within this framework. That is, within the usual separative/soluble thinking, only the following can be imagined (Nelson and England 2002; Nelson 2005, 2010a): • • •

Separative-separative: People who are self-interested and autonomous interact at arm’s length. Domination: A separative self controls a soluble self. Union: Soluble selves merge, losing the distinction between self and other.

For example, economists envision contractual and market relationships as separative-separative. In contrast, economists’ “household utility function” either is male-breadwinner controlled (domination) or represents a fusing of the preferences of all household members (union). Sometimes, when other scholars react to economists’ extreme assumption of separativeness, they also slide into the soluble extreme of imagining complete solidarity and seamless cooperation. Yet thinking about individuals-in-relation opens up the possibility of two richer models of relationship: • •

Symmetric mutuality: Individuals-in-relation who are similarly situated treat each other with mutual respect and consideration. Asymmetric mutuality: While in a situation characterized by differences in power, abilities, status, or resources, individuals-in-relation treat each other with mutual respect and consideration.

The first of these resonates with richer ideas of selfhood discussed in philosophy, literature, and the humanities, and is common in discussions of, for example, ideal citizenship within a democratic society. The second is more radical: feminist analysis of caring and care work, in which mutuality is aspired to but differences in power are endemic, suggests that hierarchies of power need not always imply domination. A nurse has more power than a bed-bound, fragile patient, for example, but, with proper human concern and professional norms, the relation can be one of mutuality rather than oppression. In light of these two richer possibilities for relationships, the earlier three can be seen as the degenerate result of too little attention to (respectively) connection, mutuality, or individuality (Nelson and England 2002; Nelson 2005, 2010a).

Applications There are now many works that correctly identify separative “economic man” as a masculine and socially constructed image, and explore how this has reinforced social gender norms and inequalities. While some analyses follow through and examine the limitations of “solubility” as well, others, unfortunately, do not.

“Economic man”: the economic agent As noted earlier, England (1993, 37) highlighted the orthodox neoclassical economic assumptions that one cannot compare utility across people, that tastes are exogenous, and that people are self-interested. The first assumption, she points out, rules out empathy and undermines the analysis of power and injustice in social relations. The second ignores the influence of our social 112

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environment on what we come to want or to do. The third ignores the possibility of concern for others and cooperation toward a mutually held goal. Such cooperation may not always be a good thing: England includes the example of a sort of “selective altruism” that might motivate men to band together with other men to exclude women from certain types of employment. I explored the image of the economic agent in Nelson (1992), using the terminology of “isolated/engulfed.” A more adequate social science of economics would arise, we argued, if the discipline did not blind itself to many realities of human identity and social existence. This is as true for the analysis of the economics of families and caring labor, as for the analysis of business and markets.

The economics of families An obvious contradiction in the neoclassical orthodoxy of the early 1990s was that the same economic agent who was assumed to act selfishly in markets was assumed, in Becker’s (1981) model, to turn into an “altruist” when he crossed the threshold of his home. In fact, that model is one of dictatorship, with women and children in the household reduced to soluble, invisible, un-agentic status. England (2003) pointed out these problems, and the only limited extent to which bargaining models of marriage (which bring in aspects of conflict between individuals) addressed these issues. I discussed models of the family which might begin to address both cooperation and competition, and considered implications for tax policy regarding families (Nelson 1996).

Caring labor Consider unpaid work in the home caring for the sick or ill, or at paid jobs that involve faceto-face contact and a purpose of serving others (e.g., nursing, teaching, social work). Looked at seriously, one sees that the usual stereotypes about men who (self-interestedly) “work” and women who (altruistically) “nurture” fall apart. That is, caring work has important emotional, connective, and relational aspects, yet it is also work. It takes time away from other activities, requires skill and effort, and often takes place in market environments in which people rely on paychecks to meet their, and their families’ needs. Recognizing this dual aspect to caring labor is critical for efforts to see this work as worthy of high respect and of substantial financial support and compensation (Nelson 1999; Folbre and Nelson 2000; Nelson and England 2002). As mentioned earlier, the realization that people with different levels of power or ability (e.g., nurse and patient, parent and child, or teacher and student) may yet relate to each other in a caring and respectful way also troubles the usual easy assumptions that hierarchy is equivalent to domination.

Business and markets If competition and work can take place in the realm of the home, can cooperation and care also take place in the realm of business and commerce? This idea is quickly dismissed by both orthodox economists wedded to a cool mechanical (separative-separative) model of homo economicus and by left-leaning economists who see capitalist structures as invariably oppressive (separativesoluble). Yet others of us have found it worth exploring (Nelson 2003, 2016, 2018a; Marcon and Dorigo 2012; Bondy and Charles 2020 (online)). There is substantial evidence, if one cares to look, that workers don’t work simply for paychecks, and managers and owners are not (at least until convinced by economists) invariably 113

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driven only by a thirst for profits. Cooperation, care, and trust can lead to healthier and more effective workplaces, better-functioning markets, and better social and natural environments. Taking these aspects of human relationships as empirical facts worthy of investigation would also shine a spotlight on socially damaging types of cooperation. For example, one can see that there is an excess of trust and cooperation among many US corporate elites (e.g., in the finance and pharmaceutical industries) and their revolving-door federal regulators. Often, the idea that firms could be caring is quickly dismissed by the argument that the “discipline of competitive markets” would drive a firm that doesn’t go after every last dollar of profit out of business. Yet note the levels of separativeness and solubility involved in this orthodox neoclassical argument. Workers are portrayed as separative when negotiating their contract with an employer, but once employed tend to be portrayed as soluble, simply becoming hands that carry out the decisions of their employer. Firms are portrayed as separative agents as they make their (presumed) profit-maximizing decisions but then become soluble, with no decisions to be made, when faced with competitive markets. In all cases, the actual complications of being interdependent and agentic are erased, in favor of a methodological individualism adopted simply for the sake of easy tractability. The real world is more complicated (Nelson 2018a).

“Gender differences” research Recently, a large behavioral economics literature has developed concerning purported “gender differences” between men and women in preferences, personality traits, and behavior (Austen 2017). Often, these differences are described as being “fundamental “or “categorical.” Analysis of this literature, however, suggests that in many if not most cases what researchers are actually “finding” is nothing more than their own preconceived notions of gender, arrayed along separative/soluble lines. Studies that “find” women to be more averse to risk, for example, have an easier time getting published than studies that fail to support the social stereotypes of female timidity and male bravery (Nelson 2014). When “differences” are found, they apply only to the groups on average (not to any individual, and so are neither “fundamental” nor “categorical”) and are usually substantively quite small. For the most part, in fact, differences among women and among men are considerably larger than the difference in an average score between men and women (Hyde 2005). That is, men’s and women’s distributions of traits and preferences are actually quite similar and overlap considerably (Nelson 2018b). Often—with no basis other than speculation—any observed (on average) difference is attributed to presumably unchangeable “natural” causes such as evolution, chromosomes, or hormones (Fine 2010). This ignores the way in which our behavior and preferences are socially shaped. Women may learn to act less assertively, for example, if a woman’s assertive behavior is perceived less favorably than the same behavior in a man (Bowles, Babcock, and Lai 2007).

Cultural comparisons While this chapter focuses on the elevation of the “separative self ” manifested in the dominant Anglo-American middle-class White culture that underlies mainstream economics, others have noticed that the separative/soluble idea is helpful in describing cross-cultural differences as well. “[T]to the extent that [the “separative self ”] model typifies Western individualism,” Beneria points out, “it shares a Western bias and is foreign to societies with more collective forms of action and decision-making” (Benería 1999, 72). That is, it may be that aspects of entire cultures, as well as aspects of gender at the level of individuals within a culture, can be fruitfully explored using this type of analysis. Scholar of philosophy and religion, Bauer (2016) draws on feminist 114

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economic analysis of the separative/soluble dualism in her analysis of the potential for co-creative activity in businesses, as informed by more relationally oriented Indian concepts of identity.

The environment Separative “economic man” is imagined as not only separate from other people but as somehow independent of his own bodily needs and radically detached from the natural world. Feminist economists and philosophers have explored the origins and consequences of this idea, as well as more adequate ways of thinking about the relation between humans and the rest of nature (Nelson 1997; Plumwood 2002). While many advances in technology have come about from a separative mindset that sees nature as something passive and distant, to be dominated and controlled by human ingenuity, it has become clear—with climate change and other environmental crises—that the future of our vulnerable human race is deeply interdependent and intertwined with issues of climate, water, and the future of other species.

Comparing disciplines To see the extent that separative/soluble thinking shapes our thinking, even about something as abstract as differences between academic disciplines, consider the contrast between the following two sets of statements of organizational purpose (drawn from (Nelson 2010b): The Society shall operate as a completely disinterested, scientific organization. . . . Its main object shall be to promote studies that aim at the unification of the theoreticalquantitative and the empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences. Econometric Society (Roos 1933) The [members of our Society] do not imagine that they are appointed to destroy the vocation of other investigators of society. They feel themselves called to represent factors in the problems of human association which have thus far received less than their share of attention. . . . The society makes no appeal for credit. It simply proposes to encourage sociological inquiry and to await competent judgment of results. American Sociological Society (1907) Note the concentration on coolness, detachment, and control in the former, and the contrasting abject humility in the second. Even though both statements were drafted by groups composed primarily of men, the historical divergence between quantitative economics and sociology clearly marked out poles on an imagined separative/soluble spectrum. This habit of thought continues today, with economists feeling themselves to be superior to other social scientists (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015).

Conclusion Feminist economists argue that the images of men as radically individual and separative, and women as radically connected and soluble, distort reality and put unnecessary and harmful bounds on the way we imagine, and analyze, our economic life together. Realizing that all of us—whether we identify as men, women, or non-binary—are all individuals who are all 115

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profoundly shaped by our social and natural environments, opens the door to new possibilities. Given persistent gender biases in the economics profession, and in particular the mainstream discipline’s naïve reliance on a narrow set of formal methods, however, progress in elaborating these possibilities has been slow.

References American Sociological Society. 1907. “The American Sociological Society.” American Journal of Sociology 12 (5): 579–80. Austen, Siobhan. 2017. “Feminist Economics for Smart Behavioral Economics.” In Handbook of Behavioral Economics and Smart Decision-Making, edited by Morris Altman, 173–87. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Bauer, Karin H. 2016. “Interconnectedness and the Self in Indian Thought and Implications for Stakeholder Theory.” PhD. Dissertation, Philosophy and Religion, and Asian and Comparative Studies. California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA. Becker, Gary S. 1981. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bem, Sandra L. 1981. “Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex Typing.” Psychological Review 88 (4): 354–64. Benería, Lourdes. 1999. “Globalization, Gender and the Davos Man.” Feminist Economics 5 (3): 61–83. Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. “The Generalized and Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and ­Drucilla Cornell, 77–95. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bondy, Krista, and Aurelie Charles. 2020. “Mitigating Stakeholder Marginalisation with the Relational Self.” Journal of Business Ethics 165: 67–82. Bowles, Hannah, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai. 2007. “Social Incentives for Gender Differences in the ­Propensity to Initiate Negotiations: Sometimes It Does Hurt to Ask.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 103 (1): 84–103. Christensen, Garret, and Edward Miguel. 2018. “Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research.” Journal of Economic Literature 56 (3): 920–80. England, Paula. 1993. “The Separative Self: Androcentric Bias in Neoclassical Assumptions.” In Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by M. A. Ferber and J. A. Nelson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. “Separative and Soluble Selves: Dichotomous Thinking in Economics.” In Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man, edited by M. A. Ferber and J. A. Nelson, 33–59. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fine, Cordelia 2010. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Folbre, Nancy, and Julie A. Nelson. 2000. “For Love or Money—or Both?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (4): 123–40. Fourcade, Marion, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan. 2015. “The Superiority of Economists.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 89–114. Gelman, Susan A. 2005. “Essentialism in Everyday Thought.” Psychological Science Agenda 19 (5): 1–6. Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hyde, Janet Shibley. 2005. “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60 (6): 581–92. Keller, Catherine. 1986. From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1985. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Knutson, Kristine M., Linda Mah, Charlotte F. Manly, and Jordan Grafman. 2007. “Neural Correlates of Automatic Beliefs About Gender and Race.” Human Brain Mapping 28 (10): 915–30. Marcon, Giuseppe, and Lorenzo Dorigo. 2012. Stakeholder Theory and Care Management: An Inquiry into Social Enterprises. Venice: Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Department of Management. Nelson, Julie A. 1992. “Gender, Metaphor, and the Definition of Economics.” Economics and Philosophy 8 (1): 103–25. ———. 1993a. “Value-Free or Valueless? Notes on the Pursuit of Detachment in Economics.” History of Political Economy 25 (1): 121–45. ———. 1993b. “Gender and Economic Ideologies.” Review of Social Economy 51 (3): 287–301. ———. 1995. “Feminism and Economics.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (2): 131–48.

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Beyond separative and soluble selves ———. 1996. Feminism, Objectivity and Economics. London: Routledge. ———. 1997. “Feminism, Ecology and the Philosophy of Economics.” Ecological Economics 20: 155–62. ———. 1999. “Of Markets or Martyrs: Is It Ok to Pay Well for Care?” Feminist Economics 5: 43–60. ———. 2003. “Separative and Soluble Firms: Androcentric Bias in Business Ethics.” In Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Interpersonal Relations and Economics: Comments from a Feminist Perspective.” In ­Economics and Social Interaction, edited by Benedetto Gui and Robert Sugden, 250–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010a. “Getting Past ‘Rational Man/Emotional Woman’: Comments on Research Programs in Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations.” International Review of Economics 5 (2): 233–53. ———. 2010b. “Sociology, Economics, and Gender: Can Knowledge of the Past Contribute to a Better Future?” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 69 (4): 1127–54. ———. 2014. “The Power of Stereotyping and Confirmation Bias to Overwhelm Accurate Assessment: The Case of Economics, Gender, and Risk Aversion.” Journal of Economic Methodology 21 (3): 211–31. ———. 2016. “Husbandry: A (Feminist) Reclamation of Masculine Responsibility for Care.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 40 (1): 1–15. ———. 2018a. Economics for Humans, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2018b. Gender and Risk-Taking: Economics, Evidence, and Why the Answer Matters. New York: Routledge. Nelson, Julie A., and Paula England. 2002. “Feminist Philosophies of Love and Work.” Hypatia 17 (2): 1–18. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Prentice, Deborah A., and Dale T. Miller. 2006. “Essentializing Differences between Women and Men.” Psychological Science 17 (2): 129–35. Rippon, Gina, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Anelis Kaiser, and Cordelia Fine. 2014. “Recommendations for Sex/Gender Neuroimaging Research: Key Principles and Implications for Research Design, Analysis, and Interpretation.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (650) (Article): 1–13. Roos, Charles F. 1933. “The Organization of the Econometric Society in Cleveland, Ohio, ­December 1930.” Econometrica 1: 71–72.

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12 INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES AND ANALYSIS Nina Banks

Introduction Feminism is a theory of liberation that uses gender as a lens for thinking about the liberation of all groups who are oppressed (Hurtado 2014). Intersectional feminism examines the interactive effects of systems of power and forms of oppression on people’s lives. It also examines the complex ways that gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, citizenship status, sexuality, ability and other identities interact to shape people’s realities. According to Collins and Bilge (2020), intersectionality is both critical theory and critical praxis. As critical theory, intersectionality challenges prevailing knowledge claims, theories, epistemologies, methodologies, and pedagogies. Critical praxis occurs when people apply intersectional analysis to their own lives in order to guide practice (Collins and Bilge 2020, 37–38). An important component of intersectionality is the need to challenge oppressions from the bottom up with and for people who experience multiple oppressions. Intersectional feminism, therefore, has both transformative and revolutionary potential. I first discuss the development of intersectional feminism out of Black feminist theorizing. I then evaluate the degree to which feminist economists have incorporated intersectional analysis into their research. In the last section, I suggest pathways for feminist economists to reorient their research in accordance with intersectional theory and praxis.

Black feminism and the emergence of intersectionality African American women developed Black Feminist Theory based on their lived experiences with multiple, overlapping forms of oppression. Black women began to speak out publicly against slavery and for their rights as women in the early 19th century because they were conscious of the unique ways in which they were oppressed by both race and gender (Guy-Sheftall 1995). The tendency, therefore, to think about intersecting identities and forms of oppression emerged among African American feminists such as Maria Stewart, Frances Harper, Ana Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells during the 19th century. Black feminists did not view gender as their major cause of oppression since they could not disentangle their gender from their race and class position (Terborg-Penn 1995). During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African American feminists’ political organizing focused 118

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on lynching, racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and employment discrimination. While Black feminists such as McDougald (1925) and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (circa 1930s) condemned the hardships Black women workers experienced because of race and gender discrimination, they nonetheless championed the need for Black women to organize on behalf of the Black community. Accordingly, Black feminists called for social and political changes that were tied specifically to race since anti-Blackness threatened the well-being of all members of the Black community. African American feminists viewed their rights as Black women as interconnected with those of Black men and children. Black women, therefore, have always defined their feminist interests broadly to encompass the well-being of Black men and children. Unlike White feminists who defined women’s struggles more narrowly, Black women have had an unbroken tradition of feminist activism in the US because of their broader definition of women’s interests. Although Black women were leaders and active participants in both the Black Liberation and Women’s Liberation movements during the 1960s and 1970s, they nonetheless experienced sexism and racism respectively in these movements. Additionally, neither movement addressed issues such as sterilization abuse and welfare exclusion that were more relevant to Black women. Beal (1969), a co-founder of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), spoke to this discontent by describing Black women’s “double jeopardy” that subjected them to both race and gender oppression through capitalist exploitation. Beal denounced attempts by Black men within the movement to suppress Black women as well as White women’s failure to struggle against capitalism and racism. Black women often felt disconnected from feminist organizations comprised mainly of White women since they believed that White women were primarily interested in sharing power with White men and complicit in racial oppression (White 1999). Black lesbian feminists have played a leading role in the development of Black feminism as critical theory and praxis (Guy-Sheftall 1995). In 1977, Barbara Smith and other members of the Combahee River Collective issued A Black Feminist Statement saying that women’s liberation required dismantling all forms of oppression, including capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and imperialism (Smith 1983). The statement advanced the concept of simultaneity by asserting the impossibility of separating race, class, and sex oppression that Black women experienced simultaneously. Lorde (1984) discussed the imperative of women examining the differences that exist between and among women in order to further their understanding of the complexity of women’s experiences and struggles so that women could relate to each other as equals across differences. By the late 1980s, Black feminist theorizing flourished and developed some of its core conceptual understandings. King (1988) rejected the notions of double and triple jeopardy as additive concepts that failed to grasp the interdependency of racism, sexism, and classism. Instead, she developed a theory of these as interactive processes that produce multiple jeopardy through their multiplicative effects on Black women. King (1988) stressed the importance of Black women’s agency in determining their priorities for liberation and posited that Black women’s history and reality of experiencing multiple forms of oppression have afforded them the ability to have a multiple consciousness necessary for their own liberation (72). Collins (1989) formulated the epistemology of Black feminist thought in a groundbreaking essay. Rejecting Eurocentric, masculinist epistemologies such as positivism with its emphasis on emotional detachment and objectivity, Collins argued that African American women validate knowledge claims by having concrete, lived experience with the subject as well as having accountability to the Black community. Although Black feminists were already using an intersectional framework, Crenshaw (1989) coined the word “intersectionality” in an influential paper. Crenshaw argued against the legal treatment of Black women as either Black or women since the separation 119

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failed to capture the ways in which Black women were subjected to the effects of both race and gender discrimination, unlike Black men or White women. The core ideas that emerged out of Black feminist theorizing have come to be more broadly understood as “Intersectional Feminism,” which is foundational within feminist theory globally. Intersectionality has four core analytical underpinnings: (1) the simultaneity of oppressions and therefore the need to struggle against multiple forms of oppression; (2) the use of lived experience as a valid form of knowledge; (3) the recognition that women are gendered differently based on their race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and caste position; and (4) the importance of positionality and relations of power between and among different groups. Simultaneity of oppressions means that gender, race, class, caste, sexuality, and citizenship status and other social categories are overlapping, mutually constitutive group identities. This speaks to the impossibility of analyzing their independent effects on individuals and groups. From an economic standpoint, simultaneity creates the need to examine the ways in which different systems of oppression interact and affect different groups in complementary or even contradictory ways. Moreover, women’s lived experiences with multiple forms of oppression create valid, generalizable knowledge. Thinking about gender within an intersectional feminist framework means taking into consideration the ways in which race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, caste, citizenship status, ability, and age construct women differently as women. Brown (1992) notes that women do not all share the same gender because of these differences and that gender is meaningless as an analytical category in the US when it is decontextualized from race. The idea that women are constructed differently as women speaks to the social embeddedness of gender. Gender meanings are formed within a particular socio-historical context that changes over time. Intersectional analysis, therefore, shifts feminist thinking beyond a conceptualization of women as a homogenous category. Brown contends that too often feminists merely acknowledge intersectional difference without sufficient attention to the ways in which these differences relate to each other through power relations; the lives that middle-class White women are able to live occurs in part because of the lives that racially marginalized (racialized hereafter) women live (p. 42).

Toward an intersectional feminist economics In addition to “gender,” intersectional feminism has led to a rethinking of other fundamental concepts that feminist economists use to explain the maintenance and reproduction of women’s subordination. Feminists have explained women’s subordination relative to men by arguing that changes in capitalist production and gender ideals during the 19th century increasingly relegated women to the private sphere of the household where they produced reproductive labor for the benefit of men as part of a gender division of labor. Feminists using an intersectional approach, however, insisted that this explanation universalized the experiences of middle-class heterosexual White women while omitting that of racialized women. Glenn (1985), Dill (1988), and Amott and Matthaei (1996) challenged the claim that the public-private split was the norm for women during the 19th and 20th centuries since racialized women often engaged in paid work outside of their households. They discussed the differences between the reproductive labor performed by middle-class White women and that of racialized women. Glenn (1985) maintained that the household, for racialized women, was more than a locus of gender conflict since it served as an important buffer against outside hostility and oppression. These analyses underscored differences in women’s work histories based on race and class position as well as the ways in which racialized women resisted their subordination—often with the assistance of racialized men. 120

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In 2002, Feminist Economics published a special issue on Gender, Color, Caste, and Class. The editors dedicated the volume to African American economist Rhonda M. Williams, an exceptional empirical economist who did innovative work on multiple forms of inequality, including race, class, gender, and sexuality within the US economy. In the introductory article, guest editors Brewer, Conrad, and King (2002) posited that, compared to other economists, feminist economists were in the best position to examine the interconnections among race, class, and gender, but still had much to figure out (2002). They noted that most economists compartmentalized gender and race rather than examined their interactive effects. The editors recognized that there are challenges in using Eurocentric, western analytic categories for understanding women’s position cross-nationally. The volume contained six articles and five explorations that analyzed dimensions of the intersection of race, class, gender, and caste on women’s economic outcomes. To assess the degree to which feminist economists have incorporated an intersectional framework in their research since the 2002 publication, I glanced at the articles in Feminist Economics over a ten-year period, from 2009 to 2019. During this period, the journal contained articles that explore intersectionality of gender and sexuality (Hammarstedt, Ahmed, and Andersson 2015; Schonpflug et  al. 2018; Schneebaum and Badgett 2019); gender and class (Koopman 2009; Warren, Pascall, and Fox 2010; Pietrykowski 2017; Steckley and Steckley 2019); gender and nationality (Park, Cruz-Saco, and Anuarbe 2017); gender, class, and ethnicity (Brown 2012), gender and caste (Rao 2014); and gender and race (Dymski, Hernandez, and Mohanty 2013). As an international journal, most of the research published in Feminist Economics examines issues outside of the US. The small number of articles in Feminist Economics that provide an intersectional framework over this period indicates that feminist economists have generally not embraced it as an analytical framework. While not all feminist economists publish in Feminist Economics, the journal is the leading outlet for disseminating feminist economic research and ideas. Of particular concern is the very small number of articles that examine race as it interacts with other dimensions of identity and oppression. Notably absent are articles by African American economists. Moreover, articles that are US centered tend to focus on the general category of “women” without disaggregating data by race and other categories. As Sharpe (2019, 2020) notes, disaggregating data allows for a movement away from racial-bias (where Whites are the norm) and gender-bias (where men are the norm) in how data are reported and it can lead to better-informed policy. Given the importance of race as a central organizing principle of economies in many parts of the world and particularly within the Global North, the absence of racial analyses within Feminist Economics is problematic.

Feminist economics as critical theory and praxis In this section, I use examples from my research to discuss two ways that feminist economists can incorporate intersectional feminist understandings of race as both critical theory and praxis into their research to counter the omission of race within feminist economic analysis. Although I  provide examples from the US, the issues that I  raise may be relevant for thinking about research on marginalized women in other countries.

Centering the experiences of racialized women While African American women have been perhaps the central figures in the history of women and work in the US, there is very little theoretical and empirical work on the economic history of African American women within the discipline of economics. This omission is due to 121

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limited research in economic history as well as the tendency to use general categories of women in economic analysis. Feminist economists often take, as a starting point, the struggles women workers experience in occupations, pay, and unpaid work, resulting from the entry of large numbers of married White women, particularly mothers, into the labor force in the 1970s. This account of “feminization” of the labor force overlooks the history of Black women’s work since African American women have had the highest labor participation rate among women since the late 19th century (Goldin 1977). Prior to that, Black women had much greater work burdens compared to other women through 250  years of unpaid, enslaved labor. Given this history, African American women have always had to balance caregiving needs with paid and unpaid work while having fewer resources than White women have had because of discrimination against both Black women and men. Until the 1970s, African American women primarily worked long hours at low pay in private household domestic service, alleviating White women’s reproductive labor burdens. Moreover, Black women’s workplace harassment has been so pervasive because of their long work history and dominant beliefs about their sexual availability that sexual harassment case law in the US developed out of their experiences and challenges (Lipsitz 2017). This is a work history in need of excavation and theorizing. There are methodological considerations for doing research involving racialized women. One consideration is the limited availability of information and data on African American women before the late 20th century. Recovering Black women’s economic history, therefore, often requires use of research methods and sources that have not been common in economic analysis. These include archival research, case studies, and participant observation. These methodologies rely on qualitative methods as well as descriptive data. In order to recover African American women’s experiences and perspectives, I learned to do archival research. For my early research on African American women migrants’ unpaid community work during the Great Migration period of 1916–1930, I used records from civic organizations and social workers, migrant letters, newspaper accounts, and recordings of migrant interviews made by White male historians (Banks 1999, 2006). I did so with caution as the biases of outside observers too often lead to pathologizing women who exist at the intersection of structural racism and patriarchy. Therefore, I asked the following questions about the historical records: Who documented the information? For what purpose did they document it? How did their perspectives affect their observations? How could I discern Black migrant women’s thoughts and priorities? My current research excavates the economic thinking of the first African American economist, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, beyond her dissertation (Banks 2005, 2008, 2019). This research is also archival and has been necessary since Alexander was not able to find employment as an economist due to the interactive effects of racial and gender discrimination. Alexander was a highly accomplished and educated woman who left extensive records that document—in her own voice—her professional and private life. This research is part of the feminist economics project of recovering the economics of early women economists. It also contributes to the intellectual history of African Americans. Although Alexander did not have employment as an economist, she popularized economics using liberatory knowledge through speeches that she gave to Black audiences. As an African American woman, Alexander occupied a unique position among early economists and so the recovery of her economic thinking on matters of economic justice, women’s roles, Black workers, and democratic rights situates Black women’s perspectives into our history of economics. Centering African American women within economic research requires framing the analysis according to Black women’s own priorities and concerns rather than those of other women (Aptheker 1997). Inclusion of primary sources of information—accounts and testimonials by 122

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women in their own words—can counter omissions, distortions, and non-relevant theoretical ideas. Interviews, first-person written accounts, and participant observations are methods that provide racialized women’s voices and viewpoints while decentering the perspectives and experiences of dominant groups. Feminist economists need to adopt methods of historians and ethnographic tools of anthropologists and sociologists so that we can better understand the working lives and histories of racialized women.

Economics as if people at the bottom mattered Intersectionality involves analyzing disparities and relative position as well as historical factors and current practices that sustain inequities overtime. Incorporating race into feminist economic research requires a focus on the ways in which structural and ideological factors interact to the detriment of women—especially racialized women. It requires examining relations of power and dominance between and among different groups, including different groups of women. Intersectionality, as critical theory and praxis, calls attention to and challenges oppressions that affect women, men, and children whose lives are the most precarious with the goal of improving their well-being. My research has focused on the work of one of the most vulnerable groups of immigrants in the US in the contemporary era—unauthorized Mexican migrant women who work as domestic servants in private households (Banks 2013). This work is invisible work and yet so vital to the process of social reproduction in the US and Mexico through global care chains (Gammage, this volume). Social reproduction has received revived attention within feminist economics due to structural economic and neoliberal policy changes that have taken place globally since the 1970s (Rao and Akram-Lodhi, this volume). Social reproduction refers to activities and social relations that help to reproduce the well-being of the family overtime on a daily and intergenerational basis. It ensures the survival of people as members of families and the continuance of the labor force. When economists frame social reproduction of families in the US as being in a period of “crisis” resulting from neoliberal reductions in state and employer supports, they elevate concern for the well-being of White families who have historically enjoyed relative economic security over those families who have always struggled to provide for their social reproduction. The story of adverse impacts of neoliberal macro policies foregrounds the concerns about the White working/middle class. The difficulty in social reproduction that White families are beginning to confront has always been the lived experience for African American, Latinx, and Native families in the US. Feminist economists must be attentive to the ideological and structural factors (laws, policies, practices) tied to race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, or citizenship status that hinder the social reproduction of these families. Mexican immigrant women’s reproductive labor in the US occurs within a historical context of social relations that have always undermined racialized women’s ability to provide for their families. Racialized women have been the most likely to perform work that is at the bottom of the racial and gender division of labor (Glenn 2000). Incorporation of race into an intersectional feminist economic analysis involves, therefore, a focus on relations among different groups of women that, in this case, have allowed White women to exploit the labor of racialized immigrant women (Baca Zinn 1994). Historically, White American households have relied on native-born racialized women and immigrant women to perform reproductive and devalued cleaning work within their households as domestic workers (Glenn 2000). Middle-class White women have sought to avoid

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performing domestic chores within their own homes because it is dirty work associated with lowly women (Palmer 1990). The caregiving and cleaning work that private household workers perform decreases White women’s unpaid workload. As a result, the paid labor that racialized women perform within private households enables White women to have more free time in order to pursue paid work or other activities much in the same way that White men have been able to enjoy these activities (Kofman 2010). This reveals the differing impact of patriarchal norms governing women’s performance of reproductive labor due to social relations that are stratified by race, ethnicity, class, and citizenship status. It also indicates a way in which racialized patriarchal relations have provided material benefits to White women. Further, we should view the social reproduction of undocumented Mexican domestic workers in the US within the context of transnational family ties. Mexican women’s low wages, long and irregular work hours, lack of worker protections, and precarious immigration status undermine their ability to sustain themselves and their own families both within the US and in Mexico. Indeed, I  argue (Banks 2013) that US private household employers—facilitated by the state—have externalized the cost of reproducing Mexican domestic workers onto their families in Mexico even though the US benefits from this labor force. This research enables critical praxis by recognizing and condemning beliefs, practices, and policies that threaten the well-being of undocumented Mexican immigrants, including massive deportation policies that separate US-born children from parents.

Future directions Feminist economists have much to gain from intersectional theory and praxis. We must apply the criticisms that we have leveled at the discipline of economics for its androcentric biases to the practice of doing feminist economics. If, as feminist economists claim, the gender of most economists matters in shaping disciplinary research, in making policy recommendations, and in hiring, then we must employ an intersectional understanding of gender by viewing the concept as incomplete when we decontextualize it from race and ethnicity. The ongoing use of “women” as a general category or its conflation with White women presents a universal understanding of womanhood in the US. This overlooks ways in which women’s experiences and outcomes differ by race and other social categories. It has, as its counterpart, the tendency in neoclassical economics to present universal laws of behavior. Using a critical intersectional framework, feminist economists should ask: How do the perceptions and concerns of White women, especially those in the Global North, affect what feminist economists regard as worthy areas of research? What issues of concern by racialized women do feminist economists neglect or ignore? Why are the critical voices of racialized women economists missing within feminist economics? What are White women’s biases in our profession and how do their class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and other identities inform these biases? How do these biases shape economic areas of research, for example, through the construction of, privileging of, and valuation feminist economists place on care work or on intra-household relations within nuclear household structures between cohabiting or married couples? Answering these questions can lead to an improvement in economic theory, policy recommendations, and practice. If the stated purpose of feminist economics is to improve women’s economic condition (Strober 2003), then we must attend to elevating the voices and concerns of women at the bottom who experience multiple forms of oppression because it is their economic position that is the most precarious.

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Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge the University of Pennsylvania Archives, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Record Group (UPT 50 A374S) for granting me permission to use the Sadie Alexander records.

References Alexander, Sadie T. M. circa 1930. “The Economic Status of Negro Women, An Index to the Negro’s Economic Status.” Speech. STMA, Box 71, FF 31. University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia. Amott, Teresa, and Julie Matthaei. 1996. Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston, MA: South End Press. Aptheker, Bettina. 1997. “Directions for Scholarship.” In African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, edited by David M. Gordon et al., 200–9. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Baca Zinn, Maxine. 1994. “Feminist Rethinking from Racial-Ethnic Families.” In Women of Color in U.S. ­Society, edited by Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thorton Dill, 18–26. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Banks, Nina. 1999. “Steadying the Husband, Uplifting the Race: The Pittsburgh Urban League’s ­Promotion of Black Female Domesticity during the Great Black Migration.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst. ———. 2005. “Black Women and Racial Advancement: The Economics of Sadie Tanner Mossell ­Alexander.” Review of Black Political Economy 33 (1): 9–24. ———. 2006. “Uplifting the Race through Domesticity: Capitalism, African American Migration, and the Household Economy in the Great Migration Era of 1916–1930.” Feminist Economics 12 (4): 599–624. ———. 2008. “The Black Worker, Economic Justice, and the Speeches of Sadie T.M. Alexander.” Review of Social Economy LXVI (2): 139–61. ———. 2013. “Family Migration in the U.S.” In Handbook of Research on Gender and Economic Life, edited by Deborah M. Figart and Tonia Warnecke. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. ———. 2019. The Black Woman Economist Who Pioneered a Federal Jobs Guarantee. New York: Institute for New Economic Thinking. Beal, Frances. 1969 [1995]. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Reprinted in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Guy-Sheftall, 146–55. New York: The New Press. Brewer, Rose, Cecilia Conrad, and Mary King. 2002. “The Complexities and Potential of Theorizing Gender, Caste, Race, and Class.” Feminist Economics, 8 (2): 3–17. Brown, E. 1992. “ ‘What Has Happened Here:’ The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics.” Feminist Studies 18 (2): 295–312. Brown, Tamara M. 2012. “Who’s the Boss? The Political Economy of Unpaid Care Work and Food ­Sharing in Brooklyn, USA.” Feminist Economics 18 (3): 1–24. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1989. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.” Signs 14 (4): 745–73. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. 2020. Intersectionality. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist ­Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 8. Dill, Bonnie Thorton. 1988. “Our mother’s Grief: Racial-Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of ­Families.” Journal of Family History 13 (1): 415–31. Dymski, Gary, Jesus Hernandez, and Lisa Mohanty. 2013. “Race, Gender, Power, and the US Subprime Mortgage and Foreclosure Crisis: A Meso Analysis.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 124–51. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1985. “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression.” Review of Radical Political Economics 17 (3): 86–108. ———. 2000. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader of U.S. Women’s History, edited by Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, 436–65. London and New York: Routledge. Goldin, Claudia. 1977. “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 and 1880.” Journal of Economic History 37: 87–108. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, ed. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press.

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Nina Banks Hammarstedt, Mats, Ali M. Ahmed, and Lina Andersson. 2015. “Sexual Prejudice and Labor Market Outcomes for Gays and Lesbians: Evidence from Sweden.” Feminist Economics 21 (1): 90–109. Hurtado, Aida. 2014. “Presentation on The Continuing Significance of Race for Feminist Praxis: ­Relating to Privilege 25 Years Later.” Presentation at the Gender & Work Symposium: Relationships among Women. Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. King, Deborah. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs 14 (1): 42–72. Kofman, Eleonore. 2010. “Gendered Migrations and the Globalisation of Social Reproduction and Care: New Dialogues and Directions.” In Gender, Migration and the Public Sphere, 1850–2005, edited by ­Marlou Schrover and Eileen Yeo, 118–39. New York: Routledge. Koopman, Jeanne. 2009. “Globalization, Gender, and Poverty in the Senegal River Valley.” Feminist ­Economics 15 (3): 253–85. Lipsitz, Raina. 2017. “Sexual Harassment Law Was Shaped by the Battles of Black Women: Their Stories Should Guide Us in Propelling the #MeToo Momentum Forward.” The Nation, October 20. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. McDougald, Elise. 1925 [1995]. “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation.” Reprinted in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Guy-Sheftall, 80–80. New York: The New Press. Palmer, Phyllis. 1990. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Park, Yongjin, María Amparo Cruz-Saco, and Mónika López Anuarbe. 2017. “Understanding the ­Remittance Gender Gap among Hispanics in the US: Gendered Norms and the Role of ­Expectations.” Feminist Economics 23 (2): 172–99. Pietrykowski, Bruce. 2017. “The Return to Caring Skills: Gender, Class, and Occupational Wages in the US.” Feminist Economics 23 (4): 32–61. Rao, Nitya. 2014. “Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women’s Work and Agency in Rural South India.” Feminist Economics 20 (3): 78–102. Schneebaum, Alyssa, and M. V. Lee Badgett. 2019.  “Poverty in US Lesbian and Gay Couple Households.” Feminist Economics 25 (1): 1–30. Schönpflug, Karen, Christine M. Klapeer, Roswitha Hofmann, and Sandra Müllbacher. 2018. “If Queers Were Counted: An Inquiry into European Socioeconomic Data on LGB(TI)QS.” Feminist Economics 24 (4): 1–30. Sharpe, Rhonda V. 2019. “Disaggregating Data by Race Allows for More Accurate Research.” Nature Human Behavior 3 (12): 1240. ———. 2020. “Disaggregate Data for a More Inclusive Society. Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race.” Accessed June 2020. https://wiserpolicy.org/disaggregate-data-for-a-more-inclusive-society/. Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. “A Combahee River Collective Statement.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, 272–82. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Steckley, Marylynn, and Joshua Steckley. 2019. “Post-Earthquake Land Appropriations and the Dispossession of Rural Women in Haiti.” Feminist Economics 25 (4): 45–67. Strober, Myra. 2003. “Rethinking Economics Through a Feminist Lens.” In Women and the Economy: A Reader, edited by Ellen Mutari and Deborah Figart. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. 1995. “Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.” In ‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’ A Reader in Black Women’s History, edited by D. C. Hine, W. King, and L. Reed, 487–503. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing. Warren, Tracey, Gillian Pascall, and Elizabeth Fox. 2010. “Gender Equality in Time: Low-Paid Mothers’ Paid and Unpaid Work in the UK.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 193–219. White, Deborah Gray. 1999. “Making a Way Out of No Way.” In Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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PART II

Methods, methodology, and measurement

13 FEMINIST USE OF QUANTITATIVE METHODS Joyce P. Jacobsen

Introduction I first started thinking about the potential impacts of feminism on economics in the 1990s, shortly after Woolley (1993) published a prescient article in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, “The Feminist Challenge to Neoclassical Economics.” In her article, Woolley lists six specific feminist challenges to economics: (1) to develop models to explain and evaluate endogenous preference changes; (2) to allow that people may make systematic mistakes; (3) to correct mistaken stylized facts; (4) to incorporate both men and women into economic analysis; (5) to find out what shapes the institutions which privilege or disadvantage women; (6) to develop a better economic model of caring and reproductive activity. As of 2019, there has been substantial progress on all of these fronts and more. Feminist economists have developed more sophisticated theoretical models that address the various concerns mentioned earlier and are more likely to use such models to motivate their empirical analyses. Most researchers take care to include both genders into their studies, often breaking out data separately by gender. International financial organizations such as the World Bank and many national and state governments have incorporated gender-sensitive analyses into their policy programs. The study of caring labor has become an important topic in its own right within economics and related fields (Moos, this volume). As such, it appears that the feminist economics intellectual project has been quite successful. However, as to the specific question as to whether the feminist challenge had led to different empirical methodologies in economics, the picture is less positive. Notably Woolley did not put that specifically as one of her challenges, perhaps again presciently realizing that particular goal was unattainable. The economics discipline is still dominated by the neoclassical approach, which aspires to be more like natural sciences with its adherence to standards of scientific rigor and reliance on testable hypotheses that can be examined using modern statistical techniques. And the identification of regression methodology with good empirical practice appears to permeate even nonmainstream feminist empirical analyses. Fundamentally, feminist use of quantitative methods in economics is barely discernible from nonfeminist use. In this chapter, I  revisit the situation regarding the impact of the feminist challenge on economists’ empirical methodology, on which I last published an essay 18 years ago (Jacobsen 2003). In that 2003 piece, I pointed out that the feminist critique of economics in general also 129

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extends to methodological concerns regarding how empirical work is performed by economists. This set of concerns consists not simply of how theoretical models are constituted and estimated or tested but also about the dominance of a particular methodological paradigm for economists, namely modern econometrics and its central focus on regression as the preferred empirical technique. Harding (1995), who wielded an early influence on feminist economics, argued that standard empirical methodology could not be freed from its sexism and androcentrism. Thus, it appeared that a new empirical methodology needed to be developed to support feminist economic inquiry. Indeed, Nelson (1995) argued that the goal of feminist economics was to develop a new methodology and identified ways of moving away from masculine bias in methodology.

Feminist economic debates on empirical methodology But then, how to proceed with feminist methodology? Feminist postmodernism, feminist empiricism, and standpoint theory were all put forth by feminists as options for how a feminist methodology might proceed. However, the postmodernist approach was basically nonviable if empirical economics was going to be at all compatible with feminist economics. The fundamental hostility of feminist postmodernists to empirical methodology meant that the vast majority of economists have had to part ways with postmodernism in order to keep going as members of the economics project, whether or not they were feminist. Since then, due to continuation of work on the feminist intellectual project, there is apparently more agreement on how to proceed regarding feminist methodology. Longino’s (1987) characterization of feminist science as a process-based (rather than content-based) approach made it feasible to consider feminist science as doing science right rather than doing away with standard approaches. Feminist empiricism—whereby a feminist viewpoint is tested using standard scientific procedure—and standpoint theory—whereby all knowledge is socially situated— have come to a melding regarding appropriate process, and thus an essential truce between these two approaches, at least for the practicing feminist economist. Feminist empiricism, which involves the combining of an empiricist approach with feminist political goals (Campbell 1994), also preserves the presence of (weak) objectivity in feminist economics. Stated goals can still be combined in research projects with empirically falsifiable hypotheses and made subject to testing by others as well as by the initial researcher. Meanwhile, while some standpoint theorists argue that feminist empiricism, being built on gendered concepts, cannot be objective, more recent standpoint approaches argue that inclusive practices in science, such as the presence of a range of social groups represented by scientific researchers—particularly drawing from the ranks of the societally marginalized, can lead to more objective studies that also incorporate information from the lives of the marginalized (Sharpe, this volume). Intemann (2010) argues that the current versions of feminist empiricism and standpoint theory have largely merged into “feminist standpoint empiricism,” as a combination of epistemology and methodology whereby one acknowledges one’s standpoint explicitly and strives to practice empiricism that is as bias-free as is possible given that acknowledgment. Beyond this consensus there remain points of disagreement regarding the kind of diversity (disciplinary/heterodox? racial/ethnic/class differences in researchers?) within scientific communities that is most beneficial (and the exact roles that ethical and political values can play in scientific inquiry (leading? standing by but not intruding?). There is also now more agreement, at least within the heterodox community, that economics is rhetoric. This latter point is due to the widespread influence that McCloskey’s work has had on the discipline (McCloskey 1985). McCloskey’s view that empiricism—and economics in general—should be viewed as forms of rhetoric has been freeing. It has allowed economists 130

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to take themselves both less seriously (because economics is not a true science, not that physical sciences as currently practiced necessarily are either) and more seriously (because they realize that they can engage in suasion to bring others around to their point of view). Feminist standpoint empiricism can meld with this view, because it allows for the disclaimer of standpoint as a matter that the reader can then either side with or not side with in deciding how to condition their own beliefs when they read an empirical research paper. In the meantime, aside from the epistemological debate, some other more nuts and bolts problems exist regarding how to move to a more explicitly feminist empirical methodology in economics (Nelson 1995). First, there has been continued emphasis on the readily measurable and thus readily regressionable. Jacobsen and Newman (2003) noted the rapid rise of the use of the technique of multiple regression in economics starting in the mid-1970s, concurrent with the rise in availability of first mainframe computing time and then personal computers. Since 2003, there is continued reliance on the particular technique of multiple regression (albeit with variants, such as the use of limited dependent variable models and instrumental variable techniques) and on the formulation of hypotheses that are compatible with that technique. In addition, measurables that fit readily into a regression framework are preferable to measurables that do not. While many variables can be incorporated into the framework, either as dummy variable sets or as scales, the problem comes with variable interactions and nonlinearities in model estimation, which are much more difficult to test in a comprehensive framework. Intersectional relationships such as how gender and race interact to affect, say, earnings may not be either a simple additive relationship or even a simple multiplicative relationship. Second is the continued heavy reliance of the profession on the analysis of the same few large data sets. Jacobsen and Newman (1997) commented about the relative lack of use of novel data sources in economics as compared to other social sciences. Government-generated household surveys are a great boon to empirical social scientists, but if the surveys do not collect the data necessary for testing feminist hypotheses then they do not advance the feminist empirical program. For example, data regarding such household matters as who controls financial assets and who performs various types of household labor are necessary for testing models of household decision-making but are not generally collected. Berik (1997, 121) pointed out that feminist economics needs pluralistic data-gathering methods, including greater use of qualitative methods, in order to “uncover and correct androcentric biases in survey-generated data/analyses; advance theory and empirical research on the processes that underlie economic outcomes” and “broaden the range of topics to include those on the margins of the discipline.” Third, even when a data set contains multiple identities of respondents, these data are not always utilized, often because of the study emphasis or size of subsamples. My 2003 work with sociologist Newman regarding whether or not gender and race are modeled explicitly in empirical work from the 1940s through the 1990s showed widespread exclusion of women and nonWhites from data samples and a failure to investigate gender and racial differences even in the 1990s (Jacobsen and Newman 2003). In support of standpoint theory, we found that women investigators were less likely to drop women from their analyses, but even better inclusionary effects stemmed from having interdisciplinary collaborators on the project team. However, due to the passage of time and continuing work on the feminist intellectual project since 2003, the situation may have improved. There are additional methods of empirical analysis now readily available, including “big data”/machine learning methods that allow for better treatment of nonlinearities and underspecified models, and the cost of computing and statistical analysis continues to decline, with many researchers now using the free program “R” for programming and statistical analysis. More data are available, and economics researchers have more ability to collect data, including through experimental methods. More data in principle 131

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should lead to less exclusion of particular social groups as well, as their numbers in the available data should increase. Feminist researchers should have increased awareness of intersectionality considerations, and more ability to model the interactions between race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status using big data methods. Researchers should also now evince more awareness of mixed methods analysis, as these methods have become taught increasingly in the academy (albeit not necessarily in economics masters and doctoral programs). In my 2003 paper I mentioned wanting to learn inductively about what is feminist economics by analyzing what had been published under that rubric with regard to topics, techniques, and results. At that point, not much had yet been published in the field’s main journal, Feminist Economics—seven years’ worth of articles at that time, so I did not survey it systematically, instead basing my observations on the work of many International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) members prior to that date as published in many outlets, including refereed articles in other journals, essays in edited volumes, monographs, and consultancy reports. Luckily, someone has recently taken up the challenge of a systematic review of the empirical content of Feminist Economics: Tejani (2019), who has written a very interesting article for the Journal of Economic Methodology, analyzing Feminist Economics articles for the two time periods of 1995 through 2005 (as in its first ten years), and 2006 through 2015. Tejani (2019, 99) finds: Although feminist economic methodology has emphasized the importance of contextual, reflexive and qualitative methods, articles published in the journal reflect a largely quantitative orientation. The research shows a heavy empirical tilt in the second decade driven by the use of econometrics with much less emphasis on theoretical issues and economic methodology. Why is this? Tejani interviews the editors, who indicate that this is what is coming in over the transom rather than caused by their own selections. As such, the patterns indicate the continuing prevalence of standard methodology in the professional training of researchers and the assumption that good research (and also professional success) follows these standard methods. In Jacobsen (2003), I laid out my own idea for a three-point plan for how to create and propagate best practices that are also feminist economist in nature: (1) developing a framework that indicates what empirical practices are feminist in nature, and why they are preferred practices (even for non-feminists); (2) considering what incentives might exist for encouraging researchers to consider their methodological choices; and (3) following good practice ourselves (always easier said than done). Apparently, the first part of the plan is still incipient, with the continuing openness of the area to a variety of practices existing in an uneasy relationship to the continuing dominance of regression-based empirical work. With regard to the second and third points of the plan, notably, Feminist Economics has a very detailed—at least relative to other economics journals—protocol regarding presentation of statistical results and methodology. In 2008, the journal published a paper that is still linked to its website, stipulating guidelines for the presentation of statistical results in its pages (Miller and van der Meulen Rodgers 2008). These guidelines are also reified into the protocol that editors follow in considering whether or not to accept or reject a paper (or return it for revisions). The referees and the associate editor in charge of the paper must indicate the level of agreement or disagreement with, among others, the two queries: “Does the paper clarify the methodology followed and is the methodology appropriate for the questions addressed?”; and “Does the paper clearly explain the variables used, refrain from using these interchangeably with other variables, and explain how the variables interact?” In addition, a paper must explain whether the conclusions are “limited to the regions/countries supported by the data, 132

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rather than overgeneralized to the entire world” and “present analysis of the implications and importance of its results.” These are good practice rather than feminist practice per se, but the attention to spelling out good practice and having editors, reviewers, and authors mindfully check through the list of good practice points is a very feminist practice; norms are explicitly stated and adhered to rather than being implicit and/or arbitrary. Yet the concern is that the very reification and statement of good practice in the area of standard empirical paper-writing may have encouraged authors to view the journal as empirically oriented and oriented toward standard econometric methodology. Thus, part of the trend that Tejani finds may actually have been caused by the publication of these explicit guidelines.

Toward more empirical pluralism The somewhat discouraging findings of Tejani are tempered by a few developments that spark some hope for more empirical pluralism in the future. First, along with the recent ascension of behavioral economics as an important subfield in economics, there has been a rise in economists collecting their own data through experiments, which has brought in a new method of data gathering for feminist economists. But two concerns are that the two areas do not move far from the problematic assumptions of neoclassical economics and the practitioners do not go beyond identifying gender as a variable. While experimental economics does not have to relate solely to behavioral economics propositions, the two areas have risen together, along with an interest in testing the tenets of game theory (including bargaining theory) using experimental settings (Croson 2014). There is as yet no such thing as feminist game theory, but bargaining theory has been key for understanding intrahousehold dynamics (Doss, this volume). Croson and Gneezy (2009) and Eckel and Grossman (2008) are not explicitly feminist economists, but they point out that context is important for understanding the apparent higher level of risk aversion of women relative to men (as opposed to earlier works that often simply asserted that women were inherently more risk averse than men). Shurchkov and Eckel (2018) discuss four behavioral traits that appear different between women and men, namely degree of risk aversion, level of competitiveness, propensity to negotiate, and social preferences (altruism, nurturing, cooperativeness). Nelson (2018) critiques the risk-aversion literature at length for its leaning toward finding gender differences and reifying difference on the basis of statistical significance, thus contributing to naturalizing difference. Shurchkov and Eckel (2018), however, point out that while the four gender differences appear across studies, there is no direct evidence regarding whether they are caused by inherent sex-linked differences rather than socially constructed gender differences and that it is hard to measure how much these factors affect the gender gap in earnings and patterns of occupational segregation. Sent and Van Staveren (2019) also actively critique the literature’s results, using an explicitly feminist economist stance. Their review stresses the intra-gender differences found in studies as well as underscoring the range of size differences found for gender-related effects. Croson and Gneezy (2009) also point out that there may be publication bias toward experimentalist papers that find gender differences. This, along with more general concerns about publication bias being toward results that support gender difference over gender similarity, might lead one to call upon feminist economists to support the movement in social and natural sciences toward publishing all results (in online materials) rather than just those that find in favor of the alternative hypothesis. Notably, however, and contrary to the critique of Nelson (2018), there is also currently movement toward requiring higher levels of statistical significance for publication, hence movement away from the idea of substantive significance, as well as movement away from allowing readers to make their own decisions regarding significance based 133

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on standard error reporting. This sea change is linked to the issue of difficulty in reproducing experimental results for both psychology and economic studies (Camerer et al. 2016). Second, US survey questions are slowly adapting to allow for more complicated realities. For example, it is interesting that the rise in the acknowledgment of the existence of a transgender population has led to more fluidity in the assignment of gender; surveys now increasingly allow for indication of trans categories. Redmount (1995), who argued for the endogeneity rather than the exogeneity of gender/sex in empirical modeling, was ahead of her time in predicting that a person’s reported gender would increasingly be both fluid over time and depend on the particular survey context. A person now might well report their gender as “woman” in one year and “man” the next year, or report their gender differently depending on whether the survey asks about home or work identity. Household surveys also now increasingly allow for more varieties of household composition to be reported—married or unmarried, same-sex or heterosexual couples, though the main US surveys, such as the Current Population Survey, lag regarding the ability to identify clearly unmarried same-sex partners. Third, the recent rise in the application of machine-learning techniques by economists and other social scientists provides some hope that economists will move to the use of models that are more resistant to over-fitting, as well as the use of models that allow for more complicated interactions. My own work with data-mining models applied to estimation of gender earnings differentials represents a small step in this direction (Jacobsen, Levin, and Tausanovitch 2016), wherein we find that our models outperform standard regression models by reducing prediction error, due to avoiding creating models that are overly specific to a particular data set. The more atheoretical approach of machine learning may also be more attractive to feminist economists in some respects, as it requires fewer a priori assumptions and allows for interactions to arise organically from the data rather than all intersectional relationships having to be specified beforehand. Fourth, Tejani does find a rise in the use of mixed methods in Feminist Economics articles over the 2006–2015 period. This has not gone unnoticed by feminist authors: Hesse-Biber and Griffin (2015) and Jefferson et al. (2014) both discuss positive aspects of mixed-methods research with particular attention to how these frameworks might be used by feminist economics (where to date most examples come from outside the economics literature). Jefferson et al. (2014) provide in their paper an explicit extended example of mixed-methods research on the employment decisions of mature women working in aged care regarding whether or not to continue such work, where interviews combine with quantitative survey data to provide a more well-rounded picture of how these decisions occur. In an ideal world, all empirical economists would comfortably utilize a multi-methods framework, in which they would tailor their empirical analyses to the specific problem under consideration from a wide range of possible methodologies. In practice, this is not happening as much in economics as in other fields such as sociology. Experiments are the only data-gathering method that has made headway among economists. Indeed, sociology stands as an excellent example to which economists might slowly edge closer, where familiarity with both qualitative and quantitative methodology, a longer tradition of immersive fieldwork and interviewing methods, and respect for ethnography alongside quantitative work have continued to coexist, albeit not always comfortably, in a social scientific discipline.

Conclusions Currently, feminist use of quantitative methods in economics is barely discernible from nonfeminist use. While topic choices may vary for feminists versus nonfeminists, and emphases and framing of results may vary, the actual techniques used to carry out empirical analyses 134

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are basically indistinguishable. This may be in part because there is less debate regarding how to proceed (where the new proposed hybrid of feminist standpoint empiricism may simply have become the status quo), but there is also not much evidence of actual introspection by practitioners regarding methodology even though the philosophical debate has progressed. If anything, there is more reliance on standard econometric methodology in the feminist economics literature now than in the past, so the literature has actually become less varied regarding methodology and type of paper in the feminist economics literature since the field emerged. There has not yet been much take-up of either big data methods or mixed methods. There has been some expansion of data sources, mainly for countries other than the US, but most data used by economists are still not personally collected. There is more use of experiments and some more use of self-performed surveys. However, experimental data are rarely collected or analyzed with much of an eye toward anything other than standard dichotomizing by gender; there is no real development of feminist game theory or feminist behavioral economics. And as yet, little attention has been paid to intersectionality in surveys or in mixed-methods studies. A backdrop to this litany of lack of real progress in defining and creating a truly feminist economic methodology is concern about representation in the economics discipline of women’s views, let alone heterodox women’s views. Lundberg and Stearns (2019) and Sharpe (this volume) point out, as have many other economists (it is a constant refrain in the annual American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession reports on women’s representation in the field), that there has not been much increase of women in the economics profession. There is much concerning evidence regarding ongoing problems with women’s progress in the profession, including recent documentation of significant sexism and misogyny (e.g., Wu 2018). Economics also continues to be strongly orthodox, both within the field in terms of nonmainstream perspectives and, notably as compared to other disciplines, with respect to the shutting out of information from other related fields. Economists predominantly cite only other economists in their work, in stark contrast to other social science disciplines (Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015; Nelson 2006), tend not to work with researchers in other fields, and exhibit little interest in exploration of the nonbinary, or of the distinction between sex and gender. It is clear that the economics profession has developed and maintained a high degree of insularity that makes it hard for it to accept any suggestions for methodological change from outside its walls. Combine the ongoing low representation of women in the field and disrespect for women in the field, with this disdain regarding learning anything from different perspectives in economics and related professions, and it is natural to be discouraged regarding how the feminist project could have greater effect on the methodologies generally used in empirical economics research. Nonetheless, there are still potential avenues for change. Acknowledgment of the ongoing lack of gender (and race/ethnic) diversity problems by the profession’s leadership is a positive step toward creating a more woman-friendly environment in the profession. The continuing positive job market for doctorates in economics, in stark contrast to most other academic disciplines, means that even heterodox job candidates have a good chance of finding stable employment either within or outside of academia. And the lower entry costs of trying out more flexible empirical methods thanks to continuing application of Moore’s law in computing—whereby computing hardware becomes both faster and cheaper—and cloud-based open-access solutions for empirical analyses and surveys—whereby software now also has become cheaper and more universally accessible—means that we may be on the verge of a new arena in which data scientists work alongside traditional social scientists to tackle new and old problems without so 135

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much bias toward use of standard empirical methodologies like multiple regression. The feminist economics project has not yet run its course, and there is still the chance that more inclusive and flexible methodologies will come to be the standard for research to be considered truly innovative and transformative—as well as being feminist.

References Berik, Günseli. 1997. “The Need for Crossing the Method Boundaries in Economics Research.” Feminist Economics 3 (2): 121–25. Camerer, Colin et al. 2016. “Evaluating Replicability of Laboratory Experiments in Economics.” Science 351 (6280): 1433–36. Campbell, Richmond. 1994. “The Virtues of Feminist Empiricism.” Hypatia 9 (1): 90–115. Croson, Rachel. 2014. “Experimentally Testing Game Theory.” In Game Theory and Business Applications, edited by Kalyan Chatterjee and William Sanderson, 307–21. Berlin: Springer. Croson, Rachel, and Uri Gneezy. 2009. “Gender Differences in Preferences.” Journal of Economic Literature 47 (2): 448–74. Eckel, Catherine C., and Philip J. Grossman. 2008. “Men, Women and Risk Aversion: Experimental Evidence.” In Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, edited by Charles Plott and Vernon Smith, 1061–73. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Fourcade, Marion, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan. 2015. “The Superiority of Economists.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 89–114. Harding, Sandra. 1995. “Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective?” Feminist Economics 1 (1): 7–32. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy, and Amy J. Griffin. 2015. “Feminist Approaches to Multimethod and Mixed Methods Research: Theory and Praxis.” In Oxford Handbook of Multimethod and Mixed Methods Research Inquiry, edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and R. Burke Johnson. doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199933624.013.6. Intemann, Kristen. 2010. “25  Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia 25 (4): 778–96. Jacobsen, Joyce P. 2003. “Some Implications of the Feminist Project in Economics for Empirical Methodology.” In Toward a Feminist Philosophy in Economics, edited by Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper, 89–104. New York and London: Routledge. Jacobsen, Joyce P., Laurence M. Levin, and Zachary Tausanovitch. 2016. “Comparing Standard Regression Modeling to Ensemble Modeling: How Data Mining Software Can Improve Economists’ Predictions.” Eastern Economic Journal 42 (3): 387–98. Jacobsen, Joyce P., and Andrew E. Newman. 1997. “What Data Do Economists Use? The Case of Labor Economics and Industrial Relations.” Feminist Economics 3 (2): 127–30. Jacobsen, Joyce P., and Andrew E. Newman. 2003. “Do Women and Non-economists Add Diversity to Research in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics?” Eastern Economic Journal 29 (4): 575–91. Jefferson, Therese, Siobhan Austen, Rhonda Sharp, Rachel Ong, and Gill Lewin. 2014. “Mixed-methods Research: What’s in it for Economists?” Economic and Labour Relations Review 25 (2): 290–305. Longino, Helen E. 1987. “Can There Be A Feminist Science?” Hypatia 2 (3): 51–64. Lundberg, Shelly, and Jenna Stearns. 2019. “Women in Economics: Stalled Progress.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33 (1): 3–22. McCloskey, Donald. 1985. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Miller, Jane E., and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2008. “Economic Importance and Statistical Significance: Guidelines for Communicating Empirical Research.” Feminist Economics 14 (2): 117–49. Nelson, Julie A. 1995. “Feminism and Economics.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (2): 131–48. Nelson, Julie A. 2006. “Can We Talk? Feminist Economists in Dialogue with Social Theorists.” Signs 31 (4): 1051–74. Nelson, Julie A. 2018. Gender and Risk-Taking. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Redmount, Esther. 1995. “Toward a Feminist Econometrics.” In Out of the Margin: Feminist Perspectives on Economics, edited by Edith Kuiper and Jolande Sap, 216–22. London and New York: Routledge. Sent, Esther-Mirjam, and Irene van Staveren. 2019. “A Feminist Review of Behavioral Economic Research on Gender Differences.” Feminist Economics 25 (2): 1–35.

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Feminist use of quantitative methods Shurchkov, Olga, and Catherine C. Eckel. 2018. “Differences in Behavioral Traits and Labor Market Outcomes.” In Oxford Handbook on Women and the Economy, edited by Susan Averett, Laura Argys, and Saul Hoffman. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190628963.013.14. Tejani, Sheba. 2019. “What’s Feminist about Feminist Economics?” Journal of Economic Methodology 26 (2): 99–117. Woolley, Frances R. 1993. “The Feminist Challenge to Neoclassical Economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 17 (4): 485–500. Wu, Alice. 2018. “Gendered Language on the Economics Job Market Rumors Forum.” AEA Papers and Proceedings 108 (2): 175–79.

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14 FEMINIST USE OF QUALITATIVE/INTERPRETIVE METHODS Peregrine Schwartz-Shea

Introduction Examining the evolution of what has been published in Feminist Economics, Tejani (2019) finds the proportion of articles employing econometric methods has increased dramatically over the second half of the journal’s 20-year record (1995–2015). Even though the number of articles using “qualitative research strategies” doubled during the second period surveyed, “they constituted only 13 percent of the total articles published” (Tejani 2019, 107). Articles on theoretical and methodological issues also decreased significantly. Taking these two trends together, she concludes the “more radical methodological edge [that characterized the earlier period of the journal] seems to have been blunted” (Tejani 2019, 114). From my vantage point as an interpretive methodologist (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012), Tejani’s and others’ use of the “­qualitative-quantitative” binary in economics has conflated elements of research practice— philosophy of science, methodology, and method—that need careful sorting. Such sorting can clarify the distinct possibilities available to those who use qualitative evidence, which can assist feminist economics to recover its “radical methodological edge.” The implicit premise of the qualitative-quantitative binary is that evidence is independent of scholarly activity. This premise hides the complex ways in which research questions—and the very form of those questions—logically imply kinds of evidence. What is evidence for any particular research project is constituted, in part, by how the research question is formulated. Consider three questions: What are the economic determinants of intimate partner violence in the states of India? How do Indian women understand the intimate partner violence used against them? Why do women in the Indian state of Kerala experience a lower rate of intimate partner violence than women in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu? The first question suggests a quantitative data set including, for example, poverty rates, with states as the unit of analysis. The second focuses on the meaningmaking activities of women in India, including those with whom they interact in various settings; evidence of any form (e.g., discourses among elites, educational materials, interviews) is analyzed in terms of human meaning-making. The third question implies a comparative case study of two states, examined either contemporaneously or over time, but without a single unit of analysis to organize relevant evidence, for example, legal documents, interviews, news reports. This question might be studied either by focusing on discrete causal mechanisms or by treating the cases holistically. 138

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The qualitative-quantitative binary also obscures how questions arise out of philosophical conceptions of “the real” (ontology) and how we might know it (epistemology)—whether these conceptions are consciously embraced or buried in research practices or doctoral methods curricula. The first question here is likely to be formulated by those holding a positivist conception of the world, which dissects phenomena into variables later reassembled into models. The second is more likely to come from an interpretivist one, which emphasizes the holism of lived experience, that is, meaning-in-context (Thomas 2011). The third could come from either orientation. I examine how qualitative evidence has been used within feminist economics and then review two research traditions that use qualitative evidence: a positivist one, employing cases to uncover causal mechanisms, and an interpretivist one that positions the meaning-making practices of human actors at the center of scientific explanation. These distinctive traditions are erased by the quantitative-qualitative binary that focuses attention solely on evidentiary forms.

The use of qualitative evidence in feminist economics Literature using qualitative evidence in economics is scant—an unsurprising state of affairs. Economists are not trained in data generation, relying on quantitative data sets produced by others (Basole and Ramnarian 2016). And methodology is understood in terms of choosing data analytic techniques appropriate to quantitative data, as taught in foundational doctoral courses in econometrics. Generally, with no economics courses mentioning qualitative evidence or devoted to methods of generating and analyzing it, graduate students interested in qualitative evidence must access courses in other disciplines that will have their own traditions, which may not fit well with the students’ disciplinary needs or may omit particular analytic techniques for qualitative evidence that might prove especially useful to them. To locate economics research using qualitative evidence, I relied on surveys completed by Starr (2014) and Basole and Ramnarain (2016), both of which briefly describe, in tabular form, articles and books using qualitative evidence as well as the particular methods of data generation employed. Starr has a specific section on feminist economics. Another source was “IDEAS/ RePEc Aggregate Rankings for Journals,” in which I searched for variations on “qualitative” and “interpretive,” as well as specific kinds of methods, such as ethnography. IDEAS is the “largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics, [indexing] over 3,000,000 items of research” (available at https://ideas.repec.org/). I  conducted a close reading of a selection of articles published in Feminist Economics and, also, examined methodological articles and texts on how to think about and, to a lesser extent, do such research.

Studies using qualitative evidence Many, if not most, feminist economists using qualitative evidence have generated it themselves in the field, a striking contrast to mainstream economics where researchers use others’ data and rarely interact with human respondents (Berik 1997). And Feminist Economics, in particular, has played a key role in publishing field studies from around the world—Tanzania, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ecuador, among other locations. The research is theoretically sophisticated, evaluating how field evidence supports or challenges basic assumptions in economic theory. As one example, examining women’s direct selling in Ecuador, de Casanova’s (2011) evidence contradicted assumptions in existing literature that women’s market activities would be empowering. Yet feminist economics has come late to the use of qualitative evidence, so there is an opportunity to increase methodological sophistication. 139

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Based on Starr (2014), Basole and Ramnarain (2016) and the articles from Feminist Economics, the predominant method of data generation in the field is interviewing, characterized variously as semi-structured or in-depth, some studies including modifiers such as extended, cognitive, or group. A few publications indicate specific interview forms, such as key informant interviews or life histories. Focus groups are also a significant way to generate qualitative evidence, and there are occasional mentions of case study method or analysis of documents. The meaning of “ethnography” or “ethnographic evidence” is not always clear from feminist economists’ descriptions of what they are doing. In some studies, “ethnography” is used as anthropologists or sociologists would, that is, indicating observation (with some degree of participation) for a specified time in a field site or sites. In other articles, going to the field, perhaps a country or a number of cities, to conduct interviews or focus groups is treated as “ethnographic data” even though there appears to be no formal observational component. The confusion may be due to the fact that an ethnography of a particular site, where the primary emphasis is on observations recorded through fieldnotes, also typically includes interviews and examination of documents. However, it is not helpful to equate interview studies conducted in the field with ethnography because the comparative advantage of the latter is observation of social actors in situ. Interviews of any form, as well as focus groups, produce “self-report” data, what individuals think they do, their “espoused values,” in contrast to what they actually do, their “enacted values.” Ethnographic observations can reveal gaps between the espoused values of social actors and the values they enact in their conduct. The extent of that gap is relevant to public policy, where, for example, the representations by a meat inspector in an interview may differ from his actual practices on the slaughterhouse floor. Loconto’s (2015) research in Tanzania demonstrates this point in the private sector. Middle managers and farm workers reported that gender was no longer important in the assignment of job tasks, as in the past, but her observations of gender ratios on factory floors and among management teams contradicted participants’ representations. Another pattern is that feminist economists do not always explain how they record the evidence (say, fieldnotes versus audio files) or how they analyze it. It may be that a systematic analysis has been done, but the form of the analysis was rarely indicated nor were there citations to methods literature. Instead, authors move directly to representation of the evidence in relation to economic theory. For example, the most common form of representing interview evidence is through direct quotations, either in block form or less lengthy ones woven directly into the researcher’s description of findings. This approach has advantages. Through the presentation of actual women’s voices in their publications, researchers demonstrate the feminist priority to include women in economic research. Kabeer and Khan (2014) quote directly from women in Afghanistan, many of them illiterate, thereby including the views of some of the least powerful actors in that society. Still, in general, in these reviewed articles there seems to be a lack of familiarity with the myriad techniques of data analysis that have been developed to deal with textual evidence, techniques that can reveal different dimensions of human meaning-making (interpretivist-qualitative) or causal connections among events (positivist-qualitative). Finally, feminist economists rarely reflect on how their identities influenced the research process (e.g., facilitated their access) or findings, even though author affiliation and family name give clues, perhaps unreliable ones. Including such detail in published articles would help economists understand what is involved in these research traditions. Moreover, it would also draw attention to the fact that all data generation begins with some human being’s interaction with the social world, whether it is a port official counting the shipping containers to produce data for tracking international trade, the census worker employing a structured instrument to count people, 140

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a UN committee writing a policy document, or a researcher recording fieldnote observations of factory processes. As feminist scholars have long recognized, it is essential to examine who produces evidence. The decisions made about evidentiary forms are ontological ones about what gets included and excluded from economic phenomena, from the GDP to the household. Ramnarain (2016) points out how her fieldwork data (generated in Nepal) provide evidence that cannot be obtained through typical household surveys, which ignore cultural assumptions that make women’s agency invisible. More information on Ramnarain’s own scholarly identity would be consistent with the feminist philosophers of science she cites, revealing, for example, how she negotiated differences in social class or religion. Over time, such information can help the feminist economic community unpack how researchers’ intersectional identities affect access and analysis. The contribution of feminist economic scholarship is clear. A  next step to developing research practice is greater awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of particular forms of qualitative evidence, accompanied by more detailed and consistent reporting of methods of data generation and researcher identity. Another area to be explored is the multitude of data analytic techniques for mining the various genres of textual evidence. Many possibilities can be considered depending on researchers’ orientation—positivist or interpretivist.

Methodological reflections on how to do “qualitative research” in economics Because economic studies using qualitative evidence are relatively rare, so, too, is methodological literature that engages why and how to do such research. Such work has occurred primarily in articles. I identified only two texts, Coast’s 2017 Qualitative Methods for Health Economics and Radović-Marković and Alecchi’s (2017) Qualitative Methods in Economics. All of the analyses are tied to the qualitative-quantitative binary. The use of the binary is problematic because it means authors either conflate the positivistqualitative and the interpretivist-qualitative traditions or erase one or the other. Pickbourn and Ramnarain (2016) conflate the two traditions. They begin by referencing Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) widely known Naturalistic Inquiry, a “qualitative approach” from education that is philosophically interpretivist, drawing from the long-standing philosophical traditions of phenomenology (lived experience) and hermeneutics (embracing iterative sense-making, a technique originally derived from biblical interpretation, as in the “hermeneutic circle”). They then move to a detailed discussion comparing the “techniques of qualitative and quantitative research” from a 2006 article by Mahoney and Goertz, which outlines only the traditions of positivistqualitative research in political science. The distinctive philosophical orientations and research practices of these two traditions are not made clear in this article. Starr (2014) follows a similar pattern, citing educator Yvonne S. Lincoln and a coeditor’s interpretivist approach to qualitative evidence and then featuring the work of political scientists and sociologists using positivistqualitative methods. Interpretivism as a scientific philosophy is recognized rarely in the economics literature with two exceptions. First, Lavoie (2011) analyzes the interpretive dimensions of economic explanation, connecting philosophers in the hermeneutic tradition to von Mises and Hayek. His student, Chamlee-Wright (2011), knows the hermeneutic literature behind “interpretive social science” yet still seeks to operationalize it using “qualitative methods”; she identifies methods, such as ethnography, without clarifying that they may be used from a positivist philosophical position as well as an interpretivist one. Second, Coast’s 2017 book recognizes interpretive methods but fails to explicitly name positivist-qualitative ones. 141

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Such conflation or erasure is common wherever the qualitative-quantitative binary is dominant. Obermann, Scheppe, and Glazinski (2013) do not acknowledge the interpretivistqualitative possibility and, conversely, Jemna (2016) writes about “qualitative research” that is exclusively interpretivist. The study by Radović-Marković and Alecchi (2017) is contradictory in its conflation of terms. To avoid such problems requires clarifying the relationships between philosophy, methodology, and method, spelling out the contrasting philosophical stances of the two traditions, and making clear how those stances translate into methods decisions.

Revealing what the quantitative-qualitative binary hides Table 14.1 presents terminology to distinguish contrasting forms of research on the qualitative side of the binary. In philosophy of science, contrasting ontological and epistemological assumptions can be combined in ways that constitute positivist or interpretivist philosophies. Methods can be divided, at least conceptually, into stages of data generation and data analysis, although sometimes they are combined as in the iterative approach used in grounded theory. Methodology concerns whether the methods used enact the philosophical underpinnings, implicit or explicit, of the researcher (i.e., applied philosophy). Placing methodology between philosophy and methods emphasizes that it is the “connective tissue” between self-conscious philosophical conceptions and pragmatic decisions made before research begins (design), during the conduct of research, and in the write-up. Positivism and interpretivism make distinctive combinations of philosophical assumptions. Regarding epistemology, the objectivist assumption of positivism presumes that objectivity of the scientist is possible and desirable, and that scientists can and should set aside their personal values and identities in the conduct of research. The key concern is “bias,” and particular research practices are meant to guard against it. In contrast, an interpretivist philosophical position posits that scientists are inevitably situated in societal structures—thereby affecting the questions asked and how the research is conducted with possible effects on conclusions drawn. Instead of procedures to guard against bias, the relevant practice is reflexivity: active reflection, during the research and research write-up phases, on how identity affects the study. As Power (2004) explains, revealing standpoints and critically examining them is a research community’s responsibility; what Harding (1993) calls “strong objectivity” can be achieved at the level of the research community when researchers admit and theorize their identities rather than deny them. Regarding ontology, positivists and interpretivists see language in contrasting ways. A realist ontology treats language as a labeling system for the world “out there.” In Shakespearean terms, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. As Berkovich (2018, 2069) expresses it, “the positivist viewpoint ‘presupposes that there is some underlying, true, unequivocal reality’ ”—implying that language is a “doily” lying atop “reality.” A constructivist ontology understands language as not only reflecting but actively constructing the social world, deeply intertwined with material practice such that language is not possible without practice and practice is not possible without language. And differences in meaning are consequential: whether the estate tax is understood as an “inheritance tax” or a “death tax” affects its political legitimacy; conceiving of immigrants as “illegal” or “undocumented” shapes their treatment; and depicting the public as “citizens” or “consumers” motivates the design and delivery of public services. Conceptualizing methodology as applied philosophy clarifies that a method of data generation can be used in different ways with consequential effects for the evidence so produced. An

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Qualitative/interpretive methods Table 14.1  Philosophy, methodology, method: Revealing the options on the qualitative side of the binary Philosophy of Science

Positivism

Interpretivism

Epistemology

Objectivist • Identity as a contaminant Realist • Language a mirror Interview: Reduce bias of researcher identity (objectivity) Observation: isolate variables and reassemble as model(s) Existing text: Transform into numerical evidence if possible

Interpretivist • Identity as a resource Constructivist • Language constructs Interview: Theorize researcher identity (reflexivity) Observation: In situ to preserve meaning-incontext; holism Existing text: Preserve the genre of the evidence

Similar to interpretivist but enacted in different ways Self-report data: Surveys (open-ended and close-ended for quantitative evidence), interviews, focus groups, life histories, etc.

Similar to positivist but enacted in different ways Self-report data: Interviews, group interviews, life histories, etc.; surveys not used because they strip away context; focus groups eschewed as not in situ Observation of conduct in situ, with degrees of participation; recorded in field notes, with reflexivity and thick description of context for holistic account Existing text/records: Documents, pamphlets, legislation, etc.

Ontology Methodology as applied philosophy

Methods Data generation

Observation of conduct in field notes, without reflexivity; guided by a priori variables thinking

Existing text/records: Documents, pamphlets, legislation, etc. Data analysis • Numerical

• Word

Counts, percentages Statistical when possible, whether frequentist or Bayesian Case analysis, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), process tracing

Counts, percentages

Many techniques, e.g., metaphor analysis, deconstruction; case study Fit to genre of textual data

interview-based project conducted from a positivist position seeks to neutralize the researcher’s identity because in that approach it is deemed a contaminant that biases research, moving it away from the ideal of objectivity. In contrast, an interview-based project conducted from an interpretive stance uses reflexivity to analyze how researcher identity interacts with interviewee identity, understanding interview evidence as co-generated by both parties (Fujii 2018). Similarly, contrasting methodological enactments can be spelled out for observation and for treatment of existing text as shown in Table 14.1. The case study method, too, can be applied in positivist ways, as implied by the research question comparing two Indian states’ different rates of intimate partner

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violence. Interpretivists who use the case study method seek a holistic sense of why actors conduct themselves in varying ways in relation to the different case contexts (Schaffer 2018). Recognizing these distinctive orientations matters given the enthusiasm for “mixed methods” research. If methods are mixed within either a positivist or an interpretivist philosophy, then coherence is not a problem. Interpretivist-qualitative ethnographers have long drawn on a mix of interviews, observation, and documents (Pachirat 2018). Similarly, positivist-qualitative case study researchers draw on a multitude of sources, from not only numerical evidence where available but also interviews and documents (Mahoney and Goertz 2006). However, the coherence of a mixed-methodologies (i.e., applied philosophies) study can be challenged. How, or why, would a researcher simultaneously endorse a realist and a constructivist ontology of language? How, or why, would one simultaneously claim that researcher identity is irrelevant (applying a plethora of methods to avoid bias) and that it is inevitable (therefore actively reflecting on how identity affects the research)? Most importantly, the choice of philosophy matters because, as Table 14.1 emphasizes, methodology as applied philosophy means conducting research in distinctive ways. These are the sorts of difficulties that the continued use of qualitative-quantitative binary creates.

Choosing a tradition Feminists using either a positivist-qualitative or an interpretivist-qualitative approach will, likely, still share goals, particularly the desire to get closer to phenomena than economists who use quantitative data sets. It is getting close—to bodies, practices and processes, emotions, and world views—that forces a reckoning with the sort of abstract theory and associated statistical methods that disappear human beings from social science. But which tradition should they choose?

The positivist-qualitative option Given their disciplinary training, feminist economists will find much in this approach that will feel familiar. Consider Brady and Collier’s (2010) volume—Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards—in which they assume a shared philosophical position with quantitative researchers, which allows them to treat methods as simply “tools,” that is, different only because the evidence is qualitative instead of quantitative. As they state (2010, 315), “caseoriented researchers certainly think in terms of variables, but their attention is strongly focused on detailed contextual knowledge of specific cases and on how variables interact with the context of these cases.” Thinking in terms of variables is a good practical indicator of a positivist stance. (Interpretivists do not think in terms of variables but in terms of the experiences of those studied.) As their title attests, as positivist-qualitative researchers they share standards with positivist-quantitative researchers—concerns such as adequate operationalization (i.e., validity and reliability), causal inference, and specification of the intended scope of theory. Brady and Collier’s volume is an exemplar showcasing that positivist-qualitative methodologists have invented ways to (a) discipline their “messy evidence” (i.e., not sharing units of analysis) and (b) reimagine statistical ideas to apply to such evidence—for example, controlled comparison, which includes a “matching of cases on selected variables” (2010, 322). This methodological literature has developed a rich set of methods for researchers who cannot quantify their evidence sufficiently to apply statistics. They argue for the superiority of their approach for certain purposes such as the identification of causal mechanisms, demonstrating that quantitative approaches cannot unpack the substance of what happens between the independent and dependent variables in satisfactory ways. 144

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For feminist researchers trained as economists, the advantages of this tradition include a less steep learning curve and the opportunity to do coherent mixed-methods research. Key methods to complement econometric analysis include case studies (involving archival sources, interviewing, documents, observational field research), with case selection methods literature for design and, for analysis, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) pioneered by Ragin (1987) and process tracing. Process tracing involves a set of decision-making criteria for deciding the strength of particular pieces of evidence in a causal chain (Beach 2017). Because of shared philosophical background and standards for assessing research, as well as the emphasis on understanding causal mechanisms in ways not possible with quantitative methods, these positivist-qualitative methods may be especially appealing ways of impacting mainstream economic knowledge, if so desired.

The interpretivist-qualitative option For scholars of feminist economics, this approach enables understanding of meaning-in-­ context. Pujol (1997, 119) used ethnographic methods to address her research question, “How did the agents of implementation [e.g., managers] understand the concepts of pay equity and of the gendered wage gap?” Such understanding can be ascertained via interview methods (Fujii 2018), but it is interpretive ethnographic observation that enables the contrast between espoused and enacted values. In a methodological piece advocating for “relations” as a key unit of analysis for economics, Zelizer recommends ethnographic methods to get at “participants’ variable understandings of the process” (2012, 165) of economic exchange and the “construction of meaning and the organization of categories” essential to understanding “all forms of economic activity” (2012, 149). Interpretivists enact what they understand as the superiority of their methods, with ­meanings-connected-to-context as essential to all research projects. Advantages include surfacing local knowledge, ways of reading silences in evidence, and identification of tacit assumptions that underpin cooperation or conflict. Methodological innovations include new conceptualizations of both causation and generalizability and development of standards of evaluation appropriate to interpretive purposes (for an overview, see Schwartz-Shea 2014). As one example, the meaning and practice of “generalizable findings” can be flipped. Providing thick description of a study context makes it possible for potential users to compare that context to their own, thereby enabling users to assess whether research results will actually work for them. A final advantage is interpretivism’s philosophical consistency with the five tenets of SPA, as outlined by Power (2004). First, SPA rejects an essentialist understanding of gender, endorsing a view of language not as a neutral labeling system but as an “active forc[e] shaping” society (Power 2004, 6, citing Gordon and Fraser 1994), a stance consistent with the constructivist ontology of interpretivism. This stance encompasses the feminist concept of intersectionality, that gender is constructed and experienced via class, race, and other major social identities. Second, the SPA view of human society as “interdependent and interconnected human actors . . . rather than the [the sum of] isolated individual[s]” (Power 2004, 4) fits well with the interpretivist understanding of societal systems as intersubjectively constructed through language and practice. Third, SPA sees ethical judgments as integral to economic analysis because theory cannot be neatly divided into positive and normative analyses (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2016, 65). Interpretivists too reject the positivist fact/value dichotomy (the possibility of an ethics-free, value-free “neutral” theory) because they recognize the constructivist nature of scientific language and emphasize reflexivity, a research practice that accords with Harding’s (1993) epistemological conception of “strong objectivity.” Fourth, the SPA criterion of well-being as a key indicator of economic success connects to lived experience—a concept which comes from the 145

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phenomenological tradition that is a primary source of interpretive methodology. Fifth, SPA attends to power, including the agency of actors. It is the case that interpretive methodology has been criticized as insensitive to power, but Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012, 43) argue that application of interpretive methods “perforce engages power dynamics” because it attends to the immediate context faced by social actors. And while not all interpretive scholars center actor agency in their work (e.g., some Foucauldians), most take it as an integral part of a constructivist ontology in that individuals “make” reality on a daily basis through their language and activities. In sum, SPA aligns with an interpretivist philosophy and its associated interpretive methods. The gestalt switch required by interpretivism may require a steep learning curve, but the charge to understand women’s lived experience and the importance of observation-in-context to many areas of economics can motivate the investment. The incredible range of available analytic techniques—from discourse analysis to semiotics—may stimulate creativity in topic areas that have only been approached and analyzed in ways consistent with positivist assumptions. Methods citations for such techniques are too numerous to list, but for those beginning a study Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012) give methodological advice for designing an interpretive project.

Conclusion Feminist researchers using qualitative evidence have made important contributions to economics. By rejecting the quantitative-qualitative binary and recognizing both positivist-qualitative and interpretivist-qualitative possibilities, scholars of feminist economics are poised to develop their own methodological traditions. One potential area of shared interest is in research that studies the construction of indicators used to track social problems—for example, sex trafficking and migration. Interpretive researchers study such measures to ask which aspects of the phenomenon get emphasized, which ignored, and who decides (e.g., Merry 2016). This shared interest in indicators could be an area for building conversations among scholars of feminist economics about how to develop community support for both positivist-qualitative and interpretive methods, so that researchers need no longer go it alone as Piore (2006) found necessary. Building such community might be part of reclaiming the radical edge that Tejani worries has been blunted. Although nurturing an interpretive community would be challenging, Barker (2003, 104, original emphasis) articulates an understanding of economics that emphasizes why interpretivist approaches, although still rare, hold considerable promise: “economics is best understood as a discourse . . . economics is a system of meanings, categories, and beliefs, articulated and supported by various practices and institutions.” An emphasis on meaning-making actors is precisely what interpretive methodologies and methods provide.

References Barker, Drucilla K. 2003. “Emancipatory for Whom?” Feminist Economics 9 (1): 103–8. Basole, Amit, and Smita Ramnarian. 2016. “Qualitative and Ethnographic Methods in Economics.” In Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Heterodox Economics, edited by Frederic S. Lee and Bruce Cronin, 136–64. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Beach, Derek. 2017. “Process-Tracing Methods in Social Science.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedias of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria S. Floro. 2016. Gender, Development, and Globalization, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Berik, Günseli. 1997. “The Need for Crossing the Method Boundary in Economic Research.” Feminist Economics 3 (2): 121–25.

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Qualitative/interpretive methods Berkovich, Izhak. 2018. “Beyond Qualitative/Quantitative Structuralism: The Positivist Qualitative Research and The Paradigmatic Disclaimer.” Quantity & Quality 52 (5): 2063–77. Brady, Henry E., and David Collier, eds. 2010 [2004 first ed.]. Rethinking Social Inquiry, 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Chamlee-Wright, Emily. 2011. “Operationalizing the Interpretive Turn.” The Review of Austrian Economics 24 (2): 157–70. Coast, Joanna, ed. 2017. Qualitative Methods for Health Economics. London: Roman and Littlefield. de Casanova, Erynn Masi. 2011. “Multiplying Themselves.” Feminist Economics 17 (2): 1–29. Fujii, Lee Ann. 2018. Interviewing in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge. Gordon, Linda, and Nancy Fraser. 1994. “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (2): 309–36. Harding, Sandra. 1993. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology.” In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 49–82. New York: Routledge. IDEAS/RePEc Aggregate Rankings for Journals. Accessed January 11, 2020. https://ideas.repec.org/. Jemna, Ligia Muntean. 2016. “Qualitative and Mixed Research Methods in Economics.” Journal of Public Administration, Finance and Law 9: 154–67. Kabeer, Naila, and Ayesha Khan. 2014. “Cultural Values or Universal Rights? Women's Narratives of Compliance and Contestation in Urban Afghanistan.” Feminist Economics 20 (3): 1–24. Lavoie, Don. 2011. “The Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” The Review of Austrian Economics 24 (2): 91–128. Lincoln, Yvonna S., and Egon G. Guba. 1985. Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Loconto, Allison. 2015. “Can Certified-Tea Value Chains Deliver Gender Equality in Tanzania?” Feminist Economics 21 (3): 191–215. Mahoney, James, and Gary Goertz. 2006. “A Tale of Two Cultures.” Political Analysis 14 (3): 227–49. Merry, Sally E. 2016. The Seductions of Quantification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Obermann, Konrad, Jasper Scheppe, and Bernd Glazinski. 2013. “More Than Figures?” Health Economics 22: 253–57. Pachirat, Timothy. 2018. Among Wolves. New York: Routledge. Pickbourn, Lynda, and Smita Ramnarian. 2016. “Separate or Symbiotic?” In Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Heterodox Economics, edited by Frederic S. Lee and Bruce Cronin, 73–134. ­Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Piore, Michael. 2006. “Qualitative Research?” European Management Review 3 (1): 17–23. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. Pujol, Michèle. 1997. “Introduction.” Feminist Economics 3 (2): 119–20. Radović-Marković, Mirjana, and Beatrice Avolio Alecchi. 2017. Qualitative Methods in Economics. New York: Routledge. Ragin, Charles C. 1987. The Comparative Method. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Ramnarain, Smita. 2016. “Unpacking Widow Headship and Agency in Post-Conflict Nepal.” Feminist Economics 22 (1): 80–105. Schaffer, Frederic C. 2018. “Two Ways to Compare.” Qualitative & Multi-Method Research 16 (1): 15–20. Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine. 2014. “Judging Quality” In Interpretation and Method, edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, 120–46. Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe. Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine, and Dvora Yanow. 2012. Interpretive Research Design. New York: Routledge. Starr, Martha A. 2014. “Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Research in Economics.” Journal of Economic Surveys 28 (2): 238–64. Tejani, Sheba. 2019. “What’s Feminist about Feminist Economics?” Journal of Economic Methodology 26 (2): 99–117. Thomas, Gary. 2011. “Models of the Whole.” In How to Do Your Case Study, 45–60. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zelizer, Vivana A. 2012. “How I  Became A  Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean?” Politics & Society 40 (2): 145–74.

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15 TIME ALLOCATION AND TIME-USE SURVEYS Maria S. Floro

Introduction How people use their time underpins policy priorities globally. These priorities include reduction of women’s unpaid work burden; meeting the care needs of children, sick and the elderly; access to decent work; attainment of healthy work-life balance; and improvement in well-being. They are addressed in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 namely the attainment of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (Razavi, this volume). Target 5.4 of SDG 5 explicitly calls for recognizing and valuing unpaid care and domestic work. Analysis of time-use data can also help in the attainment of SDGs 3 and 8, enabling governments to address them systematically. The priorities given to the promotion of healthy lives and well-being for all (Goal 3), and that of full and productive employment and decent work for all (Goal 8) require strategies that benefit from understanding the individual time resources needed and the behavioral changes involved. In particular, time-use information can help illuminate the continued presence of gender gaps in the labor market, and gender norms that assign unpaid work to women. Persistent gender differences in time allocation signal the unequal bargaining power between genders and maintain the cycle of gender inequality. The measurement of unpaid work within households and in communities can inform policymakers about the time constraints individuals face. Time-use information can help reveal the full extent of economic activities performed by women, men, girls and boys, including unpaid household and care work. Women in particular incur the time cost and experience the strains of performing multiple roles. Thus, any inquiry into the nature of well-being involves not only knowing about people’s incomes but also about their time use. Time-use data can also illuminate the impact of social stratification, income and wealth on people’s capacity to develop their capabilities and to meet basic needs. They can reveal time-based coping strategies such as reducing sleep and multi-tasking when time squeezed. While care work is crucial in the functioning of the economy and the reproduction of societies, that most of it is unpaid has made it statistically invisible to policymakers. From a policy perspective, time-use data are crucial for broadening our understanding of care and its interconnections with labor supply, productivity, growth and inequalities (Lofgren, Fontana, and Kim 2018). It is now imperative to develop a comprehensive care policy, given the ageing 148

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of populations and unmet demand for care sometimes made visible in the form of abandoned/ homeless and lonely frail elderly and latchkey children (King et al. 2021). The collection of data on unpaid work using time-use surveys has paved the way for the construction of the household production satellite accounts that accompany the official System of National Accounts (SNA). The creation of satellite accounts of household production in countries such as Australia, Colombia, South Korea, Mexico, United Kingdom, Finland, and Norway, permits the generation of “augmented” estimates of GNP that include the monetary value of unpaid work in households in the measurement of the aggregate economy (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015). Thus time-use data are necessary to our understanding of well-being and the scope of economic activities and can inform policy regarding the time-based constraints and challenges in attaining the SDG goal of gender equality. They are vital for depicting the unequal work burden and for identifying workers not captured by labor force surveys. Hence it is important to improve time use data collection and analysis, given the new challenges in capturing substantial changes in life patterns.

Time allocation, gender roles, and gender inequality within the household Time-use data enable us to measure the labor time contributed by household members in not only all forms of work but also the use of time for socialization, cultural, civic, religious, and political participation, education, and self-care (rest and leisure). A rich body of research has documented the amount of time that people spend in unpaid work and its unequal distribution by gender. The amount of unpaid work time varies widely across countries. Based on recent time-use data for 64 countries, Charmes (2018) shows that for men, the average time spent on unpaid work ranges from 200 minutes per day to as low as 18 minutes in Cambodia (ILO 2018, Figure 2.1 panel B, p. 45), while women spend on average 265 minutes per day on unpaid work, which is more than 3 times the time spent by men (83 minutes on average). Unpaid work burden is particularly heavy for women and children in households that lack access to basic services such as medical care, sanitation services, safe water supply, and electricity (Chakraborty 2005; Connelly and Kimmel 2014; Terbish and Floro 2016). For example, the lack of adequate infrastructure providing safe water and sanitation services in Mongolia affects not only the health and well-being of men, women and children, but also the amount of time women and men spend in unpaid work. The analyses of the 2011 Mongolia TUS data indicate that members of households relying on water from public wells and rivers, spend significantly more time in gathering water (Terbish and Floro 2016; Rajeh 2019). Women and men spend an hour per day on average in 41.3  percent and 37.14  percent of Mongolian households, respectively (Rajeh 2019). Women’s time in chores that use water such as cooking and cleaning also increase. Demographic changes and family composition affect the amount of unpaid work. Presence of young children can substantially increase the time spent on childcare, while the presence of older daughters and grandparents can diffuse the work burden on mothers (Floro and Miles 2003; Liu, Dong, and Zheng 2010). Ageing population and the increase in dependency ratio in a growing number of countries raise concerns regarding provisioning of quality eldercare. The global population aged 60 years or older has more than doubled since 1980 and is expected to double again in 2050 (UN 2017). Already, many older people in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa are unable to perform essential tasks of daily life without the assistance of others; this occurs at a younger age compared to their counterparts in the Global North (WHO 149

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2015). In Ghana, more than 50 percent of people between the ages of 65 years and 75 years require some assistance with daily activities (Aboderin and Beard 2015). For those 75 years and older, the percentage jumps to more than 65 percent. Women’s unpaid care work time varies also by income status and the social and care policy context. In Nordic countries, the development of a welfare state has led to public provisioning of care services (Gálvez-Muñoz, Rodríguez-Modroño, and Domínguez-Serrano 2011). In countries where there is less public investment in care provisioning, for example, Italy and Spain, a considerable amount of care work among middle- and high-income households is shifted to the market and is performed mainly by low-waged, immigrant caregivers. Women in lower-income households on the other hand rely only on their own labor and those provided by relatives and neighbors. In the Global South, public sector provisioning remains largely absent, although there are regional/cross-country variations (Esquivel, this volume). Low policy priority accorded to childcare and eldercare and the prevailing belief is that care issues bear little relation to economic development. Care responsibilities rest overwhelmingly with female family and kin members, in line with customary gender roles and norms of familial obligations. That said, even time use data may not capture gender inequalities in sharing the workload accurately. For example, time devoted to childcare is significantly underestimated for three reasons. First, many time-use surveys do not collect data on overlapped or secondary activities even though multitasking of childcare or eldercare with other tasks often go hand in hand (Floro and Miles 2003; Folbre 2012; Suh and Folbre 2016). Women in particular usually perform two or more tasks simultaneously for example, cooking while watching a toddler in his crib (Bittman 1991; Floro and Miles 2003; Suh and Folbre 2016). Childcare is a heterogeneous activity and time-use information can provide better estimations including supervisory childcare, or the amount of time spent by a caregiver in the form of passive or “on call” availability (Folbre and Yoon 2007; Suh and Folbre 2016). Using 2003–2012 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data, Suh and Folbre (2016) found that on average, an individual aged 18 years and older spends 14 hours per week on supervisory childcare, which increased the estimated value of their nonmarket household production by 57 percent. Second, caring tasks are deeply embedded in social norms and gendered identities. Accordingly, female respondents may not consider care as work in the same way as farming or street food vending. Some tasks such as supervisory care are easily overlooked and therefore not reported in time-use surveys, probably because women view supervisory care not as work but rather a form of responsibility (Folbre 2018). A third reason involves translation issues and accompanying interpretation of the term care work making it difficult to capture all care activities such as playing with children, feeding the sick, taking an elderly parent to church, etc. Unpaid work burden and its gendered division change in response to labor market conditions, policy reforms and other factors such as urbanization, migration, and divorce rates. Recessions and financial crises can affect the level and distribution of unpaid work within the household (Floro 1995; Berik and Kongar 2013; Connelly and Kongar 2017). Multi-period time-use data can reveal changes in time allocation. Kan, Sullivan, and Gershuny (2011) shows that while large differences persist in men’s and women’s time in paid and unpaid work, these have converged between the 1960s and 1990s. These trends however can easily reverse. Craig, Mullan, and Blaxland (2010) use 1992, 1997, and 2005 Australian Time Use Survey data to demonstrate that the gender convergence in Australia seems to have stopped and has taken a reversal between 1997 and 2006. They attribute the reversal to the government’s adoption of labor market deregulation and the spread of “long hours culture,” which resulted in a rise in men’s paid work hours. 150

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The measurement of women’s and men’s total work burden provides insights into their wellbeing. The length of a working day, the amount of leisure, rest, and sleep, and the manner one balances work and life provide vital information about their quality of life. Chronic and severe time pressures have serious implications for one’s health and functioning (Zuzanek 1998; Floro and Miles 2003). Time-use data reveal the constraints of women who are both time poor (overworked) and income poor. Time-use researchers and feminist economists have developed the concepts of time poverty and work intensity or the performance of two tasks at the same time (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015; Bardasi and Wodon 2010; Arora 2015). Persons who are “time squeezed” are likely to cope by multi-tasking or performing secondary work activities in conjunction with another (primary) activity, such as childminding and cooking (Roldan 1985; Floro and Pichetpongsa 2010). Not only do they work long hours but also their work intensity per hour is high. Work intensity can lead to stress and ill-health (Floro 1995). Studies on home-based workers in Mexico, Canada, Spain, and Thailand show that long hours of work, particularly with prolonged periods or high levels of work intensity, have adverse effects on women’s health. In Canada, women’s long hours of unpaid work, particularly eldercare and housework, contribute to their higher levels of stress compared to men (MacDonald, Phipps, and Lethbridge 2005). Floro and Pichetpongsa (2010) study home-based workers in Bangkok’s slum communities and find that for poor women, their labor is the only resource they have to meet their households’ subsistence needs, but this is often achieved at a significant cost to their health and well-being. Research on time-related measures of poverty and well-being brought attention to issues such as long workweeks and the need for a healthy work-life balance. In France, the legal workweek has been reduced in 2000 from 39 hours to 35 hours. The South Korean government introduced a labor law in July 2018 cutting the workweek from 68 hours to 52 hours. Time use research also promoted calls by feminist economists for public investment in childcare and long-term care insurance (de Henau et al. 2019). In Scotland, the Scottish Government has passed the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 that provides 600 hours of free Early Learning Childcare available for all three and four-year-olds and eligible two-year-olds (Kidner, Marsh, and Hudson 2014). Women’s unpaid work burden affects their availability for paid work and their position in the labor market. The principal reason given by working-age women around the world for being outside the labor force is unpaid care work (ILO 2018). Moreover, unpaid care work remains one of the key constraints to women taking on better quality jobs. The prevalence of women in part-time work for example, is linked to their other responsibilities, especially childcare. Women with care responsibilities are also more likely to be self-employed and to work in the informal economy; they are less likely to have access to pension and health-care benefits. Labor force participation and type of market work seem to be directly related to women’s but not men’s unpaid work activities. Men’s weekly hours of unpaid work vary little across stages of their lifecycle. A reduction in men’s paid work hours generally results in greater leisure time, so men literally can choose between (paid) work and leisure (Bittman and Pixley 1997; Floro and Komatsu 2011). These time-use patterns demonstrate the intrinsic link between the unequal gender division of unpaid labor and persistent gender inequalities in labor markets.

Time-use surveys: current status and directions for improvement Time-use survey data are the principal source for measuring work that is outside the production boundaries of SNA, including care work, domestic chores, unpaid training and volunteer work. Statistics Norway did one of the first estimates of unpaid household work in 1912 (Aslaksen and 151

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Koren 1996). In 1924, the USSR undertook the first systematic collection of data to measure leisure time and community-oriented work (Juster and Stafford 1991). The Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) also collected time-use data in the 1920s, to understand the impact of new technology on the time use of farm homemakers (Frazis and Stewart 2007). Time-use surveys were also carried out in other countries such as Sweden, Japan, and the US to address issues regarding work commute, use of mass media, and leisure time (Hirway 2010). In the Global South, the earliest time-use surveys were conducted by researchers in Gambia (1952), Burkina Faso (1967), and Peru (1966). Women’s rights movement worldwide in the seventies and eighties and the UN World Conferences on Women brought attention to the need for a full accounting of women’s economic contributions and the importance of unpaid work in human well-being and social reproduction (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015). These meetings provided opportunities for government representatives to discuss issues around unpaid work with feminist researchers and women’s groups and brought attention to the importance of time-use data for making this form of women’s economic contribution visible. Social scientists particularly time-use researchers in the Global North contributed to the development of tools for analyzing time-use data (Gershuny and Robinson 1988; Juster and Stafford 1991; Bittman 1991). The United Nations prepared the first International Classification of Activities for TimeUse Statistics (ICATUS) in 1997 to provide a set of guidelines for time-use measurement that is compatible with the SNA. However, different regions developed their own activity classification systems such as the Harmonized European Time Use Survey (HETUS) and the Classification for Time-Use Activities for Latin America and the Caribbean (CAUTAL) (Buvinic and King 2018). Time-use research since the early 2000s has helped address the difficulties of data collection. Efforts by national statistical agencies, the United Nations and time-use researchers have led to the construction of time-use surveys (TUS) that are suited to conditions in the Global South. A set of approaches has also evolved to deal with the complex task of measuring the value of unpaid work and to produce “a satellite account” that estimates the aggregate value of household production and can accompany a country’s SNA (Ahmad and Koh 2011; Folbre 2018). The efforts by feminist and time-use scholars, women’s groups, and the United Nations culminated in the landmark new definition of work and employment agreed by the 19th International Conference of Labor Statisticians (ICLS) in 2013. It delineates work as “any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use” (ILO 2013, 2). It also led to the revision of the ICATUS classification in 2016 in order to align it with the new ICLS definition of work, and to pave the way toward the harmonization of time-use data across countries (Buvinic and King 2018). The new work definition is a crucial step toward a broader notion of the economy to include all forms of work and hence the production of market and nonmarket goods and services. Time-use information can also identify SNA work activities that are difficult to capture in labor force surveys, such as subsistence production, informal employment, casual and other non-standard forms of employment, and document the disproportionate underestimation of women’s labor in these SNA activities (Hirway and Jose 2011; Floro and Komatsu 2011). Unlike the systematized SNA data collection, the frequency and method of TUS data collection vary across countries. While countries such as Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, the UK and the US have collected them on a periodic or regular basis in the last few decades, many South countries have only collected the data once or twice—for example, India, China, Ghana, Tanzania, and Thailand. Statistical agencies 152

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have to make various decisions when designing a TUS about the details regarding the activities performed (granularity of activities and simultaneity), when to ask (seasonality consideration), who to talk to, and how to treat those activities (richness of coding of responses). This results in varied sampling and survey designs, making the development of international standardization in data collection and the harmonization of time-use data difficult (Lentz et al. 2019). Time-use surveys are costly to conduct and budget constraints have compelled some South countries to adopt a less-costly approach that utilizes stylized questions on specific tasks, referred to as “short-tasks list” method (Esquivel 2008). For example, the 2001 Bolivian time-use survey listed only seven tasks. Similarly, Guinea and Nigeria used the interview-based recall method with a pre-listing of 9 and 14 activities respectively in their 2003 time use surveys. Common challenges to the collection of time-use data in the Global South include the absence or limited use of clocks at home, lower levels of literacy, and prevalence of non-standard forms of employment. Prevailing social norms and patterns of socialization can also lead to underreporting of certain activities. Women are often socialized to take on certain tasks such as childcare without question and they may not even be aware of performing them. For instance, the invisibility of care practices to women and communities engaging in such work in northern Malawi has produced gender-biased TUS data, leading to the under-reporting of care work (Lentz et al. 2019). South countries have designed their time-use surveys to suit their needs and budgets, aware that there are methodological trade-offs involved (Esquivel, Budlender, and Hirway 2008). Countries also differ in the mode of collecting time-use data. For example, South Africa, South Korea, India, and Mongolia have implemented a stand-alone TUS. Others attach the time-use modules to other national surveys including household surveys (Oman, Laos, Bolivia, Mexico, Tunisia), labor force surveys (Thailand, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Nepal), or the Living Standards Measurement Survey (Ghana, Guatemala, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone) (Esquivel, Budlender, and Hirway 2008; Buvinic and King 2018). More improvements to time-use data collection are necessary to support development of gender-aware economic and social policies. Folbre (2006, 2018), Hirway (2010, 2017), Suh and Folbre (2016), Buvinic and King (2018), Floro and King (2016), and Lentz et al. (2019) provide methodological suggestions to improve the survey design, sampling, and mode of collection. These include the following: •

•

•

•

Enabling the separation of a typical workday from holidays or weekends and to assess quality of time-use data, asking the following questions at the start of the diary: (1) Is this a typical or regular workday for you? (2) Do you own a watch, clock or use a mobile phone for keeping time? Making longitudinal panel data possible so that the impact of an economic shock or policy change can be assessed, collecting time-use data periodically and, to the extent possible, using the same households (that are nationally representative) for at least 50 percent of each survey sample; Enabling respondents to see activities that they usually overlook, improving the collection of secondary and tertiary activities by including the start and ending time of these activities and asking questions such as “was (were) your child(ren)/sick or disabled person/ frail elderly with you at the time?” Allowing countries to supplement TUS with their labor force survey data and utilize individual and household information collected in other surveys, designing TUS sampling so that it allows for mergers with other national surveys including labor force, household, and income and consumption/expenditures surveys; 153

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•

•

Carefully training interviewers to become aware of social norms, to help respondents record these activities that are mundane and invisible to the person reporting them, and to watch out for potential sources of response biases; Collecting information on the individual or household participation in government programs and initiatives such as early childhood program or poverty-reduction scheme in order to inform policy.

The United Nations also tries to find satisfactory solutions toward harmonization of time-use data across countries. Proponents argue that harmonized data standards would enhance international comparisons of time-based measures of poverty, gender inequality, and well-being. The Center for Time Use Research (CTUR) has produced a Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS) data that contained harmonized activity episode and context information and that encompassed over 60 data sets from 25 countries. The integration of time-use surveys especially from the Global South however has stalled, given the political exigencies and methodological variations in collecting time-use data. Moreover, some countries such as China, Australia, and Japan, have yet to allow the broader community of researchers to have access to their time use data. Data accessibility, without breach of confidentiality regarding the respondent’s identity, is crucial for generating time-use research that can inform policy.

Concluding remarks This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of TUS data in addressing SDG 5 aimed at promoting gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. TUS data are vital resources for accounting for women’s total economic and social contributions, depicting the unequal division of labor within households and its link with other forms of gender inequalities, identifying workers not captured by labor force surveys, and developing new measures of poverty and well-being. Methods for collecting time-use data have improved in the last few decades. However, more needs to be done. Demographic shifts and changing family formation brought about by decline in fertility rates, increase in life expectancies, migration, economic restructuring, and technological changes are bringing about substantial changes in life patterns, and their effects on gender equality have yet to be understood. How best to capture these changes in the use of time poses new challenges. These economic, social and demographic changes also highlight the importance of utilizing time-use information in engendering macroeconomic policies. Making unpaid care work visible in tools used for policy analysis such as macroeconomic models is an important step in ensuring that macroeconomic policies effectively promote gender equality. Gender-sensitive macroeconomic models can reveal the hidden costs and adverse consequences of policies in terms of unpaid work and at the same time show the feedback loops of public investments for care provisioning and social infrastructure on economic growth, distribution and welfare.

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Maria S. Floro Hirway, Indira. 2010. “Time-Use Surveys in Developing Countries: An Assessment.” In Unpaid Work and the Economy: Gender, Time Use and Poverty, edited by Rania Antonopoulos and Indira Hirway, 252–324. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. ———. 2017. Mainstreaming Unpaid Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirway, Indira, and Sunny Jose. 2011. “Understanding Women’s Work Using Time-Use Statistics: The Case of India.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 67–92. International Labour Organization (ILO). 2013. “Resolution Concerning Statistics of Work, Employment and Labour Underutilization.” October. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/--stat/documents/normativeinstrument/wcms_230304.pdf. _______. 2018. Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization. Juster, Thomas, and Frank Stafford. 1991. “The Allocation of Time: Empirical Findings, Behavioral ­Models, and Problems of Measurement.” Journal of Economic Literature 29 (2): 471–522. Kan, Man Yee, Oriel Sullivan, and Jonathan Gershuny. 2011. “Gender Convergence in Domestic Work: Discerning the Effects of Interactional and Institutional Barriers from Large-Scale Data.” Sociology 45 (2): 234–51. Kidner, Camilla, Richard Marsh, and Nicola Hudson. 2014. “Early Learning and Childcare.” SPICe ­Briefing Paper No. 14/26, The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh. King, Elizabeth, Hannah Randolph, Maria Floro, and Jooyeoun Suh. 2021. “Demographic, Health, and Economic Transitions and the Future Care Burden.” World Development 140 (April) https://doi. org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105371 Lentz, Erin, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Raj Patel, Laifolo Dakishoni, and Esther Lupafya. 2019. “The Invisible Hand That Rocks the Cradle: On the Limits of Time Use Surveys.” Development and Change 50 (2): 301–28. Liu, Lan, Xiao-yuan Dong, and Xiaoying Zheng. 2010. “Parental care and married women’s labor supply in urban China.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 169–92. Lofgren, Hans, Marzia Fontana, and Kijong Kim. 2018. “Caring for Young and Elderly in Aging East Asia: Stylized Policy Simulations in a Gendered General Equilibrium Model.” Paper presented at the Care Work and the Economy Project Annual Meeting, Berlin, October 21–23. MacDonald, Martha, Shelley Phipps, and Lynn Lethbridge. 2005. “Taking Its Toll: The Influence of Paid and Unpaid Work on Women’s Well-being.” Feminist Economics 11 (1): 63–94. Rajeh, Mai. 2019. “Three Essays on Female Labor Force Participation, Commitment to Work, and ­Intra-Household Time Utilization.” PhD Thesis, American University, Washington, DC. Roldan, Martha. 1985. “Industrial Outworking, Struggles for the Reproduction of Working Class ­Families and Gender Subordination.” In Beyond Employment: Household, Gender and Subsistenc, edited by N. ­Redclift and E. Mingione, 248–85. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Suh, Jooyeoun, and Nancy Folbre. 2016. “Valuing Unpaid Child Care in the US: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey.” Review of Income and Wealth 62 (4): 668–84. Terbish, Mungunsuvd, and Maria Floro. 2016. “How Does Public Infrastructure (Or Lack Thereof) Affect Time Use in Mongolia?” Asia-Pacific Population Journal 31 (2): 43–62. United Nations. 1996. “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.” Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing. UN Document No. A/CONF.177/20/REV.1., United Nations, New York. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2017. World Population Ageing. (ST/ESA/ SER.A/408). New York: United Nations. World Health Organization. 2015. World Report on Aging and Health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Zuzanek, Jiri. 1998. “Time Use, Time Pressure, Personal Stress, Mental Health, and Life Satisfaction from a Life Cycle Perspective.” Journal of Occupational Science 5 (1): 26–39.

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16 MEASUREMENT OF WELL-BEING Irene van Staveren

Introduction What we measure as well-being and how we measure it makes a difference. It matters for what we regard as economic activity and what not, what we see as worthwhile to include and what not, whose work we value and whose work not, and it matters for what we regard as important and as mere side effects of economic activity. Since the 1940s the dominant measure of well-being is gross domestic product (GDP). GDP raises all the issues mentioned earlier when one is prepared to see them through a feminist perspective, a social perspective, and an ecological one. Since feminist economics is concerned with an economy that provides livelihoods for all women, men, and children, today and in the future, feminist economists often have criticized GDP from all these aspects. GDP leaves out unpaid work, which is carried out largely by women (Waring 1988). Inclusion of unpaid work in measures of well-being will inevitably change how economic analysis and economic policy will treat work, time, and well-being (Himmelweit 1995; Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997). GDP per capita describes only an average income level per person. As Kuznets (1934) himself already recognized, it thereby ignores how it is actually distributed over social classes, ethnic groups, men and women, and other relevant categories. Others have argued that GDP is a misleading compass for our economy from a sustainability perspective. Daly and Cobb (1989) have explained how this mistaken role of GDP functions, by counting in activities that are bad for health and nature, such as tobacco production and energy production from coal, while ignoring resource depletion and climate change. Finally, GDP only measures market activity plus the money-value of public services (as government expenditures), which reinforces the capitalist nature of most of our economies. This limitation to marked-based monetary measurement also reinforces a focus on economic growth (an increase in GDP), rather than human development, which is measured in terms of expansion of capabilities. Utility is another widely criticized crude measure of well-being. Utility is sometimes measured as happiness, based on survey information about people’s subjective feeling of satisfaction with life (Layard 2005). The problem with happiness as well-being indicator is that it ignores objective dimensions of well-being (Stewart 2014). In particular, happiness measures suffer from the problem of adaptive preferences, where, in unequal societies, preferences of oppressed groups adapt to their second-class status. Sen (1990) has shown this to be the case for poor 157

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Indian women accepting their inferior nutrition status as compared to their husbands. Indeed, adaptive preferences seem to be reflected in reports of happiness: despite objective disadvantages in the economic position of women worldwide, women tend to report, on average, higher levels of life satisfaction than men (Zweig 2015). A third type of measure is a well-being index with multiple dimensions. The best known is the Human Development Index (HDI), which Sen helped to develop for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), based on his capability approach to development instead of the GDP approach. Conceptually, HDI operationalizes the three basic capabilities of the ability to lead a long and healthy life, the ability to be knowledgeable and the ability to have a decent standard of living. Statistically, these capabilities are proxied by life expectancy at birth, years of schooling, and GNI/capita, respectively. HDI has a clear advantage over GDP because it includes, next to income, education and life expectancy. And HDI is also reported as ­Inequality-adjusted HDI, corrected for inequality in its distribution over the population. However, HDI fails to address feminist (or environment-aware) critiques of GDP. Another multidimensional measure was more recently developed by the OECD: The Better Life dashboard with 11 dimensions not averaged into a single index (Durand 2015). The Better Life dashboard includes a key feminist concern in one of the 11 indicators, namely work-life balance. Feminist economists have contributed to the development of gender-aware measures of well-being in four different ways. First is by adapting or complementing general well-being measures for gender inequality and the gendered nature of economic activity. This has been done for the HDI with the Gender Inequality Index (GII—also published by UNDP) which includes health, empowerment and labor market. More recently a proposal has been made to complement the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) with qualitative information about what counts as real progress from a feminist, social and ecological perspective (Berik 2018). A second way for measuring well-being is through gender-disaggregated measures. Examples are women’s happiness versus men’s happiness, or women’s income versus men’s income. A  third type of measure focuses on the institutional constraints to women’s well-being. The OECD’s Social Institutions of Gender Inequality (SIGI) is a good example. Finally, a fourth type of genderaware well-being measure concerns broad-based measures consisting of many indicators. Examples are the Gender Equality Index (GEI) from the Institute of Social Studies, which reflects the social provisioning process, and World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index (GGGI), which is concerned with four key areas of well-being that could be targeted for policymaking. Conceptually, the four types of measures are quite different. One way in which this distinction can be made clear is with the help of Sen’s capability approach. This approach to wellbeing distinguishes between resources (inputs), capabilities (agency), institutions (constraints or entitlements), and functionings (outcomes and impacts). This distinction is helpful for feminist economic policymaking because it links a particular gender-aware well-being measure to a particular policy focus. For example, measures of gender differences in resources may be particularly useful to inform feminist policies around equal access to land or employment. Below, I will discuss the four types of gender-aware well-being measures and, for the sake of feminist policymaking, I will indicate which stage of the capability approach they focus on. But first, I briefly discuss the purpose of such measures.

The purpose of gender-aware measurement of well-being Gender-aware measurement of well-being serves three purposes. One is to produce knowledge of what contributes to well-being, and understanding of what well-being means to men and women, communities and nations. In other words, a gender-aware well-being measure serves 158

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an epistemological purpose, meaning that it expresses particular knowledge from a feminist standpoint, doing justice to women’s experiences and women’s disadvantaged position in society. Of the four types of gender-aware measures distinguished earlier, all serve this purpose, except for those that simply disaggregate existing well-being measures. A  second purpose is to collect policy information about disadvantaged groups or for the evaluation of the distributional impact of a policy. From a feminist policy information perspective, the measurement of well-being should reveal information about women’s social and economic position and about differences with men in that position, and how class, race, and ethnicity differentiate these. Indeed, all four types of measures could potentially fulfill this purpose, but often only for gender and class differences. Finally, a gender-aware measure of well-being should allow for monitoring absolute and/or relative improvements for women over time and between countries. All the measures mentioned earlier do this in a nonmonetary way, but a gender-aware version of the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) is measured in monetary terms and thus could serve as a policy tool to show costs and benefits of gender-aware policies. A limitation of SIGI, GEI, and GPI is that they are not reported on a yearly basis, so that monitoring necessarily involves a longer time-period.

Engendering general well-being measures The first multidimensional gender-aware well-being measures were developed by the UNDP’s Human Development Office in 1995: one focused on political and economic empowerment, namely Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and the other on gender-differences in the HDI, Gender Development Index (GDI). Due to criticism from feminist economists (Klasen and Schüler 2011), UNDP has constructed a new indicator in 2010: Gender Inequality Index (GII). The GII is measured for 160 countries (UNDP 2019). The index consists of five indicators covering three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment and the labor market (Table 16.1). In terms of the capability approach, three indicators reflect women’s and men’s capabilities: educational attainment, parliamentary representation and labor force participation. The other two reflect functionings relevant for women: maternal mortality and adolescent birth rate. The latter could also be considered as a capability, because a lower adolescent birth rate suggests that girls have more agency over unprotected and unwanted sex. The rationale of GII is to reveal the extent to which human development is affected by gender inequality. One way in which it is used for policy purposes is to compare a country’s HDI rank with its GII rank. When a country ranks higher on HDI than GII this is supposed to mean that a country’s human development efforts leaves women behind. And when the GII rank is higher than a country’s HDI rank, this would imply that a country is making a serious effort to reduce women’s disadvantage in human development. GII measures male-female differences without favoring the disadvantages of one sex over the other, that is female disadvantage in one can be compensated by male disadvantage in another.

Table 16.1  Gender Inequality Index (GII) Reproductive health

Empowerment

Labor market

maternal mortality adolescent birth rate

educational attainment parliamentary representation

labor force participation

Source: Human Development Reports, Gender Inequality Index (GII).

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Irene van Staveren Table 16.2  Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) Dimensions

Indicators

Economic

personal consumption expenditures Gini index of income inequality cost—value of durable consumer goods cost of underemployment net capital investment costs of pollution of water, air and noise loss of wetlands, farmlands and primary forests cost of CO2 emissions cost of ozone depletion depletion of non-renewable resources value of housework and parenting cost of family changes* cost of crime cost of household pollution abatement value of volunteer work loss of leisure time value of higher education services of roads and streets value of commuting cost of traffic accidents

Environmental

Social

* This indicator needs to be developed from a feminist standpoint, because the original design seems to assume that family breakup should be measured as a cost, which neglects domestic violence in intact families. Source: Kubiszewski et al. 2015.

However, this is not completely possible because two of the five indicators do not measure male-female differences. Maternal mortality and adolescent birth rate only refer to women. Another feature is that it uses association-sensitivity. This is a correction in the case all three male-female differences show a disadvantage for the same sex (see Permanyer (2013) for a critical discussion). Third, the index combines the five indicators with help of the geometric mean, which is multiplicative and not an additive process. The geometric mean results in a bias when any score is zero (for example no female seats in parliament) but this problem is circumvented by capping the data to a minimum of 0.1. GII is often used as an independent variable in policyoriented research, in particular on health. Such studies indicate that gender equality has health benefits, for example for reducing child mortality or increasing the life expectancy of both women and men (Brinda, Rajkumar, and Enemark 2015; Kolip and Lange 2018). Another general well-being indicator is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) originally designed by Daly and Cobb (1989) to highlight sustainability concerns. The current version (Anielski and Rowe 1999) consist of 26 indicators of costs and benefits, which together result in a single monetary value (Table 16.2). It starts with personal consumption and corrects for income inequality. To this, items such as the money value (at market wages for domestic work) of household work are added (based on an estimation of the hours spent on unpaid work in households). Then items such as costs of crime and pollution are subtracted. GPI is available for a limited number of countries due to lack of data and has been argued to fall short of capturing sustainability concerns (Neumayer 2003). Given GPI’s inclusion of unpaid care work and ecological contributors to/detractors from well-being, however, Berik (2018) has proposed to use GPI as a gender-aware aggregate well-being indicator. For example, 160

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the GPI framework could report some of its components in gender-disaggregated terms (such as housework, leisure time, underemployment) and gender-aware narratives about non-­ quantifiable dimensions of well-being could complement the GPI. These narratives will make the GPI more inclusive and more flexible for use in local policymaking. When we assess the GPI’s components in terms of the capability approach, we see that together, they reflect the first three stages of the capability process: resources, capabilities and institutions—but not functionings.

Disaggregating well-being measures Gender disaggregation of existing well-being measures implies that it is possible to separate a measure into two complementary parts, one referring to men’s well-being and the other to women’s well-being. This is not possible for every well-being indicator. Take GDP for example. One could calculate how much income is earned by men and how much by women. But what does this mean in the face of gender wage discrimination, higher rates of part-time work by women due to persistence of the traditional gender division of labor, occupational segregation by gender and the glass ceiling? The indicator that lends itself more easily for disaggregation is happiness. One can simply compare the male average score with the female average score. But as argued before, adaptive preferences make for biased reports. Moreover, happiness concerns a self-reported, subjective measure of well-being based on a very general question that allows for multiple interpretation, mood swings, reference points, and other context variables that are ignored in its measurement. The basic question asked in happiness surveys is the following: Please, imagine a ladder, with steps numbered 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (Gallup 2016). This imaginary tool is also referred to as the Cantril Ladder and is entirely subjective, both in terms of your own rating (“you personally feel”) and in terms of the reference point (“best/ worst possible life for you”). Happiness data are presented annually in the World Happiness Report, based on data collected by Gallup (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2018). The 2018 edition of the report contains data for 156 countries. A recent analysis of 73 countries finds that the average gap of female to male happiness cannot be explained by GDP per capita, geography, religion, or women’s seats in parliament (Zweig 2015). After controlling for individual characteristics such as age and education, less countries show a female-male difference in happiness but the gap is larger than the uncontrolled gap. This gap is difficult to understand without complementary analysis of objective well-being determinants (Stewart 2014), or without more specific subjective wellbeing data on attitudes of men and women on a range of issues, such as on women’s leadership or working mothers (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Seguino 2007). In terms of the capability approach, gender differences in happiness reflect only one stage, namely a capability: the capability to feel satisfaction about one’s life. Empirical analyses often use happiness as a dependent variable. For example, Meisenberg and Woodley (2015) use the male-female difference in happiness as a dependent variable, but without distinguishing between higher average female and higher average male happiness. It is therefore 161

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no surprise that most variables used as an independent variable (gender differences in income, education and parliament) are not statistically significant. They do find significant negative correlations for the female/male labor force participation rate and for female nonagricultural employment but have difficulty in interpreting these results. This may be due to the lack of a feminist economic analysis—gender differences cannot be interpreted without an understanding of how gender affects economic variables. Hori and Kamo (2018) compare female and male happiness. They show that marriage is a strong determinant of happiness for men but not for women in East Asia, without explaining why. From a feminist perspective, we would like to know if this has to do with gender roles in marriage, for example. Yet others use gender-aware well-being measures to explain male and female happiness separately. Interestingly, Audette et al. (2019) find that both for women and for men, more gender equality is correlated with more happiness.

Gendered constraints to well-being The most complete well-being measure of gendered institutions is the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). SIGI measures both formal and informal gendered institutions with 16 indicators and 27 sub-indicators (SIGI 2019). Data are collected approximately every five years. In 2019 data were available for 180 countries. The data are grouped into four categories: (1) discrimination in the family, (2) restricted physical integrity, (3) restricted access to resources, and (4) restricted civil liberties. Each category has two or three types of indicators: laws (whether or not a country has a gender equal law on the item), attitudes (the share of people supporting a particular gender norm), and practices (the prevalence of a practice following a particular gender norm). For example, violence against women is measured with all three types of indicators. Is there a law about violence against women and how much does this law cover? To what extent do women feel that wife beating is justified? And what is the percentage of women who ever suffered intimate partner physical or sexual violence? The list of SIGI indicators is presented in Table 16.3.

Table 16.3  Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) Categories

Indicators

Discrimination in the family

child marriage (law and practice) household responsibilities (law) inheritance (law) divorce (law) violence against women (laws, attitudes, practice) female genital mutilation (attitudes, practice) missing women (practice) reproductive autonomy (law, practice) secure access to land-assets (law) access to non-land assets (law) secure access to formal financial services (law, practice) workplace rights (law, attitudes, practice) citizenship rights (law) political voice (law, practice) freedom of movement (law, attitude) access to justice (law, attitudes)

Restricted physical integrity

Restricted access to productive and financial resources

Restricted civil liberties

Source: SIGI 2019.

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SIGI is measured with equal weights. The mean is calculated with exponential and logarithmic functions in order to prevent a full compensation of high inequality in one dimension with low inequality in another dimension. But unlike GII, SIGI does not allow compensation of female disadvantage with male disadvantage because it caps scores at full equality between women and men. For example, 50 percent of parliamentary seats for women is the highest possible equality score. All 16 indicators measure institutional constraints, while in terms of the capability approach five are constraints on access to resources (for example access to land), nine are constraints on capabilities (for example child marriage and political voice) and two are constraints on functionings (for example violence against women). SIGI is generally used as an independent variable in regression analyses, for example for an institutional explanation of high maternal mortality (Lan and Tavrow 2017), of women’s support for democracy (Konte and Klasen 2016) and of child mortality (Branisa, Klasen, and Ziegler 2013).

Broad-based measures Two indices encompass a relatively large number of indicators. One is the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) of the World Economic Forum, which has a policy orientation. The other is the Gender Equality Index (GEI) of the Institute of Social Studies (not to be confused with an index of the same name for the European Union member states reported at https://eige.europa. eu/gender-equality-index). Conceptually, both indices cover all four stages of the capability approach. For example, resources are covered in GGGI with school enrolment and in GEI with the chance of women to get a job. Capabilities are covered, for example, with the sex ratio at birth in GGGI and share of women in the labor force in GEI. Institutions are covered in GGGI for example with the share of female heads of state and in GEI for example with the rating on women’s rights. Finally, functionings are covered for example with the gender gap in life expectancy in GGGI and with adult female mortality in GEI. Although both indices cover all stages of the capability approach, GGGI focuses more on capabilities. GGGI is published since 2006. In 2018, data are available for 149 countries and the index measures all indicators as female/male ratios (World Economic Forum 2018). The advantage of using ratios is that the index is independent of the level of development of a country (van Staveren 2013). This method helps the policy relevance of the index across countries because higher scores are not necessarily correlated with higher levels of GDP, for example the share of parliamentary seats for women or the gender wage gap. This is a clear advantage over GII and SIGI, for which country scores tend to be correlated with their level of economic development, in particular due to low maternal mortality (in GII) and high levels of economic rights (SIGI) with higher levels of GDP. GGGI covers four policy areas: economic opportunity, education, health and political empowerment. In total, it includes 14 indicators (Table 16.4). The index is calculated through the arithmetic mean without weights but with normalization based on equalizing standard deviations. This method ensures that each indicator has the same relative impact on the index value. The index does not allow compensation of female disadvantage with male disadvantage: the values are capped at full equality, as is the case for SIGI. Due to the lack of reliable gender disaggregated data for GDP it estimates female income by multiplying the female labor participation rate with the average female wage rate. However, these two variables are also part of the index, so that income is actually included twice. In empirical analyses, GGGI can be found as an independent variable in regression analyses. For example, Henry and Wetherell (2017) have found that countries with better scores of 163

Irene van Staveren Table 16.4  The Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) Dimensions

Indicators

Economic opportunity

f/m labor force participation f/m wages f/m estimated income f/m legislators, senior officials and managers f/m professional and technical workers f/m literacy f/m net primary school enrolment f/m net secondary school enrolment f/m gross tertiary school enrolment f/m sex ratio at birth f/m life expectancy f/m seats in parliament f/m ministerial positions f/m years of female head of state

Educational attainment

Health and survival Political empowerment

Source: World Economic Forum (2018).

Table 16.5  Gender Equality Index (GEI) % agree married man has right to beat wife & children % agree women should remain subject to traditional laws and customs % agree women should have same chance being elected to political office rating on women’s economic rights rating on social rights % gender wage gap % of women agree women have same chance to get a good job % of women agree women have chance to earn same salary as men % of women agree women have same chance as men to get good education % of employers agree when jobs are scarce, men have more right to a job

% agree men make better political leaders than women % of parents agree university is more important for a boy than a girl % of employers agree men make better business executives than women % female in labor force % women legislators, senior officials, managers % women in professional jobs % women primary school enrolment % women secondary school enrolment % women tertiary school enrolment % female literacy % adult female mortality

Source: Gender Equality 2019.

GGGI also have more laws protecting sexual identities and have a higher proportion of people with positive attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. The GEI is the gender-aware well-being index that includes a balanced set of indicators across all stages of the capability approach and consist of 21 indicators (Gender Equality 2019). The GEI is available since 1990 but only for every 5 years and is available for 188 countries (Table  16.5). The calculation of the index is entirely different from that of the other wellbeing indices discussed in this chapter. As detailed at https://isd.iss.nl/home/gender-equality/, 164

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a ranking method with the help of bootstrapping is employed, so that only a country’s ranking is relevant and not the absolute value of the index. The strength of this method is a reliable country ranking per year even when limited data are available for a country, while the weakness is that absolute values cannot be compared between years. GEI can be used as an independent variable in empirical analyses of development. For example, in a study on financial inclusion it was used as an instrumental variable for women’s land rights (Balasubramanian, Kuppusamy, and Natarajan 2019). The study found that countries in which women have less land rights they also have less access to credit.

Conclusion The gender-aware well-being indicators discussed here are useful for quantitative analysis in cross-country studies. Some are collected over a relatively long period of time, which makes them also suitable for panel data analysis. And some require additional quantitative or qualitative information for a meaningful interpretation. Almost all of them reflect feminist economic scholarship in the measurement of well-being and they are all useful for informing feminist policymaking and monitoring. But none of the indicators is perfect. Moreover, their usefulness depends on the continuation of data collection over time—which is not at all certain given the fact that none of the indicators is sponsored or privileged by key agencies such as the UN System of National Accounts or the World Bank’s databank. It would therefore be advisable that a sub-set of more or less complementary gender well-being measures would be adopted as a standard well-being measure in a prominent international database.

References Anielski, Mark, and Jonathan Rowe. 1999. The Genuine Progress Indicator 1998 update. San Francisco, CA: Redefining Progress. Audette, Andre, Sean Lam, Haley O’Connor, and Benjamin Radcliff. 2019. “(E)Quality of Life: A CrossNational Analysis of the Effect of Gender Equality on Life Satisfaction.” Journal of Happiness Studies 20 (1): 2173–88. doi:10.1007/s10902-018-0042-8. Balasubramanian, Senthil Arasu, Thenmozhi Kuppusamy, and Tharamaiselvan Natarajan. 2019. “Financial Inclusion and Landownership Status of Women.” International Journal of Development Issues 18 (1): 51–69. Berik, Günseli. 2018. “To Measure and to Narrate. Paths toward a Sustainable Future.” Feminist Economics 24 (3): 136–59. Branisa, Boris, Stephan Klasen, and Maria Ziegler. 2013. “Gender Inequality in Social Institutions and Gendered Development Outcomes.” World Development 45: 252–68. Brinda, Ethel Mary, Anto Rajkumar, and Ulrika Enemark. 2015. “Association Between Gender Inequality Index and Child Mortality Rates: A Cross-National Study of 138 Countries.” BMC Public Health 15 (97). doi:10.1186/s12889-015-1449-3. Daly, Herman, and John Cobb. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Durand, Martine. 2015. “The OECD Better Life Initiative: How’s Life? And the Measurement of Wellbeing.” Review of Income and Wealth 61 (1): 4–17. Gallup. 2016. Understanding How Gallup Uses the Cantril Scale. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/ poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx. Gender Equality. 2019. Accessed January 2021. https://isd.iss.nl/home/gender-equality/. Helliwell, John, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs. 2018. World Happiness Report 2018. New York: ­Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Henry, Peter, and Geoffrey Wetherell. 2017. “Countries with Greater Gender Equality Have More ­Positive Attitudes and Laws concerning Lesbians and Gay Men.” Sex Roles 77 (7–8): 523–32. Himmelweit, Susan. 1995. “The Discovery of ‘Unpaid Work’: The Social Consequences of the Expansion of ‘Work.’ ” Feminist Economics 1 (2): 1–19.

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Irene van Staveren Hori, Makiko, and Yoshinori Kamo. 2018. “Gender Differences in Happiness: The Effects of Marriage, Social Roles and Social Support in East Asia.” Applied Research in Quality of Life 13 (4): 839–57. Human Development Reports, Gender Inequality Index (GII). Accessed October 2019. http://hdr.undp. org/en/content/gender-inequality-index-gii. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pipa Norris. 2003. Rising Tide—Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jochimsen, Maren, and Ulrike Knobloch. 1997. “Making the Hidden Visible: The Importance of Caring Activities and Their Principles for Any Economy.” Ecological Economics 20 (2): 107–12. Klasen, Stephan, and Dana Schüler. 2011. “Reforming the Gender-related Development Index and the ­Gender Empowerment Measure: Implementing Some Specific Proposals.” Feminist Economics 17 (1): 1–30. Kolip, Petra, and Cornelia Lange. 2018. “Gender Inequality and the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy in the European Union.” European Journal of Public Health 28 (5): 869–72. Konte, Maty, and Stephan Klasen. 2016. “Gender Difference in Support for Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do Social Institutions Matter?” Feminist Economics 22 (2): 55–86. Kubiszewski, Ida, Robert Constanza, Nicole Gorko, Michael Weisdorf, Austin Carnes, Cathrine Collins, Cariol Franco, Lillian Gehres, Jenna Knobloch, Gayle Matson, and Joan Schoepfer. 2015. “Estimates of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for Oregon from 1960–2010 and Recommendations for a Comprehensive Shareholder’s Report.” Ecological Economics 1 (19): 1–7. Kuznets, Simon. 1934. National Income, 1929–1932. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Lan, Chiao-Wen, and Paula Tavrow. 2017. “Composite Measures of Women’s Empowerment and their Association with Maternal Mortality in Low-Income Countries.” BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 17 (Suppl. 2): 337. doi:10.1186/s12884-017-1492-4. Layard, Richard. 2005. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Penguin. Meisenberg, Gerhard, and Michael Woodley. 2015. “Gender Differences in Subjective Wellbeing and Their Relationships with Subjective Wellbeing.” Journal of Happiness Studies 16 (6): 1539–55. Neumayer, Eric. 2003. Weak Versus Strong Sustainability. Exploring the Limits of Two Opposing Paradigms. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Permanyer, Iñaki. 2013. “A  Critical Assessment of the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index.” Feminist ­Economics 19 (2): 1–32. Seguino, Stephanie. 2007. “Plus ca Change? Evidence on Global Trends in Gender Norms and ­Stereotypes.” Feminist Economics 13 (2): 1–28. Sen, Amartya. 1990. “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts.” In Persistent Inequalities, edited by I. Tinker, 123–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SIGI. 2019. Accessed June 2019. www.genderindex.org/methodology/. Stewart, Frances. 2014. “Against Happiness: A Critical Appraisal of the Use of Measures of Happiness for Evaluating Progress in Development.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 15 (4): 293–307. UNDP. 2019. “Gender Inequality Index.” Accessed June 2019. http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII. van Staveren, Irene. 2013. “To Measure Is to Know? A Comparative Analysis of Five Gender Indices.” Review of Social Economy 71 (3): 339–72. Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. World Economic Forum. 2018. The Global Gender Gap Report 2018. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. Zweig, Jacqueline. 2015. “Are Women Happier Than Men? Evidence from the Gallup World Poll.” Journal of Happiness Studies 16: 515–41.

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PART III

Resources for provisioning

17 THE FEMINIZATION OF THE LABOR FORCE AND FIVE ASSOCIATED MYTHS Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa

Introduction The extent to which people engage in remunerative work contributes to economic growth and material well-being. Hence, labor force participation rate (LFPR), the share of the working-age population (usually ages 16–64) who are either working (including doing unpaid work in family businesses) or looking for work, provides a measure of macroeconomic health. Women’s labor force participation rate (WLFPR) is of particular interest, increasing over the 20th century in almost all documented countries. Since WLFPRs were historically below men’s, and continue to lag behind, increasing women’s participation expands the tax base and boosts the aggregate labor supply, effects which are widely appreciated as an offset to aging populations, with their negative implications for public finances and living standards. Thus, an increase in WLFPR has become a macroeconomic priority in many countries. Feminists too interpret the convergence of men and women’s rates as progress. Employment provides women with an independent income, diminishes their reliance on men, enhances their social (and self) esteem, and encourages their participation in other areas of life, for example, politics. The “feminization of the labor force” receives applause all round. The World Bank (2011) and UN Women (2019) view progress toward gender equality in LFPR as a win-win development, boosting both women’s empowerment and economic growth. This chapter explores the extent, chronology, and meaning of these trends. The standard theoretical framework hypothesizes a “U-shaped” curve relating women’s participation to national income (Goldin 1995). Recent increases are then interpreted as the rising segment of this universal trajectory. We offer a critical assessment of this interpretation, arguing that actual trends in WLFPR have been shrouded in myths about women’s economic roles in the past and the present. These stylized and often misleading vignettes overlook the hard-won nature and potential reversibility of women’s gains. Myth number 1 is that high WLFPRs are a new phenomenon. High WLFPRs have characterized economic life in many times and places, obscured by the systematic underestimation of women’s contribution. The feminization of the labor force was higher historically than conventionally estimated, shading the mechanical interpretation of secular trends as U-shaped. Myth number 2 is that feminization has involved steady progress. History reveals periods of mass influx and times of retrenchment, for example, during wartime or recessions, respectively. The 169

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legal and institutional context can be inclusive or exclusive of women workers and changed to fit macroeconomic exigencies. Myth number 3 is that men’s participation rates have always been extremely high in contrast with WLFPR. Historically, men as well as women often worked intermittently, constrained by seasons, weather, health, inclination, and need. Ideas about male breadwinning have clouded this reality. Myth number 4 is that LFP will automatically lead to women’s empowerment and independence. Access to a job is the surest way for women to gain economic independence, but it is not always empowering in the context of patriarchal and discriminatory economic and social institutions. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality. Myth number 5 is that Gender Pay Gap (GPG) is determined by women’s own choices. Orthodox economics interprets women’s position in or out of the labor force as the result of mythical utility-maximizing decisions given preferences, market wages, and opportunity costs. Such a model cannot capture the realities of a world where choices and market signals reflect social norms, power and authority relations, discrimination and ideas about identity. Like all myths, these have their kernels of truth. But their generalization and inflation have clouded our view of the past and interpretation of the present, leading to a simplistic interpretation of the WLFPR as mechanically following a U-shaped curve. Such an interpretation underestimates the accomplishments of women in struggling for economic equality and breeds a dangerous complacency.

Feminization in perspective Over the 20th century WLFPR increased in almost all countries. Strong gains in women’s rates and the simultaneous plateauing or falling male rates have brought convergence, though significant gaps remain. The World Development Report 2012 estimated that in 1980–2008, the global rate of female labor force participation increased slightly from 50.2 to 51.8 percent, while the male rate fell from 82.0 to 77.7 percent, thereby narrowing the gender gap from 32 percentage points to 26 percentage points (Ortiz-Ospina and Tzvetkova 2017). The only regions in which gender gaps in participation widened are Eastern and Southern Asia, where women were more affected than men by falling participation. Hence, gaps in participation rates widened by 2.3 percentage points in Southern Asia and 0.6 percentage points in Eastern Asia (ILO 2016, 7). The growth in WLFPR in major OECD countries is largely a post-WWII phenomenon, as Figure 17.1 shows. It has been explained by economic, social and demographic factors related to labor supply, particularly the increase in participation by married women, and demand and described as the “revolution” of our time. One key factor on the demand side has been the expansion of clerical and service jobs which disproportionately employed women. Convergence has also been fed by a widespread plateauing and decline in male rates, partly because men’s years of schooling have increased. In the new century, however, the convergence has been interrupted, as Figure 17.2 shows. The global gender gap in labor force participation stood at 27 percent in 2018, compared with 29.1 percent in 1990, and is expected to remain at 27 percent in 2030 (ILO 2018b). When the aggregate is decomposed by age group, the situation is even more disquieting. For women aged 25–54, the WPR is 63 percent compared to 94 percent for men. When including younger (aged ≥ 15 years) and older women (aged ≥ 55), in 2018 women’s global LFPR is lower still at 48.5 percent, 26.5 percentage points below that of men. The widening gender gap in participation rates in emerging countries, however, reflects not only women’s more limited labor market opportunities but the positive fact that a growing number of young women in these countries are enrolled in formal education (ILO 2018a, 6). 170

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Sweden

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40%

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Figure 17.1  Long-run perspective on female labor force participation rates Source: Our World In Data based on OECD (2017) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-labor-forceparticipation-oecd?time=1890.2016

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Figure 17.2  Labor force participation rates, 1990–2018, women, men, and total rates Source: own elaboration, with data from ILOSTAT.

Rising WLFPR has fueled household income and economic growth and helped offset declining prime-age male labor force participation. Recent retrenchment has exacerbated the labor force participation decline stemming from an aging population, weakening economic growth (Shambaugh, Nunn, and Portman 2017). Countries beyond Europe and the US, Japan and Korea, for example, have also seen women’s gains peter out with the same knock on negative effects (Olivetti and Petrongolo 2016). 171

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Until these setbacks the story of the feminization of the labor force was one of significant progress toward gender equality, with earlier generations of feminists sweeping away institutional, cultural, and social obstacles to women’s work, and economic growth doing the rest. Glass ceilings still exist, and domestic workloads remain far from equal, but these problems were expected to fade away as current generations of women climbed career ladders and more men became willing to share the burden of unpaid work. We challenge this excessively optimistic view arguing that it is based on a series of myths, which distort our understanding of both the evolution of WLFPR and its relationship with gender equality.

Myth 1: The modernity of rise in WLFPR? WLFPR is highest in some of the poorest and richest countries in the world, and it is lowest in countries with national incomes in the middle range. In other words, in a cross-­section, the relationship between female participation rates and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita follows a U-shape. In pathbreaking work, Goldin combined this cross-section description with a choice-theoretic model of time allocation and a historical case study of US women to argue that “Across the process of economic development the adult women’s labor participation is U-shaped” (Goldin 1995, 62). To justify the downward phase of the U, Goldin cited the pioneering work of Boserup (1970), which argued that the structural changes associated with economic growth, specifically the decline of subsistence agriculture, reduced women’s participation rates. To justify the upward section of the U, Goldin combined her evidence on women’s increasing educational levels with further structural changes in the form of a burgeoning service sector, which offered attractive conditions of employment. Women’s endowments and choices then explained the evolution of WLFPR. The attractions of the U-shaped account are evidenced in its widespread use, far beyond the US case study, and this despite many of its explanatory factors remaining hypothetical. More recently, however, researchers have suggested that it is not economic growth per se that influences WLFPR but rather the nature and sectoral composition of growth (Lahoti and Swaminathan 2016). Accounts of women’s economic activity rates over the long run must take account of changes in the nature of work and how it is measured. Today, in most economies wage labor is the most common form of work, and even historically it was widespread. But for women the situation is complicated by their greater involvement in self-provisioning. The changing nature of women’s work, and how it was viewed, creates problems for economists seeking a long-term perspective. One way forward involves working with diverse sources to construct meaningful measures of women’s work (Humphries and Sarasúa 2012). As gender historians have shown, many of the “housewives” identified in official statistics were in fact economically active, providing services, engaged in domestic manufacturing, or working in farms, shops, or workshops. Reconstructing women’s work from non-standard sources is difficult but surely better than simply ignoring activities which lie “off the record” (see the symposia in Feminist Economics issues 18(4) 2012 and 19(4) 2013), especially as reconstructed WLFPR are consistent in the challenge they pose to the mainstream. The trough in WLFPR turns out to be in part a statistical artifact, while demand is shown to play a greater role than previously thought in shaping trends. The historical picture is not of women deciding to stay at home but of limited job opportunities, legal constraints, and gender stereotypes trapping them at home and obscuring the extent to which they actually worked, often maintaining themselves and their families. The real change of recent times emerges as women’s access to better-paid jobs, following their access to education and the slow elimination of legal restrictions. 172

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Myth 2: WLFP marching forward? The historical development of the WPR belies any idea of steady progress toward gender equality in LFPRs. As Figure 17.2 shows, convergence has stalled. Moreover, national studies document periods of retrenchment as well as of progress, not always readily linked to income growth and structural change. For example, the conventional narrative predicts a decline in WLFPR associated with the contraction of semi-subsistence agriculture, the declining section of the U, then thrown into reverse by the later expansion of manufacturing and the service sector. In many cases, however, women were extensively involved in early modern manufacturing, particularly in the vanguard textile sector. Hand spinning, primarily women’s work, was the largest single manufacturing job in 18th-century Europe (Simonton 1998; Muldrew 2012). The extent of hand spinning, because it was women’s work and often done in the home, has been underestimated, meaning that early modern manufacturing was also underestimated and as a result structural changes, particularly the growth of manufacturing, have been mistimed (Sarasúa 2019; Humphries and Schneider 2019). It was changes in the nature of manufacturing itself, with mechanization, and not industrialization per se that limited women’s activity. National experiences often sit uncomfortably within the U-shape meta account. For instance, while the Italian miracle with rapid growth in the postwar period might be expected to have augmented the WLFPR, it actually fell as women from the shrinking agricultural sector failed to find alternative employment (Bettio 1988; Mancini 2018). Other episodes cannot be fitted into long-run economic trends. Wartime provides the most dramatic chapters with women recruited often into jobs which were hitherto exclusively male, by both economic and other forms of persuasion, only to be ejected at the close of hostilities (Shatnawi and Fishback 2018; Beddoe 1989). The fact that roughly 6.7 million additional US women went to work for pay during WWII, increasing the female labor force by almost 50 percent in a few short years (Rose 2018, 673), suggests that where there is demand for women workers (and support services) women will work for pay. The mass recruitment of women into the labor force during such national emergencies usually sees the state and labor organizations reversing their positions on the regulation of women’s work and agreeing to (temporary) “dilution” of skill levels, with women encouraged into traditionally male jobs. This could even involve U turns that were morally repugnant, with women readmitted to hazardous jobs, though this was made easier if it involved women of color in colonial dependencies. For example, in the UK during WWII, in the face of a serious fuel shortage, the 1937 prohibition on women’s work underground in India’s coal mines was suspended (Khaitan 2019). As a result, some 20,000 low-caste and Adivasi women provided an underground Victorian-era transport system, carrying coal on their backs or shoving laden carts, so contributing to the Allied war effort. State support for women workers in terms of nurseries, canteens, and transportation show how important relieving women of some of their domestic responsibilities is in enabling their employment. All could be provided in times of need when women’s paid work was applauded rather than socially discouraged. But support services and changing attitudes swiftly put in place could equally swiftly be removed when the crisis was over. In the US after 1945 the return of veterans and cutbacks in war-related industries displaced many women workers despite their interest in continued employment (Rose 2018), a pattern echoed throughout Europe. Other factors too could interrupt secular trends and leave their mark on WLFPR. The business cycle is well known for pulling and pushing women into and out of the labor force (Rubery 1988). In times of recession the scarcity of work justified prioritizing male 173

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“breadwinners.” Women often became “discouraged workers,” not registering for unemployment benefit or formally seeking work, their unemployment hidden behind domestic roles. Schoeni (2012) has described how women’s work in Canada, Australia, the US, and every European country was constructed as incongruous and problematic during the Great Depression, not only by conservatives and religious groups, but also by unions and socialist parties. Governments legislated against women’s, particularly married women’s, employment. In France and Switzerland, the catalog of measures included hiring quotas; marriage bans; reduction of women’s wages; abolition of married women’s unemployment benefits; and the firing of women in Postal, Telephone, and Telegraph services. Women lost all work-related allowances, while new financial incentives encouraged domesticity and motherhood. As a consequence, in France, the European country with the highest participation rates, WLFPR decreased from 51.7 in 1921 to 48.4 in 1931 to 46.7 in 1936, in Switzerland from 44.6 in 1921 to 35.5 percent in 1941. Years of high WLFPR have established new social norms that are difficult to cast off in a repeat of the interwar or post WWII bigotry. As a result, although the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent austerity has had adverse effects on gender equality and contributed to retrenchment in participation in many industrial economies, it has not inaugurated a mass retreat of women workers. As Karamessini and Rubery (2013) summarize the European experience, “added worker” effects have dominated households’ responses to economic stress, with women seeking to shore up family finances. Austerity has impacted the terms and conditions on which women work rather than whether they work at all. Changing ideas about gender roles can influence WLFPR. Ideas tend to adapt to economic conditions preventing the emergence of dissonance between material realities and widely held norms/beliefs. But gender standards can play an independent role, especially if reinforced by demographic trends. The baby boom that followed WWII intertwined with reinvigorated ideas about the importance of time-intensive mothering is widely held to have slowed the growth of WLFPR. Certainly, anxiety about the possible developmental disadvantages that working mothers imposed on children was an enduring topic with a hangover into modern discussions of the dilemmas of working motherhood. However, a recent meta-analysis of 69 studies found that when women returned soon after birth (supporting maternity leave policies), in general, behavioral and educational outcomes of children were not affected (Lucas-Thompson, Goldberg, and Prause 2010).

Myth 3: Men’s work in fact and fiction To ensure the accuracy of long-run estimates of growth and productivity, economic historians have come to realize that women workers have to be counted in the labor force. To date, attempts at inclusion are mere gestures. Most seek to solve the problem of recognizing women’s work by proposing a rough participation rate which, for instance, in the British case was “a constant 30 percent” from the Middle Ages to the 19th century in contrast to almost universal male participation (Broadberry et al. 2015, 355). The resulting skewed ratio of men to women in the labor force is justified by the assumption that women were in charge of unpaid work, and as a consequence their commitment to paid work must have been much less than men’s. However, many of the studies that show women’s work to be more extensive than standard sources have hitherto suggested, also show that the notion of WLFPR as irregular, seasonal, or part-time is fundamentally an ideological construct, with men’s work too often seasonal, discontinuous, and impacted by involvement in unpaid work (Humphries and Sarasúa 2012). 174

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Myth 4: Independence and empowerment through work? Women’s waged work is widely held not only to provide material resources but also to improve women’s self-esteem, give them voice in household decision-making, increase the perceived legitimacy of their claims, improve their knowledge of their rights and enable participation in community life and politics, with knock-on effects beneficial to both women and children (Agarwal 1997; Kabeer 2012; and Kabeer 2016 for some cautious considerations). Thus, the gender gap in labor force participation constitutes a common component of most gender equality indexes, such as the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Global Gender Gap index of the World Economic Forum (Dilli, Carmichael, and Rijpma 2019). But the extent to which the intensification in WLFPR increases women’s welfare depends on other aspects of economic and social organization, which must be addressed alongside access to jobs. First, working for pay has not exempted women from the burden of unpaid work. Employed women continue to perform domestic and caring work, doing double shifts with adverse effects on their health and well-being. Men have increased their contribution to unpaid work but not sufficiently to compensate women for their increased labor force participation. Inequality in the division of unpaid work remains an unfair burden that threatens women’s achievements in the labor market. Shouldering this burden has historically had deleterious effects on women’s ability to work and lowered their labor force participation during early structural change (Roncolato 2016). The persisting assumption that unpaid work is primarily women’s responsibility continues to consign women to part-time jobs, with lower wages and smaller pensions. Second, employed women remain concentrated in certain jobs and sectors of the labor market. These are usually lower paid, have fewer benefits, less obvious career ladders, lower social status, and reduced intrinsic interest. Segregation limits the extent to which paid work provides real independence or empowerment. In other words, employment conditions matter. Third, participation in the labor market does not guarantee women’s full access to their own wages. In 19th-century Europe, married women’s legal subservience to their husbands threatened their claim to their own wages. Legislation was required to guarantee married women command over their wages and to ensure that they were not misappropriated by (sometimes drunken or idle) husbands (Erickson 1993; Khan 2005). Similarly, young women were often culturally, if not legally, required to surrender earnings to fathers or other relatives. Waged work may not empower women if it co-exists with oppressive gender relations and patriarchal authority. Women have come a long way in guaranteeing rights to their own wages, but achievements are not universal. Cautionary tales exist of women and girls seizing employment opportunities only to find their wages commandeered and their subservience unchanged, indeed perhaps even reinforced given their increased value as an earning asset (Berik 1995).

Myth 5: Gender pay gap and its trend as the outcome of women’s choices The feminization of the labor force might be thought all the more impressive as it has been achieved without a relative decline in remuneration. Indeed, in most European countries and in the US, the gender pay gap (GPG), defined as the difference between average gross hourly earnings of male and female employees as a percentage of male gross earnings, has narrowed as women’s and men’s participation rates converged. In some countries, progress has been remarkable. 175

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For example, in the UK the GPG fell from almost 50 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2016. However, optimism needs to be guarded. There are three reasons for caution. The first reason for caution concerns the ways in which the GPG is conceptualized by economists and targeted by policymakers. According to most neoclassical economists, a significant part of the GPG is justified within the market calculus. It reflects women’s lower productivity, in turn related to their individual career histories, their representation in different jobs, sectors and firms, their greater propensity to interrupt paid work to provide caring labor, and their tendency to work part-time, all of which reflect their choices and need to be netted out before discrimination can be isolated. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition separates the average GPG into two components: (i) the share of the GPG attributable to differences in the characteristics of male and female workers or where and how they work and (ii) a residual identified with discrimination and inefficiency. All policy-oriented studies describe GPGs in these terms, often identifying a large number of variables as “explanations” for lower female pay other than discrimination, thereby trimming the part of the gap associated with discrimination. Specifically, studies isolate the underlying causes of women’s low pay (such as their concentration in relatively low-paid occupations, the perception if not reality that they prioritize their families over their paid work) as reflecting women’s choices and (econometrically) exclude them from accounts of discrimination. One particularly egregious issue that underlines the links between pay and participation is the penalty that women face as a result of gaps in their career continuity and pensions’ contributions. The British study by Olsen et al. (2010) found that career interruptions had a “highly negative” and cumulative impact on earnings. These economists ascribe (and rationalize) the penalty for time out to reductions in relevant experience and evidence of low job commitment, but since many women work in the care or service sectors, it is hard to see time spent in family management as irrelevant to performance in paid employment. To read GPG as requiring “adjustment” to distinguish the part associated with discrimination from that associated with women’s presumed lower productivity in distinctive sectors or patterns of paid employment involves deprecating the skills associated with women’s work and implicitly assigning to women all the burden of social reproduction. Insisting that men’s and women’s pay can only be compared when their jobs (and qualifications) are identical, as the routine statistical adjustment above suggests, weakens equalities policy. The British Equal Pay Act (1970) originally related only to men and women doing the same work. Given gender segregation, this condition was rarely met, especially as employers had time to regrade employees to ensure noncomparability. As a result, few cases were made. Only with the Equal Value Amendment in 1983 did work of equal value become the relevant criterion, opening the door to more claims, though the difficulties of evaluating traditionally femalespecific skills remain a significant hurdle. A second cautionary note on the pay front is sounded by the GPG’s stagnation in recent years and in some countries relative pay has even widened. This underlines our general argument that progress cannot be taken for granted. A third reason for caution is that convergence in the GPG has a dark side. The financial crisis, and neoliberal policy response, created job losses, unemployment, and wage cuts for women workers, but in some ways men have suffered even more. In several European countries, following austerity policies, conditions in largely female and unregulated sectors of the labor market have spread to sectors worked in by relatively disadvantaged men. Gender wage convergence cannot be interpreted only as women leveling up, as in recent years men have been leveling down: since 2008 GPGs have narrowed as a result of shared setbacks rather than equalizing progress (Karamessini and Rubery 2013).

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Conclusion: a feminist agenda regarding women’s participation rate Being outside the labor force has historically meant four things for women: economic dependence on men, lack of social and political voice, lack of economic recognition, and the shouldering of the entire burden of unpaid domestic and care work. But we have cautioned against the idea that increased participation, alone, can inaugurate independence, give voice, provide recognition, create shared domestic and caring work, and so result in better lives. The terms and conditions of employment matter as does the social and cultural context. Of course, these things are interdependent. Higher WLFPR shifts ideas about gender roles and promotes greater equality on the home front. But our brief discussion also shows that reversals do happen, and progress is not guaranteed. The idea that gender equality is assured and safeguarded henceforth is probably the greatest myth of all.

References Agarwal, Bina. 1997. “Bargaining and Gender Relations. Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51. Beddoe, Deirdre. 1989. Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars, 1918–1939. London: Pandora. Berik, Gunseli. 1995. “Towards an Understanding of Gender Hierarchy in Turkey: A Comparative Analysis of Carpet-Weaving Villages.” In Women in Modern Turkish Society: A Reader, edited by Sirin Tekeli, 112–27. London: Zed Books. Bettio, Francesca. 1988. The Sexual Division of Labour: The Italian Case. Oxford: Clarendon. Boserup, Ester, 1970. Women’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Broadberry, Stephen, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen. 2015. British Economic Growth, 1270–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dilli, Selin, Sarah G. Carmichael, and Auke Rijpma. 2019. “Introducing the Historical Gender Equality Index.” Feminist Economics 25 (1): 31–57. Erickson, Amy L. 1993. Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge. Fernández, Raquel. 2013. “Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century.” American Economic Review 103 (1): 472–500. Goldin, Claudia. 1995. “The U-Shaped Female Labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History.” In Investment in Women’s Human Capital, edited by T. Paul Schultz, 61–89. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Humphries, Jane, and Carmen Sarasúa. 2012. “Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past.” Feminist Economics 18 (4): 39–67. Humphries, Jane, and Benjamin Schneider. 2019. “Spinning the Industrial Revolution.” The Economic History Review 72 (1): 126–55. International Labor Organization (ILO). 2016. Women at Work Trends 2016. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2018a. World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends for Women 2018. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2018b. ILO Labour Force Estimates and Projections (LFEP) 2018 Key Trends. www.ilo.org/ilostatfiles/Documents/LFEPbrief.pdf Kabeer, Naila. 2012. “Women’s Economic Empowerment and Inclusive Growth: Labour Markets and Enterprise Development”, SIG Working Paper 2012/1, UK’s Department for International Development and the International Development Research Centre. ———. 2016. “Gender, Equity, Economic Growth and Women’s Agency: The ‘Endless Variety’ and ‘Monotonous Similarity’ of Patriarchal Constraints.” Feminist Economics 22 (1): 295–321. Karamessini, Maria, and Jill Rubery. 2013. Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for ­Gender Equality. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Khaitan, Urvi. 2019. “Women beneath the Surface: Coal and the Colonial State in India, 1920s–1940.s” MPhil Thesis, Oxford University. Khan, B. Zorina. 2005. Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lahoti, Rahul, and Hema Swaminathan. 2016. “Economic Development and Women’s Labor Force ­Participation in India.” Feminist Economics 22 (2): 168–95.

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Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa Lucas-Thompson, Rachel G., Wendy A. Goldberg, and JoAnn Prause. 2010. “Maternal Work Early in the Lives of Children and Its Distal Associations with Achievement and Behavior Problems: A MetaAnalysis.” Psychological Bulletin 136 (6): 915–42. Mancini, Giulia. 2018. “The Determinants of Female Labour Supply in Italy, 1881–2018.” ASE Annual Congress, Bocconi University. Muldrew, Craig. 2012. “ ‘Th’ancient Distaff’ and ‘Whirling Spindle’: Measuring the Contribution of ­Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England, 1550–1770.” Economic History Review 65 (2): 498–526. Olivetti, Claudia, and Barbara Petrongolo. 2016. “The Evolution of Gender Gaps in Industrialized Countries.” Annual Review of Economics 8: 405–34. Olsen, W., V. Gash, L. Vandecasteele, P. Walthey, and H. Heuvelman. 2010. “The Gender Pay Gap in the UK, 1995–2007: Research Report Number 1.” Government Equalities Office. Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban, and Sandra Tzvetkova. 2017. “Working Women: Key Facts and Trends in Female Labor Force Participation.” Accessed October 16, 2019. https://ourworldindata.org/femalelabor-force-participation-key-facts. Roncolato, Leanne. 2016. “The Feminization U in South Africa: Economic Structure and Women’s Labor Force Participation.” Feminist Economics 22 (4): 54–81. Rose, Evan K. 2018. “The Rise and Fall of Female Labor Force Participation During World War II in the United States.” The Journal of Economic History 78 (3): 673–711. Rubery, Jill, ed. 1988. Women and Recession. London: Routledge. Sarasúa, Carmen. 2019. “Women’s Work and Structural Change: Occupational Structure in Eighteenthcentury Spain.” The Economic History Review 72 (2): 481–509. Schoeni, Céline. 2012. Travail féminin: Retour à l’ordre! L’offensive contre le travail des femmes durant la crise économique des années 1930 [Women’s Work: Back to Order! The Offensive against Women’s Work ­during the Economic Crisis of the 1930s]. Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes. Shambaugh, Jay, Ryan Nunn, and Becca Portman. 2017. “Lessons from the Rise of Women’s Labor Force Participation in Japan.” The Hamilton Project. www.hamiltonproject.org. Shatnawi, Dina, and Price Fishback. 2018. “The Impact of World War II on the Demand for Female Workers in Manufacturing.” The Journal of Economic History 78 (2): 539–74. Simonton, Deborah. 1998. A History of European Women’s Work. New York: Routledge. UN Women. 2019. World Survey on the Role of Women in Development. Report of the Secretary General. Why Addressing Women’s Income and Time Poverty Matters for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations Publication. World Bank. 2011. “Gender Equality and Development.” World Development Report 2012. World Bank, Washington, DC.

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18 GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN THE US LABOR MARKET Heidi Hartmann and Jessica Milli

Introduction Women’s labor in the US is characterized by three key features. First, women generally work for pay less than men do and do more unpaid work. Specifically, women still do about 3/5 of the unpaid household work, while men do about 3/5 of the paid work (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). Second, women still earn less than men for full-time, year-round work. In 2018, women earned $45,097 and men earned $55,291 for full-time year-round work, resulting in a wage ratio of 81.6 percent (Hegewisch and Tesfaselassie 2019a). Third, occupational segregation persists. Substantial shares of women (39 percent) and men (48 percent) working full-time are in occupations that are typical for their gender (75 percent or more of one gender), and men’s occupations typically pay more than women’s (Hegewisch and Tesfaselassie 2019b). These three features result in substantially different economic outcomes by gender. For example, across a period of 15 years, men earn twice as much as women (Rose and Hartmann 2018). Further, if women earned as much as comparable men, 25.8  million children would benefit from women’s higher earnings and poverty rates among families with a working woman would fall by half (Milli et al. 2017). Four main theoretical frameworks in economics are used to understand women’s economic roles and gender discrimination in the labor market: neoclassical (mainstream), Marxist/radical political, institutional, and heterodox feminist (hereafter feminist). The feminist framework builds upon elements of the other traditions in developing its theoretical approach to understanding discrimination. It broadens the focus to include the least addressed and most important aspects of economic life in understanding discrimination. Caregiving labor, for example, as crucial as it is for the survival of the human species, remains understudied in all approaches other than the feminist approach, and it can be seen to account for much of the disadvantages experienced by women.

Theoretical approaches Neoclassical economics According to neoclassical economics, individual agents, acting alone, seek to allocate scarce resources by making decisions that maximize their utility. Operating in a perfectly competitive market, these decisions, taken together, result in the most efficient outcomes. Any activity 179

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excluded from the market does not matter, and different initial endowments of resources to buy market goods, are taken as given. Observed gender differences are assumed to be the result of actors’ utility maximization decisions. For example, a woman may spend more time at home providing childcare while a man may spend more time working for pay to maximize the family’s overall well-being. This framework takes as given that the man’s wages are higher and that the woman prefers childcare to employment; Becker (1981) would argue the woman’s utility function is perfectly captured in the man’s, which represents the entire household accurately because he is viewed as a benevolent dictator. Becker (1957) has also conceptualized labor market discrimination as a taste on the part of employers, coworkers, or customers that will weaken under the force of market competition. Discriminatory tastes result in lower wages for women who are equally as qualified as men, and who would otherwise earn equal wages based on the neoclassical theory that wages are payment for productivity. The neoclassical framework provides inspiration for many empirical studies and considers several market imperfections that can contribute to discrimination, such as monopoly, monopsony, and collusion, the costs of information, and the failure of markets to capture costs and benefits of externalities, public goods, and merit goods. Bergmann (1974) uses market imperfections to describe the source of wage discrimination and posits that some occupations are essentially reserved for White men even though White men are no more inherently productive than women or Black men. This dominance of White men in some occupations results in their wages being higher than competitive markets would set and in lower wages for women and Black workers in the occupations into which they are crowded. Discrimination will continue as long as entry into White men’s occupations is blocked to others, that is, unless labor markets are competitive. Imperfect information about potential employees’ productivity may lead employers to use impressions of potential employees rooted in bias and cultural stereotypes. For example, if employers think women are less productive than men as a group, perhaps because they are more likely to take time away from work to raise families and therefore accumulate less experience on the job, they will prefer men or pay women less—a phenomenon known as statistical discrimination (Phelps 1972).

Marxist/radical political economics Marxist economics and radical political economics (RPE), its modern descendant, locate the dynamics of capitalism in the drive for profits based on the exploitation of workers, resulting in class struggle. Workers both fuel the growth of capitalism and sow the seeds of change as they fight against their exploitation (Marx and Engels 2010 [1848]). This school first argued that the working class is united in its struggle against capitalism, because all workers have essentially the same role in the production process and suffer from the same exploitation. They all produce value, most of which is appropriated by those who own the means of production, the capitalists. Workers unite in their need to wrest more from the capitalist class to fulfill their need to survive. The capitalist system today looks considerably different from the one Marx described. The labor force is highly segmented with many different types of labor requiring vastly different training and education (Edwards, Gordon, and Reich 1978). The majority of workers study beyond high school to train for highly technical, well-paid jobs, while those with only high school diplomas or less often do less well-paid jobs. Workers in the different segments have 180

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different sources of power. They may perceive gains from protecting or expanding their turf and keeping other workers out. Several unionized skilled trades historically kept women and minorities out, contributing to occupational segregation by gender and race. The labor force has also changed, reflecting a far more diverse pool of workers in terms of gender and race/ethnicity. Radical political economists have updated and broadened their understanding of class to include labor market segmentation and exploitation on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, recognizing that not all people are exploited in the same way (Campbell 2012). This diversity of exploitation points to diverse sources of power in addition to the power that derives from class, including White power, nationalist power, male power, and heterosexist power (Albelda, Drago, and Shulman 2001). However, women’s lower labor force participation, lower wages, and different paid jobs are not always considered in RPE analyses, and when they are, the lower wages and different jobs are usually seen primarily as benefiting capitalists and the economy through dividing the working class, while women’s lower labor force participation is seen to help capitalism by providing the next generation of workers through çhildcare. RPE often does not acknowledge, for example, that women’s unpaid work benefits male workers who do not have to do domestic work themselves (Hartmann 1981) nor does the field often note that women’s lower wages maintain men’s greater economic power over women (Hartmann 1979). Feminist and anti-racist struggles may go unnoticed or be undervalued in labor, left, and progressive campaigns. Demands such as a minimum wage of $15 per hour, free college tuition and/or student loan cancellation, and healthcare, pension, and Social Security expansions all contribute to more power for workers, and workers in training, as has occurred in the social democratic countries in Europe (Wright 2010). Progressive campaigns for increased attention to childcare, equal pay, family and medical leave, issues of particular importance to women of all races, and the industrial prison complex and immigration and immigrants’ rights, issues of particular importance to men and women of color, may stop short of fully embracing other priorities of the women’s rights and anti-racism movements, such as abortion rights and reparations, that are important to an expanded definition of what constitutes the economy and what economics is all about.

Institutional economics Institutional analyses of the labor market focus on the need to understand institutions, customs, and common practices and how they are enculturated in the behaviors of economic actors, allowing for examination of labor market dynamics, including wage setting and discrimination (Mutari, this volume). In corporate capitalism, many workers’ wages, jobs and career ladders are now set in internal labor markets that are directly structured by employers. Jobs may have few analogs in the broader labor market and employers use several tools, including job evaluation, to determine wage rates, rather than relying on competitive market forces to set wages. Many jobevaluation plans incorporate biases based on race and gender, and jobs done by people of color and women can be rated in a way that preserves their lower social status (Acker 1989). In some cases, employers arbitrarily discounted equal ratings to arrive at lower wages for women (Newman 1976). In the institutional framework, discrimination is baked into wage setting practices and is harder to eradicate. Labor market institutions include such practices as using workers’ prior wages to set wage offers at first hire and discouraging sharing of pay information among employees. Pay rates are also affected by the culture and economics of women being primarily responsible for childrearing as well as collective struggles that can affect public policy and employer behavior. All these 181

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factors are important in the institutional approach to discrimination against women. Race, gender, and class interact in creating the context and institutions in which discrimination occurs.

Feminist economics Nonmainstream (labeled here as heterodox) feminist economic analyses are framed around the concept of “social provisioning,” studying how individuals provide for themselves (Power 2004). “Social” points to how they do this with others, and, even if independently, how they act in a context determined by many institutions and structures that are developed collectively. The individualism, utility maximizing, and benevolent male household head of neoclassical economics are all banished in developing a theory of discrimination. In their place, feminist economics brings to bear social provisioning, the central place of unpaid work, and gender power dynamics that operate in both the labor market and the home to constrain women’s labor. This approach opens up a broader landscape of the allocation of labor and the constraints under which women provision themselves, their families, and their communities, as well as a different goal for the overall endeavor of economics—well-being. Feminist economic theory clearly borrows from institutional economics, but also borrows from RPE, extending the importance of power dynamics to study conflict between women and men in both the home and the labor market (Cohen 2018). Male power is seen to shape both women’s economic opportunities and outcomes. Men and women likely differ in how they see the purpose of maximizing the benefits of economic activity (Ferber and Nelson 1993). Women’s utility, far from being accurately represented by a generous male household head who maximizes utility for his household, may be quite a bit more complex. Women’s utility is also likely to be shaped differently for different racial/ethnic groups. Banks (2018), for example, analyzes the unpaid work Black women do to preserve and strengthen their communities, work that is especially needed since local governments typically do not provide services White communities take for granted. A feminist understanding of labor market discrimination includes how men have organized to maintain their power in the context of employers maximizing profitability. For example, long hours work (Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor 1996), a social and political construction, creates positions with high pay and prestige that men occupy disproportionately, while women, who do more care work, occupy these top jobs less often. These institutional arrangements help create and reinforce the gendered division of labor. Male bosses or co-workers having tastes for discriminating against women employees and co-workers does not fully capture these established social and institutional arrangements and the accompanying acculturated behavior, such as long hours work or male-only work-related socializing or exclusionary talk. Men have historically organized collectively to exclude women from men’s jobs and limited when and where women could work outside the home (Hartmann 1976). There are also examples of male managers and employees working together to limit women’s roles in the workplace (Cherry 1989). Therefore, while mainstream economics posits that all workers earn wages equal to their marginal product in the jobs where they have chosen to work, and that if there is discrimination against any group it should be eliminated through market competition, feminist economists argue that women’s “choices” are not always choices determined by their preferences, but are determined by institutional arrangements (e.g., lack of paid family leave, lack of high-paying jobs without excessive hours). US public schools, for example, are not open the length of a typical working day, have several vacation periods, frequent holidays and other closures during which most parents must work; at least half of parents’ paid work time is 182

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outside school hours. Feminist economists also understand that many institutions and enculturated beliefs favor men’s wants, needs, and work, such as subsidized sports stadiums for wealthy teams rather than childcare, and undervalue caring labor and other women’s work (Folbre 1994).

Empirical studies of discrimination Institutionalized practices and outright discrimination on the part of employers are important sources of gender earnings inequality. Differences in earnings also reflect gender differences in characteristics such as job training, career preparation, and credentials women and men obtain and the occupations they pursue. They can also be the result of cultural norms placing a heavier care burden on women and greater pressure on men to provide for their families, as well as power differentials between husbands and wives. Historical differences in attitudes toward women’s access to skills, apprenticeships, credit for starting businesses, and higher education, as well as biases in institutional practices in these arenas also persist. Much of the empirical literature on labor market discrimination relies on neoclassical theory, whereby the wage is a reward for worker productivity. The wage differential that cannot be explained by factors related to productivity is commonly attributed at least partially to discrimination, though not all the relevant factors can be quantified and included in these analyses. A significant portion of the gender wage gap remains unexplained by productivity-related characteristics. This unexplained portion of the wage gap has declined from 48.5 percent in 1980 to 38.0 percent in 2010 (Blau and Kahn 2017). This means that relative to the raw gender wage ratio of 79.3 percent, adjusting for differences in characteristics would increase the gender wage ratio to 91.6 percent. Evidence from experiments and audit studies indicate that employers may be discriminating against mothers, hiring them less often and offering them lower salaries despite being as qualified as non-mothers, fathers, and other males. Evidence on potential employer discrimination against women more generally is mixed. Of the 11 studies on discrimination against women in non-US contexts, five found no significant difference in employers’ preferences for men relative to women, four found that employers had a preference for female applicants, and two found that employers had a preference for male applicants (Baert 2017). However, research has more strongly indicated that women face discrimination and bias on the job. Women are promoted at lower rates than men—for every 100 men promoted to managerial positions, only 79 women are (McKinsey & Company and Lean In 2018). Behind these trends are gendered perceptions in what an effective leader looks like. Men are typically seen as more “agentic”—people who are assertive and take charge—whereas women are seen as more “communal”—people who are nice, friendly, and caring. We typically think of leaders as being more agentic than communal (Institute for Policy Research 2016). And, when women leaders exhibit these more “masculine” traits, they are often viewed as unnatural or harsh. Further, when women do take on leadership roles they are often subject to greater scrutiny in their performance evaluations. Women in line jobs (that are considered “mission-critical” and have direct responsibility for profit and loss) are the most negatively evaluated of all managers (Lyness and Heilman 2006). Additionally, women had to perform at a higher level than men in order to receive promotions. And more generally, women are more likely to have their judgment questioned in their area of expertise (36 percent of women compared with 27 percent of men) and to report needing to provide more evidence of their competence than others do (31 percent of women compared with 16 percent of men; McKinsey & Company and Lean In 2018). 183

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Policy developments Many of the policy changes affecting women’s labor force participation and earnings took place in the 1960s and 1970s (Figure 18.1). The 1963 Equal Pay Act requires that women and men be paid equally for equal work within the same establishment. The work must be substantially similar and be performed under similar working conditions, but does not require that the job titles be identical (US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 2010). The “substantially similar” clause is important because men and women often work in occupations with different titles that are sometimes similar enough to meet this test for equal work. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from basing the decision to hire, pay, promote, or fire on a person’s sex or other protected status and applies to employers with 15 or more workers (US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 2015). Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments prohibits sex-based discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding and applies to a wide range of activities including admissions and counseling, financial aid, athletics, field of study, sex-based harassment, pregnancy discrimination, discipline, and employment. These new protections resulted in tremendous advances in women’s educational attainment and subsequent earnings (US Department of Justice 2012). The 60s and 70s also saw rapid expansions in women’s access to family planning services. The first contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA in 1960. Women’s newfound ability to better control whether and when to have children corresponded to increases in educational attainment and labor force participation (Bernstein and Jones 2019a). The Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which affirmed that access to safe and legal abortion is a constitutional right, resulted in increases in educational attainment and labor force participation among women, particularly Black women (Bernstein and Jones 2019b). The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or other related medical conditions and requires that such women be treated equally with other applicants or employees who are similar in their ability or inability to work (US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 2011). The period of years surrounding the passage of this law saw a large increase in the share of women working longer into their pregnancies and returning to work sooner after giving birth (within a year).

Oral Contraceptives Approved by the FDA

Title IX of the Education Amendments

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Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Family and Medical Leave Act

Equal Pay Act

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Roe v. Wade Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

Pregnancy Discrimination Act

Figure 18.1 Timeline of national laws and policies for equal pay, equal educational and employment opportunity, and women’s reproductive rights, 1960–2019 Sources: Ananat and Hungerman 2012; Alter 2015; Cornell Law School 2019.

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The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 provides access to 12 weeks annually of unpaid leave for a number of qualifying events including the birth or adoption of a child, family caregiving, and one’s own medical care (US Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division 2012; see Albelda in this volume for more on FMLA). By guaranteeing a job to return to, the Act allows workers time away from work to care for family members and then a return to their jobs, increasing their job tenure and potentially their wages as their human capital increases (Gault et al. 2014). Non-birth parents who take leave around the birth of a child subsequently also provide more childcare, contributing to the equalizing of caregiving responsibilities over time (Nepomnyaschy and Waldfogel 2007). The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 overturned the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., which limited the window of opportunity for filing employment discrimination complaints regarding pay to 180 days from an employer’s first discriminatory pay decision. The 2009 law instead treats each paycheck as a separate violation (US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 2010). Because a large share of employers discourage or prohibit employees from discussing pay (Hayes and Hartmann 2011), the 2009 clarification improves employees’ ability to address pay inequality.

Current policy proposals Policy proposals to address unequal pay in new ways are spreading across the nation. States and localities have passed “pay transparency” statutes prohibiting employers from retaliating in any way against employees for disclosing their own wages, discussing others’ wages, or inquiring about other employees’ wages; a few states have also passed laws requiring employers to make salary ranges for jobs available. They have also passed a number of “salary history bans” banning basing salary offers on past earnings, a practice that lowers earnings for disadvantaged groups (American Association of University Women 2019). Evidence on the impact of such laws is scarce since most have been passed relatively recently. However, the 2007 pay transparency law in Denmark resulted in a 7 percent reduction in the gender pay gap (Bennedsen et  al. 2019). And comparable worth initiatives that took place largely in the 1980s in state civil services in the US were effective in raising women’s wages relative to men’s (Hartmann and Aaronson 1994). Laws that increase the minimum wage or improve workers’ ability to bargain collectively also improve women’s wages relative to men’s. More than half the states have raised their minimum wage levels above the federal minimum wage since the last federal minimum wage increase in 2009 (National Conference of State Legislatures 2019). Paid family leave laws, spreading through the states, have also been shown to strengthen women’s labor force attachment (Rossin-Slater, Ruhm, and Waldfogel 2013) and to increase leave-taking among new fathers (Bartel et al. 2018). As of 2019 eight states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family leave laws (National Partnership for Women & Families 2019).

Concluding remarks The research reviewed here highlights the economic necessity for tackling women’s unpaid work burden, the gender wage gap, and occupational segregation by gender. Stronger enforcement of existing laws is needed, as well as the adoption of new laws. For instance, to close the gender pay gap, federal legislation modeled on state initiatives would enable workers to share wage information, prohibit the use of salary histories in wage setting, and provide paid family and medical leave. Such legislation adds historical and contextual considerations to the discussion 185

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of discrimination and broadens the definition of protections against discrimination to include reproductive rights, the right to form a family of one’s choosing, and the opportunity to realize one’s capabilities and provide all the necessities of life for self, family, and community. Heterodox feminist economic theory has broadened the concept of discrimination but still needs to develop a systematic way of identifying and studying discrimination in the labor market and in all the domains that are relevant to this larger sense of equal opportunity and human capability.

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Gender discrimination in the US Gault, Barbara, Heidi Hartmann, Ariane Hegewisch, Jessica Milli, and Lindsey Reichlin. 2014. Paid Parental Leave in the United States: What the Data Tell Us about Access, Usage, and Economic and Health Benefits. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. www.iwpr.org/publications/pubs/ paid-parental-leave-in-the-united-states-what-the-data-tell-us-about-access-usage-and-economicand-health-benefits. Hartmann, Heidi I. 1976. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (3, Part 2): 137–69. doi:10.1086/493283. ———. 1979. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” Capital & Class 3 (2): 1–33. doi:10.1177/030981687900800102. ———. 1981. “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework.” Signs 6 (3): 366–94. Hartmann, Heidi I., and Stephanie Aaronson. 1994. “Pay Equity and Women’s Wage Increases: Success in the States, a Model for the Nation.” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 1 (January): 69–88. Hayes, Jeff, and Heidi Hartmann. 2011. Women and Men Living on the Edge: Economic Insecurity after the Great Recession. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. www.iwpr.org/publications/pubs/women-and-menliving-on-the-edge-economic-insecurity-after-the-great-recession#sthash.Z50KC4K3.dpuf. Hegewisch, Ariane, and Adiam Tesfaselassie. 2019a. The Gender Wage Gap 2018: Earnings Differences by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. Fact Sheet IWPR #C484. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/C484.pdf. ———. 2019b. The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2018. Fact Sheet #C480. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-occupation-2018/. Institute for Policy Research. 2016. “Why Do So Few Women Hold Positions of Power?” www.ipr.north western.edu/about/news/2016/why-so-few-women-hold-positions-of-power.html. Landers, Renée M., James B. Rebitzer, and Lowell J. Taylor. 1996. “Rat Race Redux: Adverse Selection in the Determination of Work Hours in Law Firms.” The American Economic Review 86 (3): 329–48. Lyness, Karen S., and Madeline E. Heilman. 2006. “When Fit Is Fundamental: Performance Evaluations and Promotions of Upper-Level Female and Male Managers.” Journal of Applied Psychology 91 (4): 777–85. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.91.4.777. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 2010. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf. McKinsey & Company, and Lean In. 2018. Women in the Workplace: 2018. McKinsey & Company and Lean In. www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/gender-equality/women-in-the-workplace-2018. Milli, Jessica, Yixuan Huang, Heidi Hartmann, and Jeff Hayes. 2017. The Impact of Equal Pay on Poverty and the Economy. C455. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/ wp-content/uploads/2017/04/C455.pdf. National Conference of State Legislatures. 2019. “State Minimum Wages | 2019 Minimum Wage by State.” www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage-chart.aspx. National Partnership for Women & Families. 2019. “State Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Laws.” www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/resources/workplace/paid-leave/state-paid-family-leavelaws.pdf. Nepomnyaschy, Lenna, and Jane Waldfogel. 2007. “Paternity Leave and Fathers’ Involvement with Their Young Children.” Community, Work & Family 10 (4): 427–53. doi:10.1080/13668800701575077. Newman, Winn. 1976. “Combatting Occupational Segregation: Presentation III.” In Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Phelps, Edmund S. 1972. “The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism.” The American Economic Review 62 (4): 659–61. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. doi:10.1080/1354570042000267608. Rose, Stephen, and Heidi Hartmann. 2018. Still a Man’s Labor Market: The Slowly Narrowing Gender Wage Gap. IWPR Publication No. C474. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https:// iwpr.org/publications/still-mans-labor-market/. Rossin-Slater, Maya, Christopher J. Ruhm, and Jane Waldfogel. 2013. “The Effects of California’s Paid Family Leave Program on Mothers’ Leave-Taking and Subsequent Labor Market Outcomes.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 32 (2): 224–45. doi:10.1002/pam.21676. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2018. Average Hours per Day Spent in Selected Activities by Sex and Day, 2018 Annual Averages. Washington, DC: US Bureau of Labor Statistics. www.bls.gov/charts/american-timeuse/activity-by-sex.htm.

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Heidi Hartmann and Jessica Milli US Department of Justice. 2012. “Equal Access to Education: Forty Years of Title IX.” www.justice.gov/ sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/06/20/titleixreport.pdf. US Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division. 2012. Fact Sheet #28: The Family and Medical Leave Act. Washington, DC: US Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division. www.dol.gov/whd/regs/ compliance/whdfs28.pdf. US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. 2010. “Facts about Equal Pay and Compensation ­Discrimination.” www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/fs-epa.cfm. ———. 2011. “Facts about Pregnancy Discrimination.” www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/fs-preg.cfm. ———. 2015. “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Accessed March 3, 2015. Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.

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19 CONTINGENT WORK AND THE GIG ECONOMY Deborah M. Figart

Introduction The “gig economy” is a term that is increasingly used to describe a set of contemporary employment conditions. In its most common usage, the term loosely encompasses paid work classified as contingent, part-time, temporary, intermittent, or having alternative work arrangements, such as on-call scheduling, unsocial hours, irregular work schedules, and other work that is precarious and insecure. Narrower constructions of “gigs” only focus on contingent or contractual labor for a single employer or multiple employers. The broader definition of the gig economy incorporates multiple ways that risk and precariousness have been shifted from employers to those performing the work. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) identifies the “Gig Economy” as #4 on its annual list of Top Ten Workplace Trends for 2019, up from #10 in 2018 (SIOP Administrative Office 2019). This trend represents a fundamental change in how social provisioning is institutionalized in the early 21st century. The term “gig economy” is often tied to the rise of digital platform labor such as driving for Uber or Lyft. While it is certainly true that digital platforms and mobile devices are transforming work, the global workforce had been evolving even before the increasing usage of the internet in the 2000s and digital platforms in the 2010s. The rise of a more precarious labor force in the US, Canada, and Europe has been well documented (Standing 1999; Figart 2003; Vosko 2006; Carré and Heintz 2009; Vosko, MacDonald, and Campbell 2009; Lewchuk 2017). Job quality has been decreasing for decades in industrialized countries, as structural forces such as globalization, financialization, technological change, and neoliberalism have led to both increased risk taken on by workers coupled with increased job insecurity and income inequality (Kalleberg 2011; Mutari and Figart 2015; ILO 2016; Lewchuk 2017). The expansion of the gig economy reflects a historical transition in social provisioning away from a particular set of gendered and racialized norms toward an emerging set of institutions. “Jobs,” “employees,” and “occupations” are social constructs that emerged historically during the 19th and 20th centuries in concert with a shift toward a male breadwinner/female caregiver family structure. By mid-20th century, dual labor markets had emerged. The so-called primary sector provided good jobs—regular, life-time employment with benefits and decent wages—while other workers were relegated to contingent forms of work in a secondary sector. 189

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These dual labor markets were segmented by race and gender, with White males concentrated in primary sector jobs (see Mutari and Figart 2015: 6–8, for a summary). In contrast, contingent work in the secondary sector was assigned to women and other historically disadvantaged groups (Fudge and Owens 2006; Vosko 2006; Young 2010). Even today, contingent workers are disproportionately—but not exclusively—young, people of color, women, single parents, and persons with less education, that is, who possess only a high school diploma (McCrate 2012; Lambert, Haley-Lock, and Henly 2012; Luce and Fujita 2012; Golden 2015; Lambert, Fugiel, and Henly 2015). Gigs are not breadwinner jobs—the aspirational norm of labor markets since the late 19th century. Consequently, gig work is feminized, meaning it is associated with characteristics that are socially defined as feminine (Rosenberg and Lapidus 1999; Standing 1999; McCrate 2013; Figart and Mutari 2015). What is driving scholarly and media attention to the expansion of nonstandard employment is that the job characteristics that were once viewed as “secondary” and primarily associated with women and people of color are moving into the mainstream of provisioning processes. As men have increasingly experienced feminized employment conditions associated with precarious employment, gendered and racialized economic institutions have been disrupted. Debates over the extent and significance of the gig economy are thus about what type of work sustains our economies and households within our economies, and who performs these types of work. In other words, the gig economy has posed as yet-unanswered questions about how social provisioning processes should be institutionalized.

Measurement and trends The extent and economic significance of various forms of insecure employment are contested. Measurement issues play a role because definitions of concepts and survey questions posed to gather data have not been uniform. Official sources, such as US and Canadian government surveys, have generally relied on relatively narrow definitions that seem to understate the growth of precariousness (Cranford and Vosko 2006). Data that use broader definitions indicate a more widespread and growing phenomenon, as described below. Researchers and policymakers have found that, depending on the definition, the size of the contingent workforce ranges from 5 percent to more than one-third of the entire US labor force (GAO 2015). The cultural significance of the trend, however, seems to be based upon more than the percentage of the labor force who have gig jobs. While the extent may be stable or slowly increasing, it appears that net job growth is increasingly gig work (Katz and Krueger 2016; Hyman 2018). Rather than a feminized enclave, as temporary jobs and on-call workers were until a few decades ago, unstable and insecure work is emerging as an important, though not (yet) hegemonic form. Moreover, the particular limits of the binary categorizations used in official data are unable to capture the continuum of precariousness in contemporary employment relations (Lewchuk 2017). Oft-cited data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) can be used to downplay the existence of a trend toward precarious employment relationships. The BLS has collected data on “contingent and alternative employment arrangements” (Contingent Work Survey or CWS) periodically with supplementary questions in the Current Population Survey (CPS) every other year since February 1995, in 2005, then followed by a lengthy gap again in 2017. In the literature, “contingent and alternative employment arrangements” has served as a proxy measure of gig employment. The broadest measure of contingent work (“estimate #3”) refers to workers “who do not expect their job to last,” even if they have already held the job for more than one year and expect to hold the job for at least an additional year (BLS 2005). The BLS also identifies workers 190

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who have alternative work arrangements. The four types are independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help agency workers, and workers who are on sub-contract to a company providing services. Such workers have a loose affiliation with their employers and are typically not considered an “employee” under US labor law. The BLS definition does not include freelance work. Further, part-time work, which generally shares important characteristics with precarious employment, including fewer benefits, less job stability, and racialized feminization, is not included in definitions of contingent employment, even if it is involuntary (Ferber and Waldfogel 1999). Based on aggregate data using the BLS definitions, in Table 19.1 there is no clear, alarming long-run increase in precarious employment between 1995 and 2017. In 2017, the female share of the US labor force in precarious employment ranged from 33 percent to 48 percent. Other US surveys have found more extensive evidence of changing work. A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that precarious employment constituted 23.4 percent of workers (Lewchuk 2017: 407). To fill the gap in data following the 2005 BLS survey, Katz and Krueger (2016) conducted the RAND Princeton Contingent Worker Survey (RPCWS), a version of the BLS CWS, in October and November of 2015. They define alternative work as defined in Table 19.1. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements rose from 10.1  percent in 2005 to 15.8  percent in 2015, a relative increase of 56.4 percent, indicating that all of the net employment growth in the US economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements (Katz and Krueger 2016: 7). According to Hyman (2018) in Temp, in the last ten years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment (Hyman 2018: 10). Employer surveys have also shown an appreciable trend (Wiens-Tuers 2004; Donovan, Bradley, and Shimabukuro 2016). Contrary to the BLS report, these studies indicate that employers are seeking to create flexibility in their employment practices and, consequently, are transforming work. International data support a rise of this type of work not only in the US but also in other industrialized countries and in parts of the Global South. The McKinsey Global Institute published a key report of “independent work,” which is defined as having three features: a high degree of autonomy; payment by task, assignment, or sales; and a short-term relationship between worker and client (Manyika et  al. 2016). As much as 20 to 30  percent of the working-age population in the US and EU-15 countries engaged in such forms of independent work. Thirty percent of these workers derived their primary income from it. “Reluctants,” Table 19.1 Share of the US labor force in contingent and alternative work arrangements (and female share by category in 2017) 1995 Category Contingent With alternative work arrangements Independent contractors On-call workers Temporary help agency workers Workers provided by contract firms TOTAL

2005

2017

% Female

4.9%

4.1%

3.8%

(47.3%)

6.7% 1.7% 1.0% 0.5% 14.8%

7.4% 1.8% 0.9% 0.6% 14.8*

6.9% 1.7% 0.9% 0.6% 13.9%*

(35.7%) (47.5%) (47.7%) (33.0%) (46.8%)

* Some workers are both contingent and working in an alternative arrangement; thus, there is a slight overlap. This table uses BLS estimate #3 for contingent workers. Source: Wiens-Tuers (2004) for 1995, BLS (2005, 2018) for 2005 and 2017.

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who would prefer more traditional jobs, numbered 14 percent of independent workers. The International Labour Organization (ILO 2016) conducted a study of non-standard employment (NSE) in over 150 countries. By their definition, NSE comprises: temporary employment; marginal part-time and on-call employment; temporary agency employment and subcontracted labor; and “disguised employment.” The latter is often referred to as misclassification in the underground economy. According to the ILO, non-standard jobs have grown faster in industrialized than developing countries, eroding traditional employment relations, particularly with the expansion of the service sector and global supply chains. In terms of gender composition, the share of women reported to work in gig employment in selected industrialized countries ranges from 31 percent to 55 percent, depending on measurement (Hunt and Samman 2019, Figure 1), and 47 percent in the US (see Table 19.1). Workers in some alternative work arrangements were disproportionately male. Therefore, even if the US BLS data do not indicate an increase in precarious employment, there is an indication of an increased presence of men in gig work. These cross-sectional findings (BLS 2018; see also Appelbaum, Kalleberg, and Rho 2019) also indicate the overlap between contingent work and other traditionally feminized working conditions. Specifically, contingent workers are more than twice as likely as non-contingent workers to be under the age of 25 and more likely to work part-time; independent contractors are more likely to be older and gendered male; temporary help agency workers are more likely to be Black, Hispanic, or Latinx; and while more than half of contingent workers would prefer a permanent job, 39 percent of temporary help agency workers and 44 percent of on-call workers prefer their work arrangement to be something more permanent. These are the categories with the highest female representation. Moreover, most workers in alternative arrangements are not generally covered by health insurance coverage from the employer.

From the temporary help industry to digital platforms Long before Uber and TaskRabbit and Etsy, gig work was provided by the “Kelly girl.” The temporary help industry represented a significant transition, because it turned casual labor into a profit center for corporations—in contrast with pre-industrial (predominantly male) day labor on farms, in construction, and other small enterprises. Temporary work was, and continues to be, predominantly female (ILO 2016: ch. 5). The gig economy has translated the lessons garnered from the temporary help industry into new employment forms made possible through technological change. Analyzing company archives (Apple, McKinsey  & Company, and Manpower, Inc.) and experiences of gig workers such as temporary data processors, line workers, and migrant workers, Hyman (2018) argues that the origins of the gig economy date to deliberate decisions by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and corporate consultants. Specifically, Manpower, Inc. was cofounded in 1948 by Elmer Winter, who claimed in 1958 that a steady, well-paid job may no longer be possible (Hyman 2018). By the 1990s, temporary work was growing much faster than total employment (Hartmann and Lapidus 1990). Manpower, Inc. (now the ManpowerGroup) grew to be one of America’s largest employers; in 2017, it employed 50 percent more people than Walmart (Hyman 2018). In 1948, Manpower advertised for part-time, short-term workers, mostly to help type and file paperwork. Despite its name, they were not primarily interested in “man” power. Rather, the company enlisted famous psychologist and media personality Dr. Joyce Brothers to write a promotional pamphlet to women in 1966 stating that temp work was a choice for women so they could tend to the needs of husbands and children, working without undermining male 192

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authority (Hyman 2018). Its chief rival Kelly Girl (now Kelly Services), founded in 1946, hired primarily White women as office workers. The rise of the temporary help industry follows a similar path in Canada (Vosko 2000). Lapidus (1993) counters this narrative of choice in her in-depth study of the temporary help industry, by extending labor market segmentation theory to argue that employers/agencies want a pool of low-wage women with few opportunities as a basis for their business model. Temporary help was thus demand-led, not supply led. Employers, according to Hyman, reinforced the message to permanent employees that temps were unlike regular, probationary employees. Temporary work structured segmentation by distinguishing between high-quality jobs in what were seen as core business activities and insecure employment in peripheral functions (Kalleberg 2011; ILO 2016). Similar dynamics followed with the subsequent expansion of part-time employment, touted as a means for married mothers to balance work and family. These social practices established nonstandard work as gendered female, reinforcing gender norms associated with the male-breadwinner/female-caregiver family structure. As other forms of nonstandard work grew during the 1980s, the term “contingent” work was first introduced by labor economist Audrey Freedman in 1985 at a conference on employment security to describe a working relationship that was to exist only when needed by an employer for particular projects (Polivka 1996). The growth of contingent work accentuated the polarization between “good” jobs and “bad” jobs, while increasing workers’ exposure to precariousness (Kalleberg 2011). The overall impact of these forms of work has been to cut costs and “fracture” or “fissure” the traditional relationship between employer and employee, weakening the coverage of traditional labor laws and workplace regulations (Weil 2014; Stanford 2017). Rather than compensating wage differentials for the increased risk associated with nonstandard employment, such workers experience wage penalties (ILO 2016). With the rise of the internet and digital applications—“apps”—available for mobile devices, digitally mediated service work or digital platform labor evolved from the temporary help industry, exacerbating the rise of relatively low-income, on-demand service work in the burgeoning gig economy (Figart 2017: ch. 4; van Doorn 2017). Customers not only shopped online, but ordered services online such as ride shares, home repair, errands, domestic work, shopping. Some estimates have more than 22 percent of adults (2014 data) at least dipping their toes into this “sharing economy” or “platform economy” by offering services (Barzilay and Ben-David 2017). These platforms transform high-status independent contractors (e.g., taxi drivers, home repair workers) into quasi on-call employees, generating profits for the owner of the platform. Or, these gigs replace or supplement full-time employment. As in the temporary help industry, platform-facilitated labor constructs gendered outcomes. For example, gender pay gaps exist among gig workers even after controlling for factors such as feedback score, hours of work, experience, educational attainment, and occupational category (Barzilay and BenDavid 2017; Cook et al. 2018). The research is silent on whether the pay gaps can be attributed to discrimination. Lewchuk (2017) suggests that the increase in nonstandard employment has had spillover effects on standard employment. Specifically, using data from a Canadian survey, Lewchuk (2017) developed an Employment Precarity Index that included workers in standard as well as nonstandard employment and found that even those workers who identified themselves as permanent, full-time employees, had substantial elements of precarity in their jobs. These included irregular schedules, lack of benefits, and sacrificing pay when missing a day’s work. Such findings suggest that the traditional segmentation of dual labor markets may be breaking down, with the characteristics of secondary employment eroding working conditions for fulltime workers. 193

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Irregular schedules in the gig economy This erosion of working conditions is particularly exemplified by the lack of worker discretion over the timing of their hours and schedule. Aided by sophisticated scheduling software such as timesheets.com, major retail employers have found a new way to cut costs: they monitor demand and floor traffic, call workers into duty only when needed—on little notice—and send them back home when business at the brick-and-mortar store slows. This employment practice is termed “just-in-time” scheduling. McCrate’s (2012) study of employer-driven schedule flexibility finds that male workers (including black and immigrant workers, and especially married men) are more likely to be concentrated in these positions, presumably because of both single and married mothers’ family responsibilities that are incompatible with variable hours. But lower levels of education are also associated with employment in variable-hour jobs. McCrate argues that declining bargaining power among young male workers with less education and the desire of businesses to shift risk onto employees have driven these new forms of control over labor. Manufacturing employers developed just-in-time production techniques in the 1980s. Walmart, America’s largest retailer, pioneered just-in-time inventory management in the 1990s. In the new century, the employees are managed like inventory, with the evolution of just-intime scheduling practices (Boushey and Ansel 2016). Employers not only manage the overall number of workers, but their units of time, in ever-smaller timesheet units—even 15 minutes at a time. The trend is especially notable in the retail sector. According to Lambert (2008: 1212): “In all the retail stores studied, managers were held accountable for maintaining a particular ratio between the number of hours employees worked and either store sales or traffic,” that is, a payroll hours-to-sales ratio. “Corporate” and/or higher-level managers, Lambert continues, review the ratios daily and managers are expected to rebalance by the next week or next day. In one extreme example, a retailer monitored the labor-to-sales ratio hourly and staffing adjustments were made throughout the day. Underemployment, the number of employees working fewer hours than they wished—is growing (Lambert, Haley-Lock, and Henly 2012; Henly and Lambert 2014; Alexander and Haley-Lock 2015; Luce, Hammad, and Sipe 2016). And Golden (2015) estimates that about 15 percent of sales and related occupations have irregular or on-call schedules. Even full-time employment status does not guarantee full-time hours on a regular weekly basis. In fact, it is the (mal)distribution of hours across the work week that is a paramount problem for today’s working families. It is a tale of two different worlds, segmented by class as much as by gender. Long hours and mandatory overtime among the professional and managerial class combine with underwork among the working class to reinforce income polarization (Kalleberg 2011; Figart 2017). Highly educated professional and managerial workers, married or cohabitating, concentrate income gains within households able to benefit from skill-biased technological change and the rising college wage premium. Such workers may have variable schedules but exert control over their own hours (McCrate 2012). The combination of overwork for some and underwork for others also has gendered dimensions. While fathers are concentrated in variable hours jobs, mothers with less education are overly crowded into relatively low-paid, short-hours jobs (Golden et al. 2011; Peterson and Wiens-Tuers 2014).

Conclusion: impact on work-life balance and economic well-being The 20th-century institutional norm of full-time employment is unraveling. On the one hand, this was a gendered norm, one that constructed the male breadwinner and female caregiver as hegemonic social practices. For feminists, however, the shift to a gig economy grounded in 194

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precarious employment practices is not a progressive economic change as it represents a race to the bottom. The feminization of working conditions for male workers has exacerbated class inequality while adding to economic stress for working families. As globalization and financialization have pressured employers to cut costs, flexible use of labor has increased. Contingent jobs are less likely to be covered by minimum wage and other labor laws (such as overtime protection, unemployment compensation, and the Family and Medical Leave Act), and are typically lacking health insurance, pensions, paid sick leave, and other benefits (Carré and Heintz 2009; ILO 2016; Stewart and Stanford 2017). Feminist research has found that gig-type work has negative effects on workers, their spouses, and their children (see, for example, Gerstel and Clawson 2015; Boushey 2016; Vogtman and Schulman 2016). Working adults with irregular work schedules cannot schedule their lives: shopping and running errands, going to the doctor, exercising, socializing, and care work. Most importantly, the gig economy represents an institutional shift of risk from businesses to employees that increases economic insecurity and undermines the ability to make stable plans for the future, such as saving for retirement or higher education. Moving away from standard work to nonstandard employment calls for new directions in measurement, research, and policy. Living in the gig economy underscores the limitations of the labor law and work regulations system built in the mid-20th century. New legislation and innovative labor protections need to foster equitable employment practices for workers and workplaces that do not fit the old norms. New regulations and practices should be creative and heterogeneous to match the employment practices that underlie the varied nature of work in the gig economy. These should include minimum hours laws, broadening the definition of an “employer,” and organizing platform-based gig workers into unions or worker associations. Cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia are taking the lead on legislation until such time as the US Congress and President are willing to pass and sign national legislation.

References Alexander, Charlotte, and Anna Haley-Lock. 2015. “Underwork, Work-Hour Insecurity, and a New Approach to Wage and Hour Regulation.” Industrial Relations 54 (4): 695–716. Appelbaum, Eileen, Arne Kalleberg, and Hye Jin Rho. 2019. Nonstandard Work Arrangements and Older Americans, 2005–2017. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, February  28. Accessed March  2019. www.epi.org/publication/nonstandard-work-arrangements-andolder-americans-2005-2017/. Barzilay, Arianne Renan, and Anat Ben-David. 2017. “Platform Inequality: Gender in the Gig-Economy.” Seton Hall Law Review 47 (2): 393–431. Boushey, Heather. 2016. Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boushey, Heather, and Bridget Ansel. 2016. Working by the Hour: The Economic Consequences of Unpredictable Scheduling Practices. Washington, DC: Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Accessed February  2019. https://equitablegrowth.org/working-by-the-hour-the-economic-consequencesof-unpredictable-scheduling-practices/. Carré, Françoise, and James Heintz. 2009. “The United States: Different Sources of Precariousness in a Mosaic of Employment Arrangements.” In Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment, edited by Leah F. Vosko, Martha MacDonald, and Iain Campbell, 43–59. London: Routledge. Cook, Cody, Rebecca Diamond, Jonathan Hall, John A. List, and Paul Oyer. 2018. “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from Over a Million Rideshare Drivers.” Stanford University School of Business Working Paper No. 3637, Palo Alto, CA. Accessed February 2019. https://web. stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf. Cranford, Cynthia J., and Leah F. Vosko. 2006. “Conceptualizing Precarious Employment: Mapping Wage Work Across Social Location and Occupational Context.” In Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada, edited by Leah F. Vosko, 43–66. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

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Deborah M. Figart Donovan, Sarah A., David H. Bradley, and Jon O. Shimabukuro. 2016. What Does the Gig Economy Mean for Workers? Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February  5. Accessed February  2019. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc824431/m2/1/high_res_d/R44365_2016 Feb05.pdf. Ferber, Marianne A., and Jane Waldfogel. 1999. “Contingent Labour.” In The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, edited by Janice Peterson and Margaret Lewis, 77–82. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Figart, Deborah M. 2003. “Labor Market Policy: One Institutionalist’s Agenda.” Journal of Economic Issues 37 (2): 315–23. ———. 2017. Stories of Progressive Institutional Change: Challenges to the Neoliberal Economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Figart, Deborah M., and Ellen Mutari. 2015. “Social Provisioning Through Work.” In The Elgar Companion to Social Economics, edited by John B. Davis and Wilfred Dolfsma, 2nd ed., 314–30. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Fudge, Judy and Rosemary Owens, eds. 2006. Precarious Work, Women, and the New Economy. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Gerstel, Naomi, and Dan Clawson. 2015. “Inequality in Work Time: Gender and Class Stratify Hours and Schedules, Flexibility, and Unpredictability in Jobs and Families.” Sociology Compass 9 (12): 1094–105. Golden, Lonnie. 2015. “Irregular Work Scheduling and Its Consequences.” EPI Briefing Paper #394, Washington, DC, April  9. Accessed February  2019. www.epi.org/publication/irregularwork-scheduling-and-its-consequences/. Golden, Lonnie, Barbara Wiens-Tuers, Susan J. Lambert, and Julia R. Henly. 2011. “Working Time in the Employment Relationship: Working Time, Perceived Control and Work-life Balance.” In Research Handbook on the Future of Work and Employment Relations, edited by Keith Townsend and Adrian Wilkinson, 188–211. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hartmann, Heidi I., and June Lapidus. 1990. Temporary Work. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Research-in-Brief. Accessed October 2018. https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/ wpallimport/files/iwpr-export/publications/C302.pdf. Henly, Julia R., and Susan J. Lambert. 2014. “Unpredictable Work Timing in Retail Jobs: Implications for Employee Work-Life Conflict.” Industrial & Labor Relations Review 67 (3): 986–1016. Hunt, Abigail, and Emma Samman. 2019. “Gender and the Gig Economy.” Working Paper 546. Overseas Development Institute, London. Accessed January  19, 2021. https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/ files/resource-documents/12586.pdf. Hyman, Louis. 2018. Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. New York: Viking. International Labour Organization. 2016. Non-Standard Employment Around the World. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Kalleberg, Arne. 2011. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Katz, Lawrence F., and Alan B. Krueger. 2016. “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015.” Working Paper, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, March  29. Accessed September  2018. https://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/files/katz_ krueger_cws_-_march_29_20165.pdf. Lambert, Susan J. 2008. “Passing the Buck: Labor Flexibility Practices That Transfer Risk onto Hourly Workers.” Human Relations 61 (9): 1203–27. Lambert, Susan J., Peter J. Fugiel, and Julia R. Henly. 2015. Precarious Work Schedules among Early-Career Employees in the U.S.: A  National Snapshot. Chicago: University of Chicago EINet. Accessed January 2019. https://ssa.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/lambert.fugiel.henly_.precarious_work_ schedules.august2014_0.pdf. Lambert, Susan J., Anna Haley-Lock, and Julia R. Henly. 2012. “Schedule Flexibility in Hourly Jobs: Unanticipated Consequences and Promising Directions.” Community, Work & Family 15 (3): 293–315. Lapidus, June. 1993. “Family Structure, Flexible Employment, and Labor Market Segmentation: Evidence from a Study of the Temporary Help Industry.” International Contributions to Labour Studies 3: 91–100. Lewchuk, Wayne. 2017. “Precarious Jobs: Where Are They, and How Do They Affect Well-Being?” The Economic and Labor Relations Review 28 (3): 402–19. Luce, Stephanie, and Naoki Fujita. 2012. Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short. New York: Murphy Institute, City University of New York, and the Retail Action Project. Accessed February 2019. www.issuelab.org/resource/discounted-jobs-how-retailers-sell-workers-short.html.

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Contingent work and the gig economy Luce, Stephanie, Sasha Hammad, and Darrah Sipe. 2016. Short Shifted. New York: Murphy Institute of the City University of New York and Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Accessed September 2018. http://retailactionproject.org/2014/09/short-shifted/. Manyika, James, Susan Lund, Jacques Bughin, Kelsey Robinson, Jan Mischke, and Deepa Mahajan. 2016. Independent Work: Choice, Necessity, and the Gig Economy. San Francisco, CA: McKinsey Global Institute, October. Accessed October  2018. www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/ independent-work-choice-necessity-and-the-gig-economy. McCrate, Elaine. 2012. “Flexibility for Whom? Control Over Work Schedule Variability in the US.” Feminist Economics 18 (1): 39–72. ———. 2013. “Employer-Oriented Schedule Flexibility, Gender and Family Care.” In Handbook of Research on Gender and Economic Life, edited by Deborah M. Figart and Tonia L. Warnecke, 273–89. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Mutari, Ellen, and Deborah M. Figart. 2015. Just One More Hand: Life in the Casino Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Peterson, Janice, and Barbara Wiens-Tuers. 2014. Work Time, Gender, and Inequality: The Conundrums of Flexibility.” Journal of Economic Issues 48 (2): 387–94. Polivka, Anne E. 1996. “Contingent and Alternative Work Arrangements, Defined.” Monthly Labor Review 122 (10): 3–9. Rosenberg, Sam, and June Lapidus. 1999. “Contingent and Non-Standard Work in the United States: Towards a More Poorly Compensated, Insecure Workforce.” In Global Trends in Flexible Labor: Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisations, edited by Alan Felstead and Nick Jewson, 62–83. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Administrative Office. 2019. “It’s the Same, Only Different: SIOP Top 10 Workplace Trends 2019.” Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Accessed March 2019. www.siop.org/article_view.aspx?article=1894. Standing, Guy. 1999. “Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited.” World Development 27 (3): 583–602. Stanford, Jim. 2017. “The Resurgence of Gig Work: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives.” The Economic and Labour Relations Review 28 (3): 382–401. Stewart, Andrew, and Jim Stanford. 2017. “Regulating Work in the Gig Economy: What Are the Options?.” The Economic and Labour Relations Review 28 (3): 420–37. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2005. Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements–February 2005. Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, USDL-05-1433. ———. 2018. Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements–May  2017. Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, USDL-18-0942. US Government Accountability Office (GAO). 2015. Contingent Workforce: Size, Characteristics, Earnings, and Benefits. Washington, DC: GAO. van Doorn, Niels. 2017. “Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low Income Service Work in the ‘On-Demand Economy’.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (6): 898–914. Vogtman, Julie, and Karen Schulman. 2016. Set Up to Fail: When Low-Wage Work Jeopardizes Parents’ and Children’s Success. Washington, DC: National Women’s Law Center. Accessed January 2019. https://nwlc. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/FINAL-Set-Up-To-Fail-When-Low-Wage-Work-JeopardizesParents%E2%80%99-and-Children%E2%80%99s-Success.pdf. Vosko, Leah F. 2000. Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2006. “Precarious Employment: Towards an Improved Understanding of Labour Market Insecurity.” In Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada, edited by Leah F. Vosko, 3–39. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Vosko, Leah F., Martha MacDonald, and Iain Campbell. 2009. “Introduction: Gender and the Concept of Precarious Employment.” In Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment, edited by Leah F. Vosko, Martha MacDonald, and Iain Campbell, 1–25. London: Routledge. Weil, David. 2014. The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became so Bad for so Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wiens-Tuers, Barbara A. 2004. “Nonstandard Labor through an Institutionalist Lens.” In The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics, edited by Dell P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler, 190–205. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Young, Marisa C. 2010. “Gender Differences in Precarious Work Settings.” Relations Industrielles 65 (1): 3–171.

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20 LABOR MARKETS AND INFORMAL WORK IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Alma Espino and Daniela de los Santos

Introduction In the 20th century formal wage labor has been prevalent only in the Global North (Europe, North America, Japan and Australia). In Latin America a regular wage-labor relationship has characterized only around 50 percent of the working population (ILO 2018a). In the Global South informal activities contribute to livelihoods of a large number of people—one half to three-quarters of all nonagricultural employment is informal. Women in the Global South are more likely to be in the informal economy than their male counterparts (ILO 2018a). Informal employment includes the following: own account workers with or without employees from the informal sector; family workers; members of informal producers’ cooperatives; wage workers in formal or informal enterprises, or in households (paid domestic workers). This type of work is characterized by being outside the purview of labor law and regulations (income tax, social protection) and workers are not entitled to employment benefits such as prior notice for dismissal, indemnification, annual leave, and sick leave (ILO 2002). Globally, 63 percent of men are in informal employment compared to 58 percent of women. However, that higher share of men in informal employment globally reflects the trends in the Global North. In most economies of the Global South, a greater share of women than of men is in informal employment. Moreover, in parts of the Global South, most employed women are in informal work. Specifically, more than 90 percent of employed women in sub-Saharan Africa, almost 90 percent in South Asia, and almost 75 percent in Latin America are engaged in informal work (ILO 2018a). In the Global South, women in informal work tend to be unpaid family workers, rather than informal employees, employers and own account workers. Unpaid family workers constitute 28 percent of all women in informal work compared to 9 percent of men in informal work. Due to this fact, women’s average labor income from informal labor is likely to be lower compared to men. Extensive scholarship has aimed to explain the characteristics, causes and consequences of informality in global labor markets. Informality presents a two-way relationship with poverty, discrimination and occupational segregation by gender, race, ethnicity, and national origin. It creates vicious cycles that reproduce informality, but it is also a response to it (UNS 2014). In addition, informality is linked to weak institutional systems and insufficient investment in capabilities of women and men. 198

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Regardless of its causes, informal work is characterized by lack of decent job opportunities or what ILO (2013) has dubbed “decent work deficit.” Women have a higher risk of experiencing decent work deficits (ILO 2018a). Informal work adversely impacts the living conditions of informal workers and their access to fundamental rights, during their working life and in retirement. This chapter reviews the feminist scholarship that examines the trends in informal employment worldwide, the factors that contribute to women’s informal employment, and the impact of informal employment on women’s and men’s well-being. It ends with a discussion of policies that address the decent work deficit, particularly for women.

Causes and components of informality: brief review While statisticians have focused on definitions of the informal economy and measures to improve data collection, other scholars have focused on understanding the composition and drivers of the informal economy, and its linkages to the formal economy and to regulatory frameworks (Chen 2012). According to the Latin American Structuralist school of thought, informality characterizes low-productivity activities that produce for the domestic market rather than for the high-­ productivity export-oriented sector (Pinto 1965). This school of thought gave rise to the concept of informal sector, comprising activities that fall outside the formal sector and provide income and safety for the poor, especially during times of crisis, working in a countercyclical fashion with respect to the formal sector (ILO 1972; Tokman 1978). The informal sector comprises small-scale units of production of goods or services—that is, self-employed workers, microenterprises, with a low level of organization (ILO 2018a). On the other hand, according to Portes, Castells, and Benton (1989), informal activities are related, in a procyclical way, to the operation of the formal sector in both the Global South and North. Specifically, globalization and technological innovations have facilitated offshoring and outsourcing of production, which have led to the expansion of informal wage employment and of small firms with informal work arrangements (Portes 1995). Another perspective is the so-called Legalist school, according to whom self-employed and micro-entrepreneur women and men tend to operate informally due to a hostile legal system of regulations (De Soto 1989). Parallel to theoretical developments, statistical definitions have evolved over time. In the early 2000s, informality was reconceptualized by the Seventeenth International Conference of Labour Statisticians and its definition broadened. Informal employment was defined as employment without social protection, both in the formal and informal sectors (ILO 2003). While these perspectives shed some light into the causes of informality, they do not account for all the causes. Also, there is indisputable evidence that gender inequality is intrinsically linked with informality. The next section discusses these relations.

The linkages between informality and growth, poverty and income and gender inequality. The impact of economic growth on formalization is ambiguous: economic growth can lead to formalization (Farné and Vergara 2015), but it can also maintain informal employment (RuizTagle and Sehnbruch 2015). Growth reduces informality in an economy if it is accompanied by regulatory changes (Ocampo and Sehnbruch 2015). For example, in Brazil, measures to promote the formalization of employment, along with policies to stimulate economic growth and investment in certain sectors, improved employment conditions. Measures included tax 199

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incentives for the formalization of domestic workers in 2006, tax simplification for micro and small businesses; a simplified Social Security Plan to promote the contribution to the social security scheme of independent workers; pension reform to promote the contribution of rural workers in 2008, and exemptions from paying taxes to micro-enterprises with low annual income that pay Social security contributions in 2009 (Huneeus et al. 2015). Economic crises tend to increase unemployment and reduce employment opportunities in the formal sector. In the absence of safety nets such as unemployment insurance, people who lost their jobs tend to generate income through informal activities. In Latin America and the Caribbean, during the economic downturn of 2008–09, a larger proportion of women than men moved from the formal economy to the informal economy (UN Women 2017). Informality can also affect economic growth. Specifically, increasing informality can slow down economic growth (UNS 2014) because informality entails low productivity and low-wage employment (Freije 2001). Income inequality, particularly in a weak institutional setting—that is to say, where rules enforcement is low, or a broad de facto discretion exists with respect to their application, or formal rules change repeatedly—is a significant determinant of informality (Chong and Gradstein 2007). In addition, informal activities are minimally taxed or not taxed at all, and limited tax revenues lowers the quality and quantity of public goods and increase inequality (Johnson, Kaufmann, and Zoido-Lobaton 1998). The positive relationship between inequality and informality is evident in all Latin America countries (Arim and Amarante 2015). Some of the poorest regions in the world show the highest rates of informal work. Informal work is the main source of employment in Africa (85.8 percent of total employment) with a high level of heterogeneity within the continent (the informality average rates are 89 percent in the sub-Saharan region, 40 percent in South Africa, and 67 percent in North Africa). In Asia and the Pacific region, 59 percent of workers are in informal work, while this number is only 14 percent in Europe. These numbers are 18 percent in North America and 53 percent in Latin America and The Caribbean (ILO 2018a). In Latin America, 78 percent of women are employed in low productivity sectors, compared to 56 percent of men (ECLAC 2016). Structural heterogeneity (productivity gaps in the national economies) and labor market segmentation are combined with occupational and industrial gender segregation. Female-intensive occupations and industries (e.g., education, social services) are usually undervalued activities and register low levels of productivity. Labor conditions in low-productivity sectors are marked by instability, limited social security coverage, and the lack of formal labor contracts (ECLAC 2011).

Gender and informality Gender income inequality increases informality through limited access to credit, since a large number of the individuals facing these restrictions will choose the informal sector as they are not able to afford the high fixed costs of credit in the formal sector (Arim and Amarante 2015). Barriers that women face in formal labor markets such as the limited public services to support women’s care responsibilities, gender norms and formal regulations such as inheritance and land ownership laws affect women’s share in informal work and their forms of informal work. In addition, women take on informal work during crises when unemployment rises in the absence of robust social protection mechanisms for unemployment and household poverty increases (UN Women 2017). Persistence of traditional gender division of paid and unpaid labor, as well as cultural and institutional factors such as gender norms and values, affect informality through the labor supply. For example, a large proportion of women look for jobs with flexible working arrangements, 200

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or they try to generate income in home-based businesses to achieve a better balance between unpaid and paid work. Gender norms and values also lead to discontinuous or unstable careers paths among poor women, in part also conditioned by economic cycles. In Latin America labor informality has a similar performance to employment in the formal sector through the economic cycles. Periods of growth are associated with a tendency to formalize employment, particularly for women. Likewise, in a recession, a greater proportion of women than men go on to do informal work. Female labor supply is more unstable and sensitive to economic cycles in the region (Vásconez and Espinosa 2016). While some of the reasons that motivate women to be own-account workers are similar to men’s such as low skill levels, there are gender-specific factors, namely, to avoid labor discrimination (e.g., working on your own account helps avoid the screening process in recruitment) or inflexible working hours, and that informal work such as street food selling helps utilize women’s skills and abilities resulting from gender socialization (e.g., cooking). In addition, in some regions women are less educated than men to access the high-waged jobs in the formal sector (Barrientos 2002). In Latin America and the Caribbean women need to be more educated than men in order to be hired for a high-waged job (Esquivel 2007). Educational segregation by gender (in both formal education and training programs) leads to persistent occupational segregation and reinforces gender-typing of jobs such as traditionally female-intensive occupations in sewing, hairdressing, catering. Social attitudes also prevent women from achieving the top jobs (glass ceiling effect). Discriminatory employment patterns also keep female workers in the lower ranks of the job scale, with low mobility and invisible barriers to career advancement (sticky floor effect). These barriers motivate women to undertake own-account work principally due to unemployment or lack of incomes and as a means of livelihood (Espino 2012). Concentration of women in informal microenterprises is attributed to the entry barriers in this sector (e.g., educational attainment, legal requirements, capital) (Espino 2005). Its more flexible organization (usually activities are carried out from home) allows reconciliation of paid work and unpaid care and household work responsibilities. Female informal wage employment is also linked to the strategy of reducing costs intensified by international trade competition in a globalizing world, where women work in precarious conditions, with less capacity to organize in labor unions. For example, growth in low-tech labor-intensive exports, such as textiles and garments, is often accompanied by an increase in female employment (UNCTAD 2018). In societies where purdah limits women’s mobility, poor women engage in informal homebased work as a survival strategy, collaborating with male family members to sustain the household (Otobe 2017). This type of employment seems to offer women more possibilities to find a balance between paid work and family care responsibilities. The required skills for this type of employment are usually acquired through gender socialization and specialization of domestic and care activities in the household (Oliveira and Ariza 1997). Finally, paid domestic workers, who have the lowest earnings and the least social protection in the informal sector, are mostly female all around the world (ILO 2018a). Paid domestic work comprises a high share of employed women in Latin America and the Caribbean, where more than 18 million women are engaged in this sector and 78 percent of such workers work under informal conditions (UN Women 2017).

The future of work: new informal jobs? Technological innovations (e.g., big data, three-dimensional printing, artificial intelligence, robotics) lead to changes in the organization of work (e.g., crowdwork, work on demand via apps) and in recruitment practices (e.g., independent contractors), which affect the typical 201

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employment relationship. Most of platform workers are outside the purview of labor law. This particularly affects women who, for example, have no access to maternity leave. In some cases the self-employed can be within the purview of labor law, but in others workers may be listed as associates, collaborators or entrepreneurs, when they are in fact informal workers of a multinational company (ILO 2018b). This phenomenon has fueled debates all around the world within academia, unions and states, some of which have taken direct action on the matter. For instance, a landmark bill that would make many gig workers full employees was approved by legislators in 2019 in California, US, after months of tension between labor groups, on-demand economy companies, and workers’ rights advocates. It should be noted, however, that during 2020 this law was reversed for transportation and delivery companies, as a result of a ballot measure approved by voters after months of a millionaire campaign deployed by gig companies, which illustrates about the complexity of these new labor and power relations. The debate about the future of work and employment relationships highlights the need to reflect on the future of social protection and the necessary changes to not only ensure existing levels of coverage but also close the gaps in coverage (ILO 2018c). Due to the physical absence of an employer, digital platform workers are supervised and managed by algorithms. The algorithms are not gender neutral; they are based on information and perceptions of reality (the “ideal worker”). An increasingly large share of work can be carried out outside a workplace, that is, at home or elsewhere, and this is especially attractive to women. Globally, women account for one in three of microtask platform workers and one in five of them in the Global North (Berg et al. 2018). Women now work in activities related to technological services in digital platforms (telemarketing, consultancy, work on demand to meet different specifications, among others) as well as the traditionally female home-based work (e.g., textile, sewing, toys, and soccer balls). Consequently, a flexible schedule, which can be an aspiration for workers in order to manage their time, could have negative implications for women as it would reinforce the traditional gender division of work and increase the total (paid and unpaid) work burden (Scasserra 2018).

Formalization policies in the Global South For labor market and social protection policies to fulfill their role, they need to adapt and respond to the nature of current labor markets. Economic growth does not automatically translate into new and better jobs. Since the 1980s, austerity macroeconomic policies have led to increasing unemployment in formal labor markets while increasing informal employment (UN Women 2017). While women’s labor force participation has been growing, limited decent job opportunities constrains women’s employment options in formal labor markets. In Latin America, the best outcomes in terms of formalization in the early 21st century have occurred in contexts of accelerated economic growth and institutional interventions and comprehensive policies, such as changes in legislation, labor enforcement of labor regulations and employment policies (Salazar-Xirinachs and Chacaltana 2018). Some of the formalization strategies specifically aimed at work with considerable informality rates. For instance, in several Latin American countries special taxation schemes were designed for micro and small enterprises and own-account workers and pieces of legislation were passed to regulate minimum wage and working hours of domestic and rural workers. However, thus far, informality rates have not changed dramatically, suggesting that there is a strong structural component in the regional labor market segmentation (UN Women 2017).

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The debate on benefits of formalization includes the perspective of organized women informal workers of the Global South. Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) argues that the right to the city (i.e., a claim to recognize the city as a co-created space) as well as economic rights should prevail when discussing, for instance, street vendor’s activities. A legalist approach that forces them to formalize may have negative effect on women’s well-being as this may push them out of employment. Alternatively, there are good examples of regularization via complex public, private and community partnership models such as in Bhubaneshwar. This city is among the first ones in India to acknowledge street vendors as an integral part of the city by establishing aesthetically pleasing fixed kiosks in legally sanctioned vending zones (Kumar 2012). Some public policies tend to be gender blind and lack awareness regarding the importance of promoting women’s autonomy and economic empowerment to move toward a more egalitarian society. Accordingly, policy changes regarding work formalization in Latin America do not have clear objectives regarding the gendered constraints women face in informal employment (except for those addressing domestic service work). However, in 2016–17, a growing number of economies in the Global South have implemented employment policies and measures based on both gender equality principles and formalization of the informal economy. Even when policy is gender-blind, it can benefit women. Otobe (2017) describes two such experiences: the National Human Resources and Employment Policy for Sri Lanka and the National Employment Policy of Mozambique. While articulation of policy measures on formalization of informal employment is not necessarily gender inclusive or responsive in either case, policy measures stated under gender issues could contribute to formalization by promoting formal employment for both women and men equally.

Feminist insights on the impact of informal employment Remunerated work opportunities vary from low-waged precarious forms of informal employment to formal jobs, which normally offer higher wages, more stability and a certain level of social protection and security. Informal work may lead to economic and social empowerment as it contributes to poverty alleviation at the household level (USAID 2005) and it may ease the “double burden” of paid and unpaid work, through more flexible work schedules. However, freer access to informal labor markets will not eliminate the disadvantages arising from male-biased institutions (Meagher 2010). For example, gender pay gaps are often wider in informal employment compared to formal employment. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, the gender pay gap is 28 percent in informal employment compared to 6 percent for formal workers. In the informal economy, men predominate among employers and employees while women are over-represented among the least-secure and lowest-paying occupations (e.g., homeworkers and contributing family workers) (UN Women 2017). On the other hand, informal work could allow women to have their own incomes and access to the public sphere, thus reducing their dependence on male income-earners (Kabeer 2008, 2012). In their study of the Ecuador, Vega et al. (2016) conclude that the economic livelihood strategies are not necessarily translated into empowerment processes. Nevertheless, they argue that particularly young women see informal activities as temporary, in which case these strategies may be a means to enhance social mobility and to improve their prospects. Moreover, there are examples of informal, poor women workers organizing and being empowered, such as through SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) and WIEGO.

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Agenda for decent work Most studies of informal employment have not incorporated a critical perspective that examines gendered power relations (Chant and Pedwell 2008). They also lack an intersectional approach that takes into account the differences and relations among women. An in-depth study of these aspects requires quantitative and qualitative research, which will shed light on the processes and subjective elements and their impact on women’s autonomy and economic empowerment. Gender-blind analyses of the mechanisms and features of informality in labor markets lead to partial explanations and therefore partial solutions to informality. Thus, addressing economic and social causes of informal employment is as important as identifying and examining the implications of gender discrimination and employment segregation and the gender division of paid and unpaid work that contribute to informality. Moreover, it is necessary to incorporate an intersectional perspective, which addresses not only gender but a range of axes of social differentiation such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, nation, religion and ability (Chant and Pedwell 2008). Considering that informal employment is principally a problem of weak labor demand, macroeconomic policies should target increasing labor demand. Particularly, to tackle gender inequality in the labor market, there is a need to invest in public care services and create decent job opportunities in the areas of health, education, child and elderly care services (ILO 2018d). The redistribution of unpaid household work and care work not only within households (between women and men) but also among public and private sector actors should be included as part of public policies based on principles of equity and social co-responsibility. Public policies that facilitate equitable sharing of care work allow women to enter the labor force and to avoid precarious forms of work. These policies include parental leave policies and public provision of child and elderly care services. To combat occupational segregation, public interventions are important to address its root causes, including differences in educational attainment, training and experience as well as stereotypes about the roles of women and men in society. To provide women with income opportunities beyond informal employment it is also necessary to strengthen women’s income security, for example, by providing access to unemployment protection and public work programs (UN Women 2017). Addressing informality and decent work deficits require changes in the design and application of social protection programs. As the 101st Session of the International Labor Conference made clear in Recommendation No. 202, the social protection floor is a means of extending social security coverage where the contributory and noncontributory benefits operate in conjunction (ILO 2012). This combination may have positive impacts on job quality and may promote formalization. Given higher levels of participation of women in informal, precarious forms of work and the interruption of their work career because of their reproductive role and disproportionate care work burden, a strong non-contributory pillar of social protection scheme could be the key to promoting gender equality in social protection.

References Arim, Rodrigo, and Verónica Amarante. 2015. “Desigualdad de las remuneraciones e informalidad: Breve revisión de la literatura y marco analítico” [“Income Inequality and Informality: A Brief Review of the Literature and an Analytical Framework”]. In Desigualdad e informalidad: Un análisis de cinco experiencias latinoamericanas [Inequality and Informality: An Analysis of Five Latin American Experiences], edited by Veronica Amarante and Rodrigo Arim, 19–36. Santiago de Chile: Naciones Unidas.

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Informal work in the Global South Barrientos, Armando. 2002. “Women, Informal Employment, and Social Protection in Latin America.” IDPM, Discussion Paper Series, Paper No. 66, University of Manchester, Manchester. Berg, Janine, Marianne Furrer, Ellie Harmon, Uma Rani, and M. Six Silberman. 2018. Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work: Towards Decent Work in the Online World. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Chant, Sylvia, and Carolyn Pedwell. 2008. Women, Gender and the Informal Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Chen, Martha. 2012. “The Informal Economy: Definitions, Theories and Policies.” Working Paper No. 12012, WIEGO, Cambridge, August. Chong, Alberto, and  Mark Gradstein. 2007. “Inequality and Institutions.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 89 (3): 454–65. De Soto, Hernando. 1989. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Harper and Row. ECLAC. 2011. Social Panorama of Latin America. Santiago de Chile: ECLAC. ———. 2016. Equality and Women’s Autonomy in the Sustainable Development Agenda. Santiago de Chile: ECLAC. Espino, Alma. 2005. “Un marco de análisis para el fomento de las políticas de desarrollo productivo con enfoque de género”. Serie Mujer y Desarrollo N° 77. CEPAL. Diciembre del 2005. ———. 2012. “Perspectivas teóricas sobre género, trabajo y situación del mercado laboral latinoamericano” [“Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Employment and Labor Market in Latin America”]. In La economía feminista desde América Latina: Una hoja de ruta sobre los debates actuales en la región [Feminist Economics from Latin America: A Roadmap of Current Debates in the Region], edited by Valeria Esquivel. Santo Domingo: ONU Mujeres. Esquivel, Valeria. 2007. “Género y diferenciales de salarios en la Argentina” [“Gender and Wage Differentials in Argentina”]. In Estructura productiva y empleo: Un enfoque transversal [Productive Structure and Employment: A Transversal Approach], edited by Martha Novick and Héctor Palomino. Buenos Aires: Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security. Farné, Stefano, and Carlos Andrés Vergara. 2015. “Economic Growth, Labour Flexibilization and Employment Quality in Colombia, 2002–11.” International Labour Review 154 (2): 253–69. Freije, Samuel. 2001. “Informal Employment in Latin America and the Caribbean: Causes, Consequences and Policy Recommendations.” Policy Briefs Series 17, IADB-Division Labor Markets, Washington, DC. Huneeus, Federico, Oscar Landerretche, Esteban Puentes, and Javiera Seldman. 2015. “A Multidimensional Employment Quality Index for Brazil, 2002–11.” International Labour Review 154 (2): 195–226. ILO. 1972. Employment, Incomes and Inequality: A  Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2002. Decent Work and the Informal Economy: Report VI Submitted to the 90th Session of International Labour Conference. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. www.ilo.org/ilc/ILCSessions/previoussessions/90thSession/ WCMS_078849/lang-en/index.htm. ———. 2003. Guidelines Concerning a Statistical Definition of Informal Employment. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. http://ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-dgreports/-stat/documents/normativeinstrument/ wcms_087622.pdf. ———. 2012. 101st Session of the International Labour Conference, 30 May–14 June 2012. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. www.ilo.org/ilc/ILCSessions/previous-sessions/101stSession/lang-en/index.htm. ———. 2013. Decent Work Indicators: Guidelines for Producers and Users of Statistical and Legal Framework Indicators. ILO Manual: Second Version. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2018a. Women and Men in the Infrefbormal Economy: A Statistical Picture, 3rd ed. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. ———. 2018b. “Job Quality in the Platform Economy.” Issue Brief number 5, prepared for the 2nd Meeting of the Global Commission on the Future of Work, Geneva, Switzerland, February 15–17. ———. 2018c. “Present and Future of Social Protection in Latin America and the Caribbean.” In Thematic Labour: Overview 4. Lima: International Labour Office. ———. 2018d. Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Johnson, Simon, Daniel Kaufmann, and Pablo Zoido-Lobaton. 1998. “Regulatory Discretion and the Unofficial Economy.” American Economic Review 88 (2): 387–92. Kabeer, Naila. 2008. Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.

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Alma Espino and Daniela de los Santos ———. 2012. “Women’s Economic Empowerment and Inclusive Growth: Labor Markets and Enterprise Development.” SIG Working Paper 2012/1, School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Kumar, Randhir. 2012. “The Regularization of Street Vending in Bhubaneshwar, India: A Policy Model.” WIEGO Policy Brief (Urban Policies) No. 7, Cambridge, June. Meagher, Kate. 2010. “The Empowerment Trap: Gender, Poverty and the Informal Economy in SubSaharan Africa.” In The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy, edited by Sylvia Chant. Gloucestershire: Edward Elgar Publishing. Ocampo, José Antonio, and Kirsten Sehnbruch. 2015. “Introduction: Quality of Employment in Latin America.” International Labour Review 154 (2): 165–70. Oliveira, Orlandina, and Marina Ariza (1997), “División sexual del trabajo y exclusión social”. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios del Trabajo (5): 183–202. Otobe, Naoko. 2017. “Gender and the Informal Economy: Key Challenges and Policy Response.” Employment Policy Department, Employment Working Paper No. 236, International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Pinto, Aníbal. 1965. “Concentración del progreso técnico y de sus frutos en el desarrollo latinoamericano” [“Concentration of Technical Progress and Its Fruits in Latin American Development”]. El trimestre económico XXXII (4): 432–60. Portes, Alejandro. 1995. En torno a la informalidad: ensayos sobre teoría y medición de la economía no regulada [On Informality: Essays on Theory and Measurement of the Unregulated Economy]. México: Miguel Angel Porrúa. Portes, Alejandro, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton. 1989. The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ruiz-Tagle, Jaime, and Kirsten Sehnbruch. 2015. “More but not Better Jobs in Chile? The Fundamental Importance of Open-Ended Contracts.” International Labour Review 154 (2): 227–52. Salazar-Xirinachs, José Manuel, and Juan Chacaltana. 2018. Políticas de Formalización en América Latina: Avances y Desafíos [Formalization Policies in Latin America: Progress and Challenges]. Lima: OIT, Oficina Regional para América Latina y el Caribe, FORLAC. Scasserra, Sofía. 2018. Comercio electrónico, futuro del trabajo y su impacto en las mujeres [E-Commerce, Future of Work and Impacts on Women]. Instituto del Mundo del Trabajo, Universidad Tres de Febrero. https:// ourworldisnotforsale.net/2018/Scassera_gender_ES.pdf. Tokman, Victor. 1978. Las relaciones entre los sectores formal e informal [Relations Between the Formal and Informal Sectors]. Revista de la CEPAL No. 5, first semester. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. UNS. 2014. Economía informal: ¿democracia a medias? [Informal Economy: Incomplete Democracy?] San Salvador: Sistema de las Naciones Unidas en El Salvador. UNCTAD. 2018. Trade and Gender. Volume 1. Unfolding the Links. Module 4b. Trade and Gender Linkages: An Analysis of the Southern African Development Community. New York and Geneva. United Nations. UN Women. 2017. Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights. New York: United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. USAID. 2005. Gender and Pro-Poor Growth, Tools and Key Issues for Development Studies. Washington, DC: United States Agency for International Development. Vaillancourt-Laflamme, Catherine. 2005. “Trade Unions and Informal Workers’ Associations in the Urban Informal Economy of Ecuador.” Working Paper No. 57, Policy Integration Department International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland, February. Vásconez, Alison, and Elizabeth Espinosa. 2016. “Política macroeconómica, tendencias, ciclos y sus efectos en la igualdad de género en América Latina” [“Macroeconomic Policy, Trends, Cycles and their Effects on Gender Equality in Latin America”]. Working Paper for the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment’s Report: Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, New York. Vega, Cristina, and Alison Vásconez (coords.), Magaly Marega, Héctor Favio Bermúdez, and Lucrecia Saltzman. 2016. Mujeres, Empoderamiento y Trabajo Informal en Ecuador Diversidad de Regímenes y Restricción de Derechos. CIEDUR. https://www.ciedur.org.uy/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Ciedur_ Mujeres-empoderamiento-y-trabajo-informal-en-Ecuador_Diversidad-de-reg%c3%admenes-yrestricci%c3%b3n-de-derechos.pdf.

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21 INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND WOMEN WORKERS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Nidhiya Menon and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers

Introduction The channels between gender equality and international trade are complex; there could be both reverse causality and adverse consequences. For example, export-oriented growth in many countries has brought new employment opportunities for women who previously were involved in very low paying or even unpaid work, often on the farm or in small-scale self-employment. However, macroeconomic forces associated with trade, including greater global competition and industrial restructuring from technological upgrades, have the potential to aggravate gender inequalities. Given these complexities, this chapter explores the links between gender equality and international trade, considering both the direction of causality and whether the effects are harmful or beneficial for women’s advancement in the labor market and for societal well-being.

Export-orientated manufacturing and women’s employment Since the 1980s, export-oriented manufacturing industries in the Global South experienced rapid growth by actively recruiting and employing women workers, mostly from rural areas. Women became the preferred workforce due to their higher productivity, relatively lower wages and sexist assumptions such as their “nimble fingers” and docility (Elson and Pearson 1981). Feminist economics literature has well documented the feminization of the workforce in export-oriented industries in the Global South, especially in semi-industrialized countries (e.g., Ozler 2000; Baslevent and Onaran 2004; Lechman and Kaur 2015). Countries as diverse as Mauritius, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines and Sri Lanka exhibited a positive and statistically significant relationship between exports and female employment shares (Nordas 2003). Recent evidence has also linked exchange rate undervaluation, a macroeconomic policy strategy used to promote exports and long-term economic growth, with increasing women’s employment and narrowing gender gap in labor force participation rates (Erten and Metzger 2019). The increase in women’s employment in export-oriented manufacturing is entirely consistent with a neoclassical economic framework in which higher skilled and less-skilled labor are the two main factor inputs. An expansion in less-skilled-labor-intensive exports will cause the demand in the exporting country for relatively abundant, less-skilled labor to increase. Because 207

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women in the Global South tend to cluster in less-skilled jobs and men cluster in higher-skilled jobs, these changes in skill demand arising from export expansion should increase women’s employment. Women’s labor has become a primary source of foreign exchange for many economies since the 1970s. Women’s low wages—resulting from women’s job segregation in export industries that are subject to intense price competition and downward pressure on wages (especially in garments, textiles, and electronics)—have played an instrumental role in the feminization of foreign currency earnings (Seguino 2010; Kucera and Tejani 2014). This reliance on women in export-oriented manufacturing was particularly strong in the East and Southeast Asian highgrowth economies. Some economists have argued that gender wage gaps reflect patterns of competitive advantage rather than comparative advantage (Osterreich 2019). For example, in South Korea, gender wage gaps in the manufacturing sector are found to support continued export competitiveness (Seguino 1997). In this case, large gender wage gaps persisted or grew worse in the face of rapid export growth that depended on female labor. Also contributing to the lack of relative wage gains was marked employment segregation that arose due to public and private sector hiring practices that did not favor women, exclusion of women from onthe-job training opportunities, and promotion discrepancies between men and women. The South Korean case is not unique. Also using a feminist framework that emphasizes gender wage discrimination as a driver of trade competitiveness, Busse and Spielmann (2006) find that in a sample of 29 countries around the globe, gender wage gaps are positively linked with comparative advantage in the trade of labor-intensive goods.

Agricultural exports and gender While concentration of women in export manufacturing has received the most attention, what is less recognized is that in many agricultural economies, women’s seasonal or daily wage labor on farms is critical to keeping costs low and export demand high (Lastarria-Cornhiel 2006; Croppenstedt, Goldstein, and Rosas 2013). Market-oriented economic reforms and trade liberalization policies in the Global South have been accompanied by strong growth in the production of cash crops. Female participation in the cultivation and sale of cash crops is particularly important given the significant positive welfare benefits this type of farming brings as compared to subsistence agriculture. Across the Global South, increasing integration into world markets has brought new job opportunities for rural women in high-value agricultural export goods such as cut flowers, fruits, and vegetables (FAO/IFAD/ILO 2010). The horticultural export sector is not the only area where women have seen new paid employment opportunities; livestock keeping, fisheries, and aquaculture have also become important sectors for job creation for women (SOFA and Doss 2011). In two large fish-producing economies—India and China—women constitute close to one quarter of all fishers and fish farmers, and in Indonesia and Vietnam, women represent 42  percent and 80  percent of the rural aquaculture workforce, respectively. Women’s increasing participation in fisheries and aquaculture has also been reported in West Africa (SOFA and Doss 2011). In a review of women’s employment in high-value agriculture industries, Dolan and Sorby (2003) estimate that women form at least 64 percent of the workforce (in Colombia) and as much as 87 percent of the workforce (in Zimbabwe) in a sample of countries that export cut flowers. The range is similar for countries exporting vegetables (66 percent female in Kenya to about 85 percent female in Mexico), but somewhat lower for picked fruit (45 percent female in Chile to 65 percent female in Brazil). A number of country case studies reviewed in Quisumbing et al. (2012) indicate that women make up more than half of the workforce in some 208

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horticulture industries, including Senegal’s French bean industry (90  percent female) and tomato agro-industry (60 percent female), Sri Lanka’s tuna plant workers (more than 90 percent female), and Latin America’s seafood industry (ranging from 52 percent female in Uruguay to 72 percent female in Argentina). In most countries these women are, on average, quite young. For example, in Kenya, 85 percent of women workers in the vegetable export sector are less than 29 years old as compared to 78 percent of men who are less than this same age benchmark (Dolan and Sorby 2003). Consistent with trends in many labor-intensive manufactured export industries, horticultural export employers tend to hire young women for certain tasks because of their relatively low wages and lack of bargaining power vis-à-vis employers. Gender-based assumptions about women such as having “nimble fingers” for detail-oriented tasks, and women’s weaker bargaining power vis-à-vis employers relative to male workers in negotiations for terms of employment related to benefits and job security (because women are less likely to be union members), along with other gender norms related to appropriate roles for men and women in agricultural production, have contributed to high rates of occupational segregation in agribusiness enterprises. Women perform relatively labor-intensive, less-skilled jobs such as weeding in the fields, snipping and picking in the processing stage, and packaging, while men engage in jobs that are considered to require more strength and skill such as lifting heavy loads, construction, and operating and maintaining machinery (Lastarria-Cornhiel 2006). This type of segregation both reinforces socio-cultural norms and perpetuates existing employment structures in agricultural markets (Quisumbing et al. 2012; Oduol et al. 2017). An important question is the extent to which women in agriculture have benefited from international trade and foreign investment through employment opportunities, and the extent to which these jobs help to empower women (Kabeer 2012). Some feminist scholars argue that jobs in the export sector offer better pay compared to the existing alternatives for women (Kabeer 2004; Kabeer and Mahmud 2004). According to Maertens and Swinnen (2012), though the growth of modern supply chains is characterized by gender segregation, these supply chains have been beneficial for women by reducing gender inequalities in rural areas. Specifically, production through large-scale estates and processing through agro-industries have led to greater employment generation for women, and more direct benefits (in terms of earned income and less variable income) compared to farming through smallholder contracts (Tsikata and Torvikey, this volume). However, women’s relatively low wages and their crowding at the low end of the value chain have raised concerns, with feminist scholarship pointing to a structure of constraints (including less educational attainment, discrimination by gender, and women’s role as caregivers) in the perpetuation of women’s low status in global value chains (Osterreich 2019).

Trade, technological change, gender, and employment While export-oriented growth has facilitated feminization of the workforce in the Global South, in the Global North, women are often displaced from low-wage jobs in import-competing industries. This is because technological transfer through trade is skill-biased and favors higherskilled workers who are predominantly male. Women’s employment declines when trade and technological change make traditionally female jobs redundant, and as women face barriers to training for new jobs. Recently labor markets in the Global South are becoming more “polarized” due to the increasing role of technological change (World Bank 2015). That is, the share of employment in both high-paying higher-skilled jobs and low-paying less-skilled jobs is increasing, while the share of employment in mid-level jobs is decreasing. While this polarization may be beneficial 209

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globally in terms of increasing overall productivity, individuals with few skills and limited access to high-skill jobs are likely to suffer disproportionately (World Bank 2015). Women are most likely to fall in this group and may experience job losses due to trade-induced technological advances (Berik, Rodgers, and Zammit 2009). For example, in Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia, the female share of employment declined in the manufacturing sectors as these economies began to move up the industrial ladder and out of their niche as exporters of less-skill intensive goods (Ibid.). Temporary migrant workers were substituted for native women workers in less-skilled jobs, especially in Malaysia (Berik, Rodgers, and Zammit 2009). Moreover, recent evidence for 30 countries (28 OECD countries plus Singapore and Cyprus) between 2011 and 2016 indicates that women’s jobs may be more vulnerable to automation as women tend to be engaged in more routine work across all occupations compared to men (Brussevich et al. 2018). Job losses for women can also happen in the service sector, especially in the case when jobs in information, communication, and technology are outsourced from economies of the Global North such as the US to the Global South (Kongar and Price 2010). However, not all studies have found that women are hurt when countries import new knowledge and technology. For instance, Juhn, Ujhelyi, and Villegas-Sanchez (2014) develop a neoclassical model with a gender dimension in which firms adopt new technologies when they import physical capital, and the new technology entails computerized production methods that are relatively more conducive to women’s skill sets. This model is tested with establishmentlevel data from Mexico, and results indicate that technological improvements through trade contribute to help women in blue-collar occupations in terms of both employment and wages in absolute terms.

Trade competition and gender gaps in wages and employment In a neoclassical framework, discrimination is costly to employers and will not persist in a perfectly competitive market (Becker 1971). This hypothesis can be restated in an open economy context whereby firms operating in industries that face international competition will experience greater pressure to cut costs, including costs associated with discrimination. Discrimination is then expected to decline in industries that are more open to trade. However, firms in concentrated industries face less competition, and therefore experience less domestic pressure to cut costs (Borjas and Ramey 1995). In this context, any observed reduction in wage discrimination against female workers in concentrated industries may be attributed to competitive forces from international trade rather than from other domestic firms (Black and Brainerd 2004). Alternatively, non-neoclassical theory as developed in Darity and Williams (1985) and Williams (1987) posits that discrimination is a potential tool for competition. This approach implies that trade may actually increase gender wage gaps in countries where female workers have lower bargaining power and where women are segregated into lower-paying, lower-status jobs. Global evidence in support of these two contrasting theoretical frameworks is relatively thin and yields inconclusive evidence. Some studies have found evidence in support of the Becker hypothesis that increased competition drives out discriminatory firm behavior. In particular, increased competition from international trade is linked to narrowing gender wage gaps in the US (Black and Brainerd 2004) and in Mexico (Hazarika and Otero 2004), and tariff liberalization is associated with a relative increase in women’s employment in Colombia compared to men (Ederington, Minier, and Troske 2009) and Brazil (Gaddis and Pieters 2012). Other studies contradict these findings. Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (2002) find little support for the argument that more discriminatory employers with market power are punished over time through buy-outs or lower growth. Berik, Rodgers, and Zveglich (2004) find 210

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evidence that increasing trade openness is associated with higher residual wage gaps between men and women in two East Asian economies, a sign the authors interpret as increased wage discrimination. Menon and Rodgers (2009) show that increasing openness to trade is associated with larger wage gaps in India’s concentrated manufacturing industries. Kongar (2007) argues that in the US, the gender wage gap declined largely due to women’s job losses in low-wage manufacturing industries that competed with rising imports. Finally, mixed evidence is found in a cross-country study that uses data for more than 80 lower- and higher-income economies: increased trade is associated with reduced wage gaps, but the opposite result is obtained for the case of highly skilled workers in lower-income economies (Oostendorp 2009). The finding of larger gender wage gaps in the face of growing competition from international trade are consistent with a feminist framework in which groups of workers who have relatively weak bargaining power and lower workplace status may be less able to negotiate for favorable working conditions and higher pay. In a scenario with declining rents in the moreconcentrated sector post-liberalization, firms appear to have favored male workers over female workers in the wage bargaining process. Rather than competition from international trade putting pressure on firms to eliminate costly discrimination against women, studies reveal that pressures to cut costs due to international competition are hurting women’s relative pay in the manufacturing sector. Reasons include a lack of enforcement of labor standards that prohibit sex-based discrimination and employer and union practices that relatively favor male workers.

Working conditions and terms of employment Production for world markets has generated employment opportunities for women in the Global South, but these opportunities have not always translated into more secure jobs as firms have faced pressures in international markets to keep costs low. Employment is often casual, temporary, and flexible in nature, with poor working conditions and little easing of domestic workloads (Berik and Rodgers 2010; Barrientos 2013). Men are more likely to obtain formal sector jobs while women are more likely to enter the informal sector, contributing to labor market segregation. For example, following India’s sweeping trade liberalization in the early nineties; the share of the workforce classified as casual rose relatively more for women workers than men in both rural and urban areas (Bhaumik 2003; Williams and Gurtoo 2011). Recently the pattern of hiring young female workers in labor-intensive export sectors has been changing—at least in the manufacturing sector—where some employers see older women and married women with children as more reliable and more willing to accept poorer terms of employment. Supporting evidence based on feminist frameworks is found in Fussell (2000) for Mexico’s maquiladoras, in Dedeoğlu (2010) for Turkey, and in Domínguez et al. (2010) for Central America. Across countries, increases in the proportion of the workforce classified as informal may be partly explained by the growing tendency of final-goods producers to subcontract smaller-scale, home-based operations (Gwynne and Cristobal 2014). Home-based workers are predominantly women who work on a piece-rate basis, receive few (if any) fringe benefits, pay their own utility costs, and work long hours. In view of their informal status, most home-based workers remain uncovered by labor regulations that impose additional costs on producers. These tend to be predominantly new labor-market entrants, women who have lost their formal-sector jobs, or women who need to combine paid work with childcare obligations. A growing number of studies use Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) analyses to show that employment opportunities generated by trade liberalization increased women’s total work burden because the increase in their paid work time has not been accompanied by any reduction in their unpaid work time. The net effect is an increase in women’s total work burdens. For 211

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example, while tariff liberalization in Bangladesh raised women’s labor-market participation and wages, it also caused a reduction in their leisure time (Fontana and Wood 2000). In Nepal, trade liberalization raised women’s participation in market work hours and their relative wages, but the impact on their domestic work time and leisure time was ambiguous (Fofana, Cockburn, and Decaluwe 2005). Increased integration in world markets increases vulnerability to global price shocks and adverse effects on local production and labor demand and this is gendered. For example, saffron production is the major economic activity in Morocco’s mountainous Taliouine-Taznakht region, and the biggest source of paid work for women. Filipski et al. (2015) use a general equilibrium approach to show that saffron price volatility, which can be extreme, has large effects on saffron production and labor demand, especially for female harvest workers. Saffron price upswings promote increased labor market activity, with producers hiring more male and female workers. Yet the work is segregated—men are hired into cultivation activities while women into harvesting activities. Saffron price reductions entail effects that are more adverse for women than men in terms of wage income, largely because men have alternative opportunities for paid market work beyond saffron production while women have few other options for remunerated market work.

Gender-aware policy reforms In cases where women bear a disproportionately higher cost of trade liberalization, policy measures that build women’s skills (education, firm-specific training and new programs for accreditation for workers’ skills) and strengthen the social safety net may help ease the burden. Additionally, stronger enforcement of equal pay and equal opportunity legislation, which most countries have on the books, will reduce discriminatory pay practices that contribute to gender wage gaps in the face of becoming more integrated with global trade. In this discussion on improving women’s relative status, it is important to note that attempts to raise the wages of female workers may be counterproductive if firms relocate in order to avoid paying higher wages (Seguino and Grown 2006). Hence, although wage hikes may be justified in terms of the additional productivity they induce, women employed in highly mobile firms may lose from such legislation. Moreover, employees of mobile firms are unlikely to receive productivity-enhancing training, since such firms are less likely to invest in training. Alternatively, improved enforcement of labor standards and full employment policies can help provide women with more job security, and further assist women in gaining access to a wide range of better-paying jobs in occupations that have traditionally been male-dominated. Prioritizing gender equality in an open economy may also necessitate measures that slow the speed with which firms can leave locations in response to higher wage legislations (Seguino and Grown 2006). However, it is difficult no matter how great the need, to institute measures such as capital controls to prevent mobility of firms in the current policy climate, just as it is difficult to protect workers and enforce stronger labor standards in a time when labor market deregulation goes hand in hand with trade liberalization. To the extent that productivity-enhancing policies are not enough to safeguard women who are adversely affected by trade, improved social safety nets can help to ease the burden that many low-wage women face. For example, greater public provision of daycare services for very young children, and after-school services for school-age children, can help to ease the time and budgetary constraints that women workers face. Furthermore, women employed in exportproducing factories often remit high shares of their income to families in the rural sector, at potentially great personal cost. Since poor social safety nets in the rural sector contribute to the 212

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reliance on remittances from these women, policy reforms that create a viable social infrastructure in these settings including provision of social security, will serve to lessen dependence on remittances and ease pressures on such workers. Public and nongovernmental institutions could play key roles for women. In this context, an avenue for quality jobs has been employment in local or global supply value chains that generate non-traditional agricultural exports. Although wages are relatively high, women in these occupations are at the lowest rungs of the work structure and face a plethora of challenges. Since bolstering their position in the labor market by increasing their agency and voice is likely to bring significant returns, public and NGO groups have a key role to play. Avenues to accomplish this include encouraging the creation of farmer cooperatives and unions especially among smallholders, and by fostering conditions that encourage women’s active participation in them. Going beyond the agricultural sector, governments can implement legislation that enhances collective action by women coming together in various organizational forms, including women’s organizations and trade unions. Making women more aware of their employment rights, and community-led strategies to enforce labor standards embedded in codes of conduct, would serve to increase overall say and power across platforms. Collective forms of agency enable women to challenge, transform and overcome gendered structures of constraint in ways that would not be possible for individual women acting in isolation (Gammage, Kabeer, and Rodgers 2016).

Conclusion Women workers face special challenges in an integrated world resulting from international global trade linkages. The effects of trade on gender differences in employment, wages and work conditions vary across different contexts. Specifically, women’s education levels, current occupational status, the sector in which they are employed, the formal or informal nature of work, the influence of world price fluctuations on security of jobs, and household factors— especially women’s relatively larger unpaid care responsibilities—all affect gendered outcomes of trade expansion. Policy prescriptions need to address the multidimensional nature of gender inequalities and international trade, especially gender wage gaps, employment differentials, bargaining power, and working conditions. Given the context-dependent nature of how women are affected by international trade, it is not possible to pursue a one-size-fits-all solution. This skepticism about a standard set of policies on gender and trade also applies to some of the research output from major international financial institutions, and their focus on micro-level gender equity policies to empower women rather than scrutinization of macro-level policies that perpetuate inequality (Berik and Rodgers 2012). By highlighting feminist research on these issues and by offering some viable policy options, we aim to move the discourse on this topic in promising directions.

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22 RURAL WOMEN’S LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY IN AFRICA Dzodzi Tsikata and Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey

Introduction Since the early 1980s, research and policy interest in rural women’s livelihoods and food security in Africa has risen and waned in tandem with significant developments in African economies and shifts in economic policy responses to recurring crises. Implementation of neoliberal economic policies and the subsequent economic liberalization across Africa since the 1980s has generated debates about women’s livelihoods and food security in postcolonial Africa. Neoliberal economic policies promoted export-led growth of agriculture, minerals, and labor-­ intensive service sectors. In many African countries, export crops such as cocoa, coffee, tea, and horticultural produce were prioritized over food crops. At the same time, increased imports of cheap food had an adverse effect on African farmers. Rural Africa thus bore the heavy burden of the massive extractive activities in agriculture, mining, and forestry that accompanied economic liberalization. The modes of extraction, and the restructuring of agricultural production, have had significant implications for the control over productive resources such as land, labor, capital, and technologies, and for class and gender relations. In many countries and communities, economic liberalization increased livelihood insecurity, decreased incomes in rural areas, and deepened social differentiation (Tsikata 2016). The effect of neoliberal policies varied across African countries and regions, reflecting crosscountry and cross-region differences in ways of securing livelihoods, colonial histories, and socioeconomic trajectories. Amin (1972) drew attention to the differences among three kinds of colonial economies—trade economies dominated by peasant agriculture in West Africa, concession economies dominated by plantations in Central Africa, and the labor-reserve economies dominated by settlers and migrant labor regimes in East and Southern Africa. These economies had differences in livelihood structures that have persisted in the postcolonial period (AmanorWilks 2009). This chapter draws on an important body of work on rural women in agrarian and development studies that has sought to incorporate a gender perspective to rural and agrarian studies. In the 1970s, this literature made the case for paying attention to women as producers and raised questions about gendered outcomes of development policies (Boserup 1970; Palmer 1977). A second generation of studies drew attention to the centrality of gender issues in agricultural development (Buvinic 1986; Kabeer 1994). This literature also offered explanations for the 216

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unexpected gendered outcomes of development interventions. They identified how lack of attention to power relations within households, women’s heavy reproductive workload, the political economic context, and focusing solely on technical, economic, and institutional issues without recognizing women’s resistance/agency had proved damaging to development projects and created gender conflicts mainly centered on men’s control of women’s labor (Hangar and Moris 1973; Dey 1981; von Bülow and Sørensen 1993; Schroeder 1996). Some studies continued work done by the first generation of studies to highlight women’s contributions to production by using time-use studies as well as criticizing the early studies. While time-use studies illuminate the very crucial intra-household division of labor and its implication for women’s participation in agricultural production, the early studies scarcely focused on intra-household gender relations and the socioeconomic status of the household itself (Whitehead 1999; Blackden and Wodon 2006; Stevano et al. 2019). Historical and anthropological studies drew attention to more gender-equitable agrarian systems of the past and the shifts they underwent. Other studies analyzed the manifestations of gender inequalities in the control of land and other resources and the policy biases that resulted in the failure to recognize and support women’s contributions to production and the reproduction of the agrarian system. Research also examined the gendered nature of the agrarian system and the gender segmentation of work represented by factors such as differences in the crops grown by men and women, and the neglect of women farmers by a male-dominated extension service (Doss and Morris 2001). A series of studies focused on the consequences of neoliberal policies from the 1980s onward—namely, the nexus of low productivity, lack of tenure security, and high levels of poverty of rural women farmers—and drew attention to the ways in which gender-unaware policies were entrenching both inter- and intra-household gender inequalities (Udry et al. 1995; Kevane and Gray 1999). The literature on rural women’s livelihoods in Africa has generally oscillated between focusing on either structural constraints that women face or women’s powerful agency that ameliorates, counters, and resists structures of oppression within institutions such as family, community, markets, and the state. It has been challenging to devote equal attention to these two critical sides that make up the sum of women’s experiences in any one piece of writing, and this chapter is no exception. In this chapter, we examine how economic liberalization has reshaped the conditions of making a living in rural Africa since the 1980s, and its implications for rural women’s livelihoods. We argue that economic liberalization has intensified and created new forms of livelihood diversification strategies in rural areas that are gendered in practice and their outcomes. In general, land reforms and the extensive privatization of land have deepened women’s insecurity in access to land in relation to men. At the same time, labor reforms and the activities of agribusiness firms have created conditions for the land-poor such as women to take on newly created precarious jobs in rural areas and devise other livelihood strategies for survival.

Economic liberalization and gendered changes in rural livelihoods in Africa Four decades of economic liberalization have led to momentous changes in rural livelihoods in African economies. For instance, the livelihoods of rural people increasingly combine both agricultural and nonagricultural economic activities. Agricultural activities include the production of crops and livestock, fishing, the harvesting of forest products, agro-forestry, wage work linked to these activities, and the sale of produce. Nonagricultural activities encompass processing, trading, artisanal work, migration, and mining, among others. Livelihood diversification 217

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could be either a survival strategy or a strategy of accumulation. In the case of rural women, gender differences in access to and control of livelihood resources and the extensive gender segmentation of work have meant that livelihood diversification is more likely to be a survival strategy, in contrast with men, for whom it is sometimes a strategy of accumulation (Loison 2015). Bryceson (1999, 2002) and others, who situate changes in rural livelihoods in the context of agrarian crisis, argue that the decline in state investment in agriculture, withdrawal of statesponsored input supply and subsidies, and low producer prices following structural adjustment policies (SAPs) have left indelible footprints in rural economies. The resulting decline in agricultural production and rural incomes, coupled with the increasing need for cash, has pushed smallholder farmers into distress and led to responses such as the sale of land and labor to bigger farmers, engagement in nonfarm economic activities, and outmigration. According to Bryceson, Kay, and Mooij (2000), these responses have triggered processes of “de-agrarianization” and “de-peasantization,” with rural producers exiting the agricultural sector for nonagricultural livelihood activities. The de-agrarianization thesis has been critiqued by a significant segment of agrarian scholars who maintain that rural people have always engaged in multiple livelihood activities in response to their environment and socioeconomic conditions (Yaro 2006). Moyo and Yeros (2005) present a qualitatively different thesis from de-agrarianization. They argue that economic liberalization policies have produced two trends—“re-peasantization,” where urban-based workers are returning to rural areas to engage in agricultural production as either an accumulation or a survival strategy, or more commonly, “semi-proletarianization,” where rural people combine agricultural production and wage work in different ways. This more open-ended thesis has been supported by research in several countries in Africa—Ghana, Kenya, Togo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa (Hall, Scoones, and Tsikata 2017; du Toit and Neves 2014). The category of returning urban-based workers in agriculture has spawned research on medium-scale farmers and their role in agrarian change (Jayne et al. 2019). A gender analysis of these strategies is likely to show that women are less likely to participate independently in re-peasantization, although their labor has been critical for the well-being of households. Given their resource constraints in both urban and rural areas and the weight of reproductive activities, they are more likely to be semi-­proletarianized or among those rural dwellers who have no independent involvement in agriculture. Certainly, neoliberal transformation of the social, political, cultural, and economic conditions of work has been responsible for the mixed picture in livelihood trends in rural Africa. In addition to livelihood diversification and shifts from farm to nonfarm activities, labor practices changed. For instance, there has been a shift away from unpaid to paid work and from production organized around the household unit and its members to work controlled by individuals, particularly among wives and young persons. The unpaid labor of these household members has been critical for household production, but now it is increasingly lost to the household. These changes in the world of work have been driven by land and labor market reforms that were implemented in the majority of African countries since the 1980s to accelerate the development of land markets, support agricultural commercialization, and create an enabling environment for foreign direct investment. Land reforms were characterized by the promotion mainly of individual property rights through land registration and titling (Obeng-Odoom 2012). While some have advocated individual land rights for women, others have argued that land ownership is not the panacea for women’s livelihood insecurities and may not be of immediate priority for them (Jackson 2003; Lambrecht 2016). Whitehead and Tsikata (2003) have also drawn attention to the potential of land titling and registration to weaken women’s land interests given their pre-existing land tenure insecurities and the resultant shrinking of common property resources. This debate on land titling has been tangentially addressed by some studies 218

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that have examined women’s experiences of land titling and registration within the recent reforms (Bayisenge, Höjer, and Espling 2015). Land reforms have been linked to social differentiation and increased inequalities in rural areas. While rich farmers have concentrated land, poor farmers’ lands have become even more fragmented. Among the latter, women, migrants, and young people who derived land rights from others were the most affected by dispossession and tenure insecurities. These differential impacts of the reforms on classes of rural producers have occurred through various processes and mechanisms (Peters 2010; Agbosu et al. 2007). In Malawi, Peters (2010) found that the Malawian Land Policy Reform, which was designed to clarify and formalize customary tenure, had undermined women’s position in matrilineal-matrilocal areas. This, together with provisions that formalized the role of chiefs even in areas with family lands and promoted land markets, has weakened customary land governance structures and deepened land commercialization. In Cameroon, Endeley (2010) found that in the aftermath of land acquisition for a gas pipeline, men received more compensation than women because of the nature of their land interests and the high-value crops they had on the lands acquired. The loss of common property resources to privatization and land enclosures also has gendered implications, with women suffering the loss of forest resources and an intensification of their reproductive work burden (Tsikata and Yaro 2014; Levien 2017). Writing in the wake of a large spike in large-scale land acquisitions in the aftermath of the last global financial, food, and energy crises, Peters (2013) observed that large-scale land acquisitions have rendered land users surplus to the needs of investors for cheap land, creating precarity and uncertainties in the livelihoods of social groups such as women, migrants, and youth whose claim to land is deemed to be flexible and negotiable. Labor reforms have also sought to incentivize foreign direct investment through the promotion of flexible labor regimes, casualization, and the lack of regulation of existing and new labor forms across the economy. This has encouraged competition and specialization, imposing high product-quality standards such as fair trade and phyto-sanitary requirements that have burdened producers without adequate compensation for the additional labor investment. The weaknesses of labor law regimes have undermined smallholder peasant production and the economic rights of farmers. Given the centrality of women’s paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive labor to the agrarian political economy, and the gender segmentation of work, women have, in addition to their own-account farming, participated mainly as casual workers in Economic Processing Zones (EPZs) (Obeng, Wrigley-Asante, and Teye 2015; Obeng and Apatinga 2019), home-based work, and agricultural wage work with poor working conditions (Torvikey 2018). Despite these changes, agriculture remains critical to rural livelihoods in much of Africa with a few exceptions such as South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, among others. According to Haggblade, Hazell, and Reardon (2010), 35 percent of rural incomes are derived from the nonfarm sector. Agricultural production continues to contribute between 55 percent and 80 percent of rural incomes in Africa (Davis, Di Giuseppe, and Zezza 2017). In Ghana, for example, household income from crop production has decreased from 66 percent to 49 percent, income from wage employment increased marginally from 10  percent to 12  percent, while income from nonfarm self-employment increased significantly from 16 percent to 26 percent (data culled from three rounds of Living Standards Surveys in 1992, 1998 and 2005).

Gendered rural livelihoods in and outside agriculture Agriculture in Africa is currently organized within four main business models—smallholder, medium scale, contract farming, and plantations. While all African countries operate these four models, the size of each sector differs across countries, and this has implications for the agrarian 219

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structure and the nature of employment opportunities. This is because each model presents different livelihood opportunities and outcomes for women. Smallholder agriculture, the most common of these, is household based and governed by gender and intergenerational segregation and segmentation of productive and reproductive work. The segregation of work is manifested in the designation of women’s plots and crops and men’s plots and crops. As land and labor allocation between women and men in households is unequal, it is within this inequality that men and women construct their livelihood portfolios. Women play significant roles in agricultural production as own-account farmers, unpaid family wage workers on household farms, and agricultural wage workers. More crucially, women are responsible for reproductive duties that benefit the farming household (Apusigah 2009). They are also in charge of food preparation for laborers that the household might hire. In addition, through their roles as caregivers, women sustain and reproduce the next generation of household labor. However, women’s roles are complicated by gender ideologies operating within the agrarian economy. In some contexts, it results in the underestimation or complete lack of recognition of their contributions (Apusigah 2009). And yet, the different reproductive and productive roles that women play in households can present different opportunities and challenges relevant for their livelihoods (Tsikata 2009). In some communities, women’s farms do not receive the necessary support, such as inputs, labor, and extension services, which men’s farms, considered to be household farms, are able to draw on. When households scale up production to medium-scale agriculture, their reliance on household labor declines as they hire more labor. This diminishes the role of women and other household members in production. A recent study on Ghana supports this view in finding that with the expansion of the size of their operations, households had reassigned the labor of wives away from direct participation in farming to marketing or additional domestic responsibilities (Yaro, Teye, and Torvikey 2017). Contract farming is fast increasing across Africa as a strategy adopted by agribusinesses to avoid the direct dispossession of small farmers and the attendant risks such as resource conflicts and the loss of the social license to operate. In spite of its many variations, contract farming is essentially a small-scale production tied to a predetermined market. Contract farming schemes have participating criteria such as having a minimum size of land. Such criteria are insensitive to women’s more modest landholdings, and the fact that male farmers who are kin often aggregate their landholdings to enable them participate in contract farming schemes with the expectation of the use of the labor of wives, children, and other household members (Strohm and Hoeffler 2006; Tsikata and Yaro 2014; Lanz, Prügl, and Gerber 2019). Another livelihood option open to women in rural areas is wage work in plantations, which are large-scale capital-intensive farming concerns owned by agribusinesses. Depending on the type of crops they are growing, plantations may employ more or fewer women. The horticulture industry, which mainly produces flowers, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and spices, has expanded in Africa since the 1990s, especially in Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia. These plantations employ both men and women, although the labor force is gender segmented in terms of tasks and employment status. Women dominate in the tasks requiring dexterity and care, while men are largely involved in tasks considered either manually tasking or skilled. This task division results in women’s concentration in seasonal and casual work, and men’s predominance in permanent work. The outcomes are gender wage inequalities (Razavi et al. 2012; Tsikata and Yaro 2014). There are several nonagricultural activities dominated by rural women. These include harvests from common property resources, agro-processing, trading in agricultural and nonagricultural activities, and secular migration. In practice, women’s livelihood portfolios can include several of these with or without farming. 220

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Rural livelihood outcomes: food security The food insecurity status of rural food producers and their households in Africa is a wellknown paradox—namely, food-producing households in rural Africa are also the most food insecure. Many rural economies are characterized by seasonal food shortages, malnutrition, and lack of dietary diversity. Even South Africa, the most industrialized country on the continent, has not yet conquered seasonal hunger. While commercial agriculture is considered a magic bullet for solving food insecurity in rural areas, research has found that many poor households engage in distress sales and over-commercialization (Dzanku 2017). Lack of policies to correct output-market imperfections, such as low producer prices, and lack of regulation especially during peak production seasons result in farmers selling food staples at low prices and later buying when prices are very high. Since women’s farm output is lower compared to that of men, the need for cash may push female-headed households to sell more of their produce although the food sold is needed for household consumption. This phenomenon can trap women further in poverty and food insecurity as a recent study of agricultural commercialization in Ghana has found (Dzanku, Tsikata, and Adu Ankrah forthcoming). Women’s participation in nonfarm economic activities, on the other hand, has been associated with household food security. The association is even stronger for female-headed households as a study of Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia has shown (Dzanku 2019). Due to women’s resource constraints in agricultural production, participation in nonfarm income-generating activities has a higher tendency to increase food security in female headed households. Women’s participation in nonfarm work has also been associated with increased household nutrient availability (Tsiboe, Zereyesus, and Osei 2016). While what constitutes men’s crops and women’s crops varies across farming systems in Africa, it is well established that even in cases where women and men produce the same crops, their purpose, scale, and yields may differ. Within households, women and men tend to allocate more of their labor and land to producing different crops. While these differences can affect women’s ability to fulfill their food provisioning obligations, this division of labor, which differs by community, region, and country, remains invisible in policy and research circles. In some countries, food and agricultural policies and the cultural contexts tend to overemphasize staple and export crop production, which is seen as male responsibility.

Conclusion African countries emerged from colonization with some differences and commonalities in the way their economies are structured. The colonial experiences shaped the distinct livelihood strategies in rural Africa. However, economic liberalization programs implemented across the continent since the 1980s created convergences in the experiences of rural people. As part of the economic reforms, African governments reduced investment in the agricultural sector and adopted pro-market land and labor policies and laws. These reforms and government deinvestment in essential sectors of their economies had multiple ramifications for rural producers whose livelihoods depended crucially on agricultural production and nonagricultural activities related to the former. Land commercialization led to increased land acquisition, accumulation, and concentration, which in turn intensified land dispossession, fragmentation, and livelihood disruptions. Labor reforms created flexible labor conditions that worsened workers’ labor conditions. In sum, these processes have been associated with increased livelihood diversification, which has been gendered in process and outcomes. 221

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Women and men experienced the economic reforms differently due to gender differences in access to resources and roles and positioning in the family, the community, and the state. Under the reforms, policies had focused on crops produced by men while food crops produced by women were left without investment. The reforms also exacerbated women’s unequal access to productive resources within their families and communities. In this chapter, we highlighted the varied ways women’s livelihood strategies have responded to changes in the structure of agriculture in their countries. In the current conjuncture, African countries continue to implement neoliberal economic policies with wide-ranging implications for the food security of rural people, particularly women. This is further entrenched by male-biased agricultural policies that many states are implementing. With increasing land dispossession and climate change threatening rural livelihoods, women’s economic activities and food security can only be worsened. Smallholder agriculture—the mainstay of rural economies in many African countries— continues to be marginalized in reforms that seek to re-organize land, labor, and agricultural production. The capacity of agriculture to meet the food security needs of producers can be realized if policy prioritizes the needs of farmers. This includes organizing agricultural production in ways that address land access, control and ownership of women, migrants, youth, and other social groups that have limited access to land. Additionally, gendered labor deficits must receive attention in the organization of agricultural production since land and labor are intricately linked and affect livelihood outcomes. To help design policy that supports the needs of farmers, future studies should focus on long-term agrarian change and its gendered implications for the social reproduction of rural households. Only then can the changes in rural women’s lives be fully accounted for.

References Agbosu, Lennox Kwame, Mariama Awumbila, Christine Dowuona-Hammond, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2007. “Customary and Statutory Land Tenure and Land Policy in Ghana.” ISSER Technical Paper No. 70, 1–126. University of Ghana, Accra. Amanor-Wilks, Dede-Esi. 2009. “Land, Labour and Gendered Livelihoods in a ‘Peasant’ and a ‘Settler’ Economy.” Feminist Africa 12 (December): 31–50. Amin, Samir. 1972. “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa: Historical Origin.” Journal of Peace Research 9 (2): 105–19. Apusigah, Atia Agnes. 2009. “The Gendered Politics of Farm Household Production and the Shaping of Women’s Livelihoods in Northern Ghana.” Feminist Africa 12 (December): 51–68. Bayisenge, Jeannette, Höjer Staffan, and Espling Margareta. 2015. “Women’s Land Rights in the Context of the Land Tenure Reform in Rwanda—the Experiences of Policy Implementers.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 9 (1): 74–90. Blackden Mark, C., and Wodon Quentin. 2006. “Gender, Time Use and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Working Paper 73, World Bank, Washington, DC. Boserup Ester. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bryceson, Deborah Fahy. 1999. “African Rural Labour, Income Diversification & Livelihood Approaches: A Long-term Development Perspective.” Review of African Political Economy 26 (80): 171–89. ———. 2002. “Multiplex Livelihoods in Rural Africa: Recasting the Terms and Conditions of Gainful Employment.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 40 (1): 1–28. Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, Cristóbal Kay, and Jos Mooij, eds. 2000. Disappearing Peasantries: Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London: IT Publications. Buvinic, Mayra. 1986. “Projects for Women in the Third World: Explaining Their Misbehavior.” World Development 14 (5): 653–64. Davis, Benjamin, Stafania Di Giuseppe, and Alberto Zezza. 2017. “Are African Households (not) Leaving Agriculture? Patterns of Households’ Income Sources in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa.” Food Policy 67: 153–74.

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Rural women’s livelihoods in Africa Dey, Jennie. 1981. “Gambian Women: Unequal Partners in Rice Development Projects?.” Journal of Development Studies 171 (3): 109–22. Doss, Cheryl R., and Michael L. Morris. 2001. “How Does GENDER Affect the Adoption of Agricultural Innovations? The Case of Improved Maize Technology in Ghana.” Agricultural Economics 25: 27–39. Du Toit, Andries, and David Neves. 2014. “The Government of Poverty and the Arts of Survival: Mobile and Recombinant Strategies at the Margins of the South African Economy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (5): 833–53. Dzanku, Fred Mawunyo. 2017. “Rational but Poor? An Explanation for Rural Economic Livelihood Strategy.” Journal of Agricultural Economics 69 (2): 365–81. ———. 2019. “Food Security in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa: Exploring the Nexus between Gender, Geography and Off-Farm Employment.” World Development 113: 26–43. Dzanku, Fred Mawunyo, Dzodzi Tsikata, and Daniel Adu Ankrah. forthcoming. “Smallholder Agricultural Commercialization and Food Security Outcomes in Ghana: Do Gender and Geography Matter?” The Journal of Peasant Studies. Endeley, B. M. Joyce. 2010. “The Politics of Gender, Land and Compensation in Communities Traversed by the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline Project in Cameroon.” In Land Tenure, Gender and Globalization: Research and Analysis from Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Pamela Golah and Dzodzi Tsikata. New Delhi: Zubaan. Haggblade Steven, Peter Hazell, and Thomas Reardon. 2010. “The Rural Non-Farm Economy: Prospects for Growth and Poverty Reduction.” World Development 38 (10): 1429–41. Hall, Ruth, Ian Scoones, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2017. “Plantations, Outgrowers and Commercial Farming in Africa: Agricultural Commercialization and Implications for Agrarian Change.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (3): 515–37. Hangar, Jane, and Jon Moris. 1973. “Women and the Household Economy.” In Mwea: An Irrigated Rice Settlement in Kenya, edited by R. Chambers and J. Moris, 209–44. Munchen: Weltforum Verlag. Jackson, Cecile. 2003. “Gender Analysis of Land: Beyond Land Rights for Women?” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (4): 453–80. Jayne, Thomas S., Milu Muyanga, Ayala Wineman, Hosaena Ghebru, Caleb Stevens, Mercedes Stickler, Antony Chapoto, Ward Anseeuw, Divan van der Westhuizen, and David Nyange. 2019. “Are Medium-Scale Farms Driving Agricultural Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa?” Agricultural Economics 50: 75–95. Kevane, Michael, and C. Gray Leslie. 1999. “A Woman’s Field Is Made at Night: Gendered Land Rights and Norms in Burkina Faso.” Feminist Economics 5 (3): 1–26. Kabeer, Naila. 1994. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London: Verso. Lambrecht, Isabel Brigitte. 2016. “ ‘As a Husband I Will Love, Lead, and Provide’: Gendered Access to Land in Ghana.” World Development 88: 188–200. Lanz, Kristina, Elisabeth Prügl, and Jean-David Gerber. 2019. “The Poverty of Neoliberalized Feminism: Gender Equality in a ‘Best Practice’ Large-scale Land Investment in Ghana.” The Journal of Peasant Studies: 1–19. Levien, Michael. 2017. “Gender and Land Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (6): 1111–34. Loison, Alobo Sarah. 2015. “Rural Livelihood Diversification in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Literature Review.” The Journal of Development Studies 51 (9): 1125–38. Moyo, Sam, and Paris Yeros. 2005. “Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution?” In Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, 165–208. London: Zed Books; Cape Town: David Philip. Obeng, Faustina Adomaa, and Ane Apatinga Gervin. 2019. “Women’s Economic Empowerment and Precarious Employment in Ghana’s Export Processing Zones.” Labour, Capital and Society 49 (1): 1–27. Obeng, Faustina Adomaa, Charlotte Wrigley-Asante, and Joseph Kofi Teye. 2015. “Working Conditions in Ghana’s Export Processing Zone and Women’s Empowerment.” Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation 9 (2): 64–78. Obeng-Odoom, Franklin. 2012. “Land Reforms in Africa: Theory, Practice, and Outcome.” Habitat International 36: 161–70. Palmer, Ingrid. 1977. “Rural ‘Women’ and the Basic-Needs Approach to ‘Development’.” International Labour Review 115 (1): 104–39.

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Dzodzi Tsikata and Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey Peters, E. Pauline. 2010. “Our Daughters Inherit Our Land, But Our Sons Use Their Wives’ Fields’ Matrilineal-Matrilocal Land Tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4 (1): 179–99. ———. 2013. “Land Appropriation, Surplus People and a Battle Over Visions of Agrarian Futures in Africa.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (3): 537–62. Razavi, Shahra, Camila Arza, Elissa Braunstein, Sarah Cook, and Kristine Goulding. 2012. Gendered Impacts of Globalization. Geneva, Switzerland: Employment and Social Protection, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Schroeder, Richard A. 1996. “ ‘Gone to Their Second Husbands’: Marital Metaphors and Conjugal Contracts in the Gambia’s Female Garden Sector.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 30 (1): 69–87. Stevano, Sara, Kadiyala Suneetha, Johnston Deborah, Malapit Hazel, Hull Elizabeth, and Sofia Kalamatianou. 2019. “Time-Use Analytics: An Improved Way of Understanding Gendered AgricultureNutrition Pathways.” Feminist Economics 25 (3): 1–22. Strohm, Kathrine, and Heike Hoeffler. 2006. Contract Farming in Kenya: Theory, Evidence from Selected Value Chains, and Implications for Development Cooperation. Nairobi. www.fao.org/uploads/media/PSDA_ CFKenyaSelectedVCs_Main%20Report_final.pdf. Torvikey, Dzifa Gertrude. 2018. “Labour Casualisation, Youth Employment in Ghana’s Formal Private.” IDS Bulletin 49 (5): 31–44. Tsiboe, Francis, A. Yacob Zereyesus, and Evelyn Osei. 2016. “Non-Farm Work, Food Poverty, and Nutrient Availability in Northern Ghana.” Journal of Rural Studies 47: 97–107. Tsikata, Dzodzi. 2009. “Gender, Land and Labour Relations and Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Era of Economic Liberalisation: Towards a Research Agenda.” Feminist Africa 12 (December): 11–30. ———. 2016. “Gender, Land Tenure and Agrarian Production Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 5 (1): 1–19. Tsikata, Dzodzi, and Awetori Joseph Yaro. 2014. “When a Good Business Model Is Not Enough: Land Transactions and Gendered Livelihood Prospects in Rural Ghana.” Feminist Economics 20 (1): 202–26. Udry, Christopher, John Hoddinott, Harold Alderman, and Lawrence Haddad. 1995. “Gender Differentials in Farm Productivity: Implications for Household Efficiency and Agricultural Policy”. Food Policy 20 (5): 407–23. von Bülow, Dorthe, and Anne Sørensen. 1993. “Gender and Contract Farming: Tea Outgrower Schemes in Kenya.” Review of African Political Economy 56: 38–52. Whitehead, Ann. 1999. “ ‘Lazy Men’, Time-Use, and Rural Development in Zambia.” Gender and Development 7 (3): 49–61. Whitehead, Ann, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2003. “Policy Discourses on Women’s Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Re-Turn to the Customary.” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (1–2): 67–112. Yaro, Awetori Joseph, Joseph K. Teye, and Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey. 2017. “Agricultural Commercialisation Models, Agrarian Dynamics and Local Development in Ghana.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (2012): 538–54. Yaro, Awetori Joseph. 2006. “Is Deagrarianisation Real? A Study of Livelihood Activities in Rural Northern Ghana.” Journal of Modern African Studies 44 (1): 125–56.

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23 GLOBAL MIGRATION AND CARE CHAINS Sarah Gammage

Introduction Arlie Hoschschild was one of the first researchers to conceptualize and explore global care chains in the context of the recent feminization of migration flows (Hochschild 2000). Hochschild used the framing of a value chain to describe “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring” (2000, 131). It is a powerful framing because it highlights that in the process of the commodification of care, care is displaced along a chain, with paid and unpaid care givers substituting for the lack of care and ensuring care needs are met. Moreover, the framing underscores that caring work “adds value” to individuals and to economies and, indeed, that this value in Marxian terms can be seen as surplus value— adding more value than is fully compensated for in the process of providing care. The positive externalities from caring, both in terms of the human well-being and social relationships built and enhanced, and also in terms of the subsidy to the market through the reproduction of the labor force, form the basis of this surplus value, particularly where the price of substitution is less than the value added. This framing of the expropriation of surplus value along the care chain fits well with feminist scholars’ exposition of care and migration because it emphasizes the centrality of care in our societies and depicts its rendering as a subsidy both to human well-being and to the functioning of the market (Power 2004; Yeates 2012). The body of literature on care chains also points to the importance of rights and agency and the responsibility of “duty-bearers” (state actors and other entities that have legal obligations to respect, promote, and realize human rights and to abstain from human rights violations) to respect rights and agency. A critical failure by duty bearers and particularly the state in this context is that of socializing the costs and benefits of care. Consistent with the vision of social provisioning in feminist economics (Power 2004), care has to be integrated into social and economic systems to ensure that everyone has the right to care and be cared for, and that care responsibilities are shared among the household, the state, and the market and properly resourced and compensated for. With these social arrangements in place, the outcomes would be better and more just, both for those in need of care and for those who provide care. This chapter examines how national and global care chains form, explores how transnational families respond to the displacement of care needs, and lays out a research and policy agenda to address the tilt of caring resources from the Global South to the Global North. 225

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Migration and Care Currently, women make up almost half of all international migrants (Fleury 2016; UNDESA 2017; Donato and Gabaccia 2015). The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that women account for 70–80 percent of migrants from some countries (ILO 2015). Those women who are not displaced by conflict or insecurity in their home country frequently migrate in search of employment, with the goal of finding work and sending remittances back to family members at home (Ratha et  al. 2018; Fleury 2016; Petrozziello 2013, 2011). Many of those who migrate are mothers and adult women with caregiving responsibilities of their own. A substantial number of those who migrate find themselves employed as care workers in the Global North and higher-income countries and communities (WHO 2017; ILO 2013; Bartha, Fedyuk, and Zentai 2015; Spencer et al. 2010). The ILO (2016a) estimates that there are over 150 million migrant workers worldwide, of whom approximately 11.5 million are domestic workers working in private homes; for most, care defines some or all of their duties. Moreover, as the OECD Help Wanted report underscores, over the first decade of the 21st century, migrants have accounted for 47 percent of the increase in the labor force in the US and 70 percent in Europe (Colombo 2011). The same report estimates that in Australia, foreign-born workers make up more than 25 percent of all care workers; in Austria and Israel, this figure rises to 50 percent and in Italy to 72 percent. As the absolute numbers of those migrating rises, this creates a “care drain” or a pronounced shift of care resources from sending areas to receiving areas, typically from rural areas to cities (Liu, Zhang, and Li 2009) and from the Global South to the Global North (Michel and Peng 2012, 2017; Michel 2010; Benería, Deere, and Kabeer 2012). Migrants and the families they leave behind struggle to address the loss of those who provide care by developing “global care chains” that substitute for the care once provided by those who have left. They rely on older women in their home countries and communities, disproportionately pull girl children out of school to care for their siblings, or place children with aunts, grandmothers, and other relatives (usually women), and even hire paid caregivers. Pérez Orozco (2016) describes this as a process whereby: [T]he responsibility is transferred to women who have finished their reproductive cycle (i.e., elderly women who worked as caregivers for a long time and who should now be cared for themselves) or persons who are not yet ready to perform caregiving work (usually young girls and occasionally young boys). (Pérez Orozco 2016, 117) These informal childcare arrangements in the home country enable many migrant women to participate in the global labor force so that they can assume the role of transnational breadwinners. By default, these home country care arrangements also subsidize the global care chain. Moreover, the irony is that in the global care chain, migrants are exported to care for the children of others while their own children must in turn be cared for by others in the home country. The failure to socialize care deficits between households and the state has left many households in both the Global South and the North struggling to provide care for their family members and has intensified the commodification of care over time. The conceptualization of a global care chain is a powerful one as it allows us to understand how migration and labor recruitment are the fulcrum of a strategy to address care needs in host countries. As women from the Global South are recruited to address the care needs in the Global North, an international network of caregiver families and care-recipient families is established (Yeates 2005). 226

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Yeates (2005) and others (Gammage and Stevanovic 2018; FitzGerald Murphy 2014; Léon 2010; Hochschild 2000) view migration and labor recruitment alongside the “outsourcing” of care. This process is structured and mediated by gender race, caste, and class, as higher-income and higher-social-status households outsource care to women from lower-income households (Parreñas 2001; Hondageu-Sotelo, 2001). The outsourcing process is gendered, because women disproportionately perform caring roles in both the Global North and the Global South. It is mediated by class and racialized, because poorer women, and women of color, are disproportionately hired to replace the care of wealthier higher caste and higher-status White women (McGregor 2007; Hondageu-Sotelo 2001). In the more recent manifestation of global migration flows since the late 1980s, women are increasingly migrating to care. Although men do migrate, and do find themselves in caring work, global care flows primarily comprise women. As the welfare states retreat in the Global North in response to austerity measures, households are increasingly forced to resolve their care needs in the market, hiring native workers and workers from abroad (Samman, PreslerMarshall, and Jones 2016; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010). Women are also recruited internationally to care for children, the elderly, and the infirm. This global recruitment both follows and fuels migration corridors between sending and receiving countries. For example, women migrate from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to work in the Middle East as nannies and domestic servants. Healthcare systems in the Global North and in wealthier middle-income countries also benefit from migration as care workers, doctors, and nurses, many trained in the Global South, migrate for work. The Philippines and Jamaica have long been known for sending trained nurses who migrate for work in wealthier healthcare systems in the Global North (WHO 2017).

Rights in Global Care Chains Care workers, particularly immigrant care workers, often labor in appalling conditions (Varia 2006, 2014). There are only a few countries where national labor law applies to domestic work (ILO 2013). Moreover, immigrant care workers, and especially those who are undocumented or whose migration status depends on their employer, may find themselves working in highly insecure and precarious conditions without benefits and labor protections (Triandafyllidou 2013; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010). Migrant workers, and particularly migrant care workers, often lack benefits such as healthcare or health insurance and rights to social security and other old-age protections (Meghani 2016). Recruitment agencies frequently fail to provide help or protection and charge exorbitant fees for job placement. All of these conditions are exacerbated for migrant women care workers who are undocumented and thus feel insecure about reporting abuse and/or making claims for benefits. Many countries had no legal protections for domestic workers, as this work took place within private households and was not deemed to be subject to regulation. Moreover, this work was historically highly racialized, performed by groups for whom few statutory labor regulations applied. Concerns about the terms and conditions of employment in domestic work led to the development of a global instrument to ensure decent work for domestic workers, Convention 189, in 2011. Convention 189 provides a framework to formalize domestic work and improve the terms and conditions of employment for domestic workers globally. Where it has been implemented, the conditions of work for domestic workers are improving and we have little evidence of any employment losses. Countries reporting on this instrument attest to substantial gains formalizing the sector and ensuring access to benefits and healthcare for domestic workers. In 2010, the ILO estimated that only 10 percent of domestic workers were covered 227

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by labor legislation to the same extent as other workers (ILO 2016a). In 2016, the ILO reports that over 70 countries had taken action to ensure decent work for domestic workers. Of these, 22 have ratified Convention 189, another 30 have achieved law and policy reform, and at least another 18 are engaged in extending protections to domestic workers (ILO 2016b). Care workers and migrant care workers have become part of a vibrant struggle to assert their rights and improve the terms and conditions of employment (Boris and Undén 2017). The International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) was formed as a result of the unification of a number of domestic worker organizations across the globe that had been part of the struggle to establish Convention 189. The IDWF is a global federation of domestic workers that has been organizing and supporting domestic workers in national unions worldwide. As of October 2018, the IDWF had 69 affiliates from 55 countries, representing over 600,000 domestic/ household workers’ members (IDWF 2018). The global struggle to establish C189 highlights an important point— that despite the enormity of the challenges they face, care workers and migrant care workers are not powerless. Certainly, Yeates (2009, 49) challenges the one-dimensional portrayal of migrant women in global care chains as being “immiserated women migrating to ensure the economic survival of their families” (2009, 49). As Murphy observes: This one-dimensional ‘immiserated woman’ plagues much of the literature on global care chains, which often focuses on desolate women who are forced to leave their family and pursue sex work, jobs as nannies, and maid positions in other countries as their only option to survive. (FitzGerald Murphy 2014, 192) In reality, many migrant women in global care chains have advanced education, including medical and nursing degrees (WHO 2017; Barber 2011; Yeates 2009). Moreover, embracing the heterogeneity of work in global care chains and indeed of workers, their education and skills and the context they work in are critical if we are to devise migration and labor law to uphold the rights of migrant carers (Boris and Fish 2014; ILO 2016b).

Transnational Families For many, the primary purpose of migration is to find work in order to send remittances home. These remittances sustain households and communities in home countries (World Bank 2019; Ratha et al. 2018). Much of the literature on remittances underscores that they are used to secure consumption, lift households above the poverty line, invest in improving physical infrastructure and housing, and send children to school and pay for medical expenses (Azizi 2018; Petrozziello 2011, 2013; Acosta 2006). Gendered analyses of remittances tend to underscore that women send a higher proportion of their earnings to families in home countries (IOM 2007), but this may also be a feature of the fact that women typically earn less and have fewer capital investments in their home countries (Donato and Gabaccia 2015). Immigration law and labor law mediate rights along these care chains. Migration status and the type of documentation held can prolong separation and determine who can return or be reunited with family members and under what circumstances. As a result, as van Walsum (2009) observes, immigration laws, because of their impact on families—either expediting or, more likely, delaying family reunification—become, in effect, family laws. Immigration laws affect families by dictating who constitutes “the family,” who may come in to join the family and when. They can bar many migrants from entering host countries legally in the first place, thus 228

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making it difficult for other family members to join them. These laws can also prevent undocumented workers from traveling back to their home countries to visit the family left behind, either because it is too expensive (they may have to pay smugglers and attempt undocumented re-entry) and/or because they may be unable to re-enter the destination country again. Researchers estimate that millions of children in migrant-sending countries are currently growing up without their mother or father, or both. This means that many sending countries face a hidden crisis of children left behind, with the poorest children at the highest risk (Samman, Presler-Marshall, and Jones 2016). For example, Yanovich (2015) estimates that 100,000 children in Moldova and 200,000 in Ukraine have been left behind while an estimated nine million children are left behind in the Philippines based on compilations by local NGOs and advocacy groups. Despite migrant parents’ best efforts to provide economic support through remittances and continue to be in contact via internet and phone, separation is often prolonged because family reunification is extremely difficult in most host countries (Molina 2015). Unfortunately, the protracted separation of children and parents can jeopardize the well-being and developmental outcomes of many of those who are left-behind (Reyes 2008; Parreñas 2005; Gamburd 2000; Hugo 2002). Yet the vilification of migrant mothers in this process reflects highly gendered and patriarchal views of the naturalized importance of mothering (Badasu and Michel 2016). Although elder women often accommodate childcare in the mother’s absence, children, particularly girls, are also an important source of childcare for their siblings and other relatives. Parreñas (2005) and Gamburd (2000) report in their studies on transnational motherhood that daughters in the families that are left-behind frequently become the surrogate carers because entrenched social norms and rigid gender stereotypes assign them these responsibilities. In a recent report on the global care crisis, Samman, Presler-Marshall, and Jones (2016) estimate that worldwide, about two-thirds (65%) of rural girls between the ages of 13 and 17 are involved in unpaid care work, compared to 55% of urban girls in this age group and 37% of rural boys (Samman, Presler-Marshall, and Jones 2016, 40). The report further observes that adolescent girls, particularly those from the largest and poorest families, are often drafted into care work and are more likely to miss or drop out of school. For example, in Ethiopia, girls without siblings missed ten days of school compared to 21 days for those with five younger siblings, and 49 days for those with seven younger siblings (Frost and Rolleston 2013, cited in Samman, PreslerMarshall, and Jones 2016). The effects of care deficits in home countries do not only affect those left behind but are also felt by the transnational parents in host countries. Many migrant parents who have to endure separation from their own children struggle to engage in transnational parenting (Oliveira 2017; Michel and Oliveira 2017). Ironically, the public arena and the media have accused these mothers of abdicating their caregiving roles (Hoang et  al. 2015; Lutz 2017)—an accusation that reflects rigid social norms and gender stereotypes that reinforce the notion that children should be cared for by mothers (Finlay and Mancini 2016 in Meghani 2016, 23–52). Lutz (2017, 253) writes of this stigmatization that, “when mothers are not directly pilloried, their absence is given an emotional significance through the description of their children’s emotional problems.” Thus, seeking breadwinner roles abroad “fails” children left behind—even when migrants send remittances and struggle to engage in transnational parenting. But drawing on Marilyn Power’s vision of social provisioning, the real failure should be attributed to governments that do not recognize care as work, manifest in the absence of care regimes and inadequate policies to protect and support migrant women and their families in both the sending and the receiving countries (Samman, Presler-Marshall, and Jones 2016, 44). The failure by governments to recognize care needs at home, or to engage in negotiations in support of care workers, either at home 229

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or abroad, to protect their rights as workers or guarantee them pensions, highlights the view that care work is not really work that is worthy of state investments in diplomacy, rights, and services. The failure of states to socialize care and protect the rights of migrant workers abroad is particularly derelict in the case of governments that actively export women to care abroad and facilitate migration for domestic work and health care (Rosewarne 2012; WHO 2017). Along these care chains, gender roles and responsibilities are being challenged and reworked as former care givers become breadwinners and others assume new roles to compensate for the loss of care givers who have migrated abroad. In some contexts, men may assume more of the caring responsibilities; in others, the caring responsibilities are disproportionately passed on to women (Gallo and Scrinzi 2016). Yet in the absence of rights protections, of labor and migration laws that facilitate family reunification and foster circular migration, these care chains are tremendously fragile and can break under the psychological and economic stress of extended separations (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Yeates 2009, 2012).

Conclusions Feminist research on migration and global care chains highlights the critical role that care plays in our societies and economies. Consistent with the social provisioning approach, it emphasizes the displacement of care resources from the Global South to the Global North. It also emphasizes the rights framework and the pressing need for national and international duty bearers to uphold the rights of migrant care workers and the families they leave behind them. Feminist research shows that migrants and migrant women are not passive agents without decision-making power, nor does it view them solely as victims of exploitation; it surfaces voice and agency and highlights the critical role of organizing with and by migrant domestic workers to improve the terms and conditions of employment and demand their rights. Future feminist research on care chains should fill knowledge gaps. Analysis of the impact of migration on gender roles continues to be sparse, particularly from an intersectional perspective, recognizing that the experience of migration and labor market insertion and its impacts on those who migrate and those who are left behind varies by race, caste, class, and sending and receiving context. Feminist research should also continue to deepen the analysis of the central role of the state in recognizing, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care and in the social provisioning of care. The transnational provisioning of care and construction and recognition of rights, including migration, labor, and social protection rights for migrants and migrant care workers, ought to be part of new institutional arrangements that span continents and countries. Feminist scholars challenge the market as the natural or most effective distribution mechanism for care. They put ethical judgments front and center when they emphasize labor and human rights as universal and inalienable rights that should be guaranteed in paid and unpaid care work and across global care chains. These principles and commitments should inform future research on global care chains and the policy that renders care work decent and ensures that everyone has the right to care and be cared for.

References Acosta, Pablo. 2006. Labor Supply, School Attendance, and Remittances from International Migration: The Case of El Salvador, vol. 3903. World Bank, Development Research Group, Trade Team. Washington, DC: World Bank. Azizi, Sayeed Soroosh. 2018. “The Impacts of Workers’ Remittances on Human Capital and Labor Supply in Developing Countries.” Economic Modelling 75: 377–96.

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Global migration and care chains Badasu, Delali, and Sonia Michel. 2016. “On a Collision Course, Millennium Development Goals and Mothers’ Migration.” In Women Migrant Workers, Ethical, Political and Legal Problems, edited by Zahra Meghani, 75–100. New York and London: Routledge. Barber, Pauline Gardiner. 2011. “Women’s Work Unbound: Philippine Development and Global Restructuring.” In Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances, edited by M. H. Marchand and A. Sisson Runyan, 2nd ed., 143–62. New York: Routledge. Bartha Attila, Olena Fedyuk, and Violetta Zentai. 2015. “Low-Skilled Migration: Immigrant Workers in European Domestic Care.” In Green, Pink, or Silver II: The Future of Labor in Europe, edited by M. Beblavy, I. Maselli, and M. Vaselkova, 237–57. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277291100_ Green_pink_silver_The_future_of_labour_in_Europe. Benería, Lourdes, Carmen Diana Deere, and Naila Kabeer. 2012. “Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development, and Governance.” Feminist Economics 18 (2): 1–34. Boris, Eileen, and Jennifer Fish. 2014. “ ‘Slaves No More’: Making Global Labour Standards for Domestic Workers.” Feminist Studies 40 (2): 411–43. Boris, Eileen, and Megan Undén. 2017. ‘The Intimate Knows No Boundaries: Global Circuits of Domestic Worker Organizing.” In Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim, edited by Michel Sonia, and Ito Peng, 245–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Colombo, Francesca. 2011. Help Wanted? Providing and Paying for Long-Term Care. Paris: OECD. Donato, Katharine, and Donna Gabaccia. 2015. Gender and International Migration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Hochschild, eds. 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Finlay, Graham, and Joanne M. Mancini. 2016. “ ‘Her Life Within the Home’: The Construction of ­Gender and Female International Migrant Workers in the Republic of Ireland.” In Women Migrant Workers, Ethical, Political and Legal Problems, edited by Zahra Meghani. New York and London: Routledge. Fitz Gerald Murphy, Maggie. 2014. “Global Care Chains, Commodity Chains, and the Valuation of Care: A Theoretical Discussion.” American International Journal of Social Science 3 (5). Fleury, Anjali. 2016. “Understanding Women and Migration: A Literature Review.” Knomad Working Paper 8, World Bank, Washington, DC. Frost, Melanie, and Caine Rolleston. 2013. “Improving Education Quality, Equity and Access: A Report on Findings from the Young Lives School Survey (Round 1) in Ethiopia,” Young Lives Working Paper 96, Young Lives, Oxford. Gallo, Ester, and Francesca Scrinzi. 2016. Migration, Masculinities and Reproductive Labor: Men of the Home. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gamburd, Michelle Ruth. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gammage, Sarah, and Natacha Stevanovic. 2018. “Gender, Migration and Care Deficits: What Role for the Sustainable Development Goals?” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45 (April). Hoang, Lan Anh, Theodora Lam, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Elspeth Graham. 2015. “Transnational Migration, Changing Care Arrangements and Left-Behind Children’s Responses in South-East Asia.” Children’s Geographies 13 (3): 263–77. doi:10.1080/14733285.2015.972653. Hochschild, Arlie. 2000. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” In On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, edited by W. Hutton and A. Giddens. London: Jonathan Cape. Hondageu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadow of ­Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, and Ernestine Avila. 1997. “ ‘Here, but I’m There’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood.” Gender and Society 11 (5): 548–71. Hugo, Graeme. 2002. “Effects of International Migration on the Family in Indonesia.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 11 (1): 13–46. IDWF. 2018. “Affiliation and Registration.” International Domestic Workers Federation. Accessed June 2019. https://idwfed.org/en/about-us-1/idwf-affiliation. ILO. 2013. Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protections. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-dgreports/-dcomm/-publ/ documents/publication/wcms_173363.pdf. ———. 2015. ILO Global Estimates on Migrant Workers: Results and Methodology. Special Focus on Migrant Domestic Workers. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO.

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Sarah Gammage ———. 2016a. Who Cares for the Carers? Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/ newsroom/news/WCMS_490924/lang-en/index.htm. ———. 2016b. Decent Work for Domestic Workers: Achievements Since the Adoption of C189. Geneva, ­Switzerland: ILO. www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-ed_protect/-protrav/-travail/documents/ briefingnote/wcms_490778.pdf. IOM. 2007. Survey on Remittances 2007: Gender Perspectives, Working Books on Migration 24. Geneva, ­Switzerland: IOM. Léon, Margarita. 2010. “Migration and Care Work in Spain: The Domestic Sector Revisited.” Themed Issue: “Domestic and Care Work at the Intersection of Welfare, Gender and Migration Regimes: Some European Experiences.” Social Policy and Society 9 (3): 409–18. Liu, B., Y. Zhang, and Y. Li. 2009. “Reconciling Work and Family: Issues and Policies in China.” ­Conditions of Work and Employment Series, No. 22, International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland. www.ilo.org/beijing/what-we-do/publications/WCMS_141729/lang-en/index.htm. Lutz, Helma. 2017. “Euro-Orphans and the Stigmatization of Migrant Motherhood.” In Reassembling Motherhood Procreation and Care in a Globalized World, edited by Yasmine Ergas et al., 247–68. Ithaca: Columbia University Press. Lutz, Helma, and Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck. 2010. “Care Work Migration in Germany: Semi-­Compliance and Complicity.” Social Policy and Society 9 (3): 419–30. McGregor, Joann. 2007. “Joining the BBC (British Bottom Cleaners): Zimbabwean Migrants and the UK Care Industry.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (5): 801–24. Meghani, Zahra. 2016. “Trapped in a Web of Immigration and Employment Laws: Female Undocumented Home Health Workers in the US.” In Women Migrant Workers, Ethical, Political and Legal Problems, edited by Zahra Meghani, 24–53. New York and London: Routledge. Michel, Sonia. 2010. “Beyond the Global Brain Drain: The Global Care Drain.” www.theglobalist.com/ beyond-the-global-brain-drain-the-global-care-drain/. Michel Sonia, and Gabrielle Oliveira. 2017. “The Double Lives of Transnational Mothers.” In Reassembling Motherhood Procreation and Care in a Globalized World, edited by Yasmine Ergas et al., 223–46. Ithaca: Columbia University Press. Michel, Sonia, and Ito Peng. 2012. “All in the Family? Migrants, Nationhood, and Care Regimes in Asia and North America.” Journal of European Social Policy 22: 406–18. ———, eds. 2017. Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A MultiScalar Approach to the Pacific Rim. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Molina, Raúl. 2015. “Caring While Missing Children’s Infancy: Transnational Mothering among Honduran Women Working in Greater Washington.” Human Organization 74 (Spring): 62–73. Oliveira, Gabrielle. 2017. “Caring for Your Children: How Mexican Immigrant Mothers Experience Care and the Ideals of Motherhood.” In Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim, edited by Michel Sonia and Ito Peng, 91–114. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pérez Orozco, Amaia. 2016. “Global Care Chains: Reshaping the Hidden Foundations of an Unsustainable Development Model.” In Women Migrant Workers, Ethical, Political and Legal Problems, edited by Zara Meghani, 102–28. New York and London: Routledge. Petrozziello, Allison. 2011. “Feminized Financial Flows: How Gender Affects Remittances in HondurasUS Transnational Families.” Gender and Development 19 (1): 53–67. ———. 2013. Gender on the Move: Working on the Migration-Development Nexus from a Gender Perspective. Santo Domingo: UN Women. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19, Ratha, Dilip, Supriyo De, Sonia Plaza, Ganesh Seshan, Nadege Desiree Yameogo, and Eung Ju Kim. 2018. “Migration and Remittances, Recent Developments and Outlook.” Migration and Development Brief 30, World Bank, Washington, DC. Reyes, M. Melanie. 2008. Migration and Filipino Children Left-Behind: A Literature Review. Makaty City: Miriam College—Women and Gender Institute (WAGI) for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

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Global migration and care chains Rosewarne, Stuart. 2012. “Temporary International Labor Migration and Development in South and Southeast Asia.” Feminist Economics 18 (2): 63–90. Samman, Emma, Elizabeth Presler-Marshall, and Nicola Jones. 2016. Women’s Work, Mothers, Children and the Global Childcare Crisis. London: Overseas Development Institute. Spencer, Sarah, Susan Martin, Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, and Eamon O’Shea. 2010. “The Role of Migrant Care Workers in Aging Societies: Report on Research Findings in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and the United States.” IOM Migration Research Series No. 41, International Organization for Migration, Geneva, Switzerland. Triandafyllidou, Anna, ed. 2013. Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe: Who Cares? Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, CT: Ashgate. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs). 2017. International Migration Report 2017. New York: UNDESA. https://esa.un.org/unmigration/. Van Walsum, Sarah. 2009. “Transnational Mothering, National Immigration Policy, and European Law: The Experience of the Netherlands.” In Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by S. Benhabib and J. Resnik. New York: New York University Press. Varia, Nisha. 2006. “Sanctioned Abuses: The Case of Migrant Domestic Workers.” Human Rights Brief 14 (3). ———. 2014. “Dispatches: New Protection for Saudi Arabia’s Domestic Workers.” Human Rights Watch, February. www.hrw.org/news/2014/02/19/dispatches-new-protection-saudi-arabias-domestic-workers. WHO. 2017. Women on the Move, Migration, Care Work and Health. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. World Bank. 2019. “Migration and Remittances, Recent Development and Outlook.” Brief No. 31, World Bank, Washington, DC. Yanovich, Liza. 2015. Children Left Behind: The Impact of Labor Migration in Moldova and Ukraine. Migration Policy Institute. www.migrationpolicy.org/article/children-left-behind-impact-labormigration-moldova-and-ukraine. Yeates, Nicola. 2005. “Global Care Chains: A Critical Introduction.” Global Migration Perspectives, No. 44, Global Commission on International Migration, Geneva, Switzerland, September. ———. 2009. Globalising Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012. “Global Care Chains: A State-of-the-Art Review and Future Directions in Care Transnationalization Research.” Global Networks 12 (2): 135–54.

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24 SEX WORK AND TRAFFICKING Francesca Bettio

Introduction According to the (online) Collins Dictionary the current understanding of sex worker in American English is “any person paid to sexually gratify or arouse a customer, as a model or performer in pornographic magazines, films, or nightclub acts or, especially, a prostitute”—that is, “someone having sex with people in exchange of money.” (Collins Dictionary. Online. “Definition of ‘SexWorker’; Definition of ‘Prostitution’ ”). Perhaps, the most cited definition of trafficking for sexual exploitation is that enshrined in the Palermo Protocol of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or of the giving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (United Nations 2000: Annex II) This chapter reviews the feminist economics literature on sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation (hereafter referred to as trafficking). The feminist debate on these issues has become polarized partly in response to a growing influx into richer countries of migrant sex workers under the intermediation of traffickers and smugglers. A dichotomy between voluntary (or free) and involuntary (or enslaved) sex work has come to dominate the political debate, with trafficking almost invariably associated with slave-like working conditions. This debate is matched on the policy side by the opposition between supporters of legalization of sex work and those favoring prohibitionism or abolitionism where at least one of the following is outlawed: selling sex, buying sex, intermediation. However, so-called postmodern feminism refuses to adhere to a polarized view. This chapter argues that feminist economics literature on sex work and trafficking can be broadly ascribed to the postmodern strand. According to this perspective, the sex 234

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industry features a multiplicity of market segments with limited mobility between them which cannot generally be reduced to two extreme segments. The ability to influence outcomes, freedom to choose among alternatives and working conditions, including exposure to violence and other risks, and, more generally, well-being outcomes for sex workers (including well-being deprivation) are seen to significantly differ across segments. In this view, a segmented continuum of markets is more apt to describe the sex industry than a sharp distinction between a free and a forced market segment. Consistent with this view, feminist economists advocate a qualified support for legalization. Such postmodern vision makes it problematic to clearly separate the analysis of sex work in general from that of trafficking; therefore, this chapter is not organized along this distinction. It acknowledges that at one end of the continuum women trafficked for sex work lack agency and choice, but only a fraction of what is called “trafficking” in the literature could neatly be placed at this end of the spectrum.

Feminist debates on sex work and trafficking Influential feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s have conceptualized prostitution as an implicit or explicit contract where money is exchanged for a right over the person. In Pateman’s (1988) view, money is exchanged for a right over the body of the prostitute and not over her sexual services. In the marriage contract too, says Pateman, women relinquish to men the property in their own persona. In essence, both contracts enforce a relationship of domination rather than regulating an exchange of things (money in exchange for reproductive, domestic, or sexual services). Men take advantage of their often superior physical strength and use violence whenever they perceive is needed to enforce either contract. It is a short step from here to claim that violence is quintessential to women’s oppression insofar as they are denied property in their own bodies (Haag 1992); or to claim that any form of prostitution constitutes violence against women—since not only is sexual violence endemic in prostitution, much more so than in marriage, but prostitution also explicitly strips women of control over their own body, even if temporarily. While, Pateman and Haag, among others, were articulating a notion of prostitution anchored in violence, international migration flows from poorer to richer countries (and regions) in the new millennium were rapidly expanding with the intermediation of a variety of institutions that ranged from religious channels such as the Catholic Church to generally small criminal networks operating from the source countries—Brazil, China, the Edo region in Nigeria, and former Soviet Republics, among others (UNODOC 2016). Perhaps for the first time in history, a large number of women migrated on their own rather than following male relatives: those eventually reaching Western Europe often ended up working as maids in the richest countries, but some ended up in prostitution (Campani 1999). Trafficking for sexual exploitation—as the UN Protocol (2000) would later label the phenomenon—thus became increasingly visible, feeding a process of mutual reinforcement between radical feminist views that prostitution is essentially an act of violence and increasingly popular narratives about women actually forced into prostitution, degraded, abused, and enslaved by smugglers and traffickers. Carefully crafted anti-trafficking campaigns also lent credibility to the idea that there can hardly be freedom in prostitution, for a woman cannot “truly” choose what constitutes violence to herself and other women (Andrijasevic 2007). Not all feminists agreed, nor did organized prostitutes. Those operating in countries of ­immigration—like the US, Canada, or European countries like Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, or Italy—faced a double threat: on the one hand, the notion that prostitution is essentially violence threatened to reinforce the stigma attached to the profession as well as attracting restrictive policies; on the other hand, migrant prostitution threatened to lower prices and deteriorate 235

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working conditions, especially when it was brought into the country by criminal smuggling or trafficking networks. In response, the term “sex work” was crafted as a new descriptive category, free from moralistic overtones, for theorizing prostitution as a form of labor (Kempadoo 1998). Organized prostitutes from Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia gathered in Amsterdam in 1985 to form the International Committee for Prostitutes Rights and issue a World Charter which actively circulated the view that prostitution is a contractual relation among adults consenting to sex and consenting to work (ICPR 1985). As members of the feminist movement, moreover, segments of organized prostitutes and their supporters tried to reconcile the defense of their own rights with feminist views on prostitution by upholding a distinction between “voluntary” and “forced” sex work where trafficking belongs in the forced category (Doezema 2005). However, this distinction eventually turned into a sharp dichotomy between choice and nonchoice in sex work, which has long contributed to polarizing the debate, especially in the policy arena. Some feminist scholars opposed this sharp dichotomy from the start, albeit from different disciplinary perspectives, and are perhaps forming the majority view of what has been labeled the “postmodern” view of feminist scholarship about sex work and trafficking (Scoular 2004). Among anthropologists, for example, Tabet (2004) draws from her rich evidence on Niger as well as from a wealth of anthropological research to conceptualize what she terms “sexuoeconomic exchanges.” She argues that a variety of prostitution-like practices coexist with a variety of “marriage-like practices” along a continuum of sexuo-economic exchanges entailing differential degrees of female agency. With specific reference to prostitution and trafficking, Dewey (2008) maintains, among others, that it is hard to differentiate between the two; in fact, Dewey goes further and argues that consent or choice are loaded words in sex work, implying that they are not in other types of work. Clear echoes of these views can be found in Cruz’s recent mapping of the organization of migrant sex work in London (Cruz 2018, 26), where she argues that what she calls “unfree” and “free” (sexual) labor exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of (re)production, which are gendered, racialized, and legal.

Feminist economics on sex work and trafficking As mentioned earlier, feminist economics on sex work and trafficking reviewed here may be broadly ascribed to this postmodern vision. The work of several feminist economists in this area is consistent with the view of segmented sex market featuring a continuum of agency and outcomes along which all sex work can be placed. The notion of agency in this literature is close to Amartya Sen’s notion of agency freedom—for example, freedom to choose a kind of work one values, combined with the ability to exercise this freedom. According to Sen, agency freedom is “inescapably qualified and constrained by the social, political, and economic opportunities that are available to us” (Sen 1999: xi–xii.). This resonates with the view expressed by several contributions to feminist economics that sex workers’ location in the various market segments along the continuum depends on local institutions, markets, and culture, as well as one’s individual characteristics, with mobility across segments being rather limited (Farmer and Horowitz 2013; Plambech 2017; Mathews 2017; Bettio, Della Giusta, and Di Tommaso 2017). Moreover, Sen’s notion of (achieved) well-being is apt in capturing the multiplicity and complexity of outcomes for sex workers in this industry, including well-being deprivation (Hui 2017; Di Tommaso et al. 2009). While the view of a segmented continuum in sex work has developed against the backdrop of the specific feminist debate on sex work and trafficking, the wider feminist debate has inspired economic scholarship in other important respects. Two basic tenets of feminist economics on sex work and trafficking are that both phenomena are gendered rather than biologically determined, and the economic position of sex workers is socially constructed. 236

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Sex work and trafficking are gendered phenomena. According to recent estimates worldwide, eight out of ten sex workers are women and seven out of ten victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation are women (Fondation Scelles 2012; UNODOC 2016, 7). Gendering the analysis requires, among other things, learning from studies of sex work when it is not performed by women or not demanded by men. One of the rare studies on trans-gender sex workers—Botti and d’Ippoliti (2017)—adds discrimination on the ground of gender identity to the list of factors that limit employment opportunities outside the sex industry. The authors suggest that a “sex work trap”—inability to leave sex work—arises when the combined effect of push factors like poor labor market prospects and discrimination on the basis of gender identity dominate pull factors like comparatively higher earnings for sex work. The stigma attached to buying and selling sex is a clear example of how sex markets are socially constructed. Nussbaum (1998) institutes an enlightening parallel between stigma in sex work and that attached to singing, acting, and dancing for pay in 18th-century England. Quoting Adam Smith, she recalls that these artists were stigmatized if they exercised their bodily talent for money since money was seen to contaminate pure bodily art. For most of us, Nussbaum maintains, this is an old-fashioned prejudice; hence, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the stigma attached to sex work is rooted also in prejudice, gender-based prejudice in particular. Mainstream economics acknowledges that stigma plays a role in sex markets but tends to trivialize it as a norm originating from outside the economy and unaffected by the way the latter works (e.g., Edlund and Korn 2002). Della Giusta, Di Tommaso, and Strøm (2009), however, model stigma as a gendered loss of reputation that behaves differently for sex workers and for clients and that evolves in response to changes in sex markets—supply and demand in particular. A notable policy implication from the model is that provisions criminalizing or punishing clients are likely to push demand for sex work underground or change the composition of the clientele in favor of the worst type of clients for sex workers, those who love risks and are less concerned with reputation (Della Giusta, Di Tommaso, and Jewell 2017). A segmented continuum of markets. Pushing the demand for sex work underground is just an example of how female agency can be affected by stigma. The Feminist Economics special issue on sex work and trafficking (2017) contributes to disentangling the complex links between stigma, agency, working conditions, and sex workers’ well-being in segmented markets. Mathews (2017) offers an ethnographic account of how the sex market in the Philippines is structured into segments that differ in the composition and the perceived quality of the sex service package, but perhaps more importantly, in the way sex work is organized, intermediated, and remunerated. Mathews argues that identity may hinder mobility of sex workers across segments: for example, cam models are reported to be very keen to distinguish themselves from masseuses or other sex workers (who tend to earn more) because they do not think of themselves as prostitutes. Education may also play a role in segmentation. Sohn (2019) confirms by means of a specialized survey what other studies also found, namely that educated sex-workers earn more than their less-educated counterparts. He also finds that much of the positive association between education and earnings is accounted for by age and location, that is, whether sex work is performed in open spaces like streets and parks, in brothels and hotels, in massage parlors or in bars. The different locations broadly correspond to the segments identified by Mathews (2017). Di Tommaso et al. (2009) and Bettio and Nandi (2010) offer evidence that location matters for the well-being of sex workers and their control over working conditions, even when they are victims of trafficking. Both contributions exploit records compiled by the Organization for International Migration for a large sample of victims of trafficking and find that freedom of movement, access to health care, absence of abuse, choice of services on offer, and use of condom depend on and differ significantly across work locations. The evidence gathered by 237

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this literature on segmentation is rich, but it is suggestive and descriptive, while questions about mobility across segments, or the relationship between agency and outcomes within segments, are still largely unexplored. Intermediation in sex markets. The issue of segmentation is closely intertwined with that of intermediation in the sex industry. From the late 19th century onward, intermediation in the sex work industry—by pimps, bosses, brothels, smuggling networks, or agencies—has grown in importance whenever commercial sex has become more risky and secretive and, in particular, whenever the share of migrant workers increased in the industry (Knepper and Johansen 2016). Because of the frequent association with irregular and illegal markets, intermediation has traditionally been viewed through the criminal lens both in social sciences scholarship and in legislation. However, as Plambech (2017) argues in her essay on female sex work migrants from Nigeria, the assumption that all intermediation in sex work exclusively serves the economic interest of intermediaries ought to be questioned because these services do enable women to migrate. She offers evidence that while being exploited by pimps, madams, and criminal network of smugglers within an indentured work system, most migrant sex workers manage to send remittances back home. She also argues that, while traditional intermediaries are part of a “facilitating economy,” three additional circuits have grown out of female sex-work migration and thrive on their earnings or the foreign aid they attract—the remittance economy, the deportation economy, and the rescue economy. Plambech suggests that exploitation does not end at the doorstep of traditional intermediaries but runs over to new forms of intermediation that, on the contrary, are often portrayed as saviors. Earlier on, Farmer and Horowitz (2013) developed a formal model which resonates with Plambech’s conclusions. The setting is different, a sex market featuring two segments—brothels and street sex work—and populated by rational and free agents. Interestingly, however, the model is used to show that the presence of intermediaries may increase or decrease consumer surplus (accruing to the clients) depending on which functions intermediaries perform (decreasing costs, increasing market power, reducing asymmetric information); in contrast, their presence rarely diminishes sex workers’ surplus. Once again, the policy implications are worth noting. If, for example, the pimps are targeted by restrictive legislation out of the belief that they are more exploitative than brothel owners, this may end up decreasing the earnings of the poorest sex workers. Lack of data has made it difficult to test competing hypotheses on the role and impact of intermediation. One exception is the India-based study of sociologists Brady, Biradavolu, and Blankenship (2015), who examined the “embeddedness hypothesis,” that the presence of intermediaries adds to sex workers’ earnings, versus the “exploitation hypothesis.” The authors find that the exploitation hypothesis receives more support, but they also argue that the question requires further research in different countries and contexts. Sex markets and workers’ well-being. Many contributions reviewed earlier put the sex workers at the center of analysis, rather than focusing on demand for and supply of sex work, its price, or the criminal and health threats that the sex industry represents. Feminist scholarship focuses, in particular, on sex workers’ well-being and whether engaging in sex work contributes to or hinders women’s economic emancipation. Di Tommaso et al. (2009) and Hui (2017) resort to the capabilities approach to measure sex worker’s well-being. The former study uses a “multiple indicators, multiple causes model” to assess well-being deprivation of female victims of trafficking and finds that working in secluded spaces, such as massage parlors, brothels, or hotels, has an adverse effect on well-being. Hui investigates the determinants of the bargaining power, hence of well-being, among brothel sex workers in Calcutta. She shows that, despite the serious constraints faced by the workers, their well-being is also affected by their individual bargaining power, both subjective (perceived) and objective (influenced by personal characteristics, 238

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involvement in nongovernmental organizations, living in brothels, and years of experience in the industry, among others). Since individual bargaining power cannot be measured directly, Hui treats the subjective and the objective components as latent variables and estimates the effect on a given well-being outcome of a unit change in each of these two variables. Hui also uses the multiple indicators, multiple causes model estimated by Di Tommaso et. al. (2009). Jakobsson and Kotsadam (2011), Rao and Presenti (2012), and Plambech (2017) examine the links between gender (in)equality in a country and the prevalence of sex work. Using opinion surveys carried out in Sweden and Norway, Jackobson and Kotsadam find that supporters of gender equality oppose prostitution. However, given the pride taken by both these countries in being among the first to adopt a neo-abolitionist stance and enforce criminalization of clients, these findings may not be representative of other countries. The evidence marshaled by Rao and Presenti seems to point in the opposite direction to that of Jakobsson and Kotsadam. The authors argue that migration and trafficking flows originated from broadly the same set of countries around the mid-2000s and represent such closely interlocked realities that they cannot be separately analyzed. Their findings on these flows are consistent with findings from micro-level studies that most of the trafficking originates from societies that allow women to travel alone and be potential economic migrants and not from the most gender unequal societies (Plambech 2017).

Policy implications As noted, policy arguments are still polarized in favor of, respectively, legalization and prohibitionist or abolitionist legal regimes. The latter criminalize at least one of the actors involved— the sex workers, the clients, or the intermediaries—in the hope of eventually eradicating sex work. Supporters of legalization contend that legalization will eventually pull sex work out of the underground economy, eradicating stigma as well as exploitation. Radical feminists, in particular, support neo-abolitionism which favors criminalizing clients and intermediaries, not the sex workers who are considered victims. This is the Nordic model, which Sweden epitomizes, and which has been enforced in varying degrees in France, Iceland, Northern Ireland, and Norway, with Finland taking the intermediate position of criminalizing demand but only if linked to trafficking. New Zealand has gone the furthest down the road of legalization globally, and the Netherlands has done so in Europe (Crowhurst and Skilbrei 2018). Empirical evidence on whether legalization expands trafficking is mixed. Using primarily country level or regional data, several studies provide evidence in favor (Jakobsson and Kotsadam 2013). However, the quality of the data is acknowledged to be questionable, which leaves the debate still open. Given the focus on sex workers, their agency, well-being, control over working conditions, as well as exploitation, feminist economists are more likely to support legalization of sex work. Support for de-criminalization policies are both nuanced and evolving among feminist economists: nuanced because market segmentation implies that the same policy provision can have different and even opposite effects in different segments; evolving because we are still learning from the experience of countries that have opted in favor of de-criminalization or criminalization over the past decades. Farmer and Horowitz (2013) show that the same policy (eliminating pimps) may have a different impact across segments of the market. Using an equally conventional economic theorizing, the model developed by Stadtmann and Sonnabend (2019) features a two-segment sex market, one where “free” sex workers operate, and the second in the hands of traffickers who thrive on “enslaved” sex workers. The authors show that criminalizing clients may actually end up expanding the enslaved segments at the expense of the free one. 239

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Verhoeven and van Gestel (2017) study window prostitution in the Netherlands and warn that the legalization approach too may be falling short of its most optimistic expectations. Sex work is fully legal in the Netherlands where the workers in window prostitution are confined to certain zones of the city but are regulated, taxed, and inspected like other self-employed workers. Although they can operate legally in all respects, they depend on taxi drivers, pimps, errand boys, brothel owners, bodyguards, or accountants, all of whom tend to work informally, in part because clients prefer to remain anonymous in order to avoid stigmatization. The specific policy lessons the authors draw are that (i) granting full legal agency to sex workers may not be enough to eradicate stigma; and (ii) formal alternatives should be designed and encouraged for ancillary services or even intermediation services—for example, formal, reliable, support agencies.

Conclusion Inspired by the wider feminist debate, the work of feminist economists has moved economic scholarship on sex work beyond the confines of mainstream models. The latter often superimposes a paradigm of full agency and competitive markets on a highly segmented and intermediated sex industry, where issues of agency, identity and stigma interact in ways that clearly defy the paradigm. However, studies using neoclassical language and tools but departing from this paradigm have produced interesting results (e.g., Farmer and Horowitz (2013), Della Giusta, Di Tommaso, and Strøm (2009), Stadtmann and Sonnabend (2019). The variety of intermediation which is found in the industry, its relationship with sex worker exploitation or empowerment, the mechanisms underpinning segmentation, and the structure of earnings in the industry are still under-analyzed. Also, new forms of work like cam modeling are growing in this industry like elsewhere in the labor market, where services are often intermediated by platforms rather than humans. Their spread can challenge traditional notions of sex work and exploitation; for example, does sex work include virtual sex transactions like those performed on demand but on video? Should the long unpaid hours that cam models spend waiting for paying clients be counted toward exploitation? Feminist economic analyses have produced evidence to support nuanced policies that legalize sex work. Abolitionism may end up harming the more vulnerable segments of workers, including victims of trafficking or smuggling. This risk is evident even when abolitionism takes the form of criminalizing clients rather than the sex workers. However, legalization may not be able to live up to its promises if its limitations shown by recent country experiences are ignored—for example, the inability to fully eradicate stigma in the Netherlands. An effective legalization package cannot disregard the intermediation and ancillary services that allow sex workers to perform their activities. For example, formal, respectable, and yet discreet support agencies could be set up to perform the role of pimps, errand boys, bodyguards and the like. This would discourage clients from resorting to underground services in order to protect their anonymity, with the result of perpetuating stigma. Intermediation in this industry cannot be viewed as consistently “bad” for sex workers—as abolitionism contends—but we need to know more about its actual role and impact if we are pursuing full legitimacy of sex work.

References Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 2007. “Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in AntiTrafficking Campaigns.” Feminist Review 86 (1): 24–34. Bettio, Francesca, Marina Della Giusta, and Maria L. di Tommaso. 2017. “Sex Work and Trafficking: Moving Beyond Dichotomies.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 1–22.

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Sex work and trafficking Bettio, Francesca, and Tushar K. Nandi. 2010. “Evidence on Women Trafficked for Sexual Exploitation: A Rights Based Analysis.” European Journal of Law and Economics 29 (1): 15–42. Botti, Fabrizio, and Carlo D’Ippoliti. 2017. “Sex Work among Trans People: Evidence from Southern Italy.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 77–109. Brady, David W., Monica R. Biradavolu, and Kim M. Blankenship. 2015. “Brokers and the Earnings of Female Sex Workers in India.” American Sociological Review 80 (6): 1123–49. Campani, Giovanna. 1999. “Immigrant Women in Southern Europe: Gender, Social Exclusion and Prostitution in Italy.” In Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, edited by Russel King, Gabriella Lazaridies, and Charalambos Tsardanidis, 145–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins Dictionary. “Definition of ‘Sex Worker’.” Accessed July  16, 2019. www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/english/sex-worker. ———. “Definition of ‘Prostitution’.” Accessed July  16, 2019. www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/ english/prostitution. Crowhurst, Isabel, and May-Len Skilbrei. 2018. “International Comparative Explorations of Prostitution Policies: Lessons from Two European Projects.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 31 (2): 142–61. Cruz, Katie. 2018. “Beyond Liberalism: Marxist Feminism, Migrant Sex Work, and Labor Unfreedom.” Feminist Legal Studies 26 (1): 65–92. Della Giusta, Marina, Maria L. Di Tommaso, and Sarah L. Jewell. 2017. “Stigma and Risky Behaviors among Male Clients of Sex Workers in the UK.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 23–48. Della Giusta, Marina, Maria L. Di Tommaso, and Steinar Strøm. 2009. “Who Is Watching? The Market for Prostitution Services.” Journal of Population Economics 22 (2): 501–16. Dewey, Susan. 2008. Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Di Tommaso, Maria Laura, Isilda Shima, Steiner Strøm, and Francesca Bettio. 2009. “As Bad as It Gets: Well-Being Deprivation of Sexually Exploited Trafficked Women.” European Journal of Political Economy 25 (2): 143–62. Doezema, Joe. 2005. “Sex Worker Rights, Abolitionism, and the Possibilities for a Rights-Based Approach to Trafficking.” Alliance News 22: 15–22. Accessed July  16, 2019. http://gaatw.org/publications/­ Alliance%20News/dec2004/gaatwnews2004dec-01.pdf. Edlund, Lena, and Evelyn Korn. 2002 “A  Theory of Prostitution.” Journal of Political Economy 110 (1): 181–214. Farmer, Amy, and Andrew W. Horowitz. 2013. “Prostitutes, Pimps, and Brothels: Intermediaries, Information, and Market Structure in Prostitution Markets.” Southern Economic Journal 79 (3): 513–28. Fondation Scelles. 2012. Rapport Mondial sur l’Exploitation Sexuelle: La Prostitution au Cœur du Crime Organisé [Worldwide Report on Sexual Exploitation. Prostitution at the Heart of Organized Crime]. Paris: Edition Economica. Haag, Pamela. 1992. “The ‘Ill-Use of a Wife:’ Patterns of Working-Class Violence in Domestic and Public New York City, 1860–1880.” Journal of Social History 25 (3): 447–77. Hui, Neha. 2017. “Bargaining Power and Indicators of Well-Being among Brothels-Based Sex Workers in India.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 49–76. International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR). 1985. “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights: International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights February 1985, Amsterdam.” Social Text 37 (Winter), 183–85. A  Special Section Edited by Anne McClintock Explores the Sex Trade. Accessed July  16, 2019. www.jstor.org/stable/466267. Jakobsson, Niklas, and Andreas Kotsadam. 2011. “Gender Equity and Prostitution: An Investigation of Attitudes in Norway and Sweden.” Feminist Economics 17 (1): 31–58. ———. 2013. “The Law and Economics of International Sex Slavery: Prostitution Laws and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation.” European Journal of Law and Economics 35 (1): 87–107. Kempadoo, Kamala. 1998. “Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights.” In Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, edited by Kamala Kempadoo, and Jo Doezema, 1–28. New York: Routledge. Knepper, Paul, and Anja Johansen, eds. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed February 16, 2021. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/ view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199352333.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199352333?rskey=sROduJ&result=1. Mathews, Paul William. 2017. “Cam Models, Sex Work, and Job Immobility in the Philippines.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 160–83.

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Francesca Bettio Nussbaum, Martha C. 1998. “Whether from Reason or Prejudice: Taking Money for Bodily Services.” The Journal of Legal Studies 27 (S2): 693–723. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plambech, Sine. 2017. “Sex, Deportation, and Rescue: Economies of Migration among Nigerian Sex Workers.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 134–59. Rao, Smriti, and Christina Presenti. 2012. “Understanding Human Trafficking Origin: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis.” Feminist Economics 18 (2): 231–63. Scoular, Jane. 2004. “The ‘Subject’ of Prostitution.” Feminist Theory 5 (3): 343–55. Sen, Amartya K. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Sohn, Kitae. 2019. “More Educated Sex Workers Earn More in Indonesia.” Feminist Economics 25 (3): 201–23. Stadtmann, Georg, and Hendrik Sonnabend. 2019. “Good Intentions and Unintended Evil? Adverse Effects of Criminalizing Clients in Paid Sex Markets.” Feminist Economics 25 (4):1–20. Tabet, Paola. 2004. La Grande Arnaque: Sexualité des Femmes et Echange Economico-Sexuel [The Big Swindle: Women’s Sexuality and Sexuo-Economic Exchange]. Paris: L’Harmattan, Bibliothèque du Féminisme. United Nations. 2000. “Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of a Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime on the Work of Its First to Eleventh Sessions.” Accessed April  16, 2019. https://treaties.un.org/doc/source/docs/A_55_383-E.pdf. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 2016. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons. Vienna: UNODC. Accessed February 16, 2021. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/glotip_2016.html. Verhoeven, Maite, and Barbra van Gestel. 2017. “Between Visibility and Invisibility: Sex Workers and Informal Services in Amsterdam.” Feminist Economics 23 (3): 110–33.

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25 WOMEN’S WORK IN POST-REFORM CHINA Xiao-yuan Dong and Fiona MacPhail

Introduction Since the end of the Mao period in 1978, China’s economic transformation from a socialist, centrally planned to a market-oriented economy has brought about remarkable increases in income per capita and improvements in well-being. Prior to reforms, the socialist ideology proudly upheld gender equality, proclaimed in the slogan “women hold up half the sky,” and this was in some degree borne out in practice, given the high labor force participation rates among women and the low gender earnings inequality (Croll 1983; Kidd and Meng 2001). Despite China’s record of gender equality in paid work achieved during the Mao era, women have not benefited to the extent as men during the economic transformation (Berik, Dong, and Summerfield 2010). Economic changes have gender-differentiated impacts because these impacts are shaped by gendered constraints that vary among countries given the different social and institutional contexts. Gender norms regarding the assigned roles and responsibilities of girls, boys, women and men, and patriarchal relations giving men greater authority and power, influence how specific economic changes are experienced by women and men. Labor markets, for example, as Elson (1999, 611) argues, are “gendered institutions operating at the intersection of the productive and reproductive economies: that is, as markets structured by practices, perceptions, norms and networks which are ‘bearers of gender.’ ” Further, state policies insensitive to these gendered processes may serve to reinforce gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work (Berik, Rodgers, and Zammit 2009; Razavi 2011). Economic transformation in post-reform China—involving market reforms, structural change, and internal migration—has been a gendered process resulting in increased gender inequalities in unpaid and paid work. While gender interacts with other social identities, such as ethnicity and sexuality, to contribute to the specific disadvantages experienced by different groups of women, due to space constraints, this chapter focuses on the intersection of gender and residential status (hukou) in China which results in the particularly inferior paid and unpaid work outcomes of millions of women migrants and women remaining in rural areas.

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Economic transformation and improvements in well-being accompanied by rising inequality Economic transformation China’s economic transformation started with institutional reform in rural areas when the household responsibility system replaced the commune, and this was followed by promotion of industrialization and township and village enterprises (TVEs). Then in the early 1980s, the state initiated the reform of urban, state-owned-enterprises (SOEs) and permitted domestic private and foreign joint-venture enterprises to operate, and in the mid-1990s, it privatized small- and medium-scale SOEs and rural TVEs. With these market reforms, employment shifted from the public to private sector, and the lifetime employment and centralized wage-setting mechanisms of the SOEs under the central planning system were dismantled (Dong and Xu 2009). The enterprise-based system of social benefits was abandoned, and only after the mid-2000s did the state start to initiate new institutional arrangements for social security and care provisions. Structural change, the shift in output and employment from agriculture to industry and services, was facilitated through the state’s export-led, labor-intensive manufacturing strategy in the 1990s and was accentuated after 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization. The scale of structural change is indicated by the increase in the share of employment in industrial and service sectors from 29 to 73 percent between 1978 and 2017 (NBS 2018: Table 4–2). Given the rising demand for workers in the urban manufacturing, construction and service sectors, and export-oriented factories in coastal areas, the state increasingly relaxed the household registration system (hukou) (Pun 2007). This system assigns individuals an urban or rural residency status at birth and determines where people can work and their entitlement to benefits and services (Cheng and Seldon 1994). Changes to the hukou system have resulted in a dramatic increase in temporary rural–urban migration, particularly of men and young women. Between 2000 and 2017, the number of internal, rural–urban migrants doubled from 121 million to 244  million people (NBS 2018: Table  2–2), resulting in what Meng (2012, 87) has argued is “China’s single most important labor market change over the past two decades.”

Improvements in well-being accompanied by rising inequality Economic transformation has increased economic opportunities and led to improvements in well-being for both women and men. Structural change, resulting in the transfer of labor from agriculture to manufacturing, led to an increased share of wage employment offering a higher return to labor than agricultural production, and more generally, the average standard of living improved. For example, real rural (urban) household consumption per person rose from 134 to 13,432 yuan (343 to 36,396 yuan) between 1978 and 2017, and the income poverty rate declined from 88.3 to 0.7 percent (based on the $1.90/day threshold 2011 PPP $ terms) between 1981 and 2015 (NBS 2018: Table 1–2; World Bank, Poverty and Equity Data Portal). Increases in income have been accompanied by increases in education levels and life expectancy (NBS 2012: Chart 5–1; NBS 2018: Table 2–4). However, while economic transformation has led to greater economic opportunities and improvements in well-being, it has been associated with increased socioeconomic inequality. Household income inequality increased, as reflected by the rise in the Gini coefficient, from 0.320 to 0.467 between 1981 and 2017 (NBS 2018: Table 1–4). Large disparities between urban and rural areas persist given the urban–rural household consumption per person ratio of 2.71 in 2017. 244

Women’s work in post-reform China

Gendered economic transformation and rising gender inequalities in unpaid and paid work Increased gender inequality in unpaid work Growing income inequalities have been accompanied by rising gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work. Patriarchal norms have re-emerged strongly in post-reform China. Sons are preferred to daughters (To 2014), which is manifested in an unbalanced sex ratio of 114.5 boys to 100 girls in the 0–4 years of age category in 2017 (NBS 2018: Table 2–9). Patriarchal norms restricting women’s influence to the household—the “inside sphere”—are widely accepted (Yu and Chau 1997; Entwisle and Henderson 2000) and have become even more pervasive with the retreat of the socialist gender equality ideology. For example, the percentages of women and men agreeing with the statement “men should be in charge of the external affairs and women domestic affairs” increased from 50.4 to 54.8 percent among women, and from 53.9 to 61.6 percent among men, between 2000 and 2010 (NBS 2012: Chart 9–9). Greater acceptance of the separate spheres of influence underpins the resurgence of a traditional gender division of labor contributing to rising gender inequalities in unpaid work. Despite declines in the total amount of time allocated to unpaid domestic and care work for both women and men, the gender ratio of unpaid domestic and care work time rose from 2.68 to 3.32 between 2008 and 2017 (Table 25.1). Market reforms dismantling the SOEs and TVEs with their enterprise-based, elder- and childcare services resulted in the return of care provision to the family and, given the gender norms, increased women’s unpaid work burden.

Increased gender inequality in paid work Patriarchal norms also drive the allocation of women and men to different paid jobs to a greater extent in the post-reform period, given that these norms are no longer curtailed by the gender equality ideology, institutions of lifetime employment guarantees, and centralized egalitarian wage-setting mechanisms. Sex-typing of paid jobs and the sexualization of certain service Table 25.1  Average time spent on activities by married men and women in 2008 and 2017 (hours/day) 2008

2017

Men Paid work Unpaid domestic & care work Domestic work Care work Total work Non-work activities Observations

Women

Gender Ratio1

Men

Women

Gender Ratio

6.66 1.54

4.89 4.13

0.73 2.68

7.34 1.11

5.20 3.68

0.71 3.32

1.16 0.32 8.20 15.74 12,507

3.40 0.67 9.01 14.92 12,507

2.93 2.09 1.10 0.95

0.72 0.39 8.45 15.45 4,016

2.53 1.15 8.89 15.0 4,016

3.51 2.95 1.05 0.97

Source: Statistics in this table are derived from the 2008 China Time Use Survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics and the 2017 China Time Use Survey conducted jointly by Inner Mongolia University and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. The sample consists of married men and married women between 22 and 64 years of age in ten provinces covered by both surveys, namely, Beijing, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Zhenjiang, Anhui, Henan, Guangdong, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu. Gender Ratio is the ratio of the time women spent in an activity divided by the time men spent.

1

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occupations have gained prominence, and the norms and new gendered practices are further legitimated through gender-specific job advertisements, even in the civil service (Hanser 2012; Human Rights Watch 2018). Market reforms resulting in the decline in enterprise-based care services made it particularly challenging for mothers to participate in paid work (Cook and Dong 2011; Liu, Li, and Yang 2014). Fiscal policy was gender-insensitive as the state did not introduce compensating support for working mothers by increasing expenditures on child- and elder-care services. As a result, publicly funded nurseries for children aged 0–2 years disappeared and there was a serious shortage of subsidized childcare services (Liu, Zhang, and Li 2008; Du and Dong 2009). The paid– unpaid work conflict experienced by mothers became more widespread with the structural shift of employment to the urban manufacturing and services sectors, where combining paid and unpaid work is even more difficult compared to the agricultural sector. Many labor policies, social protection initiatives, and regulations in post-reform China have unintentionally reproduced or accentuated women’s disadvantage, primarily as a result of industrial or occupation sex segregation. For example, policies to assist laid-off workers during the public sector restructuring in the late 1990s benefited men more than women because they targeted the SOE sector where men were concentrated, rather than the collective sector where women were concentrated (Du and Dong 2009). Labor regulations that aim to protect women lack effective enforcement mechanisms, especially in private, informal employment. Moreover, state pensions in which benefits are defined exclusively by a person’s average earnings and length of employment serve to transform gender inequality in the labor market into even greater gender gaps in pension incomes (Zhao and Zhao 2018). Finally, women’s lower age of mandatory retirement compared to men’s results in a lower number of life-time earning years for women and provides an additional disincentive for employers to promote women.1 These gendered processes structure the labor market and underlie the rising gender inequality in terms of both participation in and benefit from paid work. While women in China have a high level of engagement in paid work compared to women in other parts of the world, their participation has declined and the gender gap in labor force participation rates (LFPR) has increased. As shown in Figure 25.1, women’s LFPR fell from 79.4 to 68.6 percent between 1990 and 2018. While men’s LFPR also declined, the drop was less than women’s, resulting in the gender LFPR gap increasing from 5.4 to 7.1 percentage points over the period. The falling LFPR among women arises in large part from the greater difficulty of combining paid and unpaid work, as paid work moved away from rural-based agriculture and the decline in publicly provided care services in urban wage employment. This explanation is supported by evidence on lower employment rates and lower hours of paid work of married women and women with greater caregiving responsibilities (Liu, Dong, and Zheng 2010; Maurer-Fazio et al. 2011; Connelly et al. 2018) and direct evidence on gender differences in reasons given for exiting the labor force (Liu, Li, and Yang 2014). The transfer of labor into the expanding industrial and service sectors has left women disproportionately behind in the agricultural sector and vulnerable employment. Over the period 1991–2018, the share of women’s employment in agriculture declined from 56.3 to 19.3 percent; however, the share of men’s employment in agriculture declined faster, and thus, the gender gap in these shares rose from 1.8 to 5.0 percentage points (Figure 25.2). The feminization of agriculture arises because of women’s greater difficulties, relative to men, in obtaining off-farm employment and the need to combine paid and unpaid work (Chang, Dong, and MacPhail 2011). Throughout the period, women have had a higher share of vulnerable employment, as men are more likely than women to be heads of enterprises that employ workers (Figure 25.3),

246

Women’s work in post-reform China 90 85 80

84.8 80.0 79.4

75.7

75

75.0

70 68.6 65 60 55

56.2 53.7

50

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

45

Chinese women

World women

Chinese men

World men

Figure 25.1 Labor force participation rates of men and women (%), 1990–2018 Source: World Bank. World Development Indicators (accessed February 1, 2019). Note: Labor force participation rate (% of female (or male) population ages 15–64), modeled ILO estimate.

indicative of men’s potential for greater remuneration (Zhang 2013). Women entrepreneurs are disadvantaged by their participation in fewer networks and discrimination in credit markets which may partially account for their lower share in the employer category (Démurger and Xu 2011; Scott and Lin 2014). Since agricultural work and vulnerable employment tend to offer lower returns to paid work and fewer opportunities for social protection, compared to wage work, women benefit less than men from paid work in the post-reform period. While wage employment opportunities increased for women over the period, gender wage inequality has been accentuated. In urban areas, women’s wages as a percentage of men’s wages fell from 78 percent in 1990 to 67 percent in 2010; and the decline in women’s relative wage is even more dramatic for rural areas, where it fell from 79 percent to 56 percent (Liu, Li, and Yang 2014). The finding of a falling gender wage ratio is consistent across studies, although the size of the ratio varies with the data and time period. In addition to the falling gender wage ratio, many studies report an increase in gender wage discrimination, the portion of the gender wage difference unaccounted for by differences in education and work hours (Chi and Li 2014; Dasgupta, Matsumoto, and Xia 2015). Since 2010 however, the gender wage ratio has increased: based on a nationally representative survey, including both urban and rural areas, women’s wages

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Figure 25.2 Distribution of women’s and men’s employment by sector, 1991, 2008, and 2018 Source: World Bank. World Development Indicators (accessed February 1, 2019).

as a percentage of men’s wages rose from 78 percent to 80 percent between 2011 and 2017, which may be related to the rising demand for women’s labor in the service sector.2 Part of the gender wage gap is attributable to women’s caregiving responsibilities (Jia and Dong 2013; Qi and Dong 2016). Another cause of the gender wage gap is occupational segregation, with women being crowded into the low-wage sectors: indeed, sectors with a high share of female employees tend to have low wages relative to the national average wage (ADB and ILO 2017: Table 2). Women migrants are particularly disadvantaged: 23.5 percent of women migrants experience low pay, which is 12.8 percentage points more than men migrants (Table 25.2). While wage employment opportunities for women have increased in post-reform China, they do not necessarily enhance women’s agency, the ability to exercise choice and to do so, in ways that challenge power relations (Kabeer 2005). Despite wage employment, women are unable to fully participate in major family decisions relating to housing, business activities, and financial investments (NBS 2012: Chart 9–5), perhaps arising from patriarchal norms. Further, MacPhail and Dong (2007) found that an increase in women’s market wage had no statistically significant impact on women’s decision-making within the household in rural areas. The All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) is a quasi-government organization with the nation-wide mandate to promote “equality between women and men,” which it does through, for example, national surveys on issues of concern to women, legislation, and inclusion of gender-sensitive language in labor laws and policies. The ACWF works with the All-China 248

Women’s work in post-reform China

Figure 25.3 Distribution of women’s and men’s employment by employment status, 1991, 2008, and 2018 Source: World Bank. World Development Indicators (accessed February 1, 2019). Note: Vulnerable employment comprises contributing unpaid family workers and own-account workers, as a percentage of total employment.

Federation of Trade Unions (ACTFU) to promote gender equity in the workplace, although efforts are constrained by the ACFTU’s focus on formal workers and the top-down approach to organizing. Feminist, nongovernmental organizations are relatively few in China, compared to other countries, and despite being constrained by legal and institutional practices, they play a vital role in raising women’s collective gender awareness and providing mechanisms for women’s voices (see, e.g., Cai 2013).

Marginalization of women in rural areas and women migrants The hukou system interacts with gendered norms, practices, and policies, resulting in particularly inferior paid and unpaid work outcomes for women in rural areas and women migrants. While single women and men migrate in equal numbers, married women and mothers are more likely than married men and fathers to return to rural areas to undertake child- and elder-care responsibilities and maintain access to land in order to further long-term household economic security (Li 2010). With greater flexibility being introduced in the hukou system, families with a rural hukou are staying longer in urban areas. However, women migrants experience a double disadvantage: 249

Xiao-yuan Dong and Fiona MacPhail Table 25.2  Characteristics and labor market outcomes of urban hukou holders and migrants, 2010

Labor market outcomes Labor force participation (%) Employment-to-population ratio (%) Informal employment (%)1 Monthly earnings (yuan)2 Weekly work hours Low pay rates (%)3 Characteristics Mean age (years) Education (%) Elementary or lower Junior middle school Senior middle school College and university Observations

Urban hukou holders

Migrants

Men

Women

Men

Women

79.3 72.8 18.6 2,618 46.2 9.1

65.4 57.0 22.8 1,981 45.4 18.0

95.2 93.2 53.8 1,949 64.1 10.7

90.2 87.0 64.1 1,629 64.0 23.5

41.7

38.8

32.8

32.1

2.8 17.3 36.7 43.3 4,061

3.6 15.7 37.9 42.9 4,216

11.0 51.0 31.5 6.5 3,424

18.4 49.3 25.8 6.5 2,700

Source: Statistics presented in this table are derived from the 2010 Rural-Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) project. The RUMiC is part of the Rural-Urban Migration in China and Indonesia (RUMiCI) project that was conducted jointly by Australia National University and Beijing Normal University. The sample for this table targets men and women between 16 and 64 years of age from Jiangsu, Guangdong, Anhui, Henan, Hubei, Chongqing, and Sichuan. Informal employment is the sum of wage workers without a labor contract, own-account workers, and unpaid contributing family workers. 2 Monthly earnings are computed for both wage earners and self-employed workers who spent more than 30 hours per week on paid work in the nonagricultural sector. Earnings are measured in 2005 constant prices. 3 Low pay rate is the percentage of employees with pay less than two-thirds of full-time median wage over total number of employees. The benchmark for full-time employees is 40 hours per week or higher. 1

they are discriminated against in paid work as women and as migrants. Ongoing difficulties in accessing education for children and health and care services, as well as affordable childcare in the increasingly privatized care system, constrain women migrants’ participation in paid work (Song and Dong 2018); women migrants have a lower LFPR and employment rate compared to men migrants (see Table  25.2). Women migrants experience particularly poor returns to paid work. As shown in Table 25.2, 23.5 percent of women migrants were low-paid workers, compared to 10.7 percent for men migrants, 18.0 percent of women with an urban hukou, and 9.1  percent for men with an urban hukou; women migrants have the lowest monthly earnings of all four groups, despite working the same average hours per week as men migrants and considerably higher working hours than women and men urban hukou holders; and finally, 64.1 percent of women migrants are in informal employment, compared to 53.8 percent of men migrants and 22.8 percent of women with an urban hukou. Women migrants employed as paid domestic workers are particularly disadvantaged, given that this sector is noted for its poor working conditions, low wages, and lack of social security provisions and coverage by the Labor Contract law (IDWFED 2013; Dong, Feng, and Yu 2017). Rural women and women with low levels of education are increasingly disadvantaged as the demand for low-skilled workers decreases. Between 1991 and 2015, rural women’s LFPR had fallen from 89.9 to 47.2 percent and the gender LFPR gap in rural areas has risen from 2.9 to 250

Women’s work in post-reform China Table 25.3  Labor market outcomes of men and women in the rural sector, 1991–2015 Labor force participation rate (%)

1991 1993 1997 2000 2004 2006 2009 2011 2015

Men

Women

Women’s share in agricultural employment (%)

92.8 92.0 89.5 88.6 84.3 82.6 84.9 86.1 69.4

89.9 86.8 84.8 82.4 69.2 68.1 69.0 68.1 47.2

51.7 51.8 51.1 50.9 52.2 52.9 52.6 54.8 46.8

Women’s share in wage employment (%)

Men’s average wage1 (yuan/ month)

Women’s average wage1 (yuan/ month)

Wage ratio (women to men)

30.8 31.7 33.3 32.6 33.3 33.0 34.3 38.5 38.4

443 525 831 1,070 1,299 1,546 2,319 2,625 3,745

305 410 603 798 936 1,075 1,390 1,755 2,652

0.689 0.782 0.726 0.746 0.721 0.695 0.599 0.668 0.708

Source: Statistics presented in this table are derived from a sample that consists of men and women between 16 and 64 years of age in the rural sector. The sample is taken from China Health and Nutrition Surveys (CHNS). 1

Wages are discounted by the rural CPI with 2015 as the base year. The calculation only includes those with wage greater than zero.

22.2 percentage points (Table 25.3). The interaction of care constraints and discrimination in the workplace results in women accounting for only 38.4 percent of wage employment in rural areas, and gender wage inequality, given a female-male wage ratio of 70.8 percent in 2015 (Table 25.3).

Conclusion The economic transformation in China, involving market reforms, structural change, and internal migration, has been a gendered process resulting in increased gender inequalities in unpaid and paid work. Gender also intersects with other markers of disadvantage in China, such as education and ethnicity; however, the interaction of gender and hukou has had widespread and particularly deleterious impacts on women migrants and women in rural areas. The state’s aspirational commitment to gender equality is reflected in its constitution and the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020), and indicated by ratification of key ILO Conventions on equal remuneration and discrimination, and support for Sustainable Development Goals, including those related to labor rights and gender equality. While the policy objectives during the reform period centered on economic growth, the historical socialist roots may make it possible for the state to advance gender equality commitments. Indeed, since the 2008 global financial crisis, the Chinese government has pursued a strategy to shift the economy away from export-led growth toward domestic demand-driven growth and a transition from high-speed to high-quality growth. An important aspect of “high-quality growth” is to ensure that all people have equal opportunities to contribute to and benefit from economic growth. Importantly from a gender equality perspective, the Chinese government has significantly increased the support for working mothers in recent years. For instance, the public spending on early childhood education and care programs increased from 0.07 percent to 0.18 percent of GDP between 2008 and 2016;3 the pre-primary school enrolment rate grew from 49.8 percent to 83.7 percent (World Bank, World Development Indicators Portal); and the number of mothers receiving paid maternity leave benefits increased from 1.4 million to 9.14 million (NBS 2017: 251

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Table 9–27). To advance progress, further efforts to improve the provision of care are needed, along with concrete actions to reduce gender segregation and the wage gap, expand social and labor protection to benefit women, and to support and amplify women’s voices and agency.

Notes 1 See “Interim Measures of the State Council concerning the retirement and resignation of workers” issued on May 24, 1978. 2 Calculated by the authors using data from the 2011 and 2017 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS). The survey was organized by Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. It covers all provinces in mainland China except for Tibet and Xinjiang. 3 For public spending on ECEC programs, information for 2008 to 2011 and 2016 was obtained from MEC and information for 2012 to 2015 was from MEC and NBS and information on GDP was from NBS (http://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=C01, accessed on December 23, 2018).

References Asian Development Bank and International Labour Organization. 2017. Gender Equality and the Labor Market: Women, Work, and Migration in the People’s Republic of China. Manila: ADB. Berik, Günseli, Xiao-yuan Dong, and Gale Summerfield. 2010. Gender, China and the World Trade Organization: Essays from Feminist Economics. London and New York: Routledge. Berik, Günseli, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, and Ann Zammit, eds. 2009. Social Justice and Gender Equality: Rethinking Development Strategies and Macroeconomic Policies. New York: Routledge. Cai, Yiping. 2013. “Reflections on the Chinese Women’s Movement in the New Era.” Third World Resurgence, No. 271–272, 28–31. Third World Network. Accessed August 5, 2019. www.twn.my/ title2/resurgence/2013/271-272/cover06.htm. Chang, Hongqin, Xiao-Yuan Dong, and Fiona MacPhail. 2011. “Labor Migration and Time Use Patterns of the Left-Behind Children and Elderly in Rural China.” World Development 39 (12): 2199–210. Cheng, Tiejun, and Mark Seldon. 1994. “The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System.” The China Quarterly 139: 644–668. Chi, Wei, and Bo Li. 2014. “Trends in China’s Gender Employment and Pay Gap: Estimating Gender Pay Gaps with Employment Selection.” Journal of Comparative Economics 42 (3): 708–25. Connelly, Rachel, Xiao-Yuan Dong, Joyce Jacobsen, and Yaohui Zhao. 2018. “The Care Economy in Post-Reform China: Feminist Research on Unpaid and Paid Work and Well-Being.” Feminist Economics 24 (2): 1–30. Cook, Sarah, and Xiao-Yuan Dong. 2011. “Harsh Choices: Chinese Women’s Paid Work and Unpaid Care Responsibilities under Economic Reform.” Development and Change 42 (4): 947–65. Croll, Elisabeth. 1983. Chinese Women Since Mao. London: Zed Books. Dasgupta, Sukti, Makiko Matsumoto, and Cuntao Xia. 2015. “Women in the Labour Market in China.” ILO Asia-Pacific Working Paper Series, ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, ILO, Bangkok. Démurger, Sylvie, and Hui Xu. 2011. “Return Migrants: The Rise of New Entrepreneurs in Rural China.” World Development 39 (10): 1847–61. Dong, Xiao-Yuan, Jin Feng, and Yangyang Yu. 2017. “Relative Pay of Domestic Eldercare Workers in Shanghai, China.” Feminist Economics 23 (1): 135–59. Dong, Xiao-Yuan, and Lixin Xu. 2009. “Labor Restructuring in China: Toward a Functioning Labor Market.” Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2): 287–305. Du, Fenglian, and Xiao-Yuan Dong. 2009. “Why Do Women Have Longer Durations of Unemployment Than Men in Post-Restructuring Urban China?” Cambridge Journal of Economics 33 (2): 233–52. Elson, Diane. 1999. “Labor Markets as Gendered Institutions: Equality, Efficiency and Empowerment Issues.” World Development 27 (3): 611–27. Entwisle, Barbara, and Gail E. Henderson, eds. 2000. Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work Households, and Gender in China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hanser, Amy. 2012. “Class and the Service Encounter: New Approaches to Inequality in the Service Work-Place.” Sociology Compass 6 (4): 293–305. Human Rights Watch. 2018. “ ‘Only Men Need Apply’: Gender Discrimination in Job Advertisements in China.” Accessed March  31, 2019. www.hrw.org/report/2018/04/23/only-men-need-apply/ gender-discrimination-job-advertisements-china.

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Women’s work in post-reform China International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWFED). 2013. “Report on the Status of Domestic Workers and Decent Work Challenges in China.” December. Accessed March  31, 2019. www.idwfed.org/ en/resources/the-status-of-domestic-workers-in-china-and-decent-work-challenges/@@display-file/ attachment_1. Jia, Nan, and Xiao-Yuan Dong. 2013. “Economic Transition and the Motherhood Wage Penalty in Urban China: Investigation Using Panel Data.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 37 (4): 819–43. Kabeer, Naila. 2005. “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: A  Critical Analysis of the Third Millennium Development Goal 1.” Gender & Development 13 (1): 13–24. Kidd, Michael P., and Xin Meng. 2001. “The Chinese State Enterprise Sector: Labour Market Reform and the Impact on Male-Female Wage Structure.” Asian Economic Journal 15 (4): 405–23. Li, Shi. 2010. “The Economic Situation of Rural Migrant Workers in China.” China Perspectives 2010 (4). Liu, Bohong, Ling Li, and Chunyu Yang. 2014. Gender Equality in China’s Economic Transformation. Beijing: UNWomen, United Nations System in China. Liu, Lan, Xiao-Yuan Dong, and Xiaoying Zheng. 2010. “Parental Care and Married Women’s Labor Supply in Urban China.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 169–92. Liu, Bohong, Yongying Zhang, and Yani Li. 2008. “Reconciling Work and Family: Issues and Policies in China.” Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 22. ILO, Geneva, Switzerland. MacPhail, Fiona, and Xiao-Yuan Dong. 2007. “Women’s Market Work and Household Status in Rural China: Evidence from Jiangsu and Shandong in the Late 1990s.” Feminist Economics 13 (3–4): 93–124. Maurer-Fazio, Margaret, Rachel Connelly, Lan Chen, and Lixin Tang. 2011. “Childcare, Eldercare, and Labor Force Participation of Married Women in Urban China, 1982–2000.” Journal of Human Resources 46 (2): 261–94. Meng, Xin. 2012. “Labor Market Outcomes and Reform in China.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 26 (4): 75–101. National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). 2012. Women and Men in China-Facts and Figures  2012. Beijing: Department of Social, Science and Technology and Cultural Statistics. ———. 2017. China Labor Statistical Yearbook. Beijing: China Statistics Press. ———. 2018. China Statistical Yearbook 2018. Beijing: China Statistics Press. Pun, Ngai. 2007. “Gendering the Dormitory Labor System: Production, Reproduction, and Migrant Labor in South China.” Feminist Economics 13 (3–4): 239–258. Qi, Liangshu, and Xiao-Yuan Dong. 2016. “Unpaid Care Work’s Interference with Paid Work and the Gender Earnings Gap in China.” Feminist Economics 22 (2): 143–67. Razavi, Shahra. 2011. “Rethinking Care in a Development Context: An Introduction.” Development and Change 42 (4): 873–903. Scott, Linda, and Jiafei Lin. 2014. Finance after Hours: A Case Study of Women’s Access to Credit. Oxford: University of Oxford, Said Business School. Accessed March 31, 2019. www.doublexeconomy.com/ wp-content/uploads/2014/05/here.pdf. Song, Yueping, and Xiao-Yuan Dong. 2018. “Childcare Costs and Migrant and Local Mothers’ Labor Force Participation in Urban China.” Feminist Economics 24 (2): 122–46. To, Clara Wai-chun. 2014. “Domestic Labor, Gendered Intergenerational Contract, and Shared Elderly Care in Rural South China.” In Social Issues in China: Gender, Ethnicity, Labor and the Environment, edited by Zhidong Hao and Sheying Chen, 67–84. New York: Springer. World Bank. “Poverty & Equity Data Portal.” Accessed March 31, 2019. http://iresearch.worldbank.org/ PovecalNet/provOnDemand.aspx#. ———. “World Development Indicators Portal.” Accessed March  31, 2019. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators. Yu, Sam Wai Kam, and Ruby Chui Man Chau. 1997. “The Sexual Division of Care in Mainland China and Hong Kong.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21 (4): 607–19. Zhang, Qian Forrest. 2013. “Gender Disparities in Self-employment in Urban China’s Market Transition: Income Inequality, Occupational Segregation, and Mobility Processes.” China Quarterly 215: 744–63. Zhao, Rui, and Yaohui Zhao. 2018. “The Gender Pension Gap in China.” Feminist Economics 24 (2): 218–39.

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26 MARKET REFORM IN TRANSITION ECONOMIES Mieke Meurs

Introduction Between 1917 and 1989 the experience with centrally planned state socialism extended to a very wide range of countries, including almost all of the former Russian Empire, Central and Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam. This was an important experiment with a distinct form of social provisioning that simultaneously encompassed a gender equality experiment, although one with many limitations. State socialism collapsed between 1989 and 1992, except in North Korea, Cuba, China, and Vietnam. During the post-socialist transformation on which this chapter focuses, the distinct form of social provisioning has given way to systems similar to those in capitalist economies, although with continuing specificities and at lower levels of provision. As market-based economies have developed slowly and unevenly, many people have relied heavily on subsistence production, family and community support. This chapter evaluates the transition from socialist social provisioning to new forms of social provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the post-1989 period from a gender-aware perspective.

The socialist model of social provisioning Countries differed significantly in their level of development at the beginning of their socialist experiments (from 1917 in Russia to 1971 in Vietnam), but most would have been described as “underdeveloped” or “low-income.” Industrialization was only beginning, and most households lived in rural areas and engaged in small-scale farming or herding. Access to education, health services, and basic infrastructure, such as running water, electricity and all-weather roads was limited (Meurs 2003). Social provisioning took place largely at the village level and required hard, physical labor. While cooperation among community members might reduce risks, there were many provisioning failures—including food shortages and deaths due to poor sanitary conditions and lack of medical care (Ransel 2000). Men contributed to provisioning through farming, herding, and hunting, but women and girls bore much of the provisioning burden, caring for the young, old and sick under difficult conditions, fetching water, and producing and preserving food and clothing, in addition to providing farm labor. With a goal of rapid industrialization, socialist governments worked to establish a different model of social provisioning. While distinct in many ways, individual country models also had 254

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an unusual degree of similarity, heavily influenced by the Soviet model and Soviet political pressure. Economic surplus needed to be generated for investment and guided by the state into prioritized sectors. To generate the surplus, governments organized paid employment for the vast majority of the working-age population. Women were expected to integrate fully into the paid workforce, albeit with breaks for child bearing and domestic tasks. To free up time for paid work, governments significantly extended infrastructure, including piped water, electricity and roads. To improve worker productivity, the state expanded education and health services widely. Workplaces often provided mid-day meals and, over time, childcare services, especially for children over 3 years old (Meurs 2003). State-organized farms and state-run industries took on an increasing role in providing affordable, basic food and clothing. Many families moved to towns to take up emerging industrial jobs. Markets played a very limited role in coordinating either production or distribution. Still, social provisioning shifted from a model based heavily on household production, supported by a close-knit community of family and neighbors, to a model based mainly on exchange between workers and the state, where workers provided labor for industrialization in exchange for state-provided basic commodities and services to reproduce the households. However, the new statist model was not monolithic within any national economy (Smith 2002). Significant production continued in the household, with women continuing to support household reproduction through unpaid housework and care work. In addition, since governments prioritized industrialization and therefore production of capital goods, planned economies suffered from notorious shortages of consumer goods. Webs of informal exchange of labor and products continued to exist throughout the economy—within social networks and even between state-run firms. These exchanges continued to be important to social provisioning, as people informally bartered plan-allocated items they did not need, for unallocated items that they needed.

Context of the market reform The socialist model of provisioning is known for important failures, particularly famines in the early years of the Soviet Union and China in the late 1950s (Kornai 1983). Still, when the market reform occurred at the end of the 1980s, socialist countries were middle-income countries, with average incomes comparable to countries like Portugal and New Zealand (Kurian 1984). They had achieved high levels of human development (UNDP 1997) and had low levels of measured income inequality (Milanovic 1998). The state-run systems of health, education, employment, and distribution integrated all but the most remote areas, centralizing a significant share of social provisioning in state organizations. With industrialization, fertility declined. By the late 1980s, women in the European areas, like Slovenia and Ukraine, had fewer than two children, on average, although rates remained higher in less-developed parts of the Soviet Union, such as Turkmenistan, where women still had an average of four children (UNICEF 2003, 62). Women had relatively long paid maternity leaves (up to 3 years) and, by international standards, preschool enrollments were high. In the Soviet Republics of Russia, Byelorussia and Moldova, enrollment rates were around 70 percent (Cornia 1995, 69). Rates in Central Asia lagged, with enrollments in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan reaching 53 percent and 30 percent, respectively, by 1988 (Riazantsev, Sipos, and Labertsky 1992, 27). Retirement age for women was lower than for men (55, compared to 60 for men) (Ghodsee 2005), and grandmothers over 55 were an important source of childcare and other household assistance. Reduced childcare responsibilities supported high rates of female labor force participation and relative gender equality in the workplace. Female labor force participation in East and Central 255

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European countries ranged from 62 percent (Hungary) to 77 percent (Czechoslovakia) in the late 1980s, well above the 59 percent average rate for the OECD countries (Boeri and Sziraczki 1993, 244). In Central Asia, where childcare was less available, female labor force participation rates remained somewhat lower: 50  percent in Kyrgyzstan and 29  percent in Tajikistan (World Bank 2019). While there remained significant occupational segregation by sex, with women over-represented in services and under-represented in manufacturing and construction (Bodrova and Anker 1985, 4), levels of segregation were below those of OECD countries. This contributed to a lower gender wage gap, which was also low by international standards (Anker 1998). Despite high female employment rates, after early flirtation with radical gender egalitarianism socialist leaders fell back on biological determinism, assigning women almost exclusive responsibility for household reproduction (McKinney 2004). Russian feminist author Posaskaya describes the attitude as: “Woman by her very nature is intended to be a mother, the keeper of the hearth” (1993, 172). Given the government focus on industrialization, consumer goods like washing machines and vacuums were scarce and rudimentary. Significant amounts of unpaid household labor were needed to reproduce a household. Since basic items of food and clothing were often also in short supply, people, especially women, spent considerable time waiting in lines or searching for basic items. Alternatively, women produced many items at home, continuing pre-socialist traditions of sewing clothes, knitting, and canning produce for winter. This burden prevented women from participating equally in the workplace and made their “emancipation” a frustrating experience (Einhorn 1993). Men also had a role in the continued self-provisioning, particularly in self-building housing outside of core urban areas (Smith 2002). Time-use data suggest that unpaid reproductive work consumed a considerable amount of time for both women and men (Viteckova 1991). However, among the 7 socialist countries included in a study of data from the 1980s, women spent significantly more time than men in unpaid reproductive work in the household. Bulgarian women worked 32 hours per week, mainly cooking, cleaning and doing the laundry, compared to men’s 10 hours. In the USSR, where only town-dwellers were surveyed, women reported lower unpaid work burdens (26 hours compared to 13 hours for men), but spent much more time shopping. While central planners sought to incorporate all households into the national systems of provisioning, uneven development persisted. In rural areas and parts of the Russian empire that were less developed at the beginning of the socialist period, households relied more heavily on self-provisioning and networks of informal exchange to meet their needs. State-run stores provided only basic goods, and rural households were expected to produce a significant share of fresh food for their own consumption. Running water was often not available inside the home but might be collected in the street, and central heating was generally not available in individual homes. Rather than giving birth in a hospital, women might be assisted by a midwife. Childcare services, especially for children under 3, were limited. Women, burdened with higher levels of unpaid work, participated at lower rates in paid labor.

Market reform The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 set off a transition away from centrally planned socialism, first in Central and Eastern Europe and, a few years later, across the Soviet Union. In most places, the initial transformation was heavily influenced by the neoliberal Washington Consensus that dominated thinking at international financial institutions in the 1980s. Core to this consensus was the idea that market exchange among private property owners is a natural 256

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and optimal way to organize economic activity, and that this works best if the state plays a very limited role. Many Western scholars and representatives of international financial institutions talked in terms of a universal transition to an ideal-type market economy (Williamson 1997). This ignored significant differences in how actual market economies developed and function, with wide variations in state support for social provisioning, including health, education, child care, and labor market regulation (Evans 1995; Meurs 2001). Policymakers in many countries, eager to deliver the expected benefits of markets and to secure support from international financial institutions, quickly dismantled state-run institutions and privatized state property, to create space for individual provisioning through markets. Across the board, however, it took much longer than expected for private economic activity to expand. Output fell rapidly and took almost two decades to recover. A decade after the Berlin Wall fell, only Poland and Slovenia had exceeded 1989 output levels, and more than half of all postsocialist countries remained at least 30 percent below 1989 levels. In 2009, after 20 years, in all Central and East European countries (except civil war-ravaged areas of former Yugoslavia), as well as Russia and Kyrgyzstan, output had finally surpassed 1989 levels. In the former Yugoslav areas, Georgia (also suffering the aftermath of a civil war), Moldova, Ukraine, and Tajikistan, output remained below 1989 levels—40 percent below in Tajikistan (EBRD 2000, 2009). After liberalization, total employment fell faster than output and recovered slowly (EBRD 2000). Wages in the formal sector fell accordingly, with much bigger declines in the former Soviet countries (to 28  percent of 1989 levels in Lithuania in 1993), where firms initially adjusted wages more than employment, than in East and Central Europe (in Poland real wages fell to 71 percent of 1989 levels) and recovered slowly. In 2001, only in the Czech Republic, Poland, Albania and the former Yugoslav republics not involved in the war, had real wages recovered to 1989 levels. In Central Asia, except in oil-rich Kazakhstan, real wages averaged less than 30 percent of 1989 levels. In many former Soviet countries, real wages reached only 40–50 percent of 1989 levels (UNICEF 2003, 93). Very large increases in poverty resulted in some places, although some highly educated individuals with western connections and language skills (and members of crime networks) saw significant jumps in income (Smith 2002). Milanovic (1998, 65) estimated poverty rates in post-socialist countries using a common poverty standard of purchasing power parity adjusted $4/day (1998, 65), finding that by 1993–95 poverty rates ranged from less than 1 percent in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia to 59 percent in Romania and 88 percent in Kyrgyzstan. In 2009, poverty rates measured using nationally defined poverty lines remained quite high in some places—20 percent in Bulgaria and Lithuania, 18 percent in Poland, and 32 percent in Kyrgyzstan, compared to 12 percent in Hungary and 13 percent in Russia (World Bank 2019). Government revenues fell with the output collapse. Responsibility for health, education, and welfare was shifted from impoverished central government to local governments, where revenue was even scarcer (Meurs 2008). Government’s role in social provisioning was radically reduced. Public transportation and state-run stores were privatized, and many childcare centers, medical clinics and schools were closed. In institutions that remained open, user fees were imposed or increased. Many people, particularly in urban areas, found opportunities in the growing informal economy. In rural areas, people relied more heavily on the household agricultural production, which had supplemented state-supplied products during under central planning. Households continued to exchange food, labor, and money to supplement their resources (Smith 2002). Many working-age individuals emigrated (Olimova and Bosc 2003; Rangelova and Vladimirova 2004). The downturn, combined with increased availability of modern contraceptives as economies opened to global markets, led young couples to postpone having children, and 257

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fertility declined substantially across the region (Frejka and Gietel-Basten 2016). In the European and Baltic areas, population aging intensified. The share of the population older than 65 rose from 12 percent in 1989 to 18 percent in 2009 in Latvia and 13 to 18 percent in Bulgaria, adding significant elder-care burdens to households and communities (World Bank 2019). These changes, combined with the political opening, gave rise to significant debate about the likely impact on women, particularly in feminist publications. Sziraczki and Windell (1992) and Goven (1993) writing in the early 1990s expected that women would be disproportionately displaced from the labor force. Fields where women had been concentrated, including the public sector and light industry, faced serious cutbacks or international competition (Sziraczki and Windell 1992). Others noted that, particularly in Central Europe, patriarchal attitudes largely unchallenged under central planning would re-emerge, pushing the “cult of domesticity” and women’s “return to their natural roles” in the home. For some women, this might offer an escape from the double burden. Overt discrimination might increase as government control of hiring gave way to free labor markets (Goven 1993). Such arguments suggested that a male breadwinner model of provisioning might emerge, with women returning to the home to address the reproductive burdens created by declining state services. Others, also writing from a feminist perspective, argued that adjustment to the global economy would lead the economy to shift away from male sectors like heavy industry, toward light industry and private services (Ghodsee 2005; Leven 2008). Women, who were concentrated in light industry and services and had more general secondary and university education than men, might gain as the old economic margin became the new economic core. The rising unemployment and falling wages would create pressures for women to contribute to household incomes. This perspective suggests that a dual earner model might emerge, with women combining their paid work with the increased reproductive burdens.

New models of provisioning By 2005, the neoliberal to-do list, as measured by the so-called Transition Indicators (EBRD 1994), was largely completed in most countries. Not surprisingly, differing political and social norms, centers of political power, levels of development and global positioning contributed to significant differences in national outcomes (Stark and Bruszt 1998; Roland 2012). More developed Central European and Baltic states, which also had more pre-socialist experience with capitalist markets, almost fully achieved the Transition Indicators. In 2004, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states were accepted into the European Union, providing further impetus for institutional reform. In most other countries, between 2005 and 2013 the reform process was more or less concluded at a somewhat lower level as measured by the Transition Indicators. Only minor regulatory changes continued (EBRD 2013, 113), even though Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to the EU in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. Ukraine and Russia continued a more statist approach, and Belarus and Uzbekistan undertook minimal reforms. The post-socialist transition thus resulted in diverse models of social provisioning, although state support is limited by the widespread adoption of a flat tax in the 2000s (Evans and Dragos Aligica 2008; Myant and Drahokoupil 2015). In Central Europe, where labor unions and prodemocracy groups were more mobilized in the 1990s (Stark and Bruszt 1998) and government elites had early aspirations for joining Europe, governments adopted European-type social policies, including support for pensions, unemployment benefits, and child and family supports, although at lower levels. So while many individuals and households were unable to adequately support themselves through the market, states provide some safety net. By 2012, these policies 258

Market reform in transition economies Table 26.1  Potential and realized poverty rates

Baltic Countries Latvia Lithuania Central Europe Czech Republic Hungary Poland Slovenia Slovakia Eastern Europe Bulgaria Romania Central Asia Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Russia

Potential Poverty Rate (%) (based on income prior to transfers)

Actual Rates, using National Poverty Line (%) (after social transfers)

2012 45 45

2012 26 28

38 50 43 42 38

10 14 17 14 13

42 50

21 23

n.a. n.a. n.a.

11* 31* 32*

* 2014 Sources: Myant and Drahokoupil 2015, for Central Asia, Russia, World Bank 2019.

reduced national poverty rates to rates similar to those achieved in Western Europe (14–16 percent) (Myant and Drahokoupil 2015) (Table 26.1). In the former Soviet Republics, and Eastern Europe, civil society actors were less organized in the early transition. Government corruption has been a significant problem and, although less so in oil-rich Russia and Kazakhstan, GDP has remained low. These countries offer much less social support. Unemployment benefits are limited, as is state spending on health care. Poverty rates are higher even after social transfers. Baltic countries, despite better economic performance and lower levels of corruption, also offer only limited social support and achieve less reduction of market-induced poverty (Myant and Drahokoupil 2015). In the Central Asia, almost a third of households in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan fell below the national poverty line in 2014 (Table 26.1). Poor households rely heavily on own production, family and social networks. Outside Central Asia, aging and even declining populations have led to policies that promote childbearing. These include generous maternity leaves, birth and child payments, and support for child care. Frejka and Gietel-Basten (2016) describe key differences in country approaches, while noting that only a few countries had adequate work-life balance policies (for China see Dong and MacPhail, this volume). One example of supportive policy is Slovenia, where policy supports dual earner households during child bearing years with 100 days each of paid maternity and paternity leave, child allowances until adulthood, and nearly universal, state-supported childcare for children over 1 year old. Central and East European countries including Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Russia, and the Baltic states instead support a model in which women specialize in care while children are young. These countries offer long paid maternity leaves and very limited childcare for children under 3  years old. In recent years Russia has implemented multiple 259

Mieke Meurs Table 26.2 Women’s work and supports, selected countries Male/Female LFPR (%) Wage Gap

(%) (a)

M

Baltic 2017 2018 Countries Latvia 16 68 Lithuania 15 67 Central and Eastern Europe Poland 7 66 Bulgaria 14 62 Slovenia 8 63 Central Asia Kyrgyzstan 26 76 Tajikistan (b) 60 Russia 23 71

F

Maternity, Homecare Leave

Children 0–2 Children 3–6 Ratio M/F in Formal in Formal Hours/Week Care Care Unpaid Household Work

(%) (d)

(%)

2018 2014

2013

2016

latest year

55 56

94 62(c)

23 12

87 90

2.2 (2003) 2.0 (2003)

49 50 53

26 110 52

10 12 45

70 81 89

1.9 (2003) 2.0 (2010) 1.8 (2001)

48 28 55

18 20 82

3(e) 2 (e) 18

31 11 89

2.5 (2005) n.a n.a

Sources: Wages, wage ratio, UNECE 2019. Labor force participation rate, World Bank 2019. Maternity Leave, Children 0–2 in Formal Care, Frejka and Gietel-Basten 2016. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Transmonee Database, UNICEF 2010. Children 3–6 in Formal Care, UNDP, 2017; 2019. Time use, UNSTATS 2019. a) 1 — (female wage/male wage) b) UNECE does not provide the data for Tajikistan. Khitarishvili (2019) shows the gap is much larger than in Russia, based on 2011 data. c) or 114 weeks at 70 percent pay. d) weeks, mothers only e) 2006/7

benefits for second and third births. Poland encourages even greater specialization for women in unpaid work, offering both limited paid maternity leave and limited childcare services for children under 3. In all post-socialist countries in Europe, childcare services for children aged 3–6 years are much more available, accommodating 70–89 percent of children. Still, in most cases the level of provision remains well below the EU target of spaces for 90 percent of children (Table 26.2). It can be costly (in Bulgaria, pre-school is free only for 5-year-olds) and in short supply (Frejka and Gietel-Basten 2016; Lovasz 2016). In Central Asia, where fertility rates remain above replacement rates and government budgets are much more constrained, family policy is consistent with overall limited support. Child care, even for children 3–6 years old, is very limited except in oil-rich Kazakhstan, as is paid maternity leave (Table 26.2). Family policies are associated with distinct patterns of women’s participation in paid and unpaid labor. Among countries in Europe and the Baltics, the gap between male and female labor force participation is highest in Poland, where paid maternity and homecare leave is the least and childcare services are unaffordable and in short supply, and Russia, where policies promote multiple births. In contrast, in Slovenia and the Baltic states, women with children under 3 years participate in the labor market at rates similar to other women and to men, and male and female labor force participation is more similar than in Poland and Russia. In other countries of East and Central Europe, women with young children participate at lower rates than men 260

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and lower rates than women without young children (OECD 2019), resulting in greater gaps in overall participation. In Central Asia, where fertility rates remain relatively high and support for employed mothers is limited, female employment rates are much lower and the male-female wage gap is much higher (Table 26.2). In all countries, women continue to specialize in housework and care work to a greater extent than men, spending about twice as much time in unpaid work. The ratio of female to male time in unpaid work varies little across the countries examined here with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, where the female labor force participation rate is very low compared to the male rate (Table 26.2). Still, women in post-socialist countries have not withdrawn from the labor force in large numbers, as was predicted by some (Goven 1993). Following up earlier feminist debates about likely outcomes for women, authors argue that rising overall unemployment and falling wages make it hard for households to survive on a single income (Ghodsee 2005). But authors also find that the structures of occupational segregation under socialism did position some women well for employment in the post socialist period. Female-dominated sectors like finance, tourism and other services have been areas of growth (although female-dominated sectors like education and medicine suffered significant losses), and women’s traditional focus on general, post-secondary education and foreign languages have prepared them well for these new jobs (Ghodsee 2005; Leven 2008). Despite significant policy differences, in most countries employed women continue to combine paid work with child rearing and other unpaid work, even as state supports have diminished (Table 26.2), resulting in a model we might call dual earner, single carer.

Conclusions Centrally planned state socialism developed a model of social provisioning. Individuals and households provided labor to the state and, in exchange, the state provided households with a significant share of daily necessities—housing, basic food, clothing, healthcare, education and infrastructure services. The model relied heavily on unpaid labor of women and significant amounts of self-provisioning, and access to state supplies and services was uneven. Implementation of the model also differed somewhat between countries. Still, the state-citizen exchange was the dominant form of provisioning across the vast Soviet block. Despite limited consumer choice and shortages of desired items, the model generally assured high levels of access to daily necessities. At the start of the post-socialist transformation, proponents of the Washington Consensus promised citizens and political leaders that market-based allocation would bring rapid economic growth, broad access to goods and services and improved standards of living. The emphasis on the optimal character of market outcomes and possible negative impacts of state intervention may have limited the attention citizens and governments paid to developing social policies to complement markets. High levels of corruption and weak government revenue in many countries have also limited social services and safety nets. In most countries, as socialist systems of provisioning were discontinued, states have taken much less responsibility for provisioning in emerging systems. Development of social protection has varied widely, depending on political factors and countries’ economic resources. With the exception of Slovenia, countries offer very limited support for parents balancing work and family responsibilities. Rather, policies in many countries encourage women to take long leaves to care for children. These policies limit women’s long-term ability to provide for themselves and their families through market work. So while some citizens have, indeed, experienced rapid improvements in their economic situation as they connected to global markets in the post-socialist period, many others find 261

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themselves marginalized in the market economy, with only their families and communities as sources of support. Research, especially feminist economics research, on the long run wellbeing implications of these changes is limited. The impact of post-socialist provisioning models on welfare, care burdens and employment are important areas for future feminist economic analysis.

References Anker, Richard. 1998. Gender and Jobs: Sex Segregation of Occupations in the World. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Bodrova, Valentina, and Richard Anker. 1985. Working Women in Socialist Countries: The Fertility Connection. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Boeri, Tito, and Gyorgy Sziraczki. 1993. “Labour Market Developments and Policies in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Analysis.” In Structural Change in Central and Eastern Europe: Labour Market and Social Policy Implications, edited by Georg Fischer and Guy Standing. Paris: OECD. Cornia, G. A. 1995. “Ugly Facts and Fancy Theories: Children and Youth During Transition.” Innocenti Occasional Papers, EPS 47. UNICEF, Florence. Einhorn, Barbara. 1993. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe. New York: Verso. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. 1994, 2000, 2009, 2013. Transition Report. London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Evans, Anthony John, and Paul Dragos Aligica. 2008. “The Spread of the Flat Tax in Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study.” Eastern European Economics 46 (3): 49–67. Evans, Peter. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton ­University Press. Frejka, Tomas, and Stuart Gietel-Basten. 2016. “Fertility and Family Policies in Central and Eastern Europe After 1990.” Comparative Population Studies 41 (1): 3–56. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2005. The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Post-Socialism on the Black Sea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goven, Joanna. 1993. “Gender Politics in Hungary: Autonomy and Antifeminism.” In Gender Politics and Post-Communism, edited by Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller. London: Routledge. Khitarishvili, Tamar. 2019. “Gender Pay Gaps in the Former Soviet Union: A Review of the Evidence.” Journal of Economic Surveys 33 (4): 1257–84. Kornai, Janos. 1983. “Comments on the Present State and the Prospects of the Hungarian Economics Reform.” Journal of Comparative Economics 7. Kurian, George. 1984. The New Book of World Rankings. New York: Facts on File. Leven, Bozena. 2008. “Poland’s Transition and New Opportunities for Women.” Feminist Economics 14 (1): 123–36. Lovasz, Anna. 2016. “Childcare Expansion and Mothers’ Employment in Post-Socialist Countries.” IZA World of Labor: 319. McKinney, Judith Record. 2004. “Lone Mothers in Russia: Soviet and Postsoviet Policy.” Feminist Economics 10 (2): 37–60. Meurs, Mieke. 2001. “Are Markets Like Mushrooms and Other Neo-Liberal Quandries.” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 91. ———. 2008. “Decentralisation and Development in Post-Socialism: Local Characteristics and Outcomes in Post-Socialist Bulgaria.” Post-Communist Economies 20 (1): 11–32. Meurs, Mieke, and Rasika Ranasinghe. 2003 “De-Development in Post-Socialism: Conceptual and Measurement Issues.” Politics and Society 31 (1). Milanovic, Branko. 1998. Income, Inequality, and Poverty during Transition from Planned to Market Economy. Washington, DC: World Bank. Myant, Martin, and Jan Drahokoupil. 2015. “Welfare and Redistributive Models.” In Inequalities During and After Transition in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Cristiano Perugini and Fabrizio Pompei. London: Palgrave Macmillan. OECD (Organization for European Cooperation and Development). 2019. “Family Database.” www. oecd.org/els/family/database.htm.

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Market reform in transition economies Olimova, Saodat, and Igor Bosc. 2003. Labour Migration from Tajikistan. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Migration. Posaskaya, Anastasia. 1993. “Changes in Gender Discourses and Policies in the Former Soviet Union.” In Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies, edited by Valentina M. Moghadam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rangelova, Rossitsa, and Katya Vladimirova. 2004. “Migration from Central and Eastern Europe: The Case of Bulgaria.” South East Europe Review 3: 7–30. Ransel, David. 2000. Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Riazantsev, A., S. Sipos, and O. Labertsky. 1992. “Child Welfare and the Socialist Experiment: Social and Economic Trends in the USSR, 1960–1990.” Innocenti Working Paper EPS 24, UNICEF, Florence. Roland, Gerard. 2012. “The Long-Run Weight of Communism or the Weight of Long-Run History.” In Economies in Transition: The Long-Run View, edited by Gerard Roland, 153–71. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Adrian. 2002. “Culture/Economy and Spaces of Economic Practice: Positioning Households in Post-Communism.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27: 232–50. Stark, David, and Lazlo Bruszt. 1998. Post-Socialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sziraczki, Gyorgy, and James Windell. 1992. Impact of Employment Restructuring on Disadvantaged Groups in Hungary and Bulgaria. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Review. UNDP (United Nations Development Program). 1997/2019. Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press. www.hdr.undp.org. UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe). 2019. Database.w3.unece.org/ PXWEB2015/pxweb/en/STAT. UNICEF (United Nations Childrens Fund). 2003. Social Monitor 2003. Innocenti Social Monitor CEE/ CIS/Baltic States. Florence: UNICEF. ———. 2010. Transmonee Database. http://52.143.21.137/database/download/. UNSTATS (United Nations Statistics). 2019. “Gender Statistics.” https://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/ timeuse/index.html. Viteckova, Jana. 1991. “Informal and Domestik (sic)Work of Women in Planned Economies.” In Time Use Studies World Wide, edited by Jonathan Gershuny, Iiris Niemi, Zahari Staikov, and Edmund WnukLipinski. Sofia, Bulgaria: Socioconsult. Williamson, John. 1997. “The Washington Consensus Revisited.” In Economic and Social Development in the XXI Century, edited by Louis Emmerij. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. World Bank. 2019. “World Development Indicators.” www.data.worldbank.org.

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27 ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES AND GENDER INEQUALITY Use, degradation, and conservation Bina Agarwal Introduction There is a growing body of work by feminist economists on women’s access to private property resources, especially agricultural land (e.g., Agarwal 1994; Deere and Leon 2003; Allendorf 2007; Doss et al. 2015; Agarwal, Anthwal, and Mahesh 2021). However, there continues to be rather little work by feminist economists on women’s access to common property resources (CPRs), such as forests, village commons, and water bodies. Yet for millions of women in the developing world, access to the commons is just as important, and often complementary to the use of private land. This chapter explores the relationship between gender and environmental resources, using forests in the Global South as an illustration. Here forests are crucial for people’s livelihoods, just as they are crucial globally for biodiversity conservation and mitigating climate change through carbon sequestration. Today, an estimated one in six persons across the world depends on forests for subsistence needs, such as uncultivated food, woodfuel, agricultural inputs (green manure, soil, water, animal fodder), and timber for farm implements, home construction, and repairs (Vira, Wildburger, and Mansourian 2016). Forests and village commons also supplement subsistence diets and provide a cushion during seasonal scarcities, droughts, and famines (Agarwal 2016). In addition, many millions sell firewood and non-wood forest products (NWFPs) for additional income. In India, by one estimate, non-marketed natural goods and ecosystem services account for 47 percent of the “GDP of the poor” (TEEB 2009). Firewood, in particular, remains the single most important cooking fuel in developing countries (Modi et al. 2005). In the early 2000s, for instance, 94 percent of rural India’s domestic energy came from traditional biofuels—firewood, crop waste, and cattle dung (NCAER 2001– 02)—and even a decade later, 67 percent of rural households depended on firewood and chips for cooking (GoI 2011–12). In sub-Saharan Africa and large parts of South Asia, dependence on firewood is high even among better-off rural households (Chaudhuri and Pfaff 2003; GoN 2004; Narain, Gupta, and van’t Veld 2005). Much of this firewood is gathered. In the early 1990s, 78 percent of households in rural India (NCAER 2001–02) and 90 percent in rural Nepal (GoN 2004) gathered it largely from forests and village commons. Although, in India, such gathering has declined in recent decades with 264

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growing restrictions on forest use, forests continue to be a key source of fuel in Nepal and subSaharan Africa (Wagura and Nyangena 2010). And most forests globally are owned by governments and communities rather than by individuals. Hence, unlike a private property resource like agricultural land where ownership rights are important, for CPRs rights of access, extraction, and management are key (Schlager and Ostrom 1992 provide a matrix of property rights).

Gendered use of environmental resources There are notable differences in how men and women draw upon forests and village commons. Women’s dependence is greater than, different from, and more everyday than men’s. The nature of women’s dependence on the commons stems especially from the gender division of labor which defines their household responsibilities, while women’s extent of dependence stems from the gender division of economic resources. For example, rural women in most developing countries are largely responsible for cooking, cattle care, and gathering fuelwood and fodder (Cooke 1998; GoI 2011–2012). And they need these items almost daily, putting them under persistent pressure to find sources. They are also the main collectors of food items during periods of scarcity (Enslin 1990; Daniggelis 1997; Agarwal 2016), apart from collecting NWFPs for seasonal earnings. Typically, women cannot gather these items from their own resources, since, as noted, most rural women in the Global South neither own nor directly control arable land. They also have fewer employment opportunities, get lower pay for similar work (World Bank 2012), face greater seasonal fluctuations in farm employment than men, and are less likely to find work in the agricultural slack seasons (Agarwal 2016). In addition, women are less mobile due to childcare responsibilities, security considerations, and (in some cultures) female seclusion norms. All this increases their dependence on local CPRs. Women in female-headed or landless households are especially disadvantaged. But even in landowning male-headed households they lack guaranteed access to male-controlled income for purchasing firewood and fodder, or to family land for growing trees and grass. In contrast, men in subsistence contexts use CPRs typically for small timber or for specific income-earning activities such as making charcoal. They are also better placed financially to purchase what they need if unavailable from CPRs. In general, therefore, gender inequalities in access to private property resources and embedded social norms create gender differences in dependence on CPRs across most wealth and asset groups, albeit in varying degrees.

Impact of forest decline and degradation Gender differences in forest dependence create gender-differentiated impact when forests decline, degrade, or are enclosed. Forest decline implies a reduction in forest area as land shifts to other uses. Degradation implies a worsening of forest condition, such as a fall in canopy cover or biodiversity. And forests are often closed off for conservation purposes. These processes can have a negative impact on women’s time, income, nutrition and health, social networks, and knowledge systems, although the intensity of impact can vary regionally with variations in ecology, technology, land ownership, and social structures (Agarwal 1997a), as well as climate change. To begin with, forest degradation increases the time taken and distances traveled by women in gathering fuel and fodder (Agarwal 2010). Girls can be pulled out of school to help mothers (Chopra et al. 2007; Biswas 2009) and usually spend more time in collection than boys (Wagura 265

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and Nyangena 2010). For women, an increase in collection time reduces time for other activities, especially crop production (see Kumar and Hotchkiss 1988 and Cooke 1998 for Nepal). Cropping patterns can also shift to less labor-intensive but less nutritious crops, especially in regions of high male outmigration where women’s time is already stretched (Kumar and Hotchkiss 1988). And fodder shortages can compel families to sell off large animals that are important for rural livelihoods. A scarcity of collectible items in the commons can also reduce incomes directly. Although this can affect both genders, women are worse affected, especially in poor households, given their greater dependence on the sale of seasonal NWFPs. Also, as CPRs decline, the availability of gatherable food falls. This has worse nutritional effects on women and girls in regions with a gender bias in intra-family distribution of food and health care, as in northern South Asia. Fuel shortages can similarly lead to fewer cooked meals and more ingestion of cold leftovers that can turn toxic in tropical climates (Howes and Jabbar 1986). Although firewood itself is not a clean fuel, forest degradation is worsening this situation as less smoky firewood varieties are becoming difficult to find with falling biodiversity. Firewood shortages are also causing households to turn to inferior and smokier fuels, such as driftwood and crop waste (Agarwal 2010). In turn, smoky fuels cause indoor air pollution leading to serious health consequences. Kitchen smoke is globally responsible for 35.7 percent of lower respiratory infections (WHO 2002, 70) and many other diseases (CSE 2001; Pokhrel et al. 2005). Women, who do much of the cooking, are the worst affected. Their mortality risk from smoke-related infections is assessed to be 50 percent higher than for men (Goldemberg et al. 2004, 6), and they account for 60 percent of the 1.6 million deaths annually due to inhaling fuel smoke (Modi et al. 2005, 28). Moreover, population displacement with large-scale deforestation undermines social support networks with neighbors on whom women, in particular, depend for sharing labor during peak agricultural seasons, for loans during economic stress, and for small amounts of food, fodder, and so forth, even in normal times (Agarwal 2016). Once disrupted, these networks cannot be reconstituted easily. The undermining of this support also lowers women’s bargaining power within families (Agarwal 1997b). Finally, while gathering forest products villagers acquire a wide knowledge of plants and local ecology. Food items, in particular, require an elaborate understanding of the nutritional and medicinal properties of plants. Such ecological knowledge is usually gendered, given differences in the products that women and men extract, the frequency of extraction, the distances from which they extract, and their years of living near forests (Pandey 1990; Gaul 1994; Berkes, Davidson-Hunt, and Davidson-Hunt 1998; Daniggelis 1997). Since women usually collect more items than men, they tend to know more about biodiversity (Daniggelis 1997; Howard 2003) and careful extraction: for example, extracting tree fodder needs fine calibration (Agarwal 2010). Forest degradation or closure can undermine the material basis of such knowledge. These effects impact on women (especially the poor) the most. Similar effects can arise if forests are closed for conservation without factoring in the gendered and class nature of forest use, or involving women in forest management.

Are women more conservationist than men? Women’s inclusion in forest management is important not only for greater equity but also because differential forest use creates differences in interest in forest conservation. But does this lead women to be more conservationist than men? An influential body of work that falls under the rubric of “ecofeminism” suggests so. Writings on ecofeminism constitute amongst the earliest feminist theorization of the relationship 266

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between women and the environment (e.g., Merchant 1980; Salleh 1984; Shiva 1988; King 1989). Emerging in the 1980s, mostly from the USA, this work is attributable to feminist philosophers and historians rather than feminist economists. Their underlying argument is that women tend to be closer to nature than men and, by implication, are likely to be more conservationist. One variant of the argument is that women are closer to nature than men, and this closeness can affirm more nurturing and caring values towards not only other humans but also “non-human” nature. Some attribute this closeness to historical and cultural factors, others mainly to women’s biology (see variously, Merchant 1980; Salleh 1984; Shiva 1988). Another variant of the argument is that women are identified as closer to nature and men as closer to culture. Since nature is seen as inferior to culture, women are seen as inferior to men. Also, the domination of both women and nature is argued to have emerged from a common world view that places women and the non-human world hierarchically below men. By extension, this perceived link between women and nature gives women a special motivation to end nature’s domination and hence their own subordination. Although most ecofeminist writings came from the Global North, Shiva (1988) provides a version from the Global South. She distinguishes Third World women from other women but conflates the former into one category, irrespective of class and caste, thereby ignoring differences between women in their subsistence needs and hence in their interest in conserving nature. Ecofeminism has been criticized on several grounds (see especially Zimmerman 1987; Biehl 1991; Nanda 1991; Li 1993; Agarwal 1992, 1998; Sinha, Gururani, and Greenberg 1997). To begin with, the idea that only or mainly women have an interest in conservation is untenable, as is the idea that women are universally caring towards nature, irrespective of their economic situation or regional location. Indeed, most ecofeminist writings ignore socioeconomic heterogeneity among women. In reality, while women from rich rural households can fall back on private property resources, poor women can be seriously conflicted between their interest in forest conservation and basic survival. Under acute need, the very values of nurturing and caring for others, especially children, which women are argued to possess, could compel them to overdraw on and sometimes degrade environmental resources. In fact, there is little to suggest a biologically rooted or culturally specific connection between women and nature that transcends ecological location and survival needs. In contrast, theoretical formulations such as Feminist Environmentalism by Agarwal (1992) and Ecological Feminism by Warren (1994) provide notable alternatives. Feminist Environmentalism, in particular, recognizes the importance of people’s everyday dependence on nature for subsistence, and how the social, economic, and political resources at their command (or lack thereof) shape their relationship with nature, their interest in protecting it, and their ability to do so effectively. Here both women and men are recognized as having an interest in conservation, since they both depend on natural resources, although some of their interests may diverge across gender lines due to differences in the products they mainly use, the time horizon within which they need to do so, and the time taken for the products to grow. For instance, in tree planting, women are found to prefer fruits, fodder, firewood, and nonwood products, and men to prefer timber species (Brara 1987; Chen 1993). Given these differences in preferences, men and women can differ in their priorities regarding what to conserve, what to replant, and what to extract. Similarly, the sporadic versus everyday nature of gendered needs can affect the timing of extraction. Moreover, men’s main interest—timber—apart from being needed occasionally, takes longer to mature than women’s main interests—firewood and fodder. Hence, in a newly regenerating forest, women will have a higher time preference than men. Also the products they use have a shorter gestation period, which can allow early and frequent extraction. Notably too, extracting timber can involve heavy lopping or felling which can harm the 267

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forest much more than collecting firewood—typically gathered in the form of twigs and fallen branches or dried wood (Agarwal 1986). Thus, even if men appear to be more conservationist in the short term, they could prove to be less so in the long term. Conceptually, this can be framed in terms of cooperative conflicts (Agarwal 1997b), wherein a shared interest in forest improvement would motivate women and men to cooperate in forest protection, but differences in their product needs and time horizons can cause gender conflict over when and what to extract. Class differences can play out similarly (Sarin and Khanna 1993; Davidson-Hunt 1997). Here women’s shared interest in forest improvement across classes provides scope for cooperation among them, but class differences in the immediacy and extent of their needs can cause conflict. To understand women’s responses to environmental conservation, these potential complexities warrant recognition. Consider now women’s role in forest governance.

Forest management: gendered exclusions Notwithstanding their stake in forests, women’s involvement in environmental management is unlikely to emerge automatically, since, even when motivated, women often face restrictive social norms in public participation. Here it is useful to distinguish between agitational and “cooperative” collective action (Agarwal 2010). The former is sporadic and situation-specific, while the latter requires regular monitoring and decision-making. Women have often been at the forefront of agitational environmental movements, as in India’s Chipko movement when the local community protested against the commercial logging of their forests, or in the agitations against the Sardar Sarovar Dam, which displaced large numbers. Despite their visibility in such protests, however, women were rarely included in the regular decision-making forums of organizations spearheading these movements (Sharma, Nautiyal, and Pandey 1987). Being sporadic, agitational protest also presents fewer gendered constrains than the “cooperative” collective action needed for long-term forest management by community forestry groups/institutions. Hence, women are more likely to get excluded in the latter forms of collective action. In the early 1990s, for example, governments began to recognize state failure and community success in protecting forests. By 1999, some 50 countries had launched community forestry programs under which communities would co-manage forests with the state (Agrawal and Gibson 2001). India and Nepal were among the first to do so in 1990 and 1993, respectively. By the early 2000s there were 84,000 such groups across India and 10,000 in Nepal. Unlike agitational environmental movements, most of these community forestry groups (CFGs) were male-dominated, and had either no women or at best 1–2 women in their decision-making committees. Mixed gender groups with significant female presence were few and all-women’s groups even fewer. The latter received very small plots of degraded forest land, compared to male-controlled CFGs which received larger forests in better condition. Most research on gender and local forest governance (undertaken predominantly by noneconomists) has focused on women’s relative absence from governance institutions and on the factors restricting their participation in mixed-gender groups. For instance, social norms and social perceptions often prevent women from attending meetings or speaking up at them, or influencing the decisions made (Agarwal 2001). But we also need to ask a different set of questions, such as what difference would women’s presence make in these institutions? How would that affect institutional functioning and outcomes for conservation and subsistence? Very few have asked these questions; even fewer have answered them empirically. A  global survey of literature published in Environmental Evidence (Craig et  al. 2016), based on a systematic search for evidence on the impact of the gender 268

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composition of forest and fishery management groups on resource governance and conservation outcomes, gleaned only 17 studies of relevance out of 11,069. Of these 17, 14 covered forests (almost all in South Asia), and only nine of the 14 were quantitative and used a group as the unit of analysis: of these, five were by one author, Bina Agarwal. The other four were by Agrawal, Yadama, and Bhattacharya (2006) and Coleman and Mwangi (2013), using large samples, and Westermann, Ashby, and Pretty (2005) and Mehra (2013), using very small samples. One paper—Agarwal (2009, reproduced in Agarwal 2010 as chap. 8)—was ranked first in empirical rigor: it examined the effect on conservation both cross-sectionally and over time. Agarwal (2010) covered many additional dimensions, such as the impact on women’s participation, rule making, environmental conservation, and equity. These are outlined next.

Impact of inclusion Agarwal (2010) examined the impact of the gender composition of community management groups in India and Nepal on several aspects: women’s effective participation and whether a critical mass of women was needed for effectiveness; the strictness of rules made for extracting forest products; forest conservation outcomes (as a measure of efficiency); and firewood and fodder shortages (as a measure of equity). The research used in-depth primary data collected for 165 community forestry groups for both countries during 2000–2001, in two districts of Nepal and three districts of Gujarat state in India. In these districts, the groups were randomly selected from a universe of those with two women or less and those with more than two women in their Executive Committees (ECs), the main decision-making bodies. In Nepal, groups with all-women ECs were also selected.

Participation in decision-making Agarwal found that in mixed gender CFGs with more than two EC women relative to those with two EC women or less, female EC members were significantly more likely to attend meetings, speak up at them, and become office bearers (president, secretary, or treasurer). Women’s attendance rate was significantly higher in ECs with 25 to 33 percent women: this was estimated to be the critical mass needed to make a key difference. Moreover, groups with more landless women had a better record of women speaking up. In addition, enhancing women’s proportions on the EC improved their chances of becoming office bearers, 25 percent being the minimum, with higher percentages increasing the impact. These results also empirically supported the popular argument for ensuring at least one-third women in decision-making bodies. Moreover, challenging the assertion of some feminist theorists (e.g., Fraser 1990) that socioeconomic equality is essential for the disadvantaged to participate effectively in public forums, these results demonstrate that poor landless women, if present in sufficient numbers, can be more outspoken than well-off women, where the stakes are high: in this example, they needed to push for forest use rules that would allow more firewood extraction.

Rule-making The gender composition of CFGs also affects the formulation of forest use rules. In both regions, these rules show considerable diversity, and their extent of strictness (e.g., what can be extracted from the forest and how frequently) varies by the EC’s gender composition and the product extracted, as well as forest size, protection methods, village inequality in land ownership, and other factors. 269

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Given the pressure on women, especially for firewood and fodder collection, we would have expected them to favor early extraction rather than deferred extraction and a push for lenient rules. Yet CFGs with ECs composed of more women or all-women typically made stricter rules, probably because of their resource constraints (smaller and more degraded forests). That women made strict rules, despite facing personal hardships resulting from the restrictions on collection, indicates that their governance practices were informed by a notable concern for conservation. The only exceptions were CFGs where the EC women were disproportionately landless: in such cases the rules were more lenient than those made by ECs with more men, although still within the bounds of conservation.

Conservation and equity outcomes The conservation impact was measured by Agarwal (2010) using several indicators, based on assessments by researchers, villagers and foresters, as well as satellite data. Both cross-sectional and cross-time differences were considered. The study found that in both Gujarat and Nepal, groups with more than two women were significantly more likely to show forest improvement by most indicators than groups with two women or less; and in Nepal all-women groups showed a 51 percent greater likelihood of forest canopy improvement and 29 percent greater probability of forest regeneration than groups with men. Including women improved forest protection and vigilance, and enabled women’s knowledge of local ecology to be used in greater measure for careful extraction and better regeneration. Finally, in villages where ECs had more women showed less likelihood of facing firewood shortages in Gujarat and fodder shortages in Nepal. Overall, therefore, including women enhanced both equity and efficiency in forest governance. This finding also holds lessons on the links between gender equality and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 13 on climate action and SDG 15 on forest conservation (Agarwal 2018).

In conclusion To conclude, this chapter has outlined the importance of CPRs for women, given their limited access to private property resources and the gendered use and knowledge of natural ecosystems. Moreover, increasing women’s presence in environmental governance is beneficial both because their participation has intrinsic worth and because it significantly improves outcomes for conservation and subsistence. This was illustrated here in the context of forests, but similar work on water and other natural resources is clearly needed, as well as research on more countries (as elaborated in Craig et al. 2016). Quantification, based on carefully collected primary data where secondary data do not exist, is also necessary, as shown in this chapter. The limited engagement with this field by feminist economists points both to a gap in existing research and a substantial opportunity for future work.

References Agarwal, Bina. 1986. Cold Hearths and Barren Slopes. London: Zed Books. ———. 1992. “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India.” Feminist Studies 18 (1): 119–58. ———. 1994. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Environmental resources, gender inequality ———. 1997a. “Gender, Environment, and Poverty Interlinks: Regional Variations and Temporal Shifts in Rural India, 1971–1991.” World Development 25 (1): 23–52. ———. 1997b. “ ‘Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51. ———. 1998. “Environmental Management, Equity, and Ecofeminism.” Journal of Peasant Studies 25 (4): 55–95. ———. 2001. “Participatory Exclusions, Community Forestry and Gender: An Analysis for South Asia and a Conceptual Framework.” World Development 29 (10): 1623–48. ———. 2009. “Gender and Forest Conservation: The Impact of Women’s Participation in Community Forest Governance.” Ecological Economics, 68 (11): 2785–99. ———. 2010. Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women’s Presence Within and Beyond Community Forestry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. “Social Security and the Family: Coping with Seasonality, Drought and Famine.” In Gender Challenges, edited by Bina Agarwal, chap. 7, vol. 1, 207–6. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. “Gender Equality, Food Security and the Sustainable Development Goals.” Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability 34: 26–32. Agrawal, Arun, and Clark Gibson. 2001. Communities and the Environment. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Agrawal, Arun, Gautam Yadama, and Ajoy Bhattacharya. 2006. “Decentralization and Environmental Conservation: Gender Effects from Participation in Joint Forest Management.” CAPRi Working Paper No. 53, CAPRi, Washington, DC. Agarwal, Bina, Pervesh Anthwal, and Malvika Mahesh. 2021. “How Many and Which Women Own Land in India?” Journal of Development Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2021.1887478. Allendorf, Keera. 2007. “Do Women’s Land Rights Promote Empowerment and Child Health in Nepal?” World Development 35: 1975–88. Berkes, Fikret, Iain Davidson-Hunt, and Kerril Davidson-Hunt. 1998. “Diversity of Common Property Resource Use and Diversity of Social Interests in the Western Indian Himalaya.” Mountain Research and Development 18 (1): 19–33. Brara, Rita. 1987. “Shifting Sands: A Study of Right in Common Pastures,” Report, Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur. Biehl, Janet. 1991. Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Biswas, H. 2009. “Analysis of Biofuel Use in Northern India: Characteristics, Health Impacts and Policy Implications.” Ph.D. dissertation, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. Chaudhuri, Shubham, and Alexander S. P. Pfaff. 2003. Fuel-Choice and Indoor Air Quality. Ithaca: Department of Economics and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, Mimeo. Chen, Martha. 1993. ‘Women and Wasteland Development in India: An Issue Paper’. In Women and Wasteland Development in India, edited by Andrea Singh and Neera Burra. Delhi: Sage Publishers, 21–90. Chopra, Neetu, Supriya Singh, Shreekant Gupta, Urvashi Narain, and Klass Van Veld. 2007. “Who ­Collect Resources in Degraded Environment? A  Case Study from Jhabua District, India.” Working Paper No. 23–07, South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics, New Delhi. Coleman, Eric A., and Mwangi Esther. 2013. “Women’s Participation in Forest Management: A Crosscountry Analysis.” Global Environmental Change 23: 193–205. Cooke, Priscilla. 1998. “The Effect of Environmental Good Scarcity on Own-Farm Labor Allocation: The Case of Agricultural Households in Rural Nepal.” Environment and Development Economics 3 (4): 443–69. Craig, Leisher, Gheda Temsah, Francesca Booker, Michael Day, Leah Samberg, Debra Prosnitz, Bina Agarwal, Elizabeth Matthews, Dilys Roe, Diane Russell, Terry Sunderland, and David Wilkie. 2016. “Does the Gender Composition of Forest and Fishery Management Groups Affect Resource ­Governance and Conservation Outcomes: A Systematic Map.” Environmental Evidence 5. doi:10.1186/ s13750-016-0057-8. CSE. 2001. “Biomass: A Smoky Problem.” Health and Environment Newsletter 1 (1): 6. Center for Science and Environment, New Delhi. Daniggelis, Ephrosine K. 1997. “The Jangal’s Hidden Wealth: A Survival Strategy by Foraging Farmers in the Upper Arun Valley, Eastern Nepal.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Davidson-Hunt, Kerril. 1997. “Class, Gender and the Commons in the Indian Himalaya.” In Sustainability of Mountain Environments in India and Canada, edited by F. Berkes and James Gardner. Winnipeg: ­Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba.

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Bina Agarwal Deere, Carmen Diana, and Magdalena Leon. 2003. “The Gender Asset Gap: Land in Latin America.” World Development 31: 925–47. Doss, Cheryl, Chiara Kovarik, Amber Peterman, Agnes Quisumbing, and Mara van den Bold. 2015. “Gender Inequalities in Ownership and Control of Land in Africa: Myth and Reality.” Agricultural Economics 46: 403–34. Enslin, Elizabeth M. W. 1990. “The Dynamics of Gender, Class and Caste in a Women’s Movement in Rural Nepal.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford. Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25–26: 56–80. Gaul, Karen K. 1994. “Negotiated Positions and Shifting Terrains: Apprehension of Forest Resources in the Western Himalaya.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. GoI. 2000. Report of the Pilot Time Use Survey 1998–99. Department of Statistics, Central Statistical Office, Government of India, New Delhi. ———. 2011–2012. Energy Sources of Indian Households for Cooking and Lighting, National Sample Survey 2011–2012. National Sample Survey Organisation, Report 567, Department of Statistics, Government of India, New Delhi. Goldemberg, Jose, Thomas B. Johansson, Amulya K. N. Reddy and Robert H. Williams. 2004. “A Global Clean Cooking Fuel Initiative.” Energy for Sustainable Development 8 (3): 5–12. GoN. 2004. Nepal Living Standards Survey 2003–04, Statistical Report. Kathmandu: CBS, Government of Nepal. Howard, Patricia L., ed. 2003. Women and Plants: Gender Relations in Biodiversity Management and Conservation. London: Zed Books. Howes, Michael, and Mohammad A. Jabbar. 1986. “Rural Fuel Shortages in Bangladesh: The Evidence from Four Villages.” Discussion Paper 213, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. King, Ynestra. 1989. “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology.” In Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by Judith Plant. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. Kumar, Shubh K., and David Hotchkiss. 1988. “Consequences of Direction for Women’s Time ­Allocation, Agricultural Production and Nutrition in Hill Areas of Nepal.” Research Report 69, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. Li, Huey. 1993. “A Cross-Cultural Critique of Ecofeminism.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, edited by G. Gaard, 272–94. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mehra, Deepshikha. 2013. Gender Equity in Forest Management: Case Studies from Vidarbha Region of ­Maharashtra State. London: Lambert Academic Publishing. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of the Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San ­Francisco, CA: Harper and Row. Modi, Vijay, Susan McDade, Dominique Lallement, and Jamal Saghir. 2005. Energy Services for the ­Millennium Development Goals. New York: UNDP, World Bank, ESMAP. Nanda, Meera. 1991. “Is Modern Science a Western Patriarchal Myth? A Critique of the Populist Orthodoxy.” South Asia Bulletin 11 (1–2): 32–61. Narain, Urvashi, Shreekant Gupta, and Klaas van’t Veld. 2005. “Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship Between Household Incomes, Private Assets and Natural Assets.” Discussion Paper 05-18, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC. NCAER. 2001–2002. Evaluation Survey of the National Programme on Improved Chulha. New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research. Pandey, Shanta. 1990. “Women in Hattidunde Forest Management in Dhading District, Nepal.” MPE Series No. 9, ICIMOD, Kathmandu. Pokhrel, A. K., K. R. Smith, A. Khalakdina, A. Deuja, and M. N. Bates. 2005. “Case-Control Study of Indoor Cooking Smoke Exposure and Cataract in Nepal and India.” International Journal of Epidemiology 34 (3): 702–8. Salleh, Ariel K. 1984. “Deeper Than Deep Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection.” Environmental Ethics 16: 339–45. Sarin, Madhu, and R. Khanna. 1993. “Women Organize for Wasteland Development.” In Women and Wasteland Development in India, edited by Andrea Singh and Neera Burra, 129–69. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Schlager, Edella, and Elinor Ostrom 1992. “Property Rights and Natural Resources: A  Conceptual ­Analysis.” Land Economics 68 (3): 249–62.

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28 POVERTY İpek İlkkaracan and Emel Memiş

Introduction “Ending poverty” is the foremost global policy goal set by the post-2015 Development Agenda; Sustainable Development Goal 1 targets an end to “extreme poverty” by 2030 for all people everywhere. The debate around the definition and measurement of poverty therefore constitutes an important issue in research and policy. Feminist critiques and proposals have played a critical role in the evolution of this debate. This chapter presents a review of the gendered perspectives on the current conceptualizations and measurements of poverty starting with the feminist critiques of conventional income-based poverty measures, overlaps of these critiques with alternative nonmonetary measures, and focuses on a relatively recent advance in a gendered measure of poverty that integrates time-poverty and caring labor.

Conceptualizing and measuring poverty The conventional measure of poverty is the monetary one where poverty is defined as the lack of access to a minimum threshold level of income or consumption expenditure. The threshold is determined typically as an absolute value of basic needs (minimum cost of nutritional, clothing and shelter needs); or in some industrialized countries (e.g., the EU) as a relative value set at some share (40 to 60 percent) of median income. This threshold establishes the poverty line separating the poor from the non-poor. Assuming pooling of resources among household members in order to incur consumption expenditures, the poverty measure becomes operational at the household level. The total income or expenditure of the household is divided by the number of household members, adjusted for some equivalence scale based on the number of household members and their ages, which allows for economies of scale in consumption. Per person income/expenditures is then compared to the threshold to determine whether the household and its members are below the poverty line. By implication, each household member has the same poverty status. As such the conventional monetary measure of poverty allows a gender disaggregation of poverty rates only on the basis of the numbers of women and men who reside in household identified as “poor” or on the basis of the sex of the household head. One of the earliest gendered perspectives on the conventional income-poverty measure was by Pearce (1978), who 274

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identified a trend of “feminization of poverty” in the US on the basis of the increasing share of the population under the poverty line that lives in female-headed households. Feminization of poverty became an important aspect of the feminist discussions on poverty both inside and outside of the US, facilitating a focus on the poverty status of female-headed households. Feminist economists have contributed to this debate by pointing out the relationship between poverty of women heads, particularly single mothers, their unpaid care work, and the resultant constraints on their ability to participate in paid work (Peterson 1999). The Fourth UN Women World Conference in Beijing asserted the feminization of poverty trend at the global level, as it stated that women constituted 70 percent (and a rising share) of the world’s poor (Bradshaw, Chant, and Linneker 2019). More recent evidence, however, on the female-headed households being more prone to poverty is not conclusive on a global scale; female headship as a criterion does not necessarily identify homogeneity within the group; for instance, income of female-headed households receiving remittances may be well above the poverty threshold (Buvinić and Gupta 1997). Others suggest alternative dimensions of gender disaggregation as more appropriate standard in understanding women’s poverty, such as female maintenance, that is, households in which women are the primary providers or all-female households (Bradshaw, Chant, and Linneker 2019). Chant (2008) points out the weakness of the feminization of poverty hypothesis methodologically and analytically, and proposes alternative perspectives such as feminization of responsibility/obligation or feminization of survival. Empirical evidence on feminization of poverty is mixed. UN Women (2016) shows that women are more likely to live in the poorest households in 41 out of 75 developing countries— most of them in sub-Saharan Africa; yet notes “the much cited ‘factoid’ that 70 percent of the world’s poor are women is now widely regarded as improbable” (UN Women 2016, 307). Based on data compiled from 89 countries representing 84 percent of the population of developing economies, Munoz-Boudet et al. (2018) present some evidence in support of feminization of poverty, while not uniform across regions. They find that girls and women in reproductive age have a higher likelihood of living in poor households (105 girls for every 100 boys live in extreme poor households; 122 women for every 100 men in the 25–34 age group live in poor households). Contrary to the focus on female-headed households as the locus of feminization of poverty, the study shows majority of the women living in poor households are in nuclear couple households with a male partner and children. Moreover, extreme poverty rate seems positively correlated with the gender poverty gap by region (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa, home to most of the global extreme poor, has the largest gender poverty gap, while Europe and Central Asia, the region with the lowest extreme poverty rate, has the smallest gender poverty gap.).

Gender critiques of the monetary measures of poverty In addition to the debate on female household headship as indicator of poverty, much of the feminist discussion on poverty has focused on critique of use of monetary definitions and measures of poverty. The feminist critiques proceed on several grounds. First, the adoption of the household rather than the individual as the unit of measurement neglects intra-household inequalities and fails to reflect the poverty of women in male-headed households. Feminists find the assumption of equally shared poverty in a household problematic as research provides some evidence to the contrary (Folbre 1986; Kabeer 1994). For example, based on UK data, Lundberg, Pollak, and Wales (1997) show that intra-household allocation of consumption expenditures depends on income-earning status. Sen (1984) points out in many local cultural contexts, particularly in the Global South, girls are discriminated relative to boys living in the 275

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same household. Harris (1990) provides evidence of calorie-intake inequality among household members in South Asia. Haddad and Kanbur (1990) point to the serious consequences of ignoring intra-household inequality in the measurement and decomposition of inequality and poverty, which reveal the insufficiency of unitary approaches to household and intra-household allocation. The unitary household approach has been criticized for conceptualizing the household as a unit of harmony where all resources are shared equally among members. A recent empirical study for the EU shows that the gender gap in the financial dependency rate, an indicator of vulnerability to poverty, is much larger than that in the conventional income poverty rate; hence the latter leads to a substantial underestimation of women’s poverty risk (Corsi, Botti, and D’Ippoliti 2016). Another feminist critique of the income poverty measure is that the exclusive focus on monetary resources misses out on the crucial aspects of women’s impoverishment. In many contexts discriminatory gender norms and structures lead to women’s deprivation beyond access to income and consumption, through illiteracy and lack of access to basic rights. This feminist critique overlaps with Sen’s capability approach to poverty, which is the primary alternative to the conventional monetary approach. Here poverty is conceptualized as deprivation of capabilities to achieve basic human functionings; such as the ability to be well nourished, sheltered, clothed, autonomous, the ability to participate in society and lead a dignified life (Fukuda-Par 2003). These insights have been influential in shifting poverty research from a focus merely on the lack of private income/consumption toward extended notions that include a paucity of opportunities to access social resources and services, autonomy and human dignity. The capability approach led to the rise of the concept of “human poverty,” which is defined as the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development, namely to lead a long, healthy, creative life and to enjoy a decent standard of living, freedom, dignity, self-esteem and the respect of others (UNDP 1997, 5). Unlike income poverty, human poverty is multidimensional, with income as just one dimension among others. The Human Poverty Index (HPI), developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is a composite index of three pillars composed of indicators of access to a healthy life (probability at birth of not surviving to age 40), access to education (adult illiteracy rate), and access to a decent standard of living (percent of population not using an improved water source and percent of children under weight-forage). While there are differentiated HPI measures for different levels of development, there is no gender-differentiated HPI. The UNDP’s current gender indexes, the Gender Inequality Index and Gender Development Index, encompass dimensions that overlap with the HPI and are able to capture the extent of gender gaps in capability deprivations (UNDP 2019). Since 2010 HPI was discontinued in favor of a multidimensional poverty index (MPI), developed by the Alkire-Foster method (Alkire et al. 2015). However, MPI relies on the household as the unit in its identification of people in poverty (Gaddis, Klasen, and Lahoti 2018). An extension of multidimensional analysis of poverty is the social exclusion approach, deemed more relevant for developed economies (Laderchi, Saith, and Stewart 2003). Social exclusion is conceptualized as a complex and multi-dimensional process, defined as deprivation in terms of psychological well-being and mental health, ability to access basic services and social protection and ability to participate “in the normal relationships and activities, available to the majority of people in a society, whether in economic, social, cultural or political arenas,” such as basic education, regular decent employment, public transport (EU 2010, 1). Since these indicators can be measured at the individual level, it becomes possible to identify social exclusion in a gender-disaggregated manner similar to human poverty. In addition to underscoring the need to go beyond merely the lack of access to monetary resources, feminists also critique the conventional income measure of poverty for failing to 276

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make an accurate assessment of the magnitude of true monetary resources accessible to a household (Peterson 1999; Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2016). The income measure does not take into account the necessary expenditures in order attain certain capabilities (or social inclusion), such as spending on childcare that a working-age adult needs to incur in order for her to be able to hold a job in the labor market and earn income. Two households with the same level of per capita income, but one with small children and one without children are assessed to have the same status with respect to a monetary poverty threshold, despite their different needs to achieve the same abilities. Hence feminists suggest that single mothers’ poverty is in fact higher than that measured by conventional measures (Folbre 1984; Albelda and Tilly 1997). Following the 1997 Welfare Reform in the US single mothers in poverty faced welfare-to-work obligations, which creates a vicious cycle whereby they are unable to move from welfare to jobs: as the sole adult in the household, they face gender discrimination in the labor market, and are constrained by lack of time and money necessary to raise children. Albelda (2011) suggests that an important mechanism underlying women’s poverty is the structural functioning of the care economy whereby women absorb the economic costs of caring for children (and other care-dependent groups).

Access to time as a dimension of poverty As an extension of the feminist insights into linkages between women’s poverty and unpaid care work, a recent gendered approach to poverty builds on Vickery (1977) to emphasize the importance of access to time. Here, time poverty is both a capability deprivation and a source of material deprivation. Accordingly, taking care of children, other dependents, and adult household members, requires access to time for care and household production beyond simply monetary resources. Vickery’s pioneering work was followed by Cash, Sellers, and Claps (2005) who show the time-use differences between women who head households receiving aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) vis-à-vis other families in the US. Harvey and Mukhopadhyay (2007) and Burchardt (2000) illustrate the cases of Canada and the United Kingdom respectively in terms of estimations of time-adjusted poverty thresholds and calculation of time-poverty rates. Time-use data has served as an essential tool in quantitative assessments of contribution of unpaid work to well-being and in poverty measurement (Floro 1995). Time is acknowledged as the universal input necessary for doing anything and hence the ultimate “currency” for equality and justice (Goodin et al. 2008). Based on Indian time-use data, Hirway (2010) proposes the intra—household division of work as a significant aspect of poverty. Antonopoulos and Memis (2010) point out that the well-being of the members of households depends on a combination of paid work, unpaid work (such as cooking, cleaning, attending to the needs of young children, the elderly, etc.) and publicly provided goods and services to ensure access to what is deemed to be the socially necessary consumption of basic goods. Each has its own time requirements, which vary considerably within a country as well as across countries with different societal trends, social, political and economic structures. The intra-household gender allocation of unpaid work determines the intra-household gender inequalities in access to time for paid work (and for leisure); this gender distribution of labor underlies the gender differences in income and consumption poverty as well as time-poverty. Zacharias (2011) argues that the standard measures implicitly assume that all households and individuals have enough time to adequately attend to the needs of household members including, for example, caring for children. These measures ignore the fact that unpaid household production contributes to the fulfillment of material needs and wants that are essential to attaining a minimum standard of living. However, some households may not have sufficient time 277

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and thus experience “time deficits.” If a household experiencing a time deficit cannot afford to cover it by buying market substitutes (e.g., hiring a care provider), the official poverty threshold would be an understatement of the requirements of that household for attaining a minimum standard of living. In this way, official estimates of poverty will underestimate the scope and the depth of poverty. In addition, time deficits themselves constitute a form of deprivation, especially when they occur in combination with other types of social and economic disadvantages faced by those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder (Srivastava and Floro 2017). The concept of “extended income” has drawn attention to the fact that necessities of life cannot be secured just by market transactions and money income (Suh and Folbre 2016). Empirical studies of time poverty set a time-poverty threshold (e.g., 12 hours of work and commute time per day) above which an individual is considered time poor. Bardasi and Wodon (2006) found that women are more likely to be time poor compared to men based on a set of time-poverty measures, while Gammage (2010) showed that women were more likely to be both time and income poor in Guatemala. Arora (2015) estimated that the gender difference in time poverty in rural Mozambique is exacerbated when she considered simultaneous care work, carried out almost entirely by women. Moreover, women’s time poverty is not responsive to standard measures of economic power, such as asset ownership or income. Among more recent attempts the empirical measure of Levy Economics Institute Measure for Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) provides multi-country evidence on the interlinkages between time and income for measurement of well-being. The LIMTIP constitutes a two-dimensional poverty measure incorporating the time deficits into the measures of income poverty (Zacharias 2011). The LIMTIP assesses the poverty threshold on the basis of access to (or lack thereof) two resources: monetary income (which enables the consumption of market produced goods and services) and time (which enables the consumption of household produced goods and services as well as consumption of leisure). As such the application of the LIMTIP measure requires both household income and expenditure data and household time-use data. As it is almost never the case that a single data set entails both types of data, the LIMTIP studies typically make use of matched data sets (income and time-use). Empirical applications so far entail Argentina, Chile and Mexico (Antonopoulos et al. 2017), South Korea (Zacharias, Masterson, and Kim 2014), Turkey (Zacharias, Masterson, and Memis 2014; İlkkaracan et al. 2020), Ghana and Tanzania (Zacharias et al. 2018) and Italy (Aloe 2020). These studies show why considering unpaid work time, household production and inequalities in time use is critical to understanding poverty and designing effective policies for poverty reduction. A comprehensive measure that accounts for not only access to income but also unpaid work time reveals a hidden dimension of deprivation invisible to the conventional monetary measure of poverty (and hence un-captured by the official poverty rates). A common finding across the countries is that LIMTIP poverty rates are notably higher than official poverty rates in most countries revealing a substantial number of “hidden poor.” In the case of Korea, the LIMTIP rates are higher than the official poverty rate for particular household types, “non-employed male head with employed spouse,” “single female-head” and “dual-earner” households, pointing to the gendered nature of working poverty in Korea. Another common finding across the LIMTIP country studies is that the time-poverty rates are higher for employed women and men living in income-poor households than their counterparts living in non-income poor households. In addition, employed women generally have higher timepoverty rates than employed men both in income-poor and non-income poor households (Figure 28.1). The gender differences in time-poverty rates are striking when the hours of employment are controlled for. Women suffer from higher time-poverty rates particularly when in employment, with the risk increasing with employment hours; in Turkey, for example, employed women’s time 278

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Figure 28.1 Time poverty rates of employed women and men by poverty status (%) Source: Conference presentation by Zacharias, Masterson, and Memis (2017) 19–20 June, Istanbul, HDR 2016 Regional Launch Conference.

poverty rate is as high as 60 percent for those with full-time jobs (36–50 hours per week) compared to less than 10 percent time-poverty rate for their male counterparts (Figure 28.2). These reflect the dual workload that employed women carry (workplace production and household production) and the severely unequal division of care work within the household. Even nonemployed women, especially in the rural areas, face the risk of time poverty due to the high demands of household production (Figure 28.2). Low wage rates, particularly for women, and long working hours are the main underlying causes of time and income poverty. For example, counterfactual analyses based on full-­ employment simulations show that, in Turkey and Korea, a substantial number of currently non-employed women would likely procure only low-wage employment with long working hours, if they were employed. Increasing women’s employment, given current market conditions, does not guarantee an adequate rise in household income to lift the household out of poverty captured by the more comprehensive LIMTIP measure. The LIMTIP simulations show that the current policies adopted in many developing countries today to promote women’s employment (women as the “untapped” resource for economic growth) may help reduce official poverty rates, but will not rescue women from time poverty and their households from consumption shortages accounting for household production as well. These findings point toward the need for a multi-pronged policy strategy for poverty reduction: Access to decent jobs entailing decent wages (to cover the cost of market substitutes for household production) plus public provisioning of social care services. A simulation based on such a policy shows empirically that access to early childhood care services reduces employed 279

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Figure 28.2 The incidence of time poverty in Turkey by weekly hours of employment (%) Source: Zacharias, Masterson, and Memis (2014)

Table 28.1 Change in time-poverty rates through job creation and access to early childhood education and care services (ECEC) in Turkey Reference Population

Job Recipient Households with kids age 0/5 years and have ECEC Access (% of households)

By Sex

Women

Men

All

Time-poor—baseline Time-poor post-job creation effect Time-poor—total effect (job creation together with access to childcare services)

16.4 51.0 28.7

14.8 35.4 13.5

15.6 43.2 21.0

Source: İlkkaracan et al. 2020.

women’s time poverty risk in Turkey (İlkkaracan et al. 2020). While the baseline time poverty rate for women in households with unemployed or non-employed adults with small children (predominantly low-income households) is 16.4 percent, with the assignment of a full-time job to the employment eligible prime working-age women, it is estimated that their time poverty rate increases to 51 percent. With simultaneous access to childcare services, however, the time poverty rate decreases almost by half to 28.7 percent (Table 28.1). The findings also indicate that raising the opportunity costs of the household production work of women through an equitable wage policy and increasing decent employment opportunities may trigger a transformation in the division of household labor, motivating household members to adopt more equal sharing of household production that could reduce time poverty and, hence, help improve their quality of life. However, this needs to be accompanied by social provisioning of care services that are widely accessible and available for all. 280

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Using a combined time- and income-based poverty measure acknowledges the contribution of (women’s) unpaid care work to well-being and integrate unpaid care needs with measures of poverty. Not limited to household-level monetary (material) well-being, these measures provide assessments based on the differences in women’s and men’s time poverty and show that this lies at the root cause of women’s constraints in access to employment and own earnings and hence of poverty at the household level. Nevertheless, while time poverty measure can be disaggregated by gender there are still difficulties in adequately disaggregating the income/consumption dimension within the household. This, on the other hand, is also a common problem of recently developed alternative multidimensional poverty measures (Gaddis, Klasen, and Lahoti 2018).

Conclusion Feminist conceptualizations and measures of poverty have moved far beyond the feminization of poverty hypothesis which focuses on female- versus male-headed households or simple headcounts of women versus men living in income-poor households. Nevertheless, there is a continued reliance on these conventional approaches in the mainstream literature. Bradshaw, Chant, and Linneker (2019, 2) argue this persistence reflects “available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data” and they suggest there is still need for methodologies and tools to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty. An important feminist contribution to the debates on poverty has been the introduction of household production, unpaid work, caring labor and the time necessary for undertaking them as an important component of well-being or deprivation thereof. Empirical research has clearly shown that policy interventions that solely target income deficits without information on women’s and men’s time availability are highly likely to aggravate existing disparities. These findings provide important insights for designing effective policies to eliminate poverty by addressing the diverse care needs of households and unveils the importance of social provisioning as an essential component of anti-poverty strategies. Poverty reduction with gender equality and women’s empowerment (improved capabilities and social inclusion) requires simultaneous access to decent employment (meaning not only decent wages and job security but also as importantly employment conditions that allow for work-life balance) along with access to quality social care services. Such a gendered approach unveils the strategy of promoting dual earner—dual carer households as an anti-poverty strategy. This is supported by feminist empirical work, which shows that dual earner households have higher resilience to economic shocks and poverty risk than single-male breadwinners (Değirmenci and İlkkaracan 2013).

References Albelda, Randy. 2011. “Time Binds: US Antipoverty Policies, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Single Mothers.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 189–214. Albelda, Randy, and Chris Tilly. 1997. Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty. Boston, MA: South End Press. Alkire, Sabina, James E. Foster, Suman Seth, Maria Emma Santos, José Roche, and Paola Ballon. 2015. Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis: Chapter  5—the Alkire-Foster Counting Methodology, 1–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aloe, Erica. 2020. “Unpaid Work, the Household and the Value of Time: An Analysis of the Effects of the Unequal Distribution of Unpaid Care and Domestic Work Within the Household and Beyond.” European Ph.D. dissertation in Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies, University of Rome, Sapienza. Antonopoulos, Rania, and Emel Memis. 2010. “Time and Poverty from a Developing Country Perspective.” Working Paper No. 600, Levy Economics Institute, New York.

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İpek İlkkaracan and Emel Memiş Antonopoulos, Rania, Valeria Esquivel, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias. 2017. “Time and Income Poverty in the City of Buenos Aires.” In Gender and Time Use in a Global Context, edited by Rachel Connelly and Ebru Kongar, 161–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Arora, Diksha. 2015. “Gender Differences in Time Poverty in Rural Mozambique.” Review of Social Economy 73 (2): 196–221. Bardasi, Elena, and Quentin Wodon. 2006. “Working Long Hours and Having No Choice: Time Poverty in Guinea.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 45–78. Beneria, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria S. Floro. 2016. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as If All People Mattered, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Bradshaw, Sarah, Sylvia Chant, and Brian Linneker. 2019. “Challenges and Changes in Gendered Poverty: The Feminization, De-Feminization, and Re-Feminization of Poverty in Latin America.” Feminist Economics 25 (1): 119–44. Burchardt, Tania. 2000. “Social Exclusion.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Work, edited by Martin Davies, 320–21. Oxford: Blackwell. Buvinić, Mayra, and Geeta Rao Gupta. 1997. “Female-Headed Households and Female-Maintained Families: Are They Worth Targeting to Reduce Poverty in Developing Countries?” Economic Development and Cultural Change 45 (2): 259–80. Cash, Scottye J., Sherrill L. Sellers, and Matthew Claps. 2005. “Money Equals Time: Influence of Poverty Status on Hours Spent Doing Housework.” Journal of Poverty 9 (2): 89–109. Chant, Sylvia. 2008. “The ‘Feminization of Poverty’ and the ‘Feminization’ of Anti-poverty Programmes: Room for Revision?” Journal of Development Studies 44 (2): 165–97. Corsi, Marcella, Fabrizio Botti, and Carlo D’Ippoliti. 2016. “The Gendered Nature of Poverty in the EU: Individualized Versus Collective Poverty Measures.” Feminist Economics 22 (4): 82–100. Değirmenci, Serkan, and İpek İlkkaracan. 2013. “The Impact of Household Labor Supply Structure on Poverty and Income Inequality.” Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies 15 (2): 121–33. European Union. 2010. The European Social Fund and Social Inclusion. Belgium: European Union. https:// ec.europa.eu/employment_social/esf/docs/sf_social_inclusion_en.pdf. Folbre, Nancy. 1984. “The Pauperization of Motherhood: Patriarchy and Public Policy in the United States.” Review of Radical Political Economics 16 (4): 72–88. ———. 1986. “Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics.” World Development 24 (10): 1597–609. Floro, Maria S. 1995. “Women’s Well-Being, Poverty, and Work Intensity.” Feminist Economics 1 (3): 1–25. Fukuda-Par, Sakiko. 2003. “The Human Development Paradigm: Operationalizing Sen’s Ideas on Capabilities.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 301–17. Gaddis, Isis, Stephan Klasen, and Rahul Lahoti. 2018. “An Individual Look at Poverty, Across Multiple Dimensions.” Accessed June  2020. https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/individual-lookpoverty-across-multiple-dimensions. Gammage, Sarah. 2010. “Time Pressed and Time Poor: Unpaid Household Work in Guatemala.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 79–112. Goodin, Robert E., James Mahmud Rice, Antti Parpo, and Lina Eriksson. 2008. Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haddad, Lawrence, and Ravi Kanbur. 1990. “How Serious Is the Neglect of Intrahousehold Inequality?” The Economic Journal 100 (402): 866–81. Harris, Barbara. 1990. “The Intra Family Distribution of Hunger in South Asia.” In The Political Economy of Hunger, edited by Jean Dréze and Amartya Sen, 351–424. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, Andrew S., and Arun K. Mukhopadhyay. 2007. “When Twenty-Four Hours Is Not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents.” Social Indicators Research 82 (1): 57–77. Hirway, Indira. 2010. “Understanding Poverty: Insights Emerging from Time Use of the Poor.” In Unpaid Work and the Economy, edited by Rania Antonopoulos and Indira Hirway, 22–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan. İlkkaracan, İpek, Kijong Kim, Tom Masterson, Emel Memiş, and Ajit Zacharias. 2020. “The Impact of Investing in Social Care on Employment Generation, Time- and Income-Poverty and Gender Gaps: A  Macro-Micro Policy Simulation for Turkey.” Gender and Macromodeling CWE-GAM Working Paper No. 20-06, doi:10.17606/3dg5-sw71. Kabeer, Naila. 1994. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Laderchi, Caterina Ruggeri, Ruhi Saith, and Frances Stewart. 2003. “Does It Matter That We Do Not Agree on the Definition of Poverty? A Comparison of Four Approaches.” Oxford Development Studies 31 (3): 243–74.

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Poverty Lundberg, Shelly J., Robert A. Pollak, and Terence J. Wales. 1997. “Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources? Evidence from the United Kingdom Child Benefit.” The Journal of Human Resources 32 (3): 463–80. Munoz-Boudet, Ana Maria, Paola Buitrago, Benedict Leroy de la Briere, David Newhouse, Eliana Rubiano Matulevich, Kinnon Scott, and Pablo Suarez-Becerra. 2018. “Gender Differences in Poverty and Household Composition Through the Life-Cycle.” Policy Research Working Paper 8360, World Bank, Washington, DC. Pearce, Diana. 1978. “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work and Welfare.” Urban and Social Change Review 11 (1): 28–36. Peterson, Janice. 1999. “Feminization of Poverty.” In The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, edited by Janice Peterson and Margaret Lewis. Cheltenham: Edward Edgar. Sen, Amartya. 1984. Resources, Values and Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Srivastava, Abhilasha, and Maria Sagrario Floro. 2017. “The Dual Problem of Unemployment and Time Poverty in South Africa: Understanding their Linkages.” In Gender and Time-Use in Global Context: The Economics of Employment and Unpaid Labor, edited by Rachel Connelly and Ebru Kongar, 193–230. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Suh, Joo Yeoun, and Nancy Folbre. 2016. “Valuing Unpaid Child Care in the US: A Prototype Satellite Account Using the American Time Use Survey.” Review of Income and Wealth 62 (4): 668–84. UNDP. 1997. Human Development to Eradicate Poverty. New York: UNDP. ———. 2019. Human Development Report. New York: UNDP. UN Women. 2016. Progress of World’s Women 2015–2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights. New York: UN Women. Vickery, Clair. 1977. “The Time-Poor: A New Look at Poverty.” The Journal of Human Resources 12 (1): 27–48. Zacharias, Ajit. 2011. “The Measurement of Time and Income Poverty.” Working Paper No. 690, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, New York. Zacharias, Ajit, Thomas Masterson, and Emel Memis. 2014. “Time Deficits and Poverty: The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty for Turkey.” Ekonomik Yaklasim [Economic Perspectives] 25 (91): 1–28. Zacharias, Ajit, Thomas Masterson, and Kijong Kim. 2014. The Measurement of Time and Income Poverty in Korea: Research Project Report. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Zacharias, Ajit, Thomas Masterson, and Emel Memis. 2017. “Time Deficits and Poverty [Conference Presentation].” The Regional Launch of UNDP 2016 Global Human Development Report, İstanbul, Turkey, June 19–20. http://tegam.itu.edu.tr/events/past-events/undp-2017. Zacharias, Ajit, Thomas Masterson, Fernando Rios-Avila, Kijong Kim, and Tamar Khitarishvili. 2018. “The Measurement of Time and Consumption Poverty in Ghana and Tanzania.” Research Project Report, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

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29 FAMILY FORMATION IN THE US AND WESTERN EUROPE Elaine McCrate

Introduction In the 1970s, in the US and western Europe, the female homemaker–male breadwinner family was strongly normative. Partners delayed childbirth until marriage and stayed together until death, raising their own children (and no one else’s) until the children were launched as adults. However, today families in the US and western Europe do not follow such a predictable pattern. First, the gender division of labor is much more fluid; the most common arrangement for opposite-sex couples is a male breadwinner who spends a little more time in unpaid work than 40 years ago, and a female who is much more likely to do paid work, often part-time, while performing a disproportionate share of unpaid work. Moreover, couples (same-sex or opposite sex) often live together before marriage or instead of it, often having children together, but often breaking up and sometimes re-partnering before the children are grown. A growing minority of people remain childless, some willingly and others not so. In short, in the US and western Europe, as in the rest of the world, there are now many paths to forming families, which have different welfare implications for women, men, and children. This chapter provides a statistical overview of these trends and reviews the relevant economic theories.

A statistical portrait of family formation in the US and western Europe Legally or religiously recognized families may be formed through marriage or childbearing (or the co-residence of kin). Families may also form through cohabitation without legal and religious recognition—sometimes also without social approbation and various forms of assistance provided in many countries to legally married couples, such as tax or retirement benefits. This section provides a statistical picture of the incidence and sequencing of childbearing, cohabitation, and marriage. The mean age at first marriage has been rising steadily in all OECD countries since 1990 (OECD 2019). In the US, when the delay of marriage is considered along with a high (but not rising) divorce rate and extended periods of widowhood, the proportion of American women aged 15 and over who are currently married has fallen steadily since about 1960, and in 2019 hovers around 50 percent (United States Census Bureau 2019). 284

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The proportion married is considerably smaller for Black women: 32  percent (United States Census Bureau 2019). By age 45, nearly 25  percent of the 1950–1955 birth cohort of Blacks had not yet married, compared to about 10 percent for Whites. However, among those who married, Blacks and Whites divorced at approximately equal rates, while Blacks actually spent more time in their marriages before divorce compared to Whites (Stevenson and Wolfers 2007). Legal recognition of same-sex marriages has to some extent offset the decline in the likelihood of marriage. As of August 2017, 27 countries recognized same-sex marriage: five in Latin America (including some jurisdictions in Mexico) and 17 in Europe, as well as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US (Pew Research Center 2017a). Same-sex marriages may have different patterns and trends of marriage and childbearing than opposite-sex marriages, but the data only rarely identify same-sex marriages. Consequently, all references to marriage in this chapter concern opposite-sex marriages unless stated otherwise. Today, many families in OECD countries start through cohabitation rather than marriage. In many of the countries with the greatest delay of marriage, there are extended periods of cohabitation preceding or instead of marriage. In EU countries in 2011, 14.4 percent of 20–34-yearolds cohabited and 24.9 percent lived in formally recognized partnerships (OECD 2019). At the same time, the age of mothers at first birth (among those with any birth) has increased steadily in all OECD countries since 1995. In 2017 women’s age at first birth was 26.8 in the US; 29.3 in Sweden; 31.1 in Italy; and 30.7 in Japan (Table 29.1). But typically, women’s age at first marriage has been increasing faster than their age at first birth, contributing to greater non-marital childbearing. For example, in the US, women’s age at first marriage increased by 11.8 percent between 1995 and 2016, while women’s age at first birth increased by only 9.4 percent. In 2016, 40 percent of children born in the US had unmarried mothers. Among Blacks, the percentage is 70 percent (Martin et al. 2018). Within five years of a birth, about one-fourth of American cohabitors with a birth got married, one-fourth continued to cohabit without marriage, and one-half broke up (McLanahan 2011). Although non-marital parenting is less stable than marital parenting in all the wealthy countries studied by Hueveline, Timberlake, and Table 29.1 Changes in women’s mean age at first marriage and mean age at first birth across different welfare regimes

US Italy Sweden Japan

Marriage Childbirth Marriage Childbirth Marriage Childbirth Marriage Childbirth

1995 (1998 in Sweden)

2017

Percent change (%)

24.5 24.5 26.9 28.1 29.7 27.7 26.3 27.5

27.4 26.8 32.2 31.1 33.8 29.3 29.4 30.7

11.8 9.4 19.7 10.7 13.8 5.8 11.8 11.6

Source: OECD 2019 Notes: Comparison of ages at marriage and childbirth are only illustrative, because some women have not yet had a child or gotten married. The documentation does not explain whether ages at first birth and first marriage pertain to everyone who had a first birth or marriage in that year, or if they are lifetime estimates for the entire population using synthetic cohort methods.

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Furstenberg (2003), there is a wide range of international variation in the stability of romantic relationships that involve children. Relationships of marriage or cohabitation, with or without children, were much more unstable in the US compared to all the 16 European countries examined by Andersson (2003) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Swedish children born to cohabiting parents were less likely to experience a parental break-up than American children born to married parents (Hueveline, Timberlake, and Furstenberg 2003, 57). In the US, the growth of non-marital parenting has been concentrated among those with less education (Carlson and England 2011). The lack of education and the lack of time, money, and social networks from two parents have contributed to growing inequality of opportunity for children, which has been compounded by increasing marital homogamy—that is, by people increasingly selecting spouses of similar income and socioeconomic status (EspingAndersen 2009).

Economic theory of family formation In the economic theory of family formation, the main questions are to what extent families form because of mutual gains for all members, to what extent family formation is contingent on the distribution of gains to individual family members, and to what extent allegiance to gender norms overrides conventional economic incentives.

Conventional models of marriage and childbearing The most widely accepted economic theory of family formation is Becker’s (1981) theory of marriage. According to this model, because of men’s higher wages and women’s assumed higher productivity in household labor, men have a comparative advantage in market work and women in unpaid work. In order to maximize full (market and household production) income, men specialize in market work and women specialize in unpaid work. Married couples also benefit from economies of scale. Among African-Americans, the comparative advantage of men in market work is relatively small because of a smaller gender wage gap than among Whites. In addition, the so-called War on Drugs in the 1980s resulted in the excessive incarceration of non-college-educated Black men (disproportionate both in comparison to Whites, and in comparison to Black-White relative use and sales of drugs) (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2009). Individuals with a criminal record have a much harder time finding a job, making them less desirable marriage partners (Wilson 1996). Not surprisingly, then, men who have been incarcerated marry much later (or not at all) than men who have not. Men who are already married are also at much higher risk of divorce if they go to prison or jail (Western 2006). In addition, Chinese import penetration increasingly undermined young men’s earnings advantage relative to young women after 1990. Where Chinese import penetration was most intense, men aged 18–39 also became more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as crime, and drug and alcohol abuse, further reducing their marriage prospects (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2017). When recent cohorts of young non-Hispanic Whites with less than a college degree have entered the labor market, they have encountered progressively worsening opportunities, across cohorts and throughout their working lives. In turn, the erosion of opportunity has affected their intimate relationships, their children’s well-being, and ultimately their morbidity and mortality (Case and Deaton 2017). Case and Deaton (2017) associated cumulatively worsening labor market conditions for this population with a decline in wages and prime-age men’s labor force participation, and a rise in non-marriage well into middle age, for each successive cohort of this 286

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population. Their outcomes data are consistent only with the cohort series on wages, not the annual data, strongly suggesting that the problem is something that builds over a lifetime. And successive cohorts of college-educated Whites do not display the same pattern of progressively worse conditions after labor market entry (Case and Deaton 2017). Becker (1981) also developed a model of childbearing—not specifically marital or ­nonmarital—in which childbearing is driven by its cost as well as the preferences of potential parents. The cost of children equals direct expenditures on housing, food, formal education, and so forth, and the time costs of caring for them. At least in the US, the time cost of children—­principally mothers’ sacrifice of market time—comprises the greater part of the cost of children in the first 18 years (Folbre 2008). The higher the mother’s wage, the greater the opportunity cost of children, hence the fewer births that Becker would expect. While Becker’s theories of marriage and childbearing can account for many empirical patterns in traditional marriage and family life, they do not fully account for recent changes in family formation. First, neither biological differences nor the gender wage differential, the drivers in Becker’s model, explains same-sex marriage. Second, Becker’s theory does not explain the growing number of cohabiting partners, who often have children together, but many of whom never get married and are at high risk of splitting up. (This is a challenge for everyone who is trying to understand contemporary families.) Third, if women’s comparative advantage in unpaid work derives primarily from their lower wages, then how can we explain the 37.9 percent of American marriages in 2015 in which the wife earned more than the husband (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019)? In particular, couples where wives earn more than their husbands are almost twice as likely to be Black relative to couples where husbands earn more (Murray-Close and Heggeness 2018, 6). Becker might have expected a reversal of gender specialization, with women specializing in the market and men in the home. Although we do not know how many of these “female breadwinner” marriages involve role-switching husbands, it is likely that the proportion is far below 37.9 percent. Fourth, Becker’s framework also assumes there are few alternatives to parents caring for their own children and that most jobs restrict opportunities for individuals to combine work and childrearing. Today, this is no longer strictly true for many workers in many economies of the Global North. Public provision of high-quality, affordable childcare has expanded rapidly throughout much of western Europe, although not the US and Japan. Moreover, the European Union’s (EU’s) 1992 Pregnant Workers Directive mandates that EU countries provide a minimum period of job-protected maternity leave for the health of the mother and the child, with an adequate income. The majority of EU member states provide 100 percent income replacement for a substantial portion of the maternity leave, and the vast majority provides more than 65 percent income replacement (EUR-Lex 2019; European Parliament 2016). In addition, all European countries, Canada, and Japan also provide paid gender-neutral parental leave at high income-replacement rates, usually job-protected, and often with incentives for men to use the leave (Plantenga, this volume). Things are now changing somewhat even in the US. Many large American firms are now keenly interested in attracting college-educated women, who now outnumber their male counterparts in the labor force (Pew Research Center 2017b). These firms have begun to provide benefits such as paid parental leave for their professional and managerial workers (although much less frequently for other workers). In addition, the Family and Medical Leave Act mandates unpaid but job-protected leave for many new parents or workers coping with serious illness in their family, although the eligibility criteria exclude many part-time workers (Albelda, this volume). Addressing shortcomings of the national law, as of August 2019, four American states had implemented paid family leave laws (Albelda, this volume). 287

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Becker would also expect less childbearing among women with higher wages, ceteris paribus. However, while this still seems to be the case within countries, the relationship between wages and labor force participation, on the one hand, and fertility, on the other, has become positive across the Global North, when men share the burden of household labor more equally, perhaps because of high-wage women’s greater bargaining power. For example, in countries where men do more household production, women continue to maintain relatively high fertility levels while participating in the labor force (de Laat and Sevilla-Sanz 2011; Nagase and Brinton 2017). Countries that provide paid job-protected parental leave and high-quality low-cost nonparental childcare also reduce women’s cost of childbearing and may increase fertility (Feyrer, Sacerdote, and Stern 2008).

Cooperation and conflict In the 1970s and 1980s, Marxists and feminists vigorously debated the family under capitalism, posing a question similar to Becker’s: can we explain the family’s durability on the basis of gains accruing to all its members? Humphries (1977) argued that the working-class family has persisted because it redistributes family income, including the products of household labor, according to well-defined expectations of reciprocity, thereby provisioning all its members, including children and the elderly. As such, it provides insurance to members in situations where formal insurance markets fail to develop or prove inadequate. The 19th- and early 20th-century workers’ struggle for a family wage sought an adequate standard of living while resisting the proletarianization of all family members. The family wage also defended workers and families against demeaning institutions, such as poorhouses. Finally, familial relationships, by promoting reciprocity, contributed to the class cohesion that was necessary to resist capitalism. Humphries recognized that a family wage for men reinforced gender inequality in the home. However, she argued that women as well as men benefited in very specific and important ways from the defense of the family wage. Unlike Becker or Humphries, Hartmann (1981) emphasized conflict in the family. While recognizing that family members share common goals, she challenged the idea of the family as a unified interest group with respect to production and internal redistribution. Although adult members contribute to the entire family through money income or household production, they also pursue their individual gendered interests. Women’s exclusion from market opportunities, through such institutional factors as denial of abortion and men’s near monopolization of trade unions, ensured that men would control women’s labor and benefit from women’s provision of personal and household services, which in turn restricted women’s opportunities in the labor market. More recently, bargaining theory has integrated some of Humphries’ and Hartmann’s insights about families, by formalizing both the possibility of mutual gains and conflict over their distribution, and characterizing situations in which potential partners are able to reach agreement and thus to become or stay married, versus situations in which they do not. Applying the cooperative Nash bargaining model, potential marriage partners bargain for a share of the gains from marriage, which may assume a variety of forms, such as gains from trade (Becker), gains from solidarity (Humphries), and/or gains from love and companionship. There are many possible bargaining outcomes that leave both people and other family members better off together rather than separate. However, assuming that all the gains are fully distributed to the partners, if one spouse gets more, the other gets less. The ultimate division of the gains is bound by the partners’ threat points, which are the resources each would command in the event that they fail to reach an agreement, and thus get a divorce or fail to marry (Manser and Brown 288

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1980; McElroy and Horney 1981). The threat points depend on “extra-household environmental parameters,” such as public support if one is divorced (McElroy 1990). Each person’s ability to secure their objectives depends critically on their ability to enhance their fallback position (say, by identifying alternatives to marriage through the social welfare state), or their ability to sabotage the other person’s fallback position (e.g. by isolating them from family and friends who could help in the event of a breakup). The solution to the bargaining problem also depends on factors such as the parties’ stubbornness in bargaining. Sen (1990) integrated the ideas of conflict and cooperation for mutual gain in marriage in his concept of “cooperative conflicts.” While household members cooperate to seek prosperity for all members, they sometimes clash over the division of the gains. Cooperative conflict determines within-household distribution of work, resources, and decision-making authority. The arrangements that help the family as a whole may constrain individual members within it, in particular if they wish to pursue opportunities for non-gender-conforming work outside the home. Sen’s approach highlights the role of culture and norms in the gender division of labor. Moreover, social perceptions of the value of women’s and men’s contributions often militate against women, obscuring their individual interests and making them feel less entitled to household resources. In addition, because people often reject situations that violate long-standing norms, marriages might break up or fail to form when women become more effective breadwinners than men. In a frequency distribution of wives’ share of couples’ earnings, the proportion of couples falls sharply at exactly the point where women earn more than 50 percent (Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan 2015). Moreover, in couples where women do earn more than their husbands, spouses may try to reconfirm their allegiance to gender norms. For example, in Australia, women who earn more than their husbands do more housework, not less (Bittman et al. 2003). In marriages where the wife earns more than the husband, both men and women incorrectly report their incomes to the Census Bureau, so that men’s earnings are exaggerated and women’s underestimated (Murray-Close and Heggeness 2018).

Explaining non-marital parenting Characteristics of unmarried couples with children vary across countries. In the US, these relationships are especially unstable, but in Scandinavia they are often long term and somewhat more like marriage. However, our understanding of the international differences in non-marital fertility is limited. Researchers on non-marital parenting in the US are reasonably certain that the consequences for children are usually not good (Carlson and England 2011). Children apparently do worse when they are born to unmarried parents, probably because of fewer economic and social resources and greater familial complexity and instability (McLanahan 2011). There are, however, many problems of causal inference in the literature, among them the fact that non-marital parenting is strongly associated with poverty and low parental education (England, McClintock, and Shafer 2011; Lundberg, Pollak, and Stearns 2016), possibly also because of selectivity. Child outcomes are better, however, in stable single-mother families, compared to families in which single mothers change partners (Osborne and McLanahan 2007). Why are families increasingly likely to be formed in situations that apparently jeopardize children? The growth of non-marital parenting in the US is not because of the growth of the welfare state. In fact, American welfare reform in 1996 greatly reduced public support for indigent single mothers. The declining availability of abortion may play a role. Childbearing outside marriage (as well as within) would be less likely when women have access to safe, legal, and affordable birth 289

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control and abortion. In recent decades, many abortion providers have closed their doors. State-level abortion rates fall by about 12 percent and birth rates increase by 2–3 percent when a woman’s residence is 100 miles farther from the nearest abortion provider (Joyce, Tan, and Zhang 2013). Unavailability of public funding for abortion for low-income women in many states has probably aggravated the situation, contributing to the social class differential in nonmarital births. In addition, anti-abortion activism has probably changed norms about childbearing, such that taking an unwanted pregnancy to term has become the moral thing to do (Morgan 2011). In contrast, Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz (1996) argued that the growing availability of contraception and abortion increased the incidence of non-marital births, by reducing the cost of non-marital sex. Men could more easily pressure women into no-commitment intercourse. Some of these women did not successfully use birth control or abortion because of indecision or religious conviction. The incidence of “shotgun marriages” fell and non-marital parenting by women increased. Thus, while many women benefited from abortion, some were hurt. However, this does not describe the situation in Japan, where abortion has been legal and uncontroversial for a long time, the norm of marital parenting remains strong, and non-marital births are still rare. The no-commitment sex argument also does not obviously explain the social class differential in non-marital births. There have been several attempts to explain it. First, England, McClintock, and Shafer (2011) point to three factors: the greater opportunity cost of childbearing for women with better job prospects; peer influences and identity formation associated with “college student” or “professional” that discourage early childbearing; and a class gradient in the belief in one’s own efficacy and the ability to self-regulate. These factors in turn affect sexual initiation and the consistency with which partners use birth control. The second type of explanation relates to non-college men’s diminished attractiveness as spouses, corresponding to their declining breadwinning opportunities (Wilson 1996). However, the explanation depends heavily on assumptions about gender norms, because men could do more household labor as wives’ incomes increase (Lundberg, Pollak, and Stearns 2016). Furstenberg (1988) argued that the decline in the gendered division of labor—stronger among low-income people because of men’s job losses—freed men from the expectation of primary breadwinning responsibility. They became free to participate more in their children’s lives, and some did. But marriage after parenting became more optional. Men increasingly eschewed traditional breadwinner obligations, and women got relatively more freedom to exit relationships with the fathers of their children. As fatherhood became more voluntary, only the most committed men, with the best economic prospects, chose parenting in the context of marriage. A final explanation of the rise in non-marital births among the less educated in the US starts with the observation that most non-marital births happen during cohabitation (Lundberg, Pollak, and Stearns 2016). Should the relationship end, moving out is far less complicated and costly than getting divorced, which entails judicial proceedings for the allocation of marital property and debt, as well as formal arrangements for children. As such, marriage is a strong commitment device that facilitates couples’ joint relationship-specific investments, especially in children. College-educated parents compound their children’s very early advantages in health and cognition with further investments over time. Consequently, more educated parents have stronger incentives than less educated ones to seek commitment devices that support intensive childrearing as a joint investment. Ultimately, the diverging economic fortunes of those with and without a college education explain the social class gradient in the rise of non-marital parenting. 290

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Conclusion Rapidly changing opportunities for women of different races, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic classes, in labor markets, reproductive control, and marriage markets, have produced a complicated variety of changes in family formation in affluent countries. These changes have revealed some shortcomings in Becker’s long-dominant theories of marriage and childbearing. Economic theory is increasingly open to exploring the causal status of family conflict as well as cooperation. There is also greater appreciation of the causal roles of gender norms and of inequality along many dimensions including gender. Both the new theory and its empirical development are in their formative stages. In particular, there has, to the best of my knowledge, been nothing published in Feminist Economics or other heterodox platforms about delayed marriage and rising non-marital parenting among Americans with low education. In the near future, self-identified feminist economists will hopefully have more to say about the effects on marriage of women’s rise in the labor market and men’s decline, and about the causes of nonmarital childbearing.

References Akerlof, George A., Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz. 1996. “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111 (2): 277–317. Andersson, Gunnar. 2003. “Dissolution of Unions in Europe: A Comparative Overview.” Working Paper, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. Accessed February 2019. www. academia.edu/23522572/Dissolution_of_unions_in_Europe_A_comparative_overview. Autor, David, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. 2017. “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men.” Unpublished Paper. Becker, Gary S. 1981. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bertrand, Marianne, Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan. 2015. “Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130 (2): 571–614. Bittman, Michael, Paula England, Liana Sayer, Nancy Folbre, and George Matheson. 2003. “When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work.” American Journal of Sociology 109 (1): 186–214. Carlson, Marcia J., and Paula England. 2011. “Social Class and Family Patterns in the United States.” In Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America, edited by Marcia J. Carlson and Paula England, 1–20. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. 2017. “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring): 397–443. de Laat, Joost, and Almudena Sevilla-Sanz. 2011. “The Fertility and Women’s Labor Force Participation Puzzle in OECD Countries: The Role of Men’s Home Production.” Feminist Economics 17 (2): 87–119. England, Paula, Elizabeth Aura McClintock, and Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer. 2011. “Class Differences in Birth Control Use and Unintended Pregnancies.” In Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal Society, edited by Paula England and Marcia Carlson, 21–49. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 2009. The Incomplete Revolution: Adapting to Women’s New Roles. Cambridge: Polity Press. EUR-Lex. “Access to European Law.” Document 31992L0085. Accessed September 2019. https://eurlex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/;ELX_SESSIONID=ZS9xJQxC1pPq1hkGyympG8GVJbL0X FS1q1vMgd8Qp1rGQcG57tCv!-1975213308?uri=CELEX:31992L0085. European Parliament. 2016. “Maternity and Paternity Leave in the EU.” Accessed September 2019. www. europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2016/593543/EPRS_ATA(2016)593543_EN.pdf. Feyrer, James, Bruce Sacerdote, and Ariel Dora Stern. 2008. “Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 (3): 3–22. Folbre, Nancy. 2008. Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Furstenberg, Frank F. 1988. “Good Dads-Bad Dads: Two Faces of Fatherhood.” In The Changing American Family and Public Policy, edited by Andrew J. Cherlin, 193–209. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

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Elaine McCrate Hartmann, Heidi I. 1981. “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework.” Signs 6 (3): 366–94. Hueveline, Patrick, Jeffrey M. Timberlake, and Frank F. Furstenberg. 2003. “Shifting Childrearing to Single Mothers: Results from 17 Western Countries.” Population and Development Review 29 (1): 47–71. Humphries, Jane. 1977. “Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (3): 241–58. Joyce, Ted, Ruoding Tan, and Yuxiu Zhang. 2013. “Abortion Before  & After Roe.” Journal of Health Economics 32 (5): 804–15. Lundberg, Shelly, Robert A. Pollak, and Jenna Stearns. 2016. “Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30 (2): 79–102. Manser, Marilyn, and Murray Brown. 1980. “Marriage and Household Decision-Making: A Bargaining Analysis.” International Economic Review 21 (1): 31–44. Martin, Joyce A., Brady E. Hamilton, Michelle J. K. Osterman, Anne K. Driscoll, and Patrick Drake. 2018. “National Vital Statistics Report.” Accessed March 2019. www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/ nvsr67_01.pdf. McElroy, Marjorie B. 1990. “The Empirical Content of Nash-Bargained Household Behavior.” Journal of Human Resources 25 (4): 559–83. McElroy, Marjorie B., and Mary J. Horney. 1981. “Nash-Bargained Household Decisions: Toward a Generalization of the Theory of Demand.” International Economic Review 22 (2): 333–49. McLanahan, Sara. 2011. “Family Instability and Complexity After a Nonmarital Birth: Outcomes for Children in Fragile Families.” In Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America, edited by Marcia J. Carlson and Paula England, 108–33. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morgan, S. Philip. 2011. “Thinking about Demographic Family Difference: Fertility Differentials in an Unequal Society.” In Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America, edited by Marcia J. Carlson and Paula England, 50–67. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Murray-Close, Marta, and Misty L. Heggeness. “Manning Up and Womaning Down: How Husbands and Wives Report Their Earnings When She Earns More.” Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division United States Census Bureau (SESHD), Working Paper # 2018–2020. Accessed November 2019. www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2018/demo/SEHSD-WP2018-20.pdf. Nagase, Nobuko, and Mary C. Brinton. 2017. “The Gender Division of Labor and Second Births: Labor Market Institutions and Fertility in Japan.” Demographic Research 36: 339–70. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2019. “OECD Family Database.” Accessed September 2019. www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm#structure. Osborne, Cynthia, and Sara McLanahan. 2007. “Partnership Instability and Child Well-Being.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 69 (4): 1065–83. Pew Research Center. 2017a. “Gay Marriage Around the World.” August  8. Accessed February  2019. www.pewforum.org/2017/08/08/gay-marriage-around-the-world-2013/. ———. 2017b. “Access to Paid Family Leave Varies Widely Across Employers, Industries.” March  23. Accessed March  2019. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/23/access-to-paid-family-leavevaries-widely-across-employers-industries/. Sen, Amartya. 1990. “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts.” In Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development, edited by Irene Tinker, 123–49. New York: Oxford University Press. Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online. 2009. “High School Students Reporting Drug, Alcohol, and Cigarette Use.” Accessed September 2019. www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t3622009.pdf. Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers. 2007. “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (2): 27–52. United States Census Bureau. 2019. “Historical Marital Status Tables.” Accessed March 2019. www.census. gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html. United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women in the Labor Force: A  Databook. Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor. Accessed September 2019. Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.

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30 GENDER DIVISION OF LABOR AMONG COUPLES Lisa Giddings

Introduction Upon opening a time capsule from the 1980s, readers of this chapter might be incredulous to find a US television commercial for a perfume called Enjoli (Enjoli Commercial 2019): I can put the wash on the line, Feed the kids, Get dressed, Pass out the kisses and get to work by five of nine. ‘Cause I’m a WOMAN! Enjoli—the 8-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman! I can bring home the bacon! Fry it up in a pan. And never never never let you forget you’re a man! This commercial perfectly encapsulates an inflection point in American history as it pertained to gender relations, women, and work. The second-wave feminist movement had taken hold, married women and mothers, including mothers of small children, were increasingly working full-time jobs, albeit continuing to perform unpaid household labor. The intended message was that women could “have it all”! What “having it all” really meant though was a division of labor in which women were doing all the work in all the spheres. The division of labor in the household refers to how couples provision households and allocate resources within and outside of the household. The gender division of labor is a function of available resources, productive technology, geography, economic and social contexts, social norms, and demographics. While all known societies have exhibited a sexual division of labor (Boserup 1970), evidence points to more equal gender divisions of labor in pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies (Peacock 1991). The 20th century witnessed a radical increase in women’s participation in the labor market not only in the US but also around the world, yet women in heterosexual unions everywhere continue to allocate a disproportionate amount of time to unpaid household labor compared to men. Women’s disproportionate unpaid work burden limits their capabilities in other spheres leading to inequality between men and women in labor markets, education, and 293

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overall well-being. The gender division of labor also reflects the contours of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation. For instance, while high-income households find market substitutes for unpaid household work (cleaning services) or childcare, thereby shifting their unpaid work burden to low-waged women, low-income households cannot afford to outsource and have only their relatives’ and communities’ labor on which to rely. Other intersectional identities have different challenges such as labor market discrimination faced, for example, by Black, Indigenous, people of color, or LGBT individuals, affecting their provisioning of labor in the market and at home. Feminist economists have shown that couples respond to social policies that relate to the division of labor, relieving women’s unpaid work burden. Furthermore, changes in social norms and legal regimes related to sex, race, gender, and sexuality also affect the division of labor.

Empirical evidence It was not until the emergence of horticulture, pastoral, and agricultural societies around 7000 BCE in the Middle East that a traditional gender division of labor emerged in which women focused on productive activities in the household while men focused on activities outside of the household. While some scholars have argued that traditional division of labor is “natural” due to biological differences between women and men, evidence from around the globe shows more equal divisions of labor in which women hunted with men for large and small game (Brightman 1996; Goodman et al. 1985; Romanoff 1983). Native American societies including the Inuit and Australian Aboriginals exhibited complicated divisions of labor with women working hard in all areas including bison hunting, gathering, clearing fields, planting, hoeing, and harvesting as well as engaging in more stereotypically gendered activities such as childrearing (Albers 1983; Tonkinson 1993). The Iroquois of North America and the Lovedu of Africa exhibited a society in which women controlled strategic resources like food and water, which led to emotional, social, and political power in their communities (Friedl 1984). As humans began to cultivate the land and settle in one area, agricultural settlements led to changes in technology and the first formalizations of property rights (McLeod and Nonnemaker 1999). New technologies, like the plow, improved production but required upper-body strength ensconcing men into the work of tending to the fields (Boserup 1970), while at the same time family size increased and less labor was required to produce food for survival. Women helped in the fields, looked after gardens, and domesticated animals, but much of their work took place in the household, leading to what is now referred to as a traditional gender division of labor. Industrialization in Western Europe and the US created a demand for cheap unskilled labor in cities and marked a shift in productive activity as families moved from rural to urban centers and sought wage employment. In the US, uneducated women, poor women, single mothers, women of color, and immigrants found a limited array of jobs in factories and textile mills, in schools, or as nurses (Goldin 2006). African American women, particularly freed slaves, took whatever work was available, often as domestic servants, laundresses, or field hands (Jones 1985). Wives faced substantial social stigma when working outside of the home because the hours were long, and the mill and factory work that women tended to do was dangerous, difficult, and dirty (Goldin 2006). Once married, if the family could afford it, women would leave their jobs to look after their own households and children, or perform piecework at home (KesslerHarris 1982). By the end of the 19th century in the US, men’s labor force participation rate was approximately 84 percent compared to 18 percent for women (Goldin 2006). Among married women, participation in the formal labor market was as low as 7.3 percent. For all women, 294

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however, regardless of employment status, social norms in the US dictated that domestic duties were a woman’s major obligation (Jones 1985). Women’s labor force participation increased in the 20th century globally, but most sharply in the early industrialized countries. The change was driven mainly by an increase in the number of married women entering formal labor markets, and then later supported by married women with young children entering or remaining in the labor market. In the US, the labor force participation rate of married women aged 35–44 increased by nearly 16 percentage points between 1920 and 1940 (Goldin 2006), and the trend continued after World War II, peaking at 64.6 percent in 1987 (BLS 2017a). The increase stalled in the 2000s, and since then the Great Recession rates have declined (BLS 2017b). In most countries around the world, across all income levels, women’s labor force participation is higher today than it was 30 years ago. Since 1980, the global trend in female labor force participation increased slightly between 1980 to 2012 from 50.2 percent to 51.8 percent (World Bank 2012). There have been large reductions in female participation in South and East Asia, while at the same time there were large increases in Latin America. The lowest participation rates remain in the Middle East and North Africa where social and legal constraints limit women’s choices in the economic sphere. Despite these dramatic increases in participation in formal labor markets, analyses of timeuse surveys reveal that women continue to perform the lion’s share of household duties. This is particularly true for mothers. Surveys from the US show that in 1910 women averaged approximately 55 hours per week on unpaid household labor (Leeds 1917). The amount of time spent on housework remained relatively unchanged through the 1970s despite the increased female labor force participation rate, a decline in fertility, and the introduction of labor-saving technology like indoor plumbing, gas, electricity, and appliances, which should have reduced the time needed to accomplish household tasks (Schor 1992; Vanek 1974). Globally, women spend three times as much time on housework and childcare than men (UN Women 2019), and once paid and unpaid work are combined, women work longer hours than men. Hochschild (1989) coined women’s extra work in the household, beyond their market labor, a “second shift.” This gender inequality is persistent but varies across countries and is largest in the context of the Global South (UN Women 2019). The ratio of female-tomale time spent in unpaid labor is at its largest in Northern Africa and Western Asia, where the median female-to-male ratio is almost six (UN Women 2019). Gender inequalities do not disappear in the Global North, but they are not as glaring (UN Women 2019).

Causes of the division of labor Feminist scholars have challenged Becker’s neoclassical model (1981), which presents the gender division of labor as determined biology and different investments in human capital that lead to differences in comparative advantages between men and women (Becker 1981). In this model, a traditional division of labor is the most efficient allocation of time and resources for husbands and wives.

Feminist models of social provisioning and bargaining The social provisioning approach (Power 2004) puts the question of families organizing their resources into a cultural, historical, and social context. The division of labor is not simply an objective problem of efficiently allocating scarce resources. Rather, the starting point is how families organize their resources and make decisions about provisioning their household: questions about how families make decisions about jobs, purchases, household chores; how the 295

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needs of dependents are taken care of (Nelson 1996); and how these questions are socially determined, interdependent, and endogenous (Hartmann 1981). Bargaining models of the household emerged in the 1980s as a response to limitations in the neoclassical model in terms of addressing the possibility of conflict and mutual interdependence among couples. In bargaining models, family members negotiate in order to reach an agreement about the distribution of resources in the family (Agarwal 1997; Horney and McElroy 1981; Lundberg and Pollak 1996). Differences in “threat points” determine bargaining power within households. In the most common type of family bargaining model, termed the “divorce-threat” model, the threat point depends on the resources controlled by each party if the marriage were to terminate. Participation in the labor force, for example, increases women’s independent resources and hence their bargaining power. Dwyer and Bruce (1988) highlight the perspective of the non-Western world by focusing on 11 field studies in the Global South. They challenge neoclassical assumptions about the household as a harmonious unit with a single decision-maker and discuss inequality and negotiation in decision-making among household members as well as the importance of cultural practices in determining outcomes. Sen (1985) described the gender division of labor as one of “cooperative conflict,” emphasizing that the relations between the sexes are conditioned by the general productive arrangements in an economy. One analysis of data from 60 developing countries showed that employment is positively associated with women’s participation in household decision-making on a range of issues, including their own healthcare, large household purchases, visits to their family, and child health (Meurs and Ismaylov 2019). Women’s access to independent income and social assistance, falling fertility rates, an increase in education among girls and women, laws defining the division of marital property, and shifts in social norms have increased women’s bargaining power in the household (Meurs and Ismaylov 2019). Kabeer (2012) analyzes the importance of women’s empowerment in terms of labor market options and access to productive assets and the impact on household decision-making. A study of Ecuador, where joint ownership of major assets among couples is common, finds that women’s share of the couple’s wealth is correlated with a more egalitarian decision-making process (Kabeer 2012).

Marxist models Marxist approaches to the gender division of labor focus on the material aspect of gender relations within family units. The organization of production and redistribution in the family is shaped by patriarchy and capitalism, and as such, the Marxist approach highlights issues of power and exploitation (Engels 1972; Humphries 1977). Hartmann (1981) emphasizes the conflictual aspects, whereby the family is a “locus of struggle” where conflicts over production and redistribution are common. Men are in a more advantageous position than women in the hierarchy of the family and the creation of gender can be thought of to be in tandem to the creation of a division of labor based on this hierarchy. Critiquing the neoclassical theory on marriage, McCrate (1987) uses a Marxian analysis of employment relations to explain power differentials among married couples and falling marriage rates the US in the late 20th century.

Institutionalist models Institutionalist critiques of the neoclassical model of the division of labor in the household emphasize the role of culturally constructed norms and social institutions that shape the behaviors and activities of economic agents. Folbre (1993, 1994) provides an alternative to neoclassical 296

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models of the household in which she emphasizes gender roles as part of structures of constraint that affect allocation and decision-making in the household. Women must choose how to divide their time within the constraints of social norms. Furthermore, institutions structure long-term relationships in a manner that minimizes the transaction costs associated with the relationship (Pollak 1985). The institution of marriage is an example. Informal gender roles and traditions, combined with formal social and legal agreements, spell out the rules of an ongoing relationship and the rights of each member should the relationship dissolve. Legal marriage, with the power to require alimony payments for example, protects partners against the risks associated with specialization. Bergmann (1986) provides an example of social norms dictating women’s roles when she describes the male breadwinner model as a “caste system” in which women were designated at birth to be restricted to housekeeping. To the extent that women’s comparative advantage for homemaking is socially determined and reflects unequal access to market opportunities, the traditional division of labor is not always efficient or desirable. She suggests instead that the duties of a housewife be “industrialized” by relying on the private market to provide goods such as housecleaning, laundry or prepared food, or on government subsidized goods such as childcare. Research shows that institutions matter. Folbre (2001) argues that patriarchal property regimes create incentives for men to force women to overspecialize in household labor. Conversely, when, for instance, marital property laws favor women, they spend more time in the labor market and less time on housework (Genadek 2018; Gray 1998). Newlywed couples in states that passed unilateral divorce laws are less likely to exhibit specialization (Stevenson 2007).

Same-sex couples Becker (1981) argued that same-sex households are inefficient because they fail to exploit the “inherently” balanced differences in comparative advantage between men and women. There are merits to this argument, even though the theory has been challenged. On the one hand, because same-sex couples are less likely to have children (Antecol and Steinberger 2013) and are more likely than heterosexual couples to earn similar incomes, they may be less likely to exhibit a traditional division of labor. On the other hand, access to legal marriage in 30 countries (as of December 2019), may encourage same-sex couples to specialize in household production and adopt a more traditional division of labor. Early studies on gay and lesbian couples relying on small samples and qualitative interviews verified that that they are less likely to have one partner specializing in wage labor while the other in household labor. Furthermore, same-sex couples are more intentionally egalitarian in the way in which they divide household tasks (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983). Rothblum, Balsam, and Mickey (2004) examine the division of labor among gay and lesbian households using siblings as their respective comparison group and find that a traditional division of labor exists only in their heterosexual sample. Both lesbian and gay couples tend to adopt an egalitarian ideology in which both partners work for pay, share decision-making, parenting, and household labor (Dunne 2000; Fulcher, Sutfin, and Patterson 2008; Johnson and O’Connor 2002). Comparing couples with children, married heterosexual women did most tasks, while lesbians and gay men tended to share tasks more evenly (Kurdek 2001, 2006). Biological mothers, however, perform more childcare tasks in both same-sex and opposite-sex couples, regardless of race (Chan et al. 1998; Moore 2008; Panozzo 2015). Moore (2008) surveyed 28 African American lesbian couples and found that the biological mothers did more housework and childrearing than the non-biological mothers. Census data for the US, as well as other large, nationally representative, and random samples from around the world have allowed researchers to examine the lives of lesbian and gay 297

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men including their division of labor. In 1990 the US Census began asking a question about living with a “non-married partner” to identify welfare recipients living with an unmarried partner. This question inadvertently allowed researchers to connect responses about living with an unmarried partner to existing questions about the sex of the respondent, thereby identifying unmarried same-sex partners. The 2020 Census allows respondents to define their relationship to their married or unmarried partners as “same-sex” or “opposite-sex.”1 Evidence from studies relying on these data show that heterosexual couples exhibit a greater degree of specialization than same-sex couples with one partner working full-time in the labor force while the other focuses on household labor (Leppel 2009; Giddings et al. 2014). Black, Sanders, and Taylor (2007) found that 19.4 percent of male and 19.5 percent of female same-sex couples from the 2000 Census had only one partner in the labor force compared with 31.9 percent of heterosexual couples.

Policy implications Work-family policies can help families balance home and market work while also alleviating gender inequalities (Baker 1997; Gornick and Meyers 2003), improve child outcomes, and make an economy more competitive (Earl, Zitha, and Heymann 2011). Examples include family leave policies, workplace flexibility, and affordable childcare. Such policies vary significantly around the world in terms of length, whether or not the leave is paid and how much, as well as what is required to receive the benefit. For a review of policies, see Albelda, this volume; Esquivel, this volume; Plantenga, this volume). Workplace flexibility gives workers some control over their hours, the days in which they work, and even the location of their work. Such input has the potential to improve women’s attachment to the labor force. Such flexibility is uncommon, however. Only about a third of all US workers have flexibility in days of work, less than half of all workers have flexible hours, and less than a fourth have flexible work locations (Glynn, Boushey, and Berg 2016). Note that the response to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 may improve labor flexibility as offices adopted more work-from-home technologies. Access to affordable and quality childcare would improve parental attachment to the labor force, and this is particularly necessary for low-income families. Workers cite missing work, having to change their work schedule, and children with chronic health issues as main reasons for childcare-related employment changes (Montes and Halterman 2011). In OECD countries, public spending on family benefits was positively correlated with female employment in 2015 (Tzvetkova and Ortiz-Ospina 2017). Bergmann (1998) is skeptical of family friendly policies. She argues that such policies do not address the underlying inequalities between men and women and may even exacerbate them. Instead, the biggest effect has been to facilitate women’s “second shift” rather than to encourage men to spend time on household work. As an example, one study of non-transferrable paternal entitlements to paid leave found that while the benefit was intended to encourage equal leave sharing between mothers and fathers, it had no effect on the long-term division of housework (OECD 2011). Alternatives to family friendly policies include a shorter standard working day, requiring partners to share parental leave associated with the birth or adoption of a child, and promoting paid substitutes for unpaid family labor such as childcare subsidies and childcare facilities at workplaces. Policies relevant to the division of labor in the Global South are more macro in nature with a focus on informal labor markets (see Espino and de los Santos, this volume). Economic models tend to support the necessity of economic growth and development to improve women’s socioeconomic status and thus the unequal division of labor in the household. 298

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Future research The effect of legalized gay marriage on the division of labor in gay and lesbian households As of January 2021, same-sex marriage is legally recognized in 30 countries. Sansone (2019) found that legalization of same-sex marriage in the US increased the probability that both partners were employed by 2.4 percentage points, exactly the opposite of specialization. The author attributes this to a decline in either perceived or real discrimination in the labor market after the law was passed, thereby encouraging employment, with no corresponding increase at that time in factors that might encourage specialization such as an increase in fertility. Further research will shed light on how access to this institution will affect the division of labor in gay and lesbian households.

Non-gender-conforming families/families with trans individuals Little attention has been paid to the division of labor among couples in which one or both partners is (are) transgender, highlighting the need of research to go beyond the self-reporting male/female gender binaries. This approach requires us to understand how gender identity and gender expression might change relationship experiences within couples. Some small-sample qualitative studies have been accomplished suggesting that transgender people tend to divide chores along stereotypical masculine and feminine lines, however, study participants argue that the pattern is idiosyncratic or personal rather than a reflection of traditional gender roles (Pfeffer 2010). Other work focuses on the emotional labor that is unique to transgender relationships in terms of validating and celebrating their partners’ masculinity or femininity (Ward 2010). One qualitative study of 30 queer participants found that the division of household labor was a negotiated process in which arrangements are shaped by preference, time and the broader social context (Kelly and Hauck 2015). These authors see queer couples as having an opportunity to “redo” gender by challenging traditional roles and creating alternatives for how gender defines social life.

Note 1 At some point the US Census will have to deal with non-binary gender categories as well.

References Agarwal, Bina. 1997. “‘Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51. Albers, Patricia. 1983. “Introduction: New Perspectives on Plains Indian Women,” in Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, eds. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Alon, Matthais Doepke, Jane Olmstead-Rumsey, and Michele Tertilt. 2020. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality.” NBER Working Paper 26947. Last Accessed January 21, 2021. https://www. nber.org/papers/w26947 Antecol, Heather, and Michael D. Steinberger. 2013. “Labor Supply Differences Between Married Heterosexual Women and Partnered Lesbians: A Semi-parametric Decomposition Approach.” Economic Inquiry 51 (1): 783–805. Baker, Maureen. 1997. “Parental Benefit Policies and the Gendered Division of Labour.” Social Service Review 71 (1): 52–71. Becker, Gary S. 1981. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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31 INTRAHOUSEHOLD DECISION-MAKING AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION Cheryl Doss

Introduction Households are the sites for many types of decisions and activities, including both market and nonmarket activities. Choices about paid work are made within the context of relationships among household members. Much of the work within households is unpaid, such as preparing meals, caring for children, and cleaning the home. The food on the table is the product of many decisions by household members; what to grow themselves; who will engage in paid employment; who will pay for the ingredients; and who will prepare the meal and clean up. Some decisions, such as those about health care or education for children may have lasting intergenerational impacts. Despite the importance of intrahousehold decision-making, economists have not always done well to understand what happens within the boundaries of the home. In part, this is because mainstream economists have focused on the market economy, often ignoring the unpaid work done within the home. In addition, much of the data on which economists rely for microeconomic analysis uses the household as the unit of analysis with little detail on who within the household earns incomes, owns resources, and performs the care work. For example, censuses and surveys have typically measured consumption and expenditure, wealth and assets, and some forms of income (especially agricultural income and transfers) at the level of the household, rather than for specific individuals. Feminist economists have challenged mainstream views of household decision-making, insisting that we consider the power dynamics within households and communities and how gendered social norms shape the opportunities that people have and the choices that they make (Agarwal 1997; Mabsout and Van Staveren 2010). Choices may reflect both individual selfinterest and deep caring for others. In part because feminist economists demonstrated the importance of data at the individual level, many national and international data collection efforts now include more of such data, allowing us to gain insights into intrahousehold decisions. Surveys now frequently collect data on the wage and self-employment income of each household member, although often provided by one household respondent. Agricultural surveys may collect data on plot-level production and identify the individual household member who manages the plot, albeit without capturing the extent to which other household members are involved in production on the plot (Doss 303

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2018). Similarly, data on household enterprises may ask who is responsible for decision-making and who keeps the income. Surveys are beginning to collect data on which household members own or control assets, such as the house or agricultural land, within the household. It remains more challenging to disaggregate consumption data; how should one allocate the cost of the house or utilities among individuals? However, it is sometimes possible to assign certain expenditures to particular individuals, such as health, education or clothing expenses based on whether they are for women, men, girls or boys. It is important to note that households are not simply collections of autonomous individuals. Rather, they are the site of extensive cooperation. Households form precisely because there are benefits to living together. Within households, there are economies of scale in production and consumption. Household members share risk and take care of each other when times are hard. There may be both joy and efficiency in raising children together with others in a household. Yet, households are also the sites of tension and conflict. The prevalence of intimate partner violence globally is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this. Sen (1990) noted that acknowledging both cooperation and conflict within households is necessary to understand gender relations and intrahousehold resource allocation. Economic models of intrahousehold resource allocation have extended beyond initial challenges to the unitary model of the household, demonstrating that many households do not obtain cooperative or efficient outcomes, at least in strictly economic terms. Yet they remain silent on issues of the underlying processes and structural constraints. The emerging literature on household ­decision-making provides some insights into intrahousehold dynamics, but many challenges remain as to how to analyze and interpret data on who is involved in making household decisions.

Models of household resource allocation Broadly speaking, we can consider cooperation to encompass the many ways in which people benefit from living together in a household, pooling some of their resources and making shared decisions about things that mutually affect them. Early economic work analyzing household decision-making took the notion of cooperation to an extreme and treated the household as a single decision-making unit (Becker 1981). The household was modeled as though it was an individual, maximizing utility subject to a budget constraint. This approach was rationalized either by assuming that one person, typically the male household head, made all of the decisions for the household or that household members had the same preferences and pooled all resources and thus, could be treated as though they were one person. The traditional split in microeconomics, still found in most textbooks, assumes that consumption occurs within the home and production occurs within firms. Thus, most of the analyses on the household used data collected at the household level on consumption. In fact, all households are involved in both production and consumption, and not all of the production takes place within the market sector. The separation of production and consumption holds up particularly poorly in agrarian societies, where farm households produce both for the market and their own consumption. The agricultural household models developed in the 1980s (Singh, Squire, and Strauss 1986) were innovative in that they explicitly acknowledged that households made both production and consumption decisions. In these recursive models, households facing perfect markets first maximized profits (typically from farming) and then allocated the proceeds across consumption, savings, and investment. Extensions to the models relaxed the perfect markets assumptions. Empirical tests of the separability of production and consumption decisions was frequently rejected, particularly in the Global South, where markets often work poorly for labor, land, and agricultural inputs and outputs. Agricultural households 304

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rely heavily on their own labor and produce for their own consumption as well as for the market, thus linking production and consumption decisions. The literature using agricultural household models thus emphasized not only that households are sites of both production and consumption, but that these decisions are interrelated. The relevance goes beyond agricultural households to all households; even nonagricultural households allocate resources, including labor, across market and nonmarket activities. But the agricultural household models are still unitary models—assuming that the household acts as though it is a single decision-maker. Critiques of the unitary model have been widespread, many of them coming from feminist economists (Folbre 1986). These critiques are based partially on the intuitive understanding that people within households do not necessarily share all of the same preferences and may seek different outcomes. In addition, a large body of quantitative literature has shown not only that household members often have different preferences, but also that social and economic structures affect how these different preferences play out within households, affecting the well-being of everyone involved. One response to these challenges modeled households by drawing on a Nash cooperative bargaining approach (Doss 2013). These cooperative-bargaining models typically focus on the interaction between household members who have different preferences. Both members have an outside option or threat point, which is determined by the level of utility that they would receive if not part of the household. Each person must obtain at least that amount of utility in order to choose to remain within the household. The approach assumes that there are gains from being in a household, which may result from increased total production or from economies of scale in consumption. The surplus from belonging to the household is then shared. The innovation in these models is that they predict that anything affecting outside options will change the distribution of resources within the household. For instance, changes in wealth that either member holds independently will affect the allocations (Doss 2006; Quisumbing and Maluccio 2003). Similarly, an increase in women’s wages in the economy will increase a woman’s outside options, regardless of whether or not she works for wages. And divorce laws or social norms about divorce will also affect both women’s and men’s outside options and thus their allocations within the household (Jackson 2013). By the late 1990s, it was widely accepted that across a wide range of countries, the assumptions of the unitary model did not hold (Alderman et  al. 1995). Tests of the unitary model demonstrated that factors such as who receives income transfers (Schultz 1990) or who owns the assets (Doss 2006; Quisumbing and Maluccio 2003) affect the outcome of household decisions, such as expenditure patterns. Although these are called “cooperative-bargaining models,” they do not analyze the process of household decision-making or have anything to say about whether household members cooperate in the common usage of this term. Instead, they assume that household members reach a cooperative or Pareto efficient outcome in which there is no reallocation of household resources which would make one member better off without making someone else worse off. This first set of bargaining models was followed by other approaches which incorporate different preferences. A set of structural models allow researchers to identify a measure of the “sharing rule” which is the fraction of household resources controlled by each member. They use data on household outcomes to obtain parameters for decision rules and bargaining power. One of the key assumptions that is common throughout this work is that households obtain Pareto efficient outcomes. Yet, the assumption that household members reach cooperative or Pareto efficient outcomes may be a strong one. A set of noncooperative-bargaining models provide a framework to test 305

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whether outcomes are Pareto efficient (Carter and Katz 1997). Most of the examples that identified noncooperative outcomes are related to production decisions, rather than consumption decisions. A noncooperative outcome simply indicates that there are potential gains to being in a household that are not fully realized. For example, Udry (1996) found that in Burkina Faso, households could increase their total crop output by reallocating fertilizer and men’s labor from men’s plots to women’s plots. And McPeak and Doss (2006) found that among pastoralist households in Northern Kenya, husbands located households farther away from markets to limit women’s ability to sell milk and control the income. Examples of households that do not obtain Pareto efficient outcomes have also been identified using experimental games. For example, Jackson (2013) analyzes public goods games in rural Uganda and finds that couples often do not maximize the potential surplus from cooperation. One reason that the production examples are more prevalent is that it is much easier to empirically demonstrate that a higher production output could be obtained than it is to show that someone could obtain higher utility without making someone else worse off by reallocating consumption. Production is observable, while utility is not. A further challenge is that these empirical models typically rely on assumptions that men and women have systematically different preferences. If this were not the case, then we would not be able to observe changes in outcomes due to changes in women’s bargaining power. The literature on intrahousehold decisions among same-sex couples has had to find other ways to examine intrahousehold dynamics, using interviews and/or longitudinal studies (Rothblum 2017). Much of this literature focuses on the Global North and finds more egalitarian patterns of the division of labor among same-sex couples than among opposite-sex couples (Rothblum 2017). Lesbian couples tend to have the most shared division of labor as opposed to heterosexual couples. Limited research on transgender couples (where one partner is transitioning and/or either partner identifies as gender queer) shows that gender identity does not seem to affect division of labor. Models of household decision-making and resource allocation are silent on the processes. They consider how proxies for bargaining power affect the outcomes, but were not designed to tell us about the processes of how these decisions and allocations were reached. We observe the outcomes, but not how the decisions were made. It may be that household members sit down and come to consensus. Or it may be that the head makes the decisions, either alone or in consultation with others. One member may threaten the others with violence or shame. It may also be that household members do not even realize that a decision is being made; they are acting within the expectations of social norms.

Who decides? A different approach to understanding intrahousehold decision-making is to study household choices directly, using quantitative and qualitative methods to examine who makes the decisions. Many surveys, including the Demographic and Health Surveys fielded in over 90 countries, now ask questions on who decides on a range of issues, including household expenditures, children’s health and education, and women’s mobility (DHS Program n.d.). A number of recent quantitative analyses use these survey responses (see Donald et al. 2020 for a discussion of these approaches). Women’s participation in decision-making is often used as a proxy for women’s bargaining power to explain the intrahousehold allocation of resources. Alternatively, women’s participation in decision-making is also used as an outcome measure, proxying for women’s empowerment, in analyses that seek to understand what factors contribute to women’s empowerment within the household. 306

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Although asking questions on who decides has opened new frontiers for intrahousehold analysis, there are reasons to worry that this approach is problematic and provides relatively limited understanding. To begin, there is no consensus on how best to ask these questions in a survey and the approaches used have ranged from asking, “Who makes the decision,” or “Who has the final say,” to “Are you involved in making the decision?” Each of these embeds assumptions about how decisions are made (Donald et al. 2020). The responses from these different types of questions are not necessarily comparable, but little work has analyzed the implications of these different approaches. Second, household decision-making also involves multiple scales. The most important decisions are about where to live and work; perhaps also decisions about family size, including the number of children, and whether to live with extended family. There are also decisions about how to allocate expenditure across broad categories, such as housing, education, food, savings and holidays. At the other extreme are everyday decisions, such as what to eat for dinner or whether to take the bus or walk. These latter decisions are made within the framework of the larger decisions. Being confined to making decisions in one sphere, without any influence on how much is allocated to that sphere may indicate relatively limited voice and agency within the household. Thus, women may have complete agency over what meals to prepare for dinner but have no choice whatsoever in decisions about where to live or how to invest the household’s savings. This raises the question of how decision-making measures can be aggregated across different spheres and different levels. Third, we need to understand not only who decides but also whose preferences are taken into account. When indicators of women’s bargaining power affect particular outcomes, such as labor or expenditure patterns, the interpretation is often that women are able to express their preferences. But rarely do these analyses have information on what these preferences are. When analyzing data on who decides, we do not identify whose preferences are reflected in the decision. A woman may make the daily decisions about what to prepare for dinner, but she is likely to take into account the preferences of those for whom she is cooking. She may do so because she cares about her family and wants to see them happy and well fed. Alternatively, she may do so because preparing a meal her husband does not like results in her being threatened or beaten (Lentz 2018). Asking who decides does not identify why this person is making these specific choices. One recent paper has tried to identify why a particular person is the decision-maker (Bernard et al. 2020). It may be that the man makes all the decisions, or husbands and wives have separate spheres, or that one has more knowledge about that area. Using survey data from a project with pastoralists in Senegal, Bernard et al. (2020) find that outcomes that appear to be related to the gender of the decision-maker are driven by the typology of why the person decides. A fourth dimension related to understanding who decides is how to consider joint decisionmaking. Many empirical analyses use data on whether the woman makes the decision alone, jointly with her husband, or he makes the decision (Donald et al. 2017). The standard approach has been to assume that a woman making the decision alone is the “best” outcome or is an indication that she has higher bargaining power than someone who makes joint decisions, and that making joint decisions is better than not making the decision. In some analyses, especially where women often have little say in decisions, the sole decision-making and joint decisionmaking are combined into one variable that indicates whether or not the woman has any say in the decision. There is little evidence, however, that women want to make all decisions independently or that they see this as the best outcome (Meinzen-Dick et  al. 2019). Making decisions

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independently means that they alone are responsible for the outcome. Women who were sole heads of household in Northern Kenya reported that one of the disadvantages of being the sole head of household was that they bear all of the responsibility alone ((McPeak, Little, and Doss 2012). A better assumption would be that women want to have a voice in decisions and want their preferences to be reflected in the outcomes. Yet, what does it mean when women report that a household decision is made jointly? It does not necessarily mean that she has equal say in the decision. A  recent study in Uganda followed up on survey responses from women who said that household decisions were made jointly. When interviewed subsequently by qualitative researchers, the range of practices that were included as joint decision-making included no conversation among partners and conversations where the man had the final say but did consider his wife’s ideas (Acosta et al. 2019). A  recent survey of analyses of experimental games focused on intrahousehold issues finds, “jointly made choices are not always a weighted average of individual choices” (Munro 2018, 166). This suggests not only that we need to consider the weighting of each person’s choices in the final outcome, but also that when a couple decides together, they may make a different decision from the one that either spouse would have made individually. This evidence on joint decision-making is consistent with evidence on joint ownership. “Joint” does not necessarily mean “equal,” and women reporting joint ownership often claim fewer rights over the asset than men reporting joint ownership (Doss, Meinzen-Dick, and Bomuhangi 2014; Jacobs and Kes 2014; Twyman, Useche, and Deere 2015). One implication is that when women say that they make decisions jointly with a spouse, we should not assume that they have equal say. A related issue is that when husbands and wives are asked the same survey question about decision-making within the household, they frequently provide different answers (Ambler et al. 2021; Twyman, Useche, and Deere 2015). An analysis of responses of husbands and wives from a survey in Tanzania finds that although the average differences between men’s and women’s responses are very small, there is widespread disagreement between husbands and wives regarding who is in charge of specific decisions, such as which crops to grow and sell (Anderson, Reynolds, and Kay 2017). Little evidence is available at this point to help us understand why husbands and wives provide different responses. There has been some work on understanding biases from interviewing one person about labor decisions (Bardasi et al. 2011) and assets (Doss, Kieran, and Kilic 2020); less has been done to understand different responses on decision-making questions. One reason that husband and wives may provide different responses is that they do not share information. Fletschner and Mesbah (2011) find that husbands and wives in Paraguay have systematic differences in their knowledge about financial institutions. Gilligan et al. (2020) find that in Uganda, including men in nutrition training about the value of orange sweet potatoes has a positive impact, indicating that they did not receive the information when only their wives were trained. Using data reported by husbands and wives in Bangladesh, Ambler et al. (2021) argue that different answers are due to asymmetric information. The patterns are fairly consistent across countries; women are more likely to report joint decision-making and men are more likely to report that they make decisions individually. This adds to the growing evidence that it matters who within the household responds to survey questions; the patterns will differ depending on whether men or women respond. This research suggests that new approaches and new methods may be needed to help us understand the processes of household decision-making. Including qualitative evidence along with quantitative analyses may be useful.

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Challenges to understanding household resource allocation and decision-making The work on formal modeling of intrahousehold resource allocation has had a tremendous impact both on the academic literature and on policy, particularly in the Global South. For example, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs—in which a household receives a cash benefit in return for complying with a specified set of behaviors, typically related to ensuring that their children attend school and receive preventative health care—have been widely implemented in the Global South. But as the intrahousehold literature unfolded in tandem with implementation of CCT programs in the 1990s and 2000s, it became commonplace for these programs to provide the transfers to the mother within a household, rather than generically to “the household” (which in practice usually meant the male head of household). Designating mothers as the recipients was based on the assumption that providing transfers to mothers had a larger impact on children’s welfare. This literature has clearly demonstrated that we cannot assume that household members necessarily share preferences or that households will obtain Pareto efficient outcomes. The evidence shows that these claims should be tested rather than assumed. And it has demonstrated that a range of factors beyond the household, including laws and policy and social norms, affect the allocation of resources within the household. The advances in the intrahousehold allocation and decision-making literature have frequently occurred due to the relationships between the theory and the empirical work. Feminist theory and realities on the ground challenged early empirical work that treated households as though they were individuals. Many of the issues that were raised by early feminist economists have now become fairly mainstream, with widespread recognition that household members may have different preferences and different abilities to see their preferences reflected in the outcomes of household decisions. Somewhat surprisingly, much more of the literature on intrahousehold resource allocation is based on data from the Global South than from the US or Europe. Yet, the success of feminist economists in reshaping the approaches to modeling intrahousehold decision-making and resource allocation has led to new challenges. As these approaches become mainstream, measures of women’s bargaining power are often incorporated into analyses of household decisions. However, few of these analyses seek to understand the how social norms and institutions may affect the distribution of resources among household members. Social roles and norms are often treated as exogenous, when in practice they may be shaped by the institutions and policies in question. As survey data have improved, new challenges emerged. Increasingly, surveys interview multiple people within a household. Survey data combined with various forms of qualitative data often provide better insights into the processes that are occurring with households and the different responses that we often get from household members. As more nationally representative data become available on same-sex couples, transgender and/or gender queer couples from a broader range of countries, this will allow further analysis of the extent to which the patterns of resource allocation and decision-making are based on gender or factors often correlated with gender, such as income, wealth, and social norms and expectations. Moving forward, it is important to analyze both the conflict and the cooperation within households. It is necessary to see men and women as individuals, with their own preferences and access to resources, but also to understand them as living in households and communities, with some shared objectives and many ways of working together to achieve them.

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References Acosta, Mariola, Margit van Wessel, Severine van Bommel, Edidah L. Ampaire, Jennifer Twyman, Laurence Jassogne, and Peter H. Feindt. 2019. “What Does It Mean to Make a ‘Joint’ Decision? Unpacking Intra-Household Decision Making in Agriculture: Implications for Policy and Practice.” The Journal of Development Studies 56 (6). Agarwal, Bina. 1997. “ ‘Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics 3 (1): 1–51. Alderman, Harold, Pierre Chiappori, Lawrence Haddad, John Hoddinott, Ravi Kanbur, and Harold Alderman. 1995. “Unitary Versus Collective Models of the Household : Is It Time to Shift the Burden of Proof ?” The World Bank Research Observer 10 (1): 1–19. Ambler, Kate, Cheryl Doss, Caitlin Kieran, and Simone Passarelli. 2021. “He Says, She Says: Spousal Disagreement in Survey Measures of Bargaining Power.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 69 (2): 765–88. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/703082. Anderson, C. Leigh, Travis W. Reynolds, and Mary Kay Gugerty. 2017. “Husband and Wife Perspectives on Farm Household Decision-Making Authority and Evidence on Intra-Household Accord in Rural Tanzania.” World Development 90: 169–83. Bardasi, Elena, Kathleen Beegle, Andrew Dillon, and Pieter Serneels. 2011. “Do Labor Statistics Depend on How and to Whom the Questions Are Asked? Results from a Survey Experiment in Tanzania.” The World Bank Economic Review 25 (3): 418–47. Becker, Gary S. 1981. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernard, Tanguy, Cheryl Doss, Melissa Hidrobo, Jessica Hoel, and Caitlin Kieran. 2020. “Ask Me Why: Patterns of Intrahousehold Decision-Making.” World Development 125. Carter, Michael R., and Elizabeth G. Katz. 1997. “Separate Spheres and the Conjugal Contract: Understanding the Impact of Gender-Biased Development.” In Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Developing Countries Models, Methods, and Policy, edited by Lawrence Haddad, John Hoddinott, and Harold Alderman, 95–111. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. DHS Program. n.d. “Demographic and Health Surveys.” Accessed November 2019. https://dhsprogram.com/. Donald, Aletheia, Gayatri Koolwal, Jeannie Annan, Kathryn Falb, and Markus Goldstein. 2017. “Measuring Women’s Agency.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 8148, World Bank, Washington, DC. ———. 2020. “Measuring Women’s Agency.” Feminist Economics 26 (3): 200–26. Doss, Cheryl R. 2006. “The Effects of Intrahousehold Property Ownership on Expenditure Patterns in Ghana.” Journal of African Economies 15 (1): 149–80. ———. 2013. “Intrahousehold Bargaining and Resource Allocation in Developing Countries.” World Bank Research Observer 28 (1): 52–78. ———. 2018. “Women and Agricultural Productivity : Reframing the Issues.” Development Policy Review 36 (1): 35–50. Doss, Cheryl, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Allan Bomuhangi. 2014. “Who Owns the Land? Perspectives from Rural Ugandans and Implications for Large-Scale Land Acquisitions.” Feminist Economics 20 (1): 76–100. Doss, Cheryl, Caitlin Kieran, and Talip Kilic. 2020. “Measuring Ownership, Control, and Use of Assets.” Feminist Economics 26 (3): 144–68. Fletschner, Diana, and Dina Mesbah. 2011. “Gender Disparity in Access to Information: Do Spouses Share What They Know?” World Development 39 (8): 1422–33. Folbre, Nancy. 1986. “Hearts and Spades : Paradigms of Household Economics.” World Development 14 (2): 245–55. Gilligan, Daniel, Neha Kumar, Scott McNiven, J. V. Meenakshi, and Agnes R. Quisumbing. 2020. “Bargaining Power, Decision Making and Biofortification: The Role of Gender in Adoption of Orange Sweet Potato in Uganda.” Food Policy 95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2020.101909. Jackson, Cecile. 2013. “Cooperative Conflicts and Gender Relations: Experimental Evidence from Southeast Uganda.” Feminist Economics 19 (4): 25–47. Jacobs, Krista, and Aslihan Kes. 2014. “The Ambiguity of Joint Asset Ownership: Cautionary Tales From Uganda and South Africa.” Feminist Economics 21 (3): 1–33. Lentz, Erin C. 2018. “Complicating Narratives of Women’s Food and Nutrition Insecurity: Domestic Violence in Rural Bangladesh.” World Development 104: 271–80.

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32 ASSETS, WEALTH, AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Carmen Diana Deere and Abena D. Oduro

Considerably more is known about the gender wage gap than about the gender wealth gap. This is largely because of the lack of individual ownership data on assets until relatively recently. Data collection on assets has been spurred by growing recognition of the multifaceted dimensions of gender inequality in access to resources, along with concern that women’s increased labor force participation does not always lead to gender equality or better outcomes in capabilities. Moreover, growing interest in intra-household bargaining models has required individual-level data to test these relationships (see Doss, this volume). In this chapter, we consider the available evidence on the gender asset and wealth gaps, gender biases in how assets are acquired, and whether women’s ownership of assets makes a difference to well-being outcomes for women and their children. For reasons of space, our review privileges literature since 2005 and studies based on national- or regional-level survey data.

Gender inequality in asset ownership and wealth There is mounting evidence on men’s and women’s asset ownership in the Global South: what they own, their property rights, and the form of ownership. Since 2010, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) of the World Bank have collected nationally representative, individuallevel asset data primarily on land and/or housing. Only a few nationally representative surveys have collected individual-level data on a comprehensive range of physical and financial assets, including the Gender Asset Gap Project (GAGP) surveys that collected comparative individuallevel data for three countries (Ecuador, Ghana, and India [Karnataka]). Gender inequality in asset ownership is usually measured by comparing the incidence of asset ownership by women and men or by using information on the share of asset owners who are women (men). Asset owners are identified using three different criteria: whether a person is reported as being the owner of the asset; ownership based on documented evidence; and the rights the person has over the asset (to rent, mortgage, bequeath, and sell). In countries where the practice of asset registration is not widespread, the identification of owners based on documented ownership underestimates the total number of owners. In some countries, asset owners do not necessarily have the full bundle of property rights. In Ghana, reported women homeowners have fewer rights than men owners (Oduro 2015). Formal and customary laws 312

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and religious practices that discriminate against women restrict the rights that women can claim, creating a gender gap in property rights (Slavchevska et al. 2016). Irrespective of the criteria used to identify asset owners, there is evidence of widespread gender inequality. There is a gender bias against women in land ownership in Africa (Doss et al. 2015), Asia (Kieran et al. 2015) and Latin America (Deere, Alvarado, and Twyman 2012). There are some exceptions, however. In Africa, the incidence of land ownership is higher among women in Lesotho and is about the same for women and men in Zimbabwe and Rwanda (Doss et al. 2015). The latter study, as well as Doss, Kim et al. (2014) and Kieran et al. (2015), also shows that the gender gap in land ownership varies depending on the measure used. The gender distribution of the ownership of housing is much more equitable in Latin America than that of land, with women in ten countries constituting from a low of around onequarter of the homeowners in Guatemala to half in Panama and Nicaragua (Deere, Alvarado, and Twyman 2012). In Ghana and the state of Karnataka, India, the gender gap in housing is biased against women, while in Ecuador it favors them (Doss, Deere et al. 2014). Some assets are owned predominantly by women, for example, businesses in Ghana and jewelry in Karnataka (Ibid.) and urban Thailand (Antonopoulos and Floro 2005). Individuals may own assets alone or jointly with others. The occurrence of joint ownership varies across countries. For example, joint ownership of land is more likely in Uganda than in Nigeria (Doss et al. 2015) and joint ownership of the home is more common in Ecuador than in Ghana and Karnataka (Doss, Deere et al. 2014). Where joint asset ownership is more common, the gender asset gap is narrower or favors women, such as in Ecuador. This contrasts with Ghana and Karnataka, where women are less likely than men to own land or the dwelling and where individual ownership predominates (Ibid.). However, joint ownership does not always reduce the gender gap in ownership rights. In South Africa, for example, Jacobs and Kes (2015) find that women joint owners of the home are less likely than men to have the right to sell it. Women are not only less likely to own assets but also often more likely to own assets of lower value than men are—hence, a lower share of total wealth. A six-country study based on surveys found that in all either the value or the number of assets that husbands bring to marriage considerably exceed wives’ contribution (Quisumbing and Hallman 2005). In Ghana and Karnataka, women own 31 percent and 19 percent, respectively, of gross physical household wealth; in contrast, in Ecuador women’s share is 52 percent (Doss, Deere et al. 2014). The gender gap in financial assets, however, is smaller than that of the value of physical wealth in Ghana and Karnataka, while larger in Ecuador. Among low-income urban couples in Thailand, the gender gap is small, and similar for physical and financial assets (Antonopoulos and Floro 2005). Does the gender wealth gap vary across the wealth distribution? Analyses of the couples’ samples for Ecuador and Ghana show diverse patterns. Nonetheless, once controls are introduced in an unconditional quantile regression model the size of the wealth gap unfavorable to women declines at the top end of the wealth distribution (Anglade, Useche, and Deere 2017; Hillesland 2019).

Women’s acquisition of assets: family, market, community, and the state Women’s accumulation of assets and wealth is broadly shaped by marital and inheritance regimes (Deere and Doss 2006). Marital regimes refer to the legal framework governing how the ownership and management of assets is determined depending upon whether they are acquired before or during the marriage and their distribution once the marriage ends, whether due to death, separation or divorce. Inheritance regimes refer to the rules governing testaments and intestate, and whether children of both sexes are treated equally and spouses have rights to a portion of 313

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each other’s estates. How these legal regimes play out in practice, however, depends on social norms, or the family and community, and particularly in the Global South, on the intersection of civil, religious, and customary law. Among the few comparative studies on women’s wealth across different regimes is Deere et al.’s (2013b) study of married women’s share of couple wealth in Ecuador (a country with the partial community property regime and where inheritance law treats all children equally regardless of gender), and Ghana and Karnataka (where separation of property is the default regime and inheritance is male biased). They find that in Ecuador married women own 44%, in Ghana 19%, and in Karnataka only 9% of couple wealth, differences that they largely attribute to the prevailing marital and inheritance regimes. In more agrarian societies, land is the most important asset, and inheritance is usually the main mode of acquisition. Most studies reveal a strong gender bias in land inheritance in favor of men, whether in Africa (Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997), Latin America (Deere and León 2001, 2003), South Asia (Agarwal 1994) or wherever Islamic inheritance law prevails (Khan 2016). In countries where land inheritance is biased against daughters, women access land through their husbands. Widows, however, do not automatically inherit land from them. Drawing on DHS surveys for 15 sub-Saharan African countries, Peterman (2012) finds that, overall, only 47% of widows inherited anything at all from their husbands. Moreover, only 32% reported that they and their children inherited the majority share of their husband’s assets. Despite the anti-female bias in inheritance regimes, inheritance is still the primary means by which women acquire assets such as land in several countries in Africa (Slavchevska et al. 2016) and Latin America (Deere and León 2003). One would expect the role of the market to expand in the process of economic development with asset acquisition increasingly dependent on earning an income, having savings and/or the use of credit. For example, among floricultural workers in Colombia, the majority of men and women acquired their homes through the market (Friedemann-Sánchez 2006). Nonetheless, in Ecuador, Ghana and Karnataka, women acquire fewer dwellings, agricultural land, other real estate and businesses through the market than men (Doss et al. 2019). When they participate in asset markets, they are both more likely to use their own savings than credit. Couples are more successful than individuals in accessing credit for asset acquisition; among individuals, the gender gap favors men. Eligibility criteria such as collateral are barriers to accessing credit for both men and women. Another way to acquire assets is through international remittances. Oduro and BoakyeYiadom (2014) and Deere and Alvarado (2016) show that while only a minority of international migrants from Ghana and Ecuador send remittances for asset acquisition, women who manage these remittances in the household of origin have benefited from this process, constituting the majority of the owners of dwellings and consumer durables purchased with remittances. Joint ownership of the dwelling between the remitter and manager is common in Ecuador, with women over-represented among both. Finally, the state may facilitate the acquisition of assets both directly, such as through land reform programs, or indirectly, through titling programs or subsidized credit. While women were under-represented among the beneficiaries of the land reforms of the past (Agarwal 1994; Deere and León 2001), state policies in recent decades have favored their inclusion in land titling or certification initiatives, as seen in the next section.

The impact of women’s ownership of assets Recent studies demonstrate how reforms that strengthen women’s property rights are associated with better outcomes for women and girls. In a 100-country global study and controlling for 314

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GDP per capita, Hallward-Dreimeier, Hasan, and Rusu (2013) show how the elimination of discriminatory legislation over the past 50 years is associated with a wide variety of positive outcomes, including women’s higher labor force participation, lower maternal and infant mortality and adolescent fertility, and girls’ higher school enrolments. Several studies use an experimental analytical framework to evaluate whether legal changes which potentially enhance women’s fallback position—but do not involve a direct transfer of resources—result in changes in women’s and children’s well-being. Kumar and Quisumbing (2012) analyze the impact of the 2000 revision of Ethiopia’s Family Code that provided for the equal division of household assets upon divorce. They find that a greater share of married women perceived that, in the case of no-fault divorce, the division of land and livestock would be equal. A change in perceptions regarding the distribution of assets, per se, did not impact measures of women’s own well-being. However, those women who perceived that their husbands would receive all the assets reported less control and ability to change their lives; moreover, their children were more likely to fall behind in school, particularly girls. Similarly, the expectation of alimony upon divorce could also increase women’s bargaining power and change the intra-household distribution of time and resources. Rangel (2006) studied the extension of alimony rights to couples in consensual unions in Brazil and finds that, compared to married couples, in those in a consensual union, women’s leisure time increased as did school enrolments of the eldest daughter; there was no significant effect on men’s time allocation. Deininger, Goyal, and Nagarajan (2013) investigate the direct and indirect effects of inheritance reform in two Indian states that equalized land rights of sons and daughters, finding that they increased the probability of women inheriting land. The reform is also associated with an increase in girls’ schooling attainment and in the age at which they marry. Drawing on a longitudinal panel for rural Tanzania, Peterman (2011) investigates how the 1999 Land Acts, which decentralized land administration to the village level while protecting women’s land rights, contributed to positive changes in local, customary law. Specifically, living in a village where women could inherit land, a dwelling and other assets, and if widowed, not be forced to marry their husband’s male relative, is associated with women’s employment outside the home as well as higher earnings. Much recent work has focused on the relation between women’s ownership of assets and their household bargaining power, considering how asset ownership is related either to their role in decision-making, or how it impacts other measures of women’s well-being, such as the composition of household expenditures, time use or a life free of violence. Among the decisionmaking studies, Allendorf (2007) and Mishra and Sam (2016) find that women’s landownership in Nepal increases their participation in decisions involving their own healthcare, major household purchases, and visiting relatives. In Karnataka, rural women’s ownership of land or housing is positively associated with their greater mobility and participation in decisions such as whether to be employed, their own healthcare and use of their own income (Swaminathan, Lahoti, and Suchitra 2012). The Gender Asset Gap Project team examined the factors that contribute to egalitarian decision-making, defined as when both partners report making decisions jointly and when each confirm that their spouse makes decisions in a similar fashion. Considering the decisions on whether to be employed and how the income that each earns is to be spent, in Ecuador (Deere and Twyman 2012) and Ghana (Oduro, Boakye-Yiadom, and Baah-Boateng 2012), a more equal distribution of couple wealth significantly increases the odds of egalitarian decisionmaking. In Karnataka, relative property status is not significant (Swaminathan, Suchitra and Lahoti 2012). 315

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Considerable attention has been given to the relationship between women’s landownership and participation in agricultural decision-making and to whether the form of ownership—sole or joint—makes a difference (Deere et al. 2013a). Doss, Kim et al. (2014) find that in Malawi, Mali and Tanzania, women’s sole ownership of land, compared to joint ownership, is more strongly associated with their participation in four agricultural decisions. However, in the state of Orissa, India, neither form of ownership is significant compared to not being a landowner. While there is growing evidence supporting Agarwal’s (1994) contention that women’s sole ownership is superior to joint ownership of land with their spouses, it is also evident that the benefits of joint ownership depend greatly on context. In Peru, there is evidence that joint titling increased women’s participation in agricultural decision-making (Wiig 2013). In Ethiopia, on the other hand, joint certification was not associated with women’s increased participation in land-related decisions and physical mobility (Melesse, Dabissa, and Bulte 2018). Nonetheless, in households with joint certificates compared to those with certificates in the name of the male head, the former spend more on women’s and girls’ clothing and less on men’s, suggesting that women’s bargaining power was enhanced as a result of joint titling (Muchomba 2017). A number of studies test the bargaining power proposition by examining changes in the composition of household expenditures or labor allocation that might reflect women’s preferences. Women’s ownership of assets and their property rights are associated with an increase in food expenditures (Doss 2006; Menon, Rodgers, and Nguyen 2014), a reduction in spending on alcohol and tobacco (Wang 2014), and an increase in the probability of husbands’ doing domestic labor and the relative amount of time that the wife dedicates to leisure activities (Brown 2009). A small-scale study in Uganda focuses on perceived differences in wealth and income among husbands and wives and finds that husbands are more likely to participate in childcare when wealth is considered to be equally distributed between them (Nkwake 2015). Women’s asset ownership has positive effects on children’s welfare. Children of mothers in Vietnam who are sole landowners are less likely to have been sick, and more likely to be covered by health insurance and enrolled in school (Menon, Rodgers, and Nguyen 2014). Mother’s asset ownership in Papua New Guinea has positive effects on the nutritional status of their children (Rodgers and Kassens 2018). Livestock that women bring to marriage is positively related to better child anthropometric and schooling outcomes in Ethiopia although there is no significant association in terms of the land that women bring to marriage (Fafchamps, Kebede, and Quisumbing 2009). Another indicator of women’s well-being is vulnerability to intimate partner violence (IPV) (see also Strenio, this volume). Women’s asset ownership is expected to deter IPV because it provides women with a fallback position. The empirical evidence suggests that the deterrent effect is context and perhaps, asset specific. In India (Panda and Agarwal 2005; ICRW 2006) and the Dominican Republic (Bueno and Henderson 2017) homeownership decreases the odds of past-year physical and emotional or psychological violence, and in several Indian states, lifetime physical violence (Bhattacharyya, Bedi, and Chhachhi 2011). The findings for land ownership are less conclusive. In Pakistan, no relationship was found between women’s land and/ or homeownership and IPV (Murshid 2017). Peterman et al. (2017) utilize the DHS surveys for 28 countries to provide a comprehensive study on whether women’s ownership of land or a dwelling deters IPV. Considering past-year violence and matching on household wealth (to control for endogeneity), they find that women’s property ownership is a significant deterrent to IPV in only three countries; positively associated with the incidence of IPV in five; and did not produce significant results for 20 countries. Drawing on the rich literature on couple status differences and IPV, Oduro, Deere, and Catanzarite (2015) argue that it might not be just women’s property status per se, but rather the 316

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value of their assets relative to those of their partners that best captures whether women’s bargaining power is a deterrent to abuse. They find that married women’s share of couple wealth protects against past year physical violence in Ecuador and emotional abuse in Ghana. Controlling for a nonlinear effect, in Ecuador, the odds of physical violence decrease until women own 58% of the wealth; thereafter, there may be a backlash effect. Cultural, social and religious norms that structure gender power relations may explain the varying association between women’s asset ownership and IPV and other measures of women’s well-being. Grabe, Grose, and Dutt (2015) hypothesize that the relationship between women’s ownership of land and the probability of IPV is an indirect relationship, mediated through gendered power relations. They find, for past-year violence and based on small sample surveys in Nicaragua and Tanzania, that women’s landownership is negatively associated with male partner power; the latter, in turn, is positively related to both physical and psychological violence against wives.

Conclusion Efforts to collect individual-level data on asset ownership have begun to bear fruit. It is increasingly possible to document a gender asset gap, usually unfavorable to women, particularly with respect to land and housing. Considerable evidence now supports the proposition that women’s ownership of assets increases their household bargaining power, which, in turn, leads to better outcomes for them and their children. We also have a better understanding of how men and women acquire assets. It is imperative that countries that have not done so, reform their marital and inheritance regimes in favor of gender equality. However, legal reforms by themselves may be insufficient. Policy attention must also focus on enhancing women’s participation in asset markets, which in turn depends on improving their labor market outcomes as well as their ability to save and access credit. Women’s ownership of assets, nonetheless, is not “a magic bullet,” leading always and everywhere to the same positive outcomes. Context matters. Comparative research suggests that the potential empowering effect for women of ownership of a specific asset may vary depending on the level of development and urbanization. In addition, the empowering effect may depend on women’s ownership of an asset first reaching a critical mass to overcome potential male backlash, a topic requiring further research. Several methodological issues also require attention, including whom to interview in a household survey. There is growing evidence that men and women often have different perceptions of who owns an asset and of outcomes such as decision-making (Twyman, Useche, and Deere 2015). This has led to the recommendation that surveys include multiple respondents of both sexes, and at least the husband and wife (Kilic and Moylan 2016). There is also some evidence that it might not be sufficient to know whether a woman is an asset owner; it is also important to know the value of the assets she owns as well as the value of her assets relative to other household members. This raises the questions of how assets should be valued and how many assets need to be included and valued to generate estimates of the gender gap in wealth, issues that are just beginning to be explored (Doss et al. 2018). Finally, a challenge in asset gap research is that many studies are based on cross-sectional survey data, making it difficult to establish causality (Doss 2013). A growing number of studies utilize two-stage models to control for endogeneity; however, the potential instruments are often weak. The alternative is to generate panel data, an expensive proposition. Irrespective, the evidence to date suggests a strong association between women’s asset ownership and better outcomes for women and their children. 317

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33 INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE Jacqueline Strenio

Introduction Worldwide, 30  percent of ever-partnered women report experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes (WHO 2013) and more than a third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner (UNODC 2018). As IPV manifests primarily as a problem of men’s violence against women (Jewkes 2002), perpetrators in both cases are overwhelmingly male. The persistence of norms of patriarchal and violent masculinities, in which violence is used to prove masculinity and masculine traits are celebrated, contributes to this global epidemic. The capability to live a life free from violence has been articulated as a universal human capability (Nussbaum 2000; Robeyns, this volume), and feminist economists have examined ways of ensuring this capability through theoretical and empirical research. IPV includes physical or sexual violence, psychological aggression, including coercion, and stalking by a current or former intimate partner (Breiding et al. 2015). Intimate partners include spouses, cohabitating dating partners, and partners who are not cohabitating, such as ongoing sexual partners. They can be same or different sex, although the vast majority of perpetrators of IPV against women are men (UNODC 2018). Although the terms IPV and domestic violence are used interchangeably, they denote different types of violence. Domestic violence refers to violence within the home, typically between a married heterosexual couple. IPV encompasses violence in all intimate relationships regardless of sexual orientation, cohabitation, or marital status. This chapter refers to IPV as the more encompassing term that covers violence in an intimate relationship both within and outside of a domicile. While IPV is the most common type of violence against women and girls (VAWG), women additionally face non-partner sexual violence, female genital mutilation, and trafficking (Fried 2003; WHO 2013). Although VAWG represents a growing area of feminist economic scholarship, this chapter focuses specifically on IPV. There is a more developed literature on IPV, and insights from IPV can aid in examination of other types of VAWG as both have similar contributing factors at the level of social norms and institutions (Heise 2011). There is substantial regional variation in the incidence of IPV (WHO 2013). The percentage of all ever-partnered women aged 15 and older who have experienced IPV range from 16 percent in East Asia and 19 percent in Western Europe to over 40 percent in South Asia and the Andean region of Latin America and 66 percent in central sub-Saharan Africa (Devries et al. 321

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2013). Some of the variation in reported rates can be attributed to differences in the survey instrument, definition, time frame, and type of IPV evaluated. To address these discrepancies, there is a push for uniform definitions (Breiding et al. 2015) and adoption of a “gold standard” method, characterized by straightforward questions about exact acts for a defined time period (WHO 2013). The issue of VAWG did not receive mainstream international attention until the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights (Fried 2003), although women’s groups had been raising awareness and providing needed support services long before that. The resulting Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted in June 1993, officially recognized women’s rights as human rights making VAWG a human rights violation (UN 1993) and contributed to the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. International attention has remained focused on reducing VAWG, which was incorporated in the 2015 UN declaration on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG 5—gender equality—includes the “elimination of all forms of violence against women” as an explicit development target.

Economic determinants Theoretical literature on the relationship between economic variables and IPV One of the main feminist critiques of Gary Becker’s household model (Becker 1981) was its justification of the traditional gender division of labor as efficient and neglect of its disadvantages to women, including the risk of IPV (Bergmann 1981). This neglect was possible since the model assumed a single set of preferences (utility function), which ruled out the possibility of disagreement. This problem was addressed by household bargaining models that introduced separate utility functions to examine intrahousehold decision-making (Manser and Brown 1980; McElroy and Horney 1981). These models posit that the relative bargaining power of each individual depends on their single-state utilities—the level of utility available outside of the relationship—in the event of failure to reach an agreement. Anything that improves a woman’s single-state utility (also known as the “threat point” or “fallback position”)—such as assets or income—increases her bargaining power and will theoretically result in a better bargain. (See Doss, this volume, for a more detailed discussion of intrahousehold decision-making.) Farmer and Tiefenthaler (1997) extended this model to incorporate IPV by inserting violence into the utility functions of each partner; the perpetrator’s utility rises with more violence, while the victim’s decreases. Anything that improves the victim’s potential single-state utility will increase her bargaining power within the relationship, including the ability to bargain for less (or no) violence, and should act as a deterrent against IPV. While feminist economists have found bargaining models useful to inform their work on household relationships, including to provide explanations for IPV, they have also highlighted limitations. The most limiting are bargaining models’ mainstream assumptions—rational, selfinterested agents, with perfect information about their options. Sen (1990) argued that these models fail to reflect intrahousehold relations whereby conflict is often cloaked in cooperation, and women’s sense of self-interest is often fused with that of their family. Sen argued that if women have weaker perceptions of their economic contribution to the household or their self-interest, they will have limited bargaining power in shaping their life options, including possible experience of IPV. Within Sen’s cooperative-conflict framework women’s bargaining power can be enhanced by education, paid work away from family relations, and consciousness 322

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raising. Agarwal (1997) added social norms and institutions as instrumental in shaping bargaining power, since they dictate what can be bargained over and how bargaining occurs. In light of these limitations, feminist economists apply the bargaining approach “heuristically” rather than as a formal model (Agarwal 1997; Seiz 1999).

Empirical evidence on economic factors as protective and risk factors for IPV Researchers have found a consistent association between economic disadvantage and IPV prevalence at the individual and aggregate level (Jewkes 2002). Early empirical evidence from the US found an inverse relationship between IPV prevalence and socioeconomic status (SES). For example, families living below the poverty line reported spousal violence at a rate five times greater than those reported by US families in the highest income bracket (Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 1980). Similar inverse relationships between wealth and IPV have been found across a diverse set of societies, including India (Panda and Agarwal 2005), a sample of 19 sub-Saharan African countries (Cools and Kotsadam 2017), and among female adolescents across 36 lowand middle-income countries (Wilson 2018). This relationship between economic disadvantage and IPV has also been established beyond the individual and household level. For example, Benson et al. (2003) find that neighborhood disadvantage is associated with higher prevalence of IPV in the US, and Sabina (2013) finds a negative association between gross national income and mean level of IPV in each country using a sample of 31 globally representative countries. Attempts to disentangle associations from causality resulted in exploration of the way economic empowerment can act as a protective or risk factor for violence. Kabeer (1999, also in this Handbook) describes empowerment as a process of change in one’s ability to make choices, which depend on resources, agency, and achievements. Although she argues that these three dimensions are inherently intertwined and cannot be evaluated separately, as discussed below, most studies on the relationship between economic empowerment and IPV focus on the resource dimension, namely women’s employment, income or asset ownership; some studies additionally examine the relationship between education and IPV.

Education Women’s higher educational attainment is generally correlated with reduced IPV prevalence (Jewkes 2002; Panda and Agarwal 2005; Vyas and Watts 2009). Intervention strategies that seek to prevent IPV through empowering women specifically target increasing educational attainment (Jewkes 2002). However, the negative relationship between educational attainment and IPV may not be as straightforward in all societies. Some countries, including the US and South Africa, exhibit an inverted U-shape relation between education and IPV, implying that the lowest and highest educational levels are protective. Small increases in women’s education may increase their risk of IPV until they reach a high-enough level of education for it to be protective (Jewkes 2002). The aforementioned relationship does not necessarily imply that higher educational attainment causes the reduction in IPV victimization. Erten and Keskin (2018) is one of the first studies to causally examine the effect of increased educational attainment on IPV in Turkey. Although they find that the resulting increase in women’s educational attainment improved women’s labor market outcomes, it had no effect on physical or sexual IPV and actually increased self-reported psychological IPV and financial coercion among rural women. 323

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Employment and earnings Bargaining models predict that a woman’s employment should reduce the risk for IPV as wages would increase her threat-point utility. However, in their review of studies covering 41 sites, Vyas and Watts (2009) report mixed results regarding the protective effect of employment. Additional empirical research also reports mixed results. Evidence from India shows that women’s employment is protective with respect to IPV in both the north (Bhattacharyya, Bedi, and Chhachhi 2011 on Uttar Pradesh) and the south (Panda and Agarwal 2005 on Kerala), as well as in Egypt (Kishor and Johnson 2004) and Tanzania (qualitative evidence from Vyas, Mbwambo, and Heise 2015). However, quantitative evidence from Vyas, Mbwambo, and Heise (2015) shows no association between women’s employment and IPV in Tanzania. Lenze and Klasen (2017) also find no association between employment and IPV in Jordan; however, when they disaggregate by type of IPV, they find that employment may be protective with respect to sexual violence. Some studies have found a positive correlation between women’s employment and IPV, including in Iran (Kishor and Johnson 2004) and across samples of 19–20 countries in subSaharan Africa (Cools and Kotsadam 2017; Tandrayen-Ragoobur 2018). Focusing on India, Bhattacharya (2015) explores the reverse causality suggested by the previous studies: that is, how does IPV affect women’s current employment? She finds that spousal violence increases the likelihood of women’s employment. The mixed results indicate that context matters in the translation of employment to protection. Potential mediating factors include social norms and customs, type of employment, and partner’s employment status. Macmillan and Gartner (1999) find that in Canada women’s employment is protective from IPV when their partners also have a job but increases the risk for IPV if the husband is unemployed. Bueno and Henderson (2017) report a similar pattern in the Dominican Republic: women’s employment is protective, unless the woman earns more than her partner. Therefore, relative labor market status or earnings—status/earnings in relation to the partner’s status/earnings—might be more important than absolute labor market status/earnings, having a job in and of itself, or the actual size of the paycheck. For example, in the US, women’s wages relative to men’s are protective with respect to IPV; Aizer (2010) finds that reductions in the gender wage gap help explain reductions in IPV against women. Cultural norms may impede the translation of employment or income into increased bargaining power (Agarwal 1997) or employment might not be a visible-enough signal of women’s bargaining power in Kerala, India (Panda and Agarwal 2005). Additionally, employment might make it harder to leave an abusive relationship if the employer does not provide paid time off.

Asset ownership Panda and Agarwal’s (2005) pioneering study explored the association between land and home ownership and physical and psychological IPV in Kerala, India. They find that both forms of asset ownership are protective against IPV. Not only are such assets visible and more permanent than employment, women’s ownership of a house or land provides a more tangible exit option even if the women do not actually use it. Bhattacharyya, Bedi, and Chhachhi (2011) also find that women’s home ownership is protective with respect to lifetime physical IPV in Uttar Pradesh, India. Women’s wealth is found to be protective in Ghana and Ecuador—with caveats (Oduro, Deere, and Catanzarite 2015). Controlling for overall household wealth, women’s share of total wealth in Ghana decreased the odds of emotional abuse but was not significantly associated with physical IPV. In Ecuador, women’s share of household wealth is protective, but its 324

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protective effects are mediated by the nature of wealth distribution. If a woman owns a greater share of total wealth, it is less protective than a more egalitarian distribution. These results emphasize the importance of studying the pathways through which economic empowerment is translated into bargaining power and protection. As in the case of earnings, care should be taken to differentiate between the potentially protective effects of absolute versus relative wealth. Special attention should also be paid to social and cultural norms that can affect these mechanisms. Examining the relationship between women’s asset ownership and IPV across 28 different countries, Peterman et al. (2017) find no consistent relationship; in some countries, asset ownership is protective while in others either there is no association with IPV or asset ownership actually increases risk. These norms may change over time. For example, Schuler and Nazneen (2018) posit that the transition from incipient to normative empowerment of women within a society may explain the mixed findings in the literature. As a society transitions to accepting women’s empowerment as normal, empowerment becomes protective.

Costs and consequences Some of the most serious consequences of IPV are adverse mental and physical health effects on the victims (Bonomi et al. 2006). Such health effects result in elevated annual healthcare costs during the period of abuse (Bonomi et al. 2009), which continue on for up to three years after the cessation of IPV in a sample of women in the US (Fishman et al. 2010). Drawing upon methodologies popular in the economic analysis of healthcare (Eisenberg 1989), economists have started conducting cost-identification studies to tally the economic burden of IPV. There are three categories—direct costs, indirect costs, and intangible costs—that accrue at the individual and societal level, spanning a multitude of sectors, including the justice and healthcare systems, social services, education, business, household and personal costs, and second-­ generation impact costs (Duvvury et al. 2013). Direct costs are direct expenditures on goods and services. Indirect costs include costs associated with loss of life or livelihood as a result of IPV-related morbidities or mortalities. They include the costs associated with lost paid and unpaid work days (absenteeism), and the costs associated with reduced productivity while at work (presenteeism). Intangible costs are those that are difficult to quantify; they include the costs associated with pain and suffering. The standard strategy for estimating direct costs is an accounting methodology, adding up costs across all transactions. Economists value indirect costs using either the human capital approach or willingness-to-pay (WTP) method. The value of indirect costs using the human capital method is the estimate of the net present value of the future stream of the victim’s earnings. Shortcomings of this approach include large variations in estimates depending on the discount rate chosen. Additionally, using the labor market value of work to estimate indirect costs can result in underestimates as they reflect labor market discrimination. The WTP method values IPV based on the amount an individual would be willing to pay to avoid IPV. Thus, it offers an alternative to using the labor market to value indirect costs while still applying market economy principles. Shortcomings of this approach include the timeintensive nature of surveying populations regarding their WTP and determining who should be surveyed, as different populations will have different responses. WTP varies by the ability to pay and by the probability and proximity of that event actually occurring. For example, if a woman feels at risk for IPV due to past victimization, she might have a higher WTP. However, if IPV is normalized in a particular society, a woman might report being less willing to pay and therefore WTP estimates may undervalue the true cost of violence (Duvvury et al. 2013). 325

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Estimates of the macroeconomic costs of IPV are staggering. In Australia, the annual direct and indirect costs of IPV against female victims in 2002–2003 was estimated at $4.6 billion, or $8.1 billion when including intangible costs (Access Economics 2004). In the UK, the total cost of IPV against males and females was estimated at £16 billion in 2008 (Walby 2009). Estimates of direct and indirect costs associated with female victims of domestic violence in Vietnam derived from data collected in 2010 and 2012 were estimated at $1.17  billion annually and indirect costs associated with productivity losses at $2.26 billion annually (Duvvury, Minh, and Carney 2012). Over time, these costs are even greater. For example, in the US, the total female population lifetime costs of IPV are estimated at about $3.28 trillion (Peterson et al. 2018). Yet these numbers may still underestimate the true costs of IPV because they fail to account for the structural interlinkages of the economy and resulting indirect losses (deemed the multiplier effect or multiplier loss) of missed work days (Raghavendra, Duvvury, and Ashe 2017). Moreover, costing studies underestimate the true burden of IPV because they are static measurements of cost over a given time period. As Duvvury et al. 2013 emphasize, the costs of IPV linger throughout the lifetime, either directly through increased healthcare utilization and costs that continue past the period of abuse or through disruption of educational and occupational trajectories which may impact economic well-being in the long run. Studies of teenagers in the US find that IPV during adolescence (or, dating violence) is associated with reduced academic performance (Banyard and Cross 2008) and increased likelihood of skipping school (VivoloKantor, Olsen, and Bacon 2016). These associations persist into young adulthood as well. Among a sample of women attending college in Canada, psychological dating violence is significantly associated with lower academic performance (LeBlanc, Barling, and Turner 2014). College students in the US report dropping classes, switching majors, or transferring universities to avoid perpetrators (Krebs et al. 2007). These negative educational effects can have financial ramifications in terms of lost lifetime potential earnings associated with different levels of educational attainment. Among a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the US, IPV during young adulthood is found to be significantly associated with reduced educational attainment and increased likelihood of reporting economic hardship and/or receipt of public assistance in later life (Strenio 2018).

Policies and programs The ultimate goal of research on IPV is its eradication; therefore, researchers have turned to evaluating the effectiveness of prevention policies. In her exploration of prevention strategies, Heise (2011) presents five correlates of IPV prevalence: notions of violent masculinity among perpetrators and female subordination; victims’ and perpetrators’ exposure to violence during childhood; male alcohol abuse; women’s economic empowerment; and legal and justice systems. The first three have been shown to contribute to IPV and, therefore, prevention strategies targeted at their reduction should translate to reductions in IPV. The next two correlates are areas that require continued research, investment, and modification. Feminist economists have typically focused on the role of women’s economic empowerment and how to increase it, while researchers in other fields have focused on the role of the legal system. In this regard, the two strategies currently taking center stage in the Global South are cash transfer programs and microfinance. In a mixed-method review of 14 studies exploring the causal link between cash transfer programs and IPV in low- and middle-income countries, Buller et al. (2018) show that the majority of studies find a decrease in IPV that can be attributed to the cash transfer program; only one study found mixed results (both increased and decreased IPV) while two found no 326

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impact. Evidence from a randomized experiment in Ecuador that examined cash transfers, as well as food and voucher transfers, also found that all transfers were associated with a decrease in physical and sexual violence (Hidrobo, Peterman, and Heise 2016). Empirical evidence on microfinance and IPV is mixed. Early work acknowledges that microfinance is not a “magic bullet” while also arguing that participation could be associated with a decrease in IPV by reducing financial stress and increasing women’s perceived bargaining power (Kabeer 2005). Research from Bangladesh, however, found no association between microfinance participation and the likelihood of IPV on average, although among women who were relatively better off economically, microfinance increased the odds of IPV (Murshid, Akincigil, and Zippay 2016). The authors hypothesize this may be a result of male backlash to status inconsistencies between the partners arising from microfinance participation.

Conclusion Feminist economic research on IPV, and more generally VAWG, has made critical theoretical contributions and provided influential empirical evidence regarding the role of economic empowerment, employment, and asset ownership as risk or protective factors. A growing number of research-backed policies are being implemented at the national level and VAWG is increasingly being incorporated into international development goals (García-Moreno, Zimmerman, and Watts 2017). However, much work remains to be done requiring interdisciplinary academic work and coordination between practitioners, academics, and governments. Future research should focus on the pathways and mechanisms through which IPV reduces well-being with an eye toward intervention strategies that might mitigate the worst of these consequences. Continued evaluation of evidence on prevention strategies is also imperative if we are to create a world in which women and girls have the capability to live a life free from violence.

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Intimate partner violence Murshid, Nadine Shaanta, Ayse Akincigil, and Allison Zippay. 2016. “Microfinance Participation and Domestic Violence in Bangladesh: Results from a Nationally Representative Survey.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 31 (9): 1579–96. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oduro, Abena D., Carmen Diana Deere, and Zachary B. Catanzarite. 2015. “Women’s Wealth and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights from Ecuador and Ghana.” Feminist Economics 21 (2): 1–29. Panda, Pradeep, and Bina Agarwal. 2005. “Marital Violence, Human Development and Women’s Property Status in India.” World Development 33 (5): 823–50. Peterman, Amber, Audrey Pereira, Jennifer Bleck, Tia M. Palermo, and Kathryn M. Yount. 2017. “Women’s Individual Asset Ownership and Experience of Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from 28 International Surveys.” American Journal of Public Health 107 (5): 747–55. Peterson, Cora, Megan C. Kearns, Wendy LiKamWa McIntosh, Lianne Fuino Estefan, Christina Nicolaidis, Kathryn E. McCollister, Amy Gordon, and Curtis Florence. 2018. “Lifetime Economic Burden of Intimate Partner Violence Among U.S. Adults.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 55 (4): 433–44. Raghavendra, Srinivas, Nata Duvvury, and Sinéad Ashe. 2017. “The Macroeconomic Loss Due to Violence Against Women: The Case of Vietnam.” Feminist Economics 23 (4): 62–89. Sabina, Chiara. 2013. “Individual and National Level Associations Between Economic Deprivation and Partner Violence Among College Students in 31 National Settings.” Aggressive Behavior 39 (4): 247–56. Schuler, Sidney Ruth, and Sohela Nazneen. 2018. “Does Intimate Partner Violence Decline as Women’s Empowerment Becomes Normative? Perspectives of Bangladeshi Women.” World Development 101 (January): 284–92. Seiz, Janet A. 1999. “Game Theory and Bargaining Models.” In The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, edited by Janet Peterson and Margaret Lewis. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Sen, Amartya K. 1990. “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts.” In Persistent Inequalities, edited by Irene Tinker. New York: Oxford University Press. Straus, Murray A., Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz. 1980. Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Strenio, Jacqueline. 2018. “The Economic Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence Over the Life Cycle.” PhD dissertation, ProQuest, University of Utah, Utah. Tandrayen-Ragoobur, Verena. 2018. “Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Labour Force Participation in Sub Saharan Africa.” Community, Work & Family: 19–43. United Nations Human Rights. 1993. “Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action.” World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna, June 25. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 2018. Global Study on Homicide 2018. Vienna: UNODC. Accessed July  2019. www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/GSH2018/GSH18_ Gender-related_killing_of_women_and_girls.pdf. Vivolo-Kantor, Alana M., Emily O. M. Olsen, and Sarah Bacon. 2016. “Associations of Teen Dating Violence Victimization with School Violence and Bullying Among US High School Students.” Journal of School Health 86 (8): 620–27. Vyas, Seema, Jessie Mbwambo, and Lori Heise. 2015. “Women’s Paid Work and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights from Tanzania.” Feminist Economics 21 (1): 35–58. Vyas, Seema, and Charlotte Watts. 2009. “How Does Economic Empowerment Affect Women’s Risk of Intimate Partner Violence in Low and Middle Income Countries? A Systematic Review of Published Literature.” Journal of International Development 21: 577–602. Walby, Sylvia. 2009. “The Cost of Domestic Violence: Up-Date 2009.” Accessed July 2019. www.lancaster. ac.uk/fass/doc_library/ . . . /Cost_of_domestic_violence_update.doc. Wilson, Nicholas L. 2018. “Violence Against Female Adolescents in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Evidence from 36 National Household Surveys.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence. doi:10.1177/0886260518792971. World Health Organization (WHO). 2013. Global and Regional Estimates of Violence against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence and Non-Partner Sexual Violence. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization.

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34 REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT Kelly M. Jones and Anna Bernstein

Introduction Reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being in all matters relating to the reproductive system. This implies the ability to have a satisfying and safe sex life, the capability to reproduce, and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so (UNFPA 2019). One’s economic empowerment will have a significant impact on their ability to achieve reproductive health. In turn, their reproductive health can also impact their economic empowerment in both the short and long run. In this chapter, we examine how women’s abilities to secure their livelihoods affect key capabilities of bodily health and bodily integrity (Nussbaum 2003). We also explore the ways in which these capabilities, specifically related to reproductive health, shape women’s economic outcomes or levels of provisioning. Finally, we highlight key deficits in women’s agency regarding their own health and bodies, and the ways in which these have harmed women’s well-being and contributed to enduring gender inequalities.

Fertility Economic empowerment impacts control over own fertility The ability to limit and space one’s fertility is central to reproductive health and is strongly impacted by a woman’s economic empowerment. Women living in poverty have considerably less access to fertility control than others and have higher unmet need for contraception. This is defined as the proportion of currently married women who do not want to have more children or who would like to postpone children for at least two years but are not using any form of family planning. In countries defined by the World Bank as low-income, unmet need is nearly three times what it is in the US (World Bank 2014). Rates of unintended pregnancy are higher in the Global South, yet access to safe abortion is lower. Nearly all countries with highly restrictive abortion bans are in the Global South, where only 29 percent of women have unrestricted access (as compared to 81 percent of women in the Global North). As a result, unsafe abortions are common in these areas and often result in complications requiring medical attention—and in some cases, death (Singh et al. 2018). 330

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The situation is exacerbated by the reliance of the reproductive health sectors in the Global South on international aid. When the US cut funding to foreign reproductive health organizations under the Mexico City Policy (commonly called the Global Gag Rule), contraceptive availability declined, abortion increased, and overall fertility increased in recipient countries (Bendavid, Avila, and Miller 2011; Jones 2015; Rodgers 2018). Even in the Global North, individuals’ ability to access family planning resources is often dependent on socioeconomic status. In Canada, cost is a major barrier to contraceptive access, with the women least likely to be able to afford contraceptives also being the least likely to be insured. Even for those with health coverage, insurers do not always cover the full range of methods. Abortion care is also associated with a number of costs beyond the procedure itself— particularly for women living outside of urban areas (Hulme et al. 2015). In the US, there is a robust network of publicly funded family planning clinics—an important resource given the country’s inequity in health insurance coverage and access. In 2015, over six million women received subsidized contraceptive services from almost 11,000 clinics (Frost et al. 2017). Still, racial and socioeconomic disparities persist in access to contraception, and current attacks on federally funded clinics threaten to further reduce access for the poor (Dehlendorf et al. 2010). Abortion care in the US is even more dependent on income because federally funded public insurance (and most state-funded public insurance) cannot be used to pay for the procedure. Even for women who have private insurance, abortion coverage is often limited. In addition to the procedure cost itself, most women incur costs for travel, lost wages, childcare, and other expenses (Jones, Upadhyay, and Weitz 2013). Since many women seek abortions for financial reasons (Biggs, Gould, and Foster 2013), restrictions on funding threaten to further disempower women already struggling economically. In some cases, women’s abilities to plan their families and plan their lives requires more than averting unwanted pregnancies and births. Many couples struggle to conceive their desired number of children; estimates suggest that 12 percent of couples worldwide suffer from some form of infertility, with the highest rates in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa/Middle East, and Central/Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Mascarenhas et al. 2012). Assisted reproductive health technology (ART) encompasses a range of treatments used to treat infertility, including in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer, and gestational surrogacy. A single round of IVF (the most common form of ART) costs an average of $12,500 in the US and $4,000 in Japan. Because multiple rounds are often needed, estimated costs for a live birth in 2006 ranged from $24,000 to $41,000 across Japan, Scandinavia, Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US (Chambers et al. 2009). Given these high costs, accessing ART in the Global North remains in the purview of the economically privileged (Smith et al. 2011; Harris et al. 2016). In the US, insurance coverage of ART is only mandated in 15 states and is rarely covered by public insurance. Even in states with these mandates, many employers are exempt, coverage is limited, and not all policies actually require coverage of IVF (Devine, Stillman, and DeCherney 2014). There are limited data on infertility services in the Global South. This is due in part to a history of population control in high-fertility areas, where there is often a narrow emphasis of reproductive health on contraception and sexually transmitted diseases (Daar and Merali 2002). Access to ART is limited, and when it is available, the cost is usually prohibitively high. This in turn worsens economic outcomes: in many countries in the Global South, an inability to have children means that infertile couples miss an important source for social and economic support as they age (Daar and Merali 2002).

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Own fertility control impacts economic empowerment The ability to control one’s own fertility can also affect economic empowerment. Delaying or preventing unwanted births may allow women to expand their capabilities. Just by lowering fertility alone, families may save financial resources (Schultz 2007). Even when actual fertility outcomes are unchanged, the availability of contraception and abortion have been demonstrated to alter women’s expectations, allowing for increases in educational attainment (Bernstein and Jones 2019a, 2019b). The Matlab experiment in Bangladesh, which ran from 1974 to 1996, is one of the primary ways through which the economic effects of contraception have been measured in the Global South. Treatment households received family planning outreach with various contraceptive methods available, while non-treatment households received only regular government health and family planning programs, which generally required that women visit a local health clinic to receive services. In addition to a decline in fertility and an improvement in related health outcomes, women in treatment households experienced an increase in economic productivity outside the household and increased household assets. Historically, various natural experiments in abortion access in middle- and high-income countries have also demonstrated impacts on women’s economic well-being. Research examining 2007 abortion reforms in Mexico found that improved access to abortion increased women’s role in household decision-making—an important marker of women’s empowerment (Clarke and Mühlrad 2016). Abortion legalization in Oslo in the late 1960s produced similar results: abortion access led to improved educational attainment for young women, with spillover effects enhancing economic outcomes for the next generation (Mølland 2016). In the US, legal access to contraception and abortion in the 1960s and 1970s improved economic outcomes for women later in adulthood. Contraception allowed women to graduate from college in greater numbers, and subsequently enter professional careers and participate in the workforce at higher rates and receive higher wages (Bailey 2006; Hock 2008; Bailey, Hershbein, and Miller 2012). Similarly, abortion reforms led to increased educational attainment, which then translated into increased labor force participation, particularly for black women (Angrist and Evans 2000; Kalist 2004). Access to ART can also impact economic outcomes. The possibility of relying on ART in the future allows (more advantaged) women to delay childbearing to later ages, allowing women to expand their capabilities and receive education and participate in the labor market—even if they do not eventually conceive through ART. In the US, research has documented impacts of insurance mandates for ART coverage that were implemented between 1985 and 2005. Data from 1982–1999 show that these mandates increased women’s labor force participation and resulted in higher wages later in their careers (Buckles 2007). Data from 1977 to 2005 also indicate that ART access increased the share of college-educated women who chose professional careers and who completed professional degrees (Kroeger and La Mattina 2017). In Israel, a 1994 policy providing access to free ART induced women born between 1950 and 1980 to both complete college and obtain postcollege education (measured in 2008) (Gershoni and Low 2017). Given these benefits, the economic barriers to ART discussed in the previous section may exacerbate economic inequality. Impacts of ART on inequality exist not only within countries, but across the Global South and North as well. Gestational surrogacy is available to the most privileged—including relatively wealthy families in the Global North and upper classes globally (Hewitson 2014). In India, a transnational surrogacy market has emerged, in which surrogate mothers act as autonomous

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economic actors. As more privileged women can purchase these gestational services from less privileged women, these contracts support rather than subvert existing class inequities.

Maternity Maternal health Access to maternity care depends heavily on economic resources, with 99 percent of maternal deaths occurring in the Global South (WHO 2019a). The inequity in access that causes these preventable deaths can be understood through the “three delays” framework, in which there are three points for delay of care: in the decision to seek care, in reaching a healthcare facility, and in receiving adequate care once at a facility (Thaddeus and Maine 1994). All three are affected by both the economic resources of the women themselves and the health system in which they are seeking care. Maternal mortality can impact economic outcomes for children and families. Studies in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, and Ethiopia have demonstrated that maternal death adversely affects the financial security and educational opportunities for children, spouses, and other family members left behind (Belizan and Miller 2015). Postpartum depression and/or anxiety affect 13  percent of new mothers globally (WHO 2019b). These mental health issues have been shown in the US to have substantial implications for labor outcomes, including earnings (Marcotte and Wilcox-Gok 2003). Given that even healthy women often suffer career setbacks after giving birth, the mental and physical wellbeing of new mothers should be prioritized to support continued participation in the labor market.

Breastfeeding The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends exclusive breastfeeding for six months after birth, continued with complementary food to at least two years of age (UNICEF 2018). These guidelines are based on potential health benefits for both infant and mother. For women who breastfeed, there is evidence of lower rates of postpartum depression, diabetes, coronary heart disease, breast cancer, some reproductive cancers, and rheumatoid arthritis (Godfrey and Lawrence 2010). While breastfeeding is the dominant norm in the Global South, several factors can inhibit optimal breastfeeding behavior. More than 50 cultures (predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and among native cultures in Central America, Mexico and the US) practice a cultural taboo around early breastfeeding, when the child should receive the nutrientdense first milk (Morse, Jehle, and Gamble 1990). Further, preferences for high fertility lead many women to cease breastfeeding due to pregnancy before the recommended duration is completed. Even within-country economic inequality can impact these outcomes. In Benin, women in the richest quintile are seven times more likely to exclusively breastfeed for the first six months than women in the poorest quintile (Mangasaryan et al. 2012). Based on the World Bank’s country categorization, UNICEF (2018) reports that rates of ever breastfeeding are the lowest in high-income countries, where the practice is not always compatible with the lives of mothers who work for pay. US mothers who are employed fulltime are less likely to breastfeed than those who are employed part-time employed or not employed (Ryan, Zhou, and Arensberg 2006). Women who return to work within 12 weeks of giving birth breastfeed for about five fewer weeks than other women, on average (Berger, Hill, 333

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and Waldfogel 2005). In 2012, a quarter of US mothers interviewed returned to work within two weeks of birth (Lerner 2015). Perhaps unsurprisingly, paid leave has been shown to increase rates and duration of breastfeeding in the US and Canada (Baker and Milligan 2008; Appelbaum and Milkman 2011). In addition to leave mandates, workplaces could create more supportive environments for mothers once they return to work. Availability of breastfeeding facilities at work increases rates of breastfeeding in the UK and Taiwan (Chen, Wu, and Chie 2006; Bono and Pronzato 2012). Women in the US who had adequate accommodations for pumping at work, such as break time and private space, were over twice as likely to be exclusively breastfeeding at six months (Kozhimannil et al. 2016). However, accommodations vary globally: 25 percent of countries do not guarantee paid breastfeeding breaks, and among those that do, there is substantial variation in the time allowed (Heymann, Raub, and Earle 2013). Such difficulties may affect women’s labor market outcomes. US women who breastfed for six months or longer had lower earnings, as longer-duration breastfeeders were more likely to be non-employed in the years following childbirth and worked fewer hours when they were employed (Rippeyoung and Noonan 2012). These findings suggest that although breastfeeding proponents may promote the practice as “free,” it can have costly effects for mothers.

Special issues in the Global South Transactional sex Transactional sex encompasses any type of sexual relationship which is tied to a transfer of money or other valuables. This includes prostitution, but is much broader in scope, including the keeping of boyfriends as “insurance,” and the reliance of young girls on “sugar daddies” (LoPiccalo, Robinson, and Yeh 2016). The “sugar daddy” arrangement of a significantly older man giving a young woman gifts or money in exchange for sex is common in East and Southern Africa, with estimates as high as 52 percent and 57 percent of young women in Kenya and Tanzania, respectively (Maswanya et al. 2011; Wamoyi et al. 2016). In this region there are limited options for adolescent girls, with most leaving school during or after primary education and marrying by age 18. Higher education can improve marriage and employment prospects, but few families have the means, and daughters are not prioritized. Sugar daddies offer an important opportunity, despite the risks of unwanted pregnancy and disease. Young women significantly increase their risk of HIV by partnering with older men, whose HIV prevalence is two to five times higher than that of men their own age (ICF 2020). Women’s economic disempowerment drives other forms of transactional sex as well. Vulnerable women may rely on transactional relationships in times of hardship to cover unexpected costs. In Kenya this has been observed not only among sex workers, but also among other vulnerable women (Jones and Gong 2018). While many widows and single mothers report being sexually inactive, those who are active report more than two-thirds of their sexual encounters as remunerated. Such behaviors are a key driver in the AIDS epidemic in East and Southern Africa (Halperin and Epstein 2004). What drives women to rely on sex as insurance? Financial inclusion is lower in this region than anywhere else in the world, and the case is worse for women, who are 25 percent less likely than men to hold a bank account (World Bank 2017). Without access to savings, formal insurance, or credit, women are left to find alternatives to cover expenses. Sixty percent report they are not able to cover emergency expenses on their own (ibid). Economic disempowerment leads 334

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women to rely on sex, which can harm their own welfare and safety, as well as exert significant negative externalities in terms of public health.

Female genital mutilation Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a rite of passage to womanhood in many cultures, with the highest concentration of cases in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. It includes “all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons” (WHO 2019c). In addition to the estimated 200 million women and girls who have undergone the procedure, up to three million girls are at risk of FGM each year. The practice has been documented in 30 countries, with prevalence rates of over 80 percent in some (WHO 2019c). Proponents claim it prevents premarital sex and ensures wives’ faithfulness. Where FGM is compulsory, women who do not undergo the procedure may be socially ostracized and prevented from marrying (Bogale, Markos, and Kaso 2014). Nonetheless, the practice has been deemed genderbased violence and a violation of human rights, with the United Nations calling for its elimination (United Nations 1994). The health risks of FGM include increased risk of urinary tract infections, painful sexual intercourse, bacterial vaginosis, and obstetric difficulties, among others (Berg et al. 2014). Women who undergo FGM often experience psychological trauma either from the practice itself or subsequent obstetric complications (Mulongo, Hollins Martin, and McAndrew 2014). In an analysis of six African countries, modeled annual costs of FGM were $3.7  million (international dollars) with a loss of 130,000 years of life (Adam et al. 2010). Evidence shows FGM leads to a decline in household earnings and savings, and limits girls’ education potential (UNFPA 2008); findings from Kenya in the early 1990s show FGM contributed to girls’ high school dropout rates (Kabira, Gachukia, and Matiangi 1997). Given that healthier people live more productive lives, the negative effects of FGM doubtlessly extend to economic activity. Some potential complications of FGM may make women completely unable to work, leaving them economically reliant on their fathers or husbands.

Conclusion Economic empowerment has important consequences for women’s reproductive health. Poverty hinders one’s capability to prevent unwanted births and to achieve desired births in the case of infertility. In turn, a woman’s fertility control impacts her other capabilities, including the provisioning of education, desired occupation and career timing, economic security, and even decision-making power within her household. Maternal health also exhibits this bidirectional relationship with economic empowerment, with poor women having worse maternal outcomes, and maternal mortality and morbidity harming the economic welfare of women and their families. In contrast, some efforts at maternal (and child) health, such as breastfeeding, can present obstacles for women’s economic participation and advancement. In the Global South, women’s economic and social disempowerment create unique challenges to reproductive health. Lack of economic capabilities drives young women to risky sexual relationships that provide support for schooling or serve as emergency insurance. Conservative sexual mores mandate rites of passage that physically harm genitalia and may cause significant reproductive challenges and economic burdens. This synthesis has identified key challenges to reproductive health that may be improved with economic interventions. These include improvements to women’s access to formal banking and 335

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credit (to reduce transactional sex), increased paid parental leave (to reduce the impact of breastfeeding on economic participation and improve maternal mental health), systemic investments in public health sectors in the Global South (to reduce maternal mortality), and improved public support for poor women’s access to family planning. In turn, we also find that improvements in reproductive health such as increasing access to family planning and ART, improving maternal health, and reducing FGM can pay significant dividends in terms of economic welfare. Future research should continue to investigate the nuanced ways in which economic empowerment is linked to reproductive health. To date we have insufficient evidence on many important questions in this space, including: what is driving the high unmet need for contraception in the Global South? Is it just access or also preferences? What are the impacts of infertility and the extent of ART access in the Global South? How do nuanced elements of maternal health, such as postpartum anxiety, affect economic activity? What is the causal link between breastfeeding and career advancement? And what, if any, economic forces are driving the continuation of FGM practices? These questions we leave to future feminist scholars.

References Adam, Taghreed, Heli Bathija, David Bishai, Yung-Ting Bonnenfant, Manal Darwish, Dale Huntington, and Elise Johansen. 2010. “Estimating the Obstetric Costs of Female Genital Mutilation in Six African Countries.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 88 (4): 281–88. Angrist, Joshua D., and William N. Evans. 2000. “Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of the 1970 State Abortion Reforms.” In Research in Labor Economics, 75–113. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Appelbaum, Eileen, and Ruth Milkman. 2011. Leaves That Pay: Employer and Worker Experiences with Paid Family Leave in California. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Report. Bailey, Martha J. 2006. “More Power to the Pill: The Impact of Contraceptive Freedom on Women’s Life Cycle Labor Supply.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 121 (1): 289–320. Bailey, Martha J., Brad Hershbein, and Amalia R. Miller. 2012. “The Opt-in Revolution: Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4 (3): 225–54. Baker, Michael, and Kevin Milligan. 2008. “Maternal Employment, Breastfeeding, and Health: Evidence from Maternity Leave Mandates.” Journal of Health Economics 27 (4): 871–87. Belizan, Jose, and Suellen Miller. 2015. “True Costs of Maternal Death: Individual Tragedy Impacts Family, Community, and Nations.” Reproductive Health 12 (S1). Bendavid, Eran, Patrick Avila, and Grant Miller. 2011. “United States Aid Policy and Induced Abortion in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 89: 873–80. Berg, Rigmor C., Vigdis Underland, Jan Odgaard-Jensen, Atle Fretheim, and Gunn E. Vist. 2014. “Effects of Female Genital Cutting on Physical Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” BMJ Open 4 (11): e006316. Berger, Lawrence M., Jennifer Hill, and Jane Waldfogel. 2005. “Maternity Leave, Early Maternal Employment and Child Health and Development in the US.” The Economic Journal 115 (501): F29–47. Bernstein, Anna, and Kelly M. Jones. 2019a. “The Economic Effects of Abortion Access: A Review of the Evidence.” Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/publications/economic-effectsabortion-access-report/. ———. 2019b. “The Economic Effects of Contraceptive Access: A Review of the Evidence.” Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/publications/economic-contraceptive-access-review/. Biggs, M. Antonia, Heather Gould, and Diana Greene Foster. 2013. “Understanding Why Women Seek Abortions in the US.” BMC Women’s Health 13 (July): 29. Bogale, Daniel, Desalegn Markos, and Muhammedawel Kaso. 2014. “Prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation and Its Effect on Women’s Health in Bale Zone, Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study.” BMC Public Health 14. Bono, Emilia Del, and Chiara Daniela Pronzato. 2012. “Does Breastfeeding Support at Work Help Mothers and Employers at the Same Time?” IZA Discussion Paper Series DP6619. https://www.coursehero.com/ file/73069477/dp6619pdf/. Buckles, Kasey. 2007. “Stopping the Biological Clock: Infertility Treatments and the Career-Family Tradeoff.” Unpublished Manuscript, Boston University. https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/natality.pdf.

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Reproductive health & economic empowerment Chambers, Georgina M., Elizabeth A. Sullivan, Osamu Ishihara, Michael G. Chapman, and G. David Adamson. 2009. “The Economic Impact of Assisted Reproductive Technology: A Review of Selected Developed Countries.” Fertility and Sterility 91 (6): 2281–94. doi:10.1016/j.fertnstert.2009.04.029. Chen, Yi Chun, Ya-Chi Wu, and Wei-Chu Chie. 2006. “Effects of Work-Related Factors on the Breastfeeding Behavior of Working Mothers in a Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturer: A Cross-­Sectional Survey.” BMC Public Health 6 (June): 160. Clarke, Damian, and Hanna Mühlrad. 2016. “The Impact of Abortion Legalization on Fertility and Female Empowerment: New Evidence from Mexico.” Working Paper WPS/2016-33-1, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, Oxford. Daar, Abdallah S., and Zara Merali. 2002. “Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Developing World.” Current Practices and Controversies in Assisted Reproduction: Report of a Meeting on Medical, Ethical and Social Aspects of Assisted Reproduction Held at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, September 17–21. Dehlendorf, Christine, Maria Isabel Rodriguez, Kira Levy, Sonya Borrero, and Jody Steinauer. 2010. “Disparities in Family Planning.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 202 (3): 214–20. Devine, Kate, Robert J. Stillman, and Alan DeCherney. 2014. “The Affordable Care Act: Early Implications for Fertility Medicine.” Fertility and Sterility 101 (5): 1224–27. Frost, Jennifer J., Lori F. Frohwirth, Nakeisha Blades, Mia R. Zolna, Ayana Douglas-Hall, and Jonathan Bearak. 2017. Publicly Funded Contraceptive Services at U.S. Clinics, 2015. New York: Guttmacher Institute. Gershoni, Naomi, and Corinne Low. 2017. “The Impact of Extended Reproductive Time Horizons: Evidence from Israel’s Expansion of Access to IVF.” Population Center Working Paper Series 2017-15. University of Pennsylvania. https://repository.upenn.edu/psc_publications/15. Godfrey, Jodi R., and Ruth A. Lawrence. 2010. “Toward Optimal Health: The Maternal Benefits of Breastfeeding.” Journal of Women’s Health (15409996) 19 (9): 1597–602. Halperin, Daniel T., and Helen Epstein. 2004. “Concurrent Sexual Partnerships Help to Explain Africa’s High HIV Prevalence: Implications for Prevention.” The Lancet 364 (9428): 4–6. Harris, Katie, Hugh Burley, Robert McLachlan, Mark Bowman, Alan Macaldowie, Kate Taylor, Michael Chapman, and Georgina Mary Chambers. 2016. “Socio-Economic Disparities in Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Australia.” Reproductive BioMedicine Online 33 (5): 575–84. Hewitson, Gillian. 2014. “The Commodified Womb and Neoliberal Families.” Review of Radical Political Economics 46 (4): 489–95. Heymann, Jody, Amy Raub, and Alison Earle. 2013. “Breastfeeding Policy: A  Globally Comparative Analysis.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 91: 398–406. Hock, Heinrich. 2008. “The Pill and the College Attainment of American Women and Men.” Working Paper wp2007_10_01, Department of Economics, Florida State University. https://ideas.repec.org/p/ fsu/wpaper/wp2007_10_01.html. Hulme, Jennifer, Sheila Dunn, Edith Guilbert, Judith Soon, and Wendy Norman. 2015. “Barriers and Facilitators to Family Planning Access in Canada.” Healthcare Policy 10 (3): 48–63. ICF. 2020. “The DHS Program STATcompiler. Funded by USAID. Indictors Used: HIV Prevalence of Men Aged 15–49 and Men Aged 15–24 in East and Southern African Countries.” http://www.statcompiler.com. Jones, Kelly M. 2015. “Contraceptive Supply and Fertility Outcomes: Evidence from Ghana.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 64 (1): 31–69. Jones, Kelly M., and Erick Gong. 2018. “Improving Shock Coping with Precautionary Savings: The Effects of Mobile Banking on Transactional Sex in Kenya.” Working Paper. www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/ files/publications/Working%20Paper%20-%20Savings%20and%20Shock%20Coping%20%281%29.pdf. Jones, Rachel K., Ushma D. Upadhyay, and Tracy A. Weitz. 2013. “At What Cost? Payment for Abortion Care by U.S. Women.” Women’s Health Issues 23 (3): e173–78. Kabira, W. M., E. W. Gachukia, and F. O. Matiangi. 1997. “The Effect of Women’s Role on Health: The Paradox.” International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 58 (1): 23–34. Kalist, David E. 2004. “Abortion and Female Labor Force Participation: Evidence Prior to Roe v. Wade.” Journal of Labor Research 25 (3): 503–14. Kozhimannil, Katy B., Judy Jou, Dwenda K. Gjerdingen, and Patricia M. McGovern. 2016. “Access to Workplace Accommodations to Support Breastfeeding After Passage of the Affordable Care Act.” Women’s Health Issues 26 (1): 6–13. Kroeger, Sarah, and Giulia La Mattina. 2017. “Assisted Reproductive Technology and Women’s Choice to Pursue Professional Careers.” Journal of Population Economics 30 (3): 723–69. Lerner, Sharon. 2015. “The Real War on Families: Why the U.S. Needs Paid Leave Now.” In These Times, August 18. http://inthesetimes.com/article/18151/the-real-war-on-families.

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Kelly M. Jones and Anna Bernstein LoPiccalo, Katherine, Jonathan Robinson, and Ethan Yeh. 2016. “Income, Income Shocks, and Transactional Sex.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Prostitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mangasaryan, Nune, Luann Martin, Ann Brownlee, Adebayo Ogunlade, Christiane Rudert, and Xiaodong Cai. 2012. “Breastfeeding Promotion, Support and Protection: Review of Six Country Programmes.” Nutrients 4 (8): 990–1014. Marcotte, Dave E., and Virginia Wilcox-Gok. 2003. “Estimating Earning Losses Due to Mental Illness: A Quantile Regression Approach.” Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics 6 (3): 123–34. Mascarenhas, Maya N., Seth R. Flaxman, Ties Boerma, Sheryl Vanderpoel, and Gretchen A. Stevens. 2012. “National, Regional, and Global Trends in Infertility Prevalence Since 1990: A Systematic Analysis of 277 Health Surveys.” PLoS Medicine 9 (12): e1001356. Maswanya, E. S., K. Mohi, K. Aoyagi, and T. Takemoto. 2011. “Sexual Behavior and Condom Use in Female Students in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania: Differences by Steady and Casual Partners.” East African Journal of Public Health 8 (2): 69–76. Mølland, Eirin. 2016. “Benefits from Delay? The Effect of Abortion Availability on Young Women and Their Children.” Labour Economics 43 (December): 6–28. Morse, Janice M., Corinne Jehle, and Diane Gamble. 1990. “Initiating Breastfeeding: A World Survey of the Timing of Postpartum Breastfeeding.” International Journal of Nursing Studies 27 (3): 303–13. Mulongo, Peggy, Caroline Hollins Martin, and Sue McAndrew. 2014. “The Psychological Impact of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) on Girls/Women’s Mental Health: A Narrative Literature Review.” Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 32 (5): 469–85. Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 33–59. Rippeyoung, Phyllis L. F., and Mary C. Noonan. 2012. “Is Breastfeeding Truly Cost Free? Income Consequences of Breastfeeding for Women.” American Sociological Review 77 (2): 244–67. Rodgers, Yana van der Meulen. 2018. The Global Gag Rule and Women’s Reproductive Health: Rhetoric Versus Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryan, Alan S., Wenjun Zhou, and Mary Beth Arensberg. 2006. “The Effect of Employment Status on Breastfeeding in the United States.” Women’s Health Issues 16 (5): 243–51. Schultz, T. Paul. 2007. “Population Policies, Fertility, Women’s Human Capital, and Child Quality.” Handbook of Development Economics 4: 3249–303. Singh, Susheela, Lisa Remez, Gilda Sedgh, Lorraine Kwok, and Tsuyoshi Onda. 2018. Abortion Worldwide 2017: Uneven Progress and Unequal Access. New York: Guttmacher Institute. Smith, James F., Michael L. Eisenberg, David Glidden, Susan G. Millstein, Marcelle Cedars, Thomas J. Walsh, Jonathan Showstack, Lauri A. Pasch, Nancy Adler, and Patricia P. Katz. 2011. “Socioeconomic Disparities in the Utilization and Success of Fertility Treatments: Analysis of Data from a Prospective Cohort in the United States.” Fertility and Sterility 96 (1): 95–101. Thaddeus, Sereen, and Deborah Maine. 1994. “Too Far to Walk: Maternal Mortality in Context.” Social Science & Medicine (1982) 38 (8): 1091–110. UNFPA. 2008. Global Consultation on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting. New York: United Nations Population Fund, Gender Human Rights and Culture Branch Technical Division. ———. 2019. Sexual  & Reproductive Health. New York: United Nations Population Fund. Accessed August 21, 2019. www.unfpa.org/sexual-reproductive-health. UNICEF. 2018. Breastfeeding: A Mothers Gift for Every Child. New York: UNICEF, Nutrition Section. United Nations. 1994. “Report of the International Conference on Population and Development.” A/ CONF.171/13/Rev.l. https://labordoc.ilo.org/discovery/fulldisplay?vid=41ILO_INST:41ILO_ V1&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&tab=Everything&docid=alma993135843402676&lang=en&cont ext=L&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&query=sub,exact,social%20research&offset=20. Wamoyi, Joyce, Kirsten Stobeanau, Natalia Bobrova, Tanya Abramsky, and Charlotte Watts. 2016. “Transactional Sex and Risk for HIV Infection in Sub-Saharan Africa: A  Systematic Review and Metaanalysis.” Journal of the International AIDS Society 19 (1): 20992. WHO. 2019a. “Maternal Mortality.” Accessed February  2019. www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/ detail/maternal-mortality. ———. 2019b. “Maternal Mental Health.” Accessed August  2019. www.who.int/mental_health/ maternal-child/maternal_mental_health/en/. ———. 2019c. “Female Genital Mutilation.” Accessed February  2019. www.who.int/news-room/ fact-sheets/detail/female-genital-mutilation. World Bank. 2014. “Health and Population Statistics.” Accessed February 2019. https://databank.worldbank.org. ———. 2017. “The Global Findex Database 2017.” Accessed February 2019. https://globalfindex.world bank.org/. 338

PART IV

Institutions and policies

35 GENDER AND ECONOMIC GROWTH Stephanie Seguino

Introduction Does the relationship between women and men at the micro level have economy-wide effects? Feminist economists have explored this question since the 1990s, adding to the literature on the determinants of economic growth. Interest in the macroeconomic effects of gender relations emanated from concerns over the unintended impacts of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the 1980s, when numerous authors noted the disparate gender effects of macro-level policies (Elson 1995). Unforeseen gender effects of SAPs, it was argued, occurred due to flawed macroeconomic theory that ignored gender, with the result that gender-unaware policies could backfire, undermining macroeconomic goals. The research that has integrated gender into macroeconomic theory and models highlights the impact of gender inequality in labor markets on macroeconomic aggregates, such as consumption, investment, and net exports, as well as economic growth. It also sheds light on the unpaid care work that women disproportionately provide for long-run productivity growth. This chapter surveys both the heterodox and neoclassical approaches to growth theory with an emphasis on the Global South. Also taken up is the impact of macroeconomic policy on gender inequality. At this juncture in a world of climate change and global warming, it may seem both naïve and deeply flawed to emphasize economic growth. Environmental challenges have received little consideration in the gender and growth literature (just as in the non-gendered growth research, with a few exceptions) (see Dengler, this volume). That said, for poor countries, growth is especially necessary in order to raise living standards from their very low level. Growth can also facilitate gender equality, especially if it occurs in the services sector, for instance, in care and education. In contrast, in a no-growth environment, gender equality requires a redistribution of resources that would result in a decline in men’s absolute well-being. Men are more likely to tolerate greater gender equality when the economic pie is expanding so that as women gain economically, men’s absolute well-being is maintained, even as their relative status declines.

Theoretical approaches to integrating gender into growth theory Two sets of theoretical models have been developed to incorporate the role of gender in macroeconomic growth models—heterodox feminist and neoclassical. Heterodox feminist models reflect their Keynesian, Kaleckian, and structuralist roots, accounting for both the short-and 341

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long-run impacts of gender (in)equality on growth as well as demand- and supply- side effects (Seguino 2019). Earlier models focused on two aspects of gender inequality—gender inequality in education and the paid economy. More recent research models also explore the impact of gendered roles in the care economy. Neoclassical models emphasize supply-side variables influencing long-run growth, especially gender differences in education, often via fertility decisions (Cuberes and Teignier 2014). Neoclassical models are of two variants: Solow-type growth models and overlapping generation (OLG) models, the latter explicitly capturing the effect of bargaining power on household decision-making. Most neoclassical models assume labor market flexibility and full employment (thus ignoring demand-side effects of gender inequality).

Gender and growth in heterodox feminist macro models Heterodox feminist macroeconomic models derive their formal structure from Keynesian, Kaleckian, and structuralist macroeconomic theories. The models are Keynesian in that growth is demand-driven, and investment does not automatically equal savings. The models draw on Kaleckian theory with savings (and thus consumption) propensities that differ by both class and gender. In this way, a redistribution of income from capitalists to workers, and from men to women, affects the level of aggregate demand. The models are structuralist in that they account for salient stylized features of an economy: market structure (competitive or oligopolistic), types of goods produced and their income and price elasticities), and macro-level policies that reflect relations with the rest of the world (rules on trade, investment, and financial flows). Models also account for key social relationships (such as intergroup inequality along racial and ethnic lines), and the form and extent of gendered job segregation. Earlier models emphasized the interaction of gender job segregation, gender wage inequality, and the structure of production (Braunstein 2000; Seguino 2000; Blecker and Seguino 2002; Seguino 2010). Blecker and Seguino (2002) integrate gender job segregation by developing a model of a two-sector economy, with women concentrated in the labor-intensive manufacturing export sector and men in non-tradables and the capital-intensive export sector. The model captures the characteristics of semi-industrialized economies (SIEs) with emerging laborintensive manufacturing export sectors, largely dependent on female labor in that export sector. Reflecting the tendency for markets in these countries to be oligopolistic, prices are modeled as a mark-up over unit costs. Models of this type explore the effect of changes in the degree of gender equality (such as higher relative female wages) in the short run on the demand side of the macro economy. In particular, savings, exports, investment and imports may be influenced by higher relative female wages thereby affecting the macroeconomic equilibrium condition, with impacts on employment and output. A key structural feature of such models is that labor-intensive export goods are price elastic such that higher female wages squeeze profit margins, leading to a decline in firm investment and thus employment in that sector. In contrast, goods produced in the “male” sector are price inelastic and male wage hikes do not negatively affect profits and thus investment or employment. The models show that under some conditions, a higher female wage (greater gender wage equality) causes export demand to decline leading to a decrease in aggregate demand and thus employment. Gender equality, in other words, is contractionary and thus gender conflictive; as women’s wages rise, both men and women lose jobs. The effect of greater gender equality may differ a) in economies of different structures, b) and in the short versus long run. Seguino (2010), for example, extends the two-sector model approach to consider the role of gender inequality in low-income agricultural economies 342

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(LIAEs) as compared to SIEs. She incorporates both fast-acting gender variables in the shortrun model such as wages and employment, as well as those that have effects only in the longer run (various measures of capabilities such as education and health). In LIAEs, men are concentrated in the export sector while women work as subsistence farmers. The effects of gender equality on the balance of payments differs significantly from SIEs, since improvement in women’s well-being, access to credit, and other productive resources can raise domestic food output, reducing the demand for imports. Because of this difference in structure, and the role of women in influencing the balance of payments, in the short and long run, gender equality stimulates growth in LIAEs. In the long-run models, gender equality is a stimulus to growth in both types of economies, due to the positive effect of gender equality on human capacities development and thus productivity growth. Mitra-Kahn and Mitra-Kahn (2009) find that the relationship between the gender wage gap and growth is nonlinear, and in particular, as countries move up the industrial ladder, the gender manufacturing wage gap no longer has a significant effect on growth. This could result from two related factors: (a) the lesser importance of the labor-intensive manufacturing sector in stimulating growth as a result of the process of technological and structural change and (b) gender employment discrimination in capital-and skill-intensive industries. Tejani and Milberg (2016) provide evidence consistent with Mitra-Kahn and Mitra-Kahn’s (2009) in that a defeminization of employment has taken place in those countries that have moved up the industrial ladder to the production of more capital- and skill-intensive goods. The newer heterodox models incorporate an explicit macroeconomic role for social reproduction, illuminating an area of growth theory that had heretofore been invisible—and that is, the gendered process of the reproduction of people. The time and resources required to reproduce people, and thus the future labor force, are key ingredients of a well-functioning economy, and women’s disproportionate role in social reproduction is central to understanding the determinants of gender inequality. Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani (2011) developed a pathbreaking growth model with social reproduction. How social reproduction is ­organized—that is, the extent to which reproduction takes place in the household, public or market sectors— and the gender distribution of the labor in each sector influences current aggregate demand and long-run productivity growth. Thus the model highlights the endogeneity of both paid and unpaid labor and their feedback effects on the economy, taking account of demand and other structural features of economies. The scope of gendered heterodox macroeconomic growth models has expanded further to explore other avenues by which gender equality can be achieved, in particular, public investment. Onaran, Oyvat, and Fotopoulou (2016) model the impact of targeted public expenditures that can reduce women’s care burden, facilitating their entry into the paid labor market. In the Global South, physical infrastructure investments in clean water, electrification, and roads, for example, can reduce women’s unpaid labor time. Public investment in the social sector of the economy that includes education, health, and social care, can both reduce women’s unpaid care burden by publicly funding such work and promote gender equality in employment, since women workers tend to be concentrated in social services and publicly funded care work. In addition to stimulating aggregate demand, this social infrastructure spending increases labor productivity, thereby promoting private investment and long-run growth. The heterodox feminist models discussed here recognize that there is no unique relationship between gender and economic growth. That relationship depends on a variety of factors. Macro-level government policies, discussed below, have an important role to play in creating the conditions such that gender equality and economic growth are compatible. 343

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Neoclassical growth theory Neoclassical growth models assume full employment and perfect competition in product and labor markets. Because short-run demand-side problems are assumed away, the focus in these models is on the determinants of long-run growth, and in particular, the supply side effects of greater gender equality. Three entry points for gender equality to stimulate growth are identified in this work: education, fertility, and employment. Models focusing on education emphasize that unequal access to education can lead to a selection bias effect whereby an overinvestment in less-talented males crowds out investment in (more) talented females. By closing educational gaps, economies then can raise economy-wide productivity thereby stimulating growth (Knowles, Lorgelly, and Owen 2002). A second channel by which gender equality is theorized to stimulate growth is via the impact on fertility rates (Galor and Weil 1996). Lower fertility rates improve the quality of labor by permitting greater resource and time investments in children, raising economy-wide productivity. They also reduce women’s unpaid labor time, permitting them to spend more time in paid work, adding to the resources available to invest in children. Research focused on the effects of gender gaps in labor force participation also assumes that women and men have the same talent distribution (Cuberes and Teignier 2016). Exclusion of women, either overtly due to discrimination or indirectly as a result of women’s disproportionate care responsibilities, depresses economy-wide labor productivity. In OLG models, women’s time allocation between productive and reproductive work comprises the central focus of the analysis, with an emphasis on the impacts of mother’s health and physical infrastructure on women’s ability to participate in paid labor (Agénor and Canuto 2012). In addition, investments in women’s health can have a beneficial impact on children’s cognitive abilities, even in utero. Regardless of the modeling approach, neoclassical models find that gender inequality dampens economic growth. But this work fails to note that the positive growth effect of gender equality in education may fail to be rewarded with higher wages, such that narrowing educational gaps simply contribute to a greater degree of exploitation. More generally, neoclassical growth models have limited policy applicability because they disregard structural differences between countries and real-world macroeconomic problems such as aggregate demand deficiencies and balance of payments crises, which regularly occur in macroeconomies.

Gender and growth: theoretical lacuna More work is needed to fill a variety of lacuna in the gender and growth literature. First, most models tend not to incorporate relations with the rest of the world. This is problematic since there is evidence of the emergence of the feminization of migration and a new international division of reproductive labor (Degiuli 2016). These trends have implications for labor force participation and wages in both receiving and sending countries and on the quantity and distribution of the responsibility for caring labor. Moreover, for sending countries, remittances influence the rate of economic growth. Some heterodox models of North-South trade provide a framework for exploring issues of uneven development and growth paths (Dutt 1989). Feminist economists can add to North-South models an understanding of the implications for productivity growth, especially in the Global South, of the loss of female labor due to migration. Another area that requires more research is gendered behavioral patterns affecting aggregate demand. For example, there is very little evidence to date on gender differences in savings

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propensities. Seguino and Floro (2003) is one of the few studies to explore gender differences in savings propensities. Taking a structuralist approach, they found that women’s saving propensities were greater than men’s in semi-industrialized export-oriented economies where the primary source of female labor was young unmarried women. Similarly, import propensities by gender have not been empirically investigated. Insofar as women and men have differing consumption propensities, redistribution to women can affect the import bill, the balance of payments, and thus aggregate demand and short-run growth. Despite widespread critiques of gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of well-being, it continues to be used as the primary indicator of economic performance. The accounting framework on which calculations of GDP are based counts as positive contributions to well-being expenditures that may be defensive. It ignores nonmarket but highly relevant economic activities and outcomes, such as ecosystem services and nonmarket work, including unpaid work and volunteer activities. Models and empirical studies that rely on other well-being measures or composite measures (such as the Genuine Progress Indicator) are needed to more accurately assess the effect of gender equality on economy-wide well-being (Berik 2018). Finally, a persistent problem in the literature is that there is little effort to engage with and reconcile the different findings that emerge from heterodox feminist theory and neoclassical models. Neoclassical authors tend to cite primarily, if not only, the work of other neoclassical authors. Indeed, neoclassical studies that explore the effect of the burden of unpaid labor on women’s labor force participation, highlighted first by feminist economists such as Folbre and Elson, often pay tribute only to male and/or neoclassical economists. The appropriation of the work of subordinate groups (in this case, feminist economists) by the dominant group (here, males and neoclassical economists) is not new. But it bears mentioning, as it has hampered progress in developing models that integrate real world macro conditions, such as excess capacity, unemployment and balance of payments constraints. The impediments to cross-fertilization may be institutional (for example, World Bank authors tend to cite World Bank authors and tend also to be neoclassical). The lack of neoclassical engagement with the heterodox feminist literature also reflects the ongoing debate on whether the demand side (and thus the short run) matters in influencing growth, whether market imperfections are widespread, and whether there is a one-size-fits-all macroeconomic growth framework for countries, regardless of stage of development. The absence of cross-fertilization limits engagement with opposing or different theoretical perspectives and hampers progress in this area of research.

The effect of macroeconomic policies on gender equality The macro economy acts as a structure of constraint on gender equality in a variety of domains, especially education, employment, income, and wealth. The effect of macroeconomic policies on gender equality is thus of great relevance. Early efforts to evaluate the effects of macro-level policies on gender equality were a response to SAPs in the Global South in the 1980s. Since that time, research evaluating the effect of economic growth on gender equality has been conducted (World Bank 2001). The limitation of those studies is that growth can be stimulated by a variety of macro-level policies and therefore, a more precise approach would be to evaluate the effect of specific macroeconomic policies. Another strand of research has pursued this approach, exploring the effect of specific macro-level policies on gender equality, including policies associated with global economic integration (trade and investment), and fiscal policy, the latter comprised of a focus on public sector investment in physical and social infrastructure.

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Globalization policies A methodology for capturing impacts of globalization policies is to employ as explanatory variables the specific policies in question, such as the degree of trade, investment, and capital account liberalization as measured by trade shares of GDP, foreign direct investment (FDI), and cross-border financial flows. The pathways by which these three policies (which may be construed as disaggregated indicators of the degree of economic globalization) produce genderdifferentiated effects are intertwined, and it is also important to evaluate the collective effect of trade, investment, and financial liberalization policies on gender equality.

Trade and investment liberalization Early on, Elson and Pearson (1981) noted that women were being absorbed as workers in laborintensive export manufacturing industries in the Global South due to their relatively low wages. This trend coincided with the shift to export-led growth strategies in these economies (in many cases, as a result of external debt constraints poor countries faced as well as conditionality agreements with the IMF and World Bank to shift incentives to stimulate production of tradable goods). Standing (1989) later dubbed this process the “global feminization of labor.” Women’s cheap labor, it was inferred, was a stimulus to export and economy-wide growth. The relevant question is whether trade liberalization and the pursuit of export-led growth benefits women and gender wage and employment equality in the longer run. It is not easy to disentangle trade effects from investment liberalization; it is best instead to analyze the joint effects of these two policy variables. This is because a large share of FDI to the Global South is vertical. That is, its purpose is to shift production to lower-cost production venues with the intent to export to foreign markets. Numerous studies have validated the positive effect of export growth on women’s relative employment in labor-intensive manufacturing and services (such as tourism and call centers) (Staritz and Reis 2013). Export growth, however, is not synonymous with trade liberalization. In many countries, including in East Asia, export-led growth was fueled by government import tariffs and subsidies to exporting firms, contrary to the tenets of trade liberalization (Amsden 2001), and indeed, there is evidence that weighted tariffs have had a positive effect on women’s relative access to industrial sector jobs (UNCTAD 2016). Moreover, employment effects differ, according to a country’s economic structure (Wamboye and Seguino 2014). A more challenging problem is that employment data do not confer information about the quality of jobs. In some cases, the jobs that women do obtain are insecure and dead-end. Facing intense global competition, firms have adopted flexible and informal work arrangements that are temporary, seasonal, casual, and based on unregulated labor contracts. The evidence on investment liberalization, and in particular, the impact of FDI on gendered employment and wages is also contradictory. Initially, in a number of countries, FDI in laborintensive industries led to an increase in women’s relative employment. There is, however, now evidence of gender reversals (Braunstein 2012) with women’s share of manufacturing employment falling. Reversals have occurred in some countries such as Mexico, due to competition from other low-wage economies of the Global South. Moreover, industrial upgrading, associated with increased capital intensity of production, contributes to women’s decreased share of manufacturing employment (Tejani and Milberg 2016). Setting aside the employment reversals, one might theorize that over time, gender wage gaps should narrow as a result of their incorporation into paid work due to the relative demand for female labor in the Global South.

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Numerous studies, however, have found that gender wage gaps have either widened, or if they have narrowed, the discriminatory portion of the wage gap has increased (Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Joseph Zveglich 2004; Menon and Rodgers 2009). While these country-specific studies shed light on how trade and investment liberalization affect gender equality, the range of countries studied is limited due to lack of time-series data on wages and other employment conditions. Absent that data, it is difficult to resolve the debate that has ensued as to whether women’s incorporation into low-wage labor-intensive manufacturing and service sector jobs has reduced gender inequality in other domains. A lesson to be drawn from this literature is that trade and investment liberalization effects differ by country, varying with the gender division of labor and the position of the economy in world trade, in part related to a country’s economic structure. There is thus no one-size-fits-all trade or investment policy that can be counted on to promote gender equality in all countries.

Financial liberalization The theoretical and empirical literature on the gender effects of financial liberalization, defined as reduced restrictions on cross-border capital flows, is not yet well developed. Feminist research, however, identified pathways by which financial liberalization may have differential gender effects (Braunstein 2012). One effect is increased macroeconomic volatility with women especially vulnerable during such times due to their care responsibilities, and because they have fewer resources than men to fall back on during hard times. Further, when men lose jobs during crises, women are often propelled into the labor force to take on more precarious forms of work. With regard to the gendered impact of financial crisis on women and men’s time allocation, Berik and Kongar (2013) find that in the Great Recession in the US, fathers had more leisure time than before the slump and relative to mothers. Financial liberalization also contributes to a deflationary bias (that is, economic contraction and slower growth) at the macro level. This is because central banks in countries with liberalized capital accounts feel pressure to keep inflation low, since wealth holders avoid inflation as it reduces the real rate of return on their financial investments. This has contributed to central banks adopting contractionary monetary policies with negative employment effects, and thus exacerbating gender job competition. Tracing out these dynamics theoretically and empirically should be high on the priority list for gender and macroeconomics research.

Fiscal policy and public investment Until recently, research focused on the multiplier effects of fiscal policy. As mentioned earlier, recent research has shed light on the positive effects of public investment in physical and social infrastructure that lessens women’s unpaid care burden, thus freeing up time to spend in paid work (Onaran, Oyvat, and Fotopoulou 2016). By relieving women’s unpaid care burden through publicly funded social services, women’s access to paid work improves. Moreover, such jobs are female-intensive, generating disproportionately more jobs for women than investment in physical infrastructure (Antonopoulos et al. 2011). These results make clear that a demand-side (fiscal) stimulus can, when appropriately targeted, produce a differential demand for female labor. This fiscal stimulus serves the additional purpose of absorbing the increased female labor supply that results from publicly funding care services.

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A further finding of research on the effects of public investment relates to the issue of fiscal space. Because greater gender equality in employment can stimulate growth, appropriately targeted public investment has the potential to create fiscal space in the medium term. This is because higher growth rates generate a stream of revenues to government with which to pay down the cost of the initial investment. Accordingly, public spending has an investment quality, similar to private investment, with the additional fact that such spending can be targeted to narrow gender gaps in a variety of areas (Seguino 2019).

Areas for further exploration Several types of macroeconomic policies require further exploration. Macroprudential policies, designed to reduce systemic risk in financial system, can promote gender equality, given that macroeconomic instability tends to generate greater costs for women. Exchange rate policies may also be gendered in their effects. Blecker and Seguino’s (2002) theoretical model showed that women’s relatively low wages substitute for currency devaluation, thus shifting the burden of export competitiveness to women. There is, however, little empirical work on the gendered effects of exchange rate policy. Similarly, feminist research identified a differential effect of monetary policy on women and men (Seguino and Heintz 2012). More research on the gender implications of monetary policy, as well as alternative monetary policies (such as loan guarantees for women farmers who do not have title to land) that extend beyond the limited tool of interest rates, is needed.

Conclusion Feminist economics research highlights the importance of viewing macro-level policies through a gender lens in order to make policies concordant with the goal of promoting gender equality in capabilities and ability to secure livelihoods. Given the role that gender plays in influencing macroeconomic outcomes, a lesson that emerges is that policy goals can be thwarted if gender effects are not taken into consideration. Many studies underscore that gender equality in education and labor force participation is a stimulus to growth, and therefore that policies that reduce women’s unpaid care burden can be beneficial not only to women but to society as a whole. Heterodox feminist literature pays attention to two additional important issues: (1) while women may desire to join the paid labor force, they may not be able to find employment due to limited aggregate demand, and (2) when women take on paid work, the conditions of work may leave them in a disadvantaged and subordinate position relative to men. The jobs that women do get in the paid economy tend to be low-wage, repetitive jobs, with little opportunity for advancement. Lack of research in the latter area is due to a dearth of data, especially time-series data on wages. That said, organizations like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have been too quick to shout the praises of women’s increased paid work, when in some if not many cases, that work merely represents a shift of (unpaid) work in the home to the workplace. In other words, studies finding a positive effect of women’s relatively higher education and employment on growth may be merely reflecting the stimulus this gives to profits in circumstances women lack the bargaining power to convert skills into commensurate wages. Although policymakers and economists will benefit from more research in this area, it does not belie the significant contribution of work to date on gender and growth. Twenty years ago, gender was not considered to be an important macroeconomic variable. Today it is.

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References Agénor, Pierre-Richard, and Octaviano Canuto. 2012. “Access to Infrastructure and Women’s Time Allocation: Evidence and a Framework for Policy Analysis.” Policy Paper No. 45. FERDI, April. Amsden, Alice. 2001. The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Antonopoulos, Rania, Kijong Kim, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias. 2011. “Investing in Care: A Strategy for Effective and Equitable Job Creation.” In Gender Perspectives and Gender Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis, edited by R. Antonopoulos, 47–72. London: Routledge. Berik, Günseli. 2018. “Toward More Inclusive Measures of Economic Well-Being: Debates and Practices.” ILO Future of Work Research Paper Series, ILO, Geneva, Switzerland. Berik, Günseli, and Ebru Kongar. 2013. “Time Allocation of Married Mothers and Fathers in Hard Times: The 2007–09 US Recession.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 208–37. Berik, Günseli, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, and Joseph Zveglich. 2004. “International Trade and Gender Wage Discrimination.” Review of Development Economics 8 (2): 237–54. Blecker, Robert, and Stephanie Seguino. 2002. “Macroeconomic Effects of Reducing Gender Wage Inequality in an Export-Oriented, Semi-Industrialized Economy.” Review of Development Economics 6 (1): 103–11. Braunstein, Elissa. 2000. “Engendering Foreign Direct Investment: Family Structure, Labor, Markets and International Capital Mobility.” World Development 28 (7): 1157–72. ———. 2012. “Neoliberal Development Macroeconomics: A  Consideration of Its Gendered Employment Effects.” UNRISD Research Paper 2012–1. https://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/ search/F95D244010CF453DC12579AD0049AB47?OpenDocument. Braunstein, Elissa, Irene van Staveren, and Daniele Tavani. 2011. “Embedding Care and Unpaid Work in Macroeconomic Modeling: A Structuralist Approach.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 5–31. Cuberes, David, and Marc Teignier. 2014. “Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: A Critical Review.” Journal of International Development 26 (2): 260–76. ———. 2016. “Aggregate Costs of Gender Gaps in the Labor Market: A Quantitative Estimate.” Journal of Human Capital 10 (1): 1–32. Degiuli, Francesca. 2016. Caring for a Living: Migrant Women, Aging Citizens, and Italian Families. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dengler, Corinna. 2020. “Degrowth.” This Volume. Dutt, Amitava. 1989. “Uneven Development in Alternative Models of North-South Trade.” Eastern Economic Journal 15 (2): 91–106. Elson, Diane. 1995. “Gender Awareness in Modeling Structural Adjustment.” World Development 23 (11): 1851–68. Elson, Diane, and Ruth Pearson. 1981. “ ‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers’: An Analysis of Women’s Manufacturing Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing.” Feminist Review 7: 87–107. Galor, Oded, and David Weil. 1996. “The Gender Gap, Fertility and Growth.” American Economic Review 86 (3): 374–87. Knowles, Stephen, Paula Lorgelly, and Dorian Owen. 2002. “Are Educational Gender Gaps a Brake on Economic Development? Some Cross-Country Empirical Evidence.” Oxford Economic Papers 54 (1): 18–149. Menon, Nidhiya, and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2009. “International Trade and the Gender Wage Gap: New Evidence from India’s Manufacturing Sector.” World Development 37 (5): 965–81. Mitra-Kahn, Benjamin, and Trishima Mitra-Kahn. 2009. “Gender Wage Gaps and Growth: “The Case of Semi-Industrial Countries Reconsidered.” Mimeo, New School for Social Research. Onaran, Özlem, Cem Oyvat, and Eurydice Fotopoulou. 2016. “The Effect of Income Distribution and Gender Equality on Growth and Employment: A  Gendered Macroeconomic Model for the UK.” Paper presented at 20 Years Anniversary of FMM Research Network Conference: Towards Pluralism in Macroeconomics, Berlin, October. Seguino, Stephanie. 2000. “Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis.” World Development 28 (7): 1211–30. ———. 2010. “Gender, Distribution, and Balance of Payments Constrained Growth in Developing Countries.” Review of Political Economy 22 (3): 373–404. ———. 2019. “Engendering Macroeconomic Theory and Policy.” Feminist Economics 26 (2): 27–61.

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36 CARE AND THE MACROECONOMY Elissa Braunstein

Introduction The field of gender and macroeconomics casts the gender system as both cause and consequence of macroeconomic aggregates like trade, investment and prices, and macroeconomic processes like growth, distribution, and economic crisis. Its earliest seeds were part of the first wave of women and gender in development thought, which included calls for recognizing and estimating the value of women’s work, to better understand aggregate economic processes and the consequences of policy, as well as their associated impacts on women’s work and wellbeing. Boserup’s (1970) classic piece on women’s roles in the development process argued that economic statistics for the most part neglected women’s traditional subsistence activities, which were important for household production and the national economy. However, Boserup largely ignored the role of women in social reproduction—the creation and maintenance of the labor force (Benería and Sen 1981), which has set the feminist research and policy agenda on care work (Benería 1979; Waring 1988). This area of care and the macroeconomy is the focus of this chapter, but we start with a short review of the wider gender and macroeconomics literature to better situate its intellectual and political significance. The absence of gender in macroeconomics was so striking that it occasioned not one but two special issues of World Development devoted to establishing a body of work on the topic (Çagatay, Elson, and Grown 1995; Grown, Elson, and Çagatay 2000). A  main focus of this early and influential research is empirical analysis of how changing macroeconomic structures and policies affect women and men differently, especially in the labor market. These fall under two broad categories: analyses of the consequences of economic crisis and studies of structural change. Research on the gender differential impacts of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) was among the first to emerge in this literature, with ongoing work that parallels successive waves of global economic crises (e.g., Benería and Feldman 1992; Çagatay and Ozler 1995; Floro 1995; Fukuda-Parr, Heintz, and Seguino 2013). The association between labor force feminization and the gender wage gap on the one hand, and aggregate structural shifts like export growth and technological changes that affect the labor intensity of production on the other, have been ongoing themes of both country-specific and cross-country studies (e.g., Çagatay and Berik 1990; Seguino 2000; Tejani and Milberg 2016; Braunstein and Seguino 2018).

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A second approach focuses on the opposite causal direction: How gender relations, particularly as manifested in the market economy, affect the structure and performance of the macroeconomy. On the empirical side, the macroeconomic ground has been most well-tilled by gender-aware (but not necessarily feminist) approaches that examine the relationship between gender equality and economic growth (see Seguino, this volume). The core finding of a positive growth-gender equality relationship in this literature has become an empirical regularity or a “stylized fact” in macroeconomics and provided a widely accepted rationale for the global gender equality agenda in diverse international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations. In terms of theoretical modeling heterodox feminist economists have modeled the macroeconomic consequences of changes in women’s labor market participation and gender wage inequality in the context of class- and gender-based hierarchies (e.g., Ertürk and Çagatay 1995; Braunstein 2000; Seguino 2010). However, to the extent that women’s responsibility for care and unpaid work appears in these models, it is most often incorporated as a constraint on their paid work participation, with consequences for women’s wages, bargaining power and provisioning capabilities. Feminist economists have also been arguing for the special role of care in the macroeconomy since the late 1980s. They contended that the economic models underlying the prescriptions for social-welfare spending cuts associated with structural adjustment wrongly presumed virtually unlimited supplies of unpaid labor from women and girls, with negative consequences not only for well-being, but for the economic goals of the programs themselves (Elson 1991, 1995; Benería and Feldman 1992). These studies went far beyond accounting for differential policy impacts on women versus men. They highlighted the “social content of macroeconomic policies”—the gender and class relations embedded in the market economy and the unpaid work and care that the market economy relied on (Elson and Çagatay 2000). The “care economy,” as Elson (1995) so aptly first termed it, both its paid and unpaid components, became increasingly recognized as not only important for well-being, but also elemental to the functioning and performance of the macroeconomy, producing and reproducing the labor force. The remainder of the chapter highlights three major strands of feminist work that emerged out of these early insights on care and the macroeconomy: (a) efforts to redress the invisibility of unpaid care work in national income accounting; (b) more recent work on social reproduction in macroeconomic modeling; and (c) what we term “care-aware” macroeconomic policy analysis. Work on care and macroeconomy is very much in keeping with Power’s (2004) social provisioning approach. Both paid and unpaid care is central to macroeconomic analyses. In that vein, it is embedded in the structures and functionings of the rest of economic activities. Macroeconomic approaches to care take an aggregate view of the organization of material life, which alights on how care provisioning is “a set of social activities, rather than individual choices, and its outcome is social production and reproduction, rather than individual happiness” (Power 2004, 7). They also afford a view into the aggregate economic dynamics of power, reflected in the causes and effects of distribution across different social groups, particularly gender, class, race, ethnicity and age. This is true for the gender and macroeconomic literature more generally. But by incorporating care and social reproduction, feminist economists move beyond the traditional boundaries of economics in ways that can transform economic theory and policy.

National income accounting—Is GDP all we have? The United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) specifies global accounting standards for recording GDP and thereby measuring growth and economic performance. As noted earlier, feminist economists identified early on the problem of exclusion of women’s unpaid 352

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care and volunteer services from national income accounting, as well as undercounting of their subsistence and informal market production (Waring 1988; Benería 1992). This exclusion not only ignores the value of women’s unpaid work, it was argued, but also misrepresents growth, overestimating production gains when women increase their market labor force participation, overstating losses when production shifts back home, and therefore giving a misleading foundation for policy choice. After revisions that have expanded the SNA’s production boundary, SNA now includes production for own use, such as growing food for one’s own consumption or collecting firewood or fuel. Unpaid care work still falls outside the SNA production boundary despite its economic importance. For instance, estimates of unpaid household work, including cooking, cleaning and care, among a sample of mostly OECD countries amount to between 1/3 and ½ of total economic activity (Miranda 2011). One might expect larger shares in the Global South where commodification of women’s traditional work is more limited, but estimates based on either opportunity or replacement cost are low because of women’s extremely low wages generally and in care-related services in particular (Budlender 2008). With the 2008 SNA revision, national statistical offices are now encouraged to produce satellite accounts that incorporate unpaid care work, but international consensus on methodology is still evolving and the project of collecting data has not been enthusiastically embraced very broadly. The 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians went farther in 2013, defining work as any activity performed to provide goods or services for one’s own or others’ use, which includes both paid employment and unpaid work, including unpaid care of persons and household work—that part of care work that is most often and consistently excluded from official statistics (ILO 2018). The global feminist community has been calling for time-use surveys partly for the purpose of generating such satellite accounts, at least since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. There has been progress, albeit limited, on the data collection front (see Floro, this volume), some resulting in monetary estimates of the value of unpaid care work that is comparable to GDP such as those cited earlier. Yet, the production of these aggregates has not had much impact on macroeconomic policy-making (Esquivel 2011), perhaps because such estimates have yet to substantially connect with or inform macroeconomic theory. Wider dissatisfaction with GDP as a measure of well-being or social progress, particularly given increasing inequality within many countries and the ever more pressing threat of ecological crisis, spurred efforts to generate alternative measures of macroeconomic performance. One of the most significant was a commission on the subject set up by the French president in 2008, led by Stiglitz and including feminist economists Agarwal and Folbre (Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi 2009). Though a number of careful and promising recommendations were made, including broadening income measures to include nonmarket activities and focusing more on household well-being than economic production, GDP maintained its primary place as a measure of market production, and will likely remain dominant as a performance metric for some time (Elson 2017).

Transforming macromodeling: care and social reproduction Models help simplify complex processes, identify appropriate data and structure empirical analyses, as well as interpret the results. Articulating more clearly the complex social structures and processes associated with social provisioning is thus a special contribution afforded by macro modeling care. At their best models can also be transformative in the sense of changing economic theory and the social and policy consequences thereof. In this and the next section, I characterize the state of the feminist field, starting in this section with approaches that integrate the care 353

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economy and social reproduction into macroeconomic modeling. This approach reveals how the care economy is central to economic structures and processes, most importantly in terms of its role in the production and maintenance of the labor force, or social reproduction. Care is not “shoehorned in as an afterthought” (Power 2004, 4). Social reproduction, and the gender system that drives it, is then a key component of all the customary macroeconomic concerns, from investment to distribution to public finance. Early feminist efforts to link care and macroeconomics were rare but important, sketching out the possibilities for connection and the sorts of questions one could ask (e.g., Ertürk and Çagatay 1995). Perhaps the first effort to model care and macroeconomics from a feminist perspective in any detailed way is Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani (2011), with a non-mathematical explication of the model and application to country- and structure-specific cases in Braunstein (2014), and empirical estimates based on the theoretical model in Braunstein, Bouhia, and Seguino (2020). Using as its base a Kaleckian, post-Keynesian structuralist framework, where the distribution of income between capital and labor is a key determinant of output and growth, the model links the structures of economic growth with those of social reproduction and gender inequality in unpaid care work and the labor market. Employment, output, and long-run prospects for growth are driven by class and gender dynamics and social reproduction, defined as the time and money it takes to produce, maintain and invest in the labor force in both the long-term and on a daily basis. “Human capacities” constitute the output of social reproduction, broader than the neoclassical concept of human capital in that they incorporate a wider array of attributes than the standards of health, education and work experience that human capital typically refers to, including for instance emotional intelligence or community connectedness. And they are narrower than Sen’s human capabilities in that human capacities include only those attributes that are instrumental to growth and production (e.g., a characteristic like dignity is an important capability for well-being, but not necessarily for growth and production). How social reproduction is ­organized—the extent to which reproduction takes place in the household, public or market sectors, and the gender distribution of labor in each—influences both the extent of current economic activities like consumption and investment and long-run productivity growth. The set of stylized regimes presented in Table 36.1 illustrate the key aggregate dynamics of the model. There is both a demand and supply side. The demand side captures the dynamics of demand for market goods and services, including investments in human capacities and physical capital, and hence the consequences of such economic activities for growth. The extent of “caring spirits,” defined as the tendency, whether determined by social norms, individual motivation, or public preferences as reflected in the structure of the social welfare state, to provide care (or support for care) for one’s self and others in ways that add to current demand and future productivity growth, determine demand dynamics. We differentiate between two stylized cases or demand regimes, care-led versus inequality-led. When economies are care-led, higher wages and market participation for women are associated with increased investments in human capacities, raising both current aggregate demand and future productivity. When economies are inequality-led, the share of profits in national income is the dominant growth driver, so higher wages for women (i.e., greater gender and class equality) is associated with lower demand and growth. The supply side of the economy is determined by the gender distribution of the time and financial costs of social reproduction among women, men, the state and capital. Like the demand side there are two stylized cases, low-road and high-road. Low-road regimes concentrate the time and money costs of social reproduction on women, resulting in a “feminization of responsibility and obligation,” as Chant (2006) put it. High-road or gender egalitarian regimes feature 354

Care and the macroeconomy Table 36.1  Growth and social reproduction Supply: The distribution of social reproduction Demand: Growth

Low road Feminization of responsibility & obligation

High road Gender egalitarian

Care-led

Time squeeze Higher wages for women are good for growth, but more market participation squeezes time and lowers human capacities production. Growth is elusive or unstable. Exploitation Higher wages for women lower growth, and more market participation squeezes time and lowers human capacities production. Growth is partly based on exploiting women’s labor and human resources.

Mutual Higher wages for women are good for growth, and more market participation increases human capacities production. Growth and social reproduction reinforce one another. Wage squeeze Higher wages for women lower growth, but more market participation enhances human capacities production. Growth is elusive or unstable.

Inequality-led

a widely shared distribution of social reproduction. These regimes are characterized by equal sharing of unpaid care work between women and men, strong public provisioning for care, and an extensive and high-quality market for care services, including better wages for paid care work and thus narrower gender wage gaps overall. Putting the supply and demand sides together illustrates the complementarities and contradictions of care and social reproduction in terms of the production of human capacities, gender inequality and market production. In the time-squeeze case, which pairs care-led demand and growth with a low-road approach to social reproduction, more gender equality in the labor market is initially good for growth because women’s higher wages help finance greater investments in human capacities in ways that maintain overall profitability and growth. However, because women continue to bear a disproportionate share of the responsibilities for social ­reproduction—the low-road case—women’s higher market participation squeezes their time for care provisioning and lowers human capacities production. There is thus a contradiction between the supply and demand sides of the economy in the time squeeze case, one that yields simultaneous increases and decreases in human capacities production, likely resulting in economic (and social) instabilities and undermining growth sustainability. The wage-squeeze scenario features the opposite contradiction: the distribution of social reproduction is gender egalitarian, and women’s greater participation in market work induces more human capacities production on the supply side (the high road). On the inequality-led demand side greater gender equality in the labor market cuts into profitability by more than it raises investment in human capacities. As with the contradiction of the time squeeze case, instability and anemic growth is likely to follow. Both the exploitation and mutual regimes feature complementary dynamics on the demand and supply sides, but the first is based on exploiting women in terms of both paid and unpaid work, whereas in the mutual case gender equality spurs both more market demand and investment and greater human capacities production—the win-win scenario. 355

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Though a key axis of this analysis is GDP growth and market production, and therefore may seem problematic in light of feminist critiques of such measures, this orientation comes from wanting to better understand systems for social provisioning and the aggregate economic structures that provide for material life. At the same time, approaches like this engage with standard macro concepts and thus provide a door into macro theory and policy discussions that would otherwise be difficult to access. This sort of dialogue is particularly important for feminists to pursue because there are competing narratives based on orthodox macroeconomic reasoning with real consequences for people’s lives, such as those that underlie the logic of austerity or encourage women’s market labor participation as a way to counter recent failures of growth and development to generate sufficient improvements to livelihoods. At the same time, aspects of this orthodox literature are instructive for feminists, particularly that featuring the notion of human capital, which has long been a standard concept in neoclassical macroeconomics. And though gender is typically barely acknowledged (mostly in terms that note heterosexual pairings for the purposes of reproducing the labor force over time), there is at least a role for health and education, and consequently some costs associated with producing them (see, e.g., Barro 2013; Heckman and Masterov 2007). Partly in recognition of the need to seed further work that incorporates care and social reproduction into macroeconomic modeling, the Rethinking Macroeconomics Group of the Care Work and the Economy Project (CWE-GAM) has commissioned a collaborative group of scholars to construct a new generation of such macroeconomic models building on the best aspects of feminist, heterodox and neoclassical insights and techniques.1

Sectoral disaggregation for care-aware policy analysis The models reviewed earlier seek to transform macroeconomic theory by incorporating care and social reproduction into the macroeconomic system. A second set of feminist approaches to care and the macroeconomy take a different approach, adding on to or disaggregating standard models in terms that uncover how macro policy choices can be better evaluated or more effective in their stated aims if they are care-aware. For instance, differentiating between women’s and men’s typical jobs (e.g., paid care work versus construction) enables more specific analysis of the consequences of different types of public spending. Adding a household sector, and tracing through the impacts of economic policy shifts on gendered time use gives a better view into the well-being and distribution effects of macroeconomic policy. These are excellent methods for policy interventions, but social reproduction is still external to the system. The earliest examples of this approach add an unpaid household sector to a standard computable general equilibrium (CGE) model framework to assess the impact of trade liberalization on women’s welfare as well as a number of other economic variables (Fontana and Wood 2000; Fontana 2007). The household sector parallels the market sector, and prices and preferences determine the distribution of women’s time across paid and unpaid work and leisure as well as household incomes, determining women’s welfare. These models bring into focus the connection between policy and women’s welfare in terms that emphasize women’s primary responsibility for care work. A contemporary framing of this issue can be found in Ilkkaracan’s (2013) notion of the “purple economy.” The purple economy recognizes care, like ecosystems and ecological services, as central to well-being, and calls for an economy that can sustain its provisioning in ways that do not reproduce inequalities. A different set of empirical models focus on fiscal policy and the consequences of public spending on social versus physical infrastructure. Public borrowing for investing in physical infrastructure like roads and telecommunications is acceptable in standard treatments of public 356

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finance because such investments add to the stock of capital assets and thus yield future returns, both directly in terms of increasing output, and indirectly in terms of increasing labor productivity and generating other sorts of production externalities (Elson 2017). Clearly, public spending on education, health, and care services carry the same promise of future returns—though it is never modeled that way—as well as increase women’s labor force participation on both the supply and demand sides, further increasing output. However, this sort of social infrastructure spending is classified as current government consumption, not public investment. In this neoliberal era of austerity where government spending and budget deficits are viewed with vehement suspicion, this classification severely limits the potential for fiscal policy to contribute to overall welfare and support the functioning of the care economy. Feminist macromodeling efforts challenge this policy conclusion by simulating the demandside impact of expanding social infrastructure spending, quantifying job creation and the associated multiplier effects. Country-level policy simulations that trace out the impact on job creation and income distribution have been done for South Africa and the US (Antonopoulos and Kim 2011) and Turkey (Ilkkaracan, Kim, and Kaya 2015). These studies find that spending on social infrastructure creates more employment than other types of fiscal spending, and more employment for women and low-income workers in particular. To give a sense of magnitude in a cross-country setting, based on input-output tables, De Henau et al. (2016) simulate the impact of a spending increase of two percent of GDP in caring industries versus the same amount in construction (a proxy for physical infrastructure) for seven OECD countries. For the increase in social infrastructure spending, overall employment increases ranged between 2.4 and 6.1 percent (versus half as many jobs created for an equivalent increase in spending on construction). Women’s employment rates would increase between 3.3 and 8.2 percentage points, versus 1.4 and 4.0 percentage points for men, inducing a decline in the gender employment gap—as both women and men gain employment. These simulations proffer powerful arguments on policy, but because they are not cast as part of a system of social reproduction, it is difficult to infer implications for long-term productivity growth or social reproduction itself. Onaran (2016) summarizes a hybrid of model of sorts that is still being developed (and is also part of the CWE-GAM project), which takes on the question of the employment impact of fiscal policy spending on social infrastructure, but also incorporates a post-Keynesian theoretical structure along the lines of Braunstein, van Staveren, and Tavani (2011). The links between social infrastructure spending, investment and productivity growth, particularly in a developing country context, is an especially important set of issues to explore in future work.

Concluding thoughts Elson (1991) noted that one of the big problems with macroeconomics, one that reflected its inherent male bias (both orthodox and heterodox, I  would add), is that labor, like land and other natural resources, is a non-produced factor of production that can be costlessly transferable across different activities. Almost 30 years later, macroeconomics still has the same problem, albeit with some notable, largely feminist exceptions. These perspectives are solidly grounded in early feminist thinking on social reproduction, as well as build on the feminist methodologies articulated by Power (2004) in the social provisioning approach. The questions these models tackle are getting only more pressing. In many countries recent declines in fertility below replacement have called into question the sustainability of current models of growth and social welfare provisioning, in particular on the question of eldercare. Care and social reproduction thus have become pressing public policy issues, presenting an 357

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important opportunity for feminist economists to influence macroeconomic theory and policy. Doing so does, at times, mean stepping away from portraying the personal and relational aspects of care in favor of its more instrumental versions or outcomes like human capacities or even human capital. Using these concepts as entry points, feminists can work on changing the frame and focus of analysis: from GDP growth to well-being, from production to people, from consumption to care. But we need more feminist macroeconomics first.

Note 1 For more information and to access its working papers, see https://research.american.edu/carework economy/research-area/rethinking-macroeconomics/.

References Antonopoulos, Rania, and Kijong Kim. 2011. “Public Job-Creation Programs: The Economic Benefits of Investing in Social Care. Case Studies in South and the United States.” Working Paper No. 671, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Barro, Robert J. 2013. “Education and Economic Growth.” Annals of Economics and Finance 14 (2): 301–28. Benería, Lourdes. 1979. “Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of Labour.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (3): 203–25. ———. 1992. “Accounting for Women’s Work: The Progress of Two Decades.” World Development 20 (11): 1547–60. Benería, Lourdes, and Shelley Feldman, eds. 1992. Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Benería, Lourdes, and Gita Sen. 1981. “Accumulation, Reproduction, and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited.” Signs 7 (2): 279–98. Boserup, Ester. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Braunstein, Elissa. 2000. “Engendering Foreign Direct Investment: Family Structure, Labor Markets and International Capital Mobility.” World Development 28 (7): 1157–72. Braunstein, Elissa. 2014. “Economic Growth and Social Reproduction: Gender Inequality as Cause and Consequence.” Discussion Paper, UN Women, New York. Braunstein, Elissa, Rachid Bouhia, and Stephanie Seguino. 2020. “Social Reproduction, Gender Inequality and Economic Growth.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 44 (1): 129–156. Braunstein, Elissa, and Stephanie Seguino. 2018. “The Impact of Economic Policy and Structural Change on Gender Employment Inequality in Latin America, 1990–2010.” Review of Keynesian Economics 6 (3): 307–32. Braunstein, Elissa, Irene Van Staveren, and Daniele Tavani. 2011. “Embedding Care and Unpaid Work in Macroeconomic Modeling: A Structuralist Approach.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 5–31. Budlender, Debbie. 2008. “The Statistical Evidence on Care and Non-Care Work Across Six Countries.” Gender and Development Programme Paper No. 4, UNRISD, Geneva, Switzerland. Çagatay, Nilufer, and Günseli Berik. 1990. “Transition to Export-Led Growth in Turkey: Is There a Feminization of Employment?” Review of Radical Political Economics 22 (1): 115–34. Çagatay, Nilüfer, Diane Elson, and Caren Grown. 1995. “Introduction.” World Development 23 (11): 1827–36. Çagatay, Nilufer, and Sule Ozler. 1995. “Feminization of the Labor Force: The Effects of Long-Term Development and Structural Adjustment.” World Development 23 (11): 1883–94. Chant, Sylvia. 2006. “Re-Thinking the ‘Feminization of Poverty’ in Relation to Aggregate Gender ­Indices.” Journal of Human Development 7 (2): 201–20. De Henau, Jerome, Susan Himmelweit, Zofia Lapniewska, and Diane Perrons. 2016. “Investing in the Care Economy. A Gender Analysis of Employment Stimulus in Seven OECD Countries.” International Trade Union Confederation. Elson, Diane. 1991. “Male Bias in Macro-Economics: The Case of Structural Adjustment.” In Male Bias in the Development Process, edited by Diane Elson, 164–90. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ———. 1995. “Gender Awareness in Modeling Structural Adjustment.” World Development 23 (11): 1851–68.

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Care and the macroeconomy ———. 2017. “A Gender-Equitable Macroeconomic Framework for Europe.” In Economics and Austerity in Europe Gendered Impacts and Sustainable Alternatives, edited by Hannah Bargawi, Giovanni Cozzi, and Susan Himmelweit, 15–26. London and New York: Routledge. Elson, Diane, and Nilufer Çagatay. 2000. “The Social Content of Macroeconomic Policies.” World Development 28 (7): 1347–64. Ertürk, Korkut, and Nilufer Çagatay. 1995. “Macroeconomic Consequences of Cyclical and Secular Changes in Feminization: An Experiment at Gendered Macromodelling.” World Development 23 (11): 1969–77. Esquivel, Valeria. 2011. “Sixteen Years After Beijing: What Are the New Policy Agendas for Time-Use Data collection?” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 215–38. Floro, Maria. 1995. “Economic Restructuring, Gender and the Allocation of Time.” World Development 23 (11): 1913–29. Fontana, Marzia. 2007. “Modeling the Effects of Trade on Women, at Work and at Home: A Comparative Perspective.” In The Feminist Economics of Trade, edited by Irene van Staveren, Diane Elson, Caren Grown, and Nilüfer Çağatay, 117–40. London and New York: Routledge. Fontana, Marzia, and Adrian Wood. 2000. “Modeling the Effects of Trade on Women, at Work and at Home.” World Development 28 (7): 1173–90. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, James Heintz, and Stephanie Seguino. 2013. “Critical Perspectives on Financial and Economic Crises: Heterodox Macroeconomics Meets Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 4–31. Grown, Caren, Diane Elson, and Nilüfer Çagatay. 2000. “Introduction.” World Development 23 (11): 1845–56. Heckman, James J., and Dimitriy V. Masterov. 2007. “The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children.” Review of Agricultural Economics 29 (3): 446–93. Ilkkaracan, Ipek. 2013. “The Purple Economy: A Call for a New Economic Order beyond the Green Economy.” In Sustainable Economy and Green Growth: Who Cares?, edited by U. Röhr and C. van Heemstra, 32–37. Berlin: Life E.V. and German Ministry for the Environment. Ilkkaracan, Ipek, Kijong Kim, and Tolga Kaya. 2015. “The Impact of Public Investment in Social Care Services on Employment, Gender Equality and Poverty.” ITU WSC-SET, Levy Economics Institute, ILO, UNDP and UN Women, İstanbul. ILO (International Labour Organization). 2018. Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Miranda, Veerlee. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work Around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Mi Migration Working Papers, No. 116, OECD, Paris. Onaran, Ozlem. 2016. “The Role of Gender Equality in an Equality-Led Sustainable Development Strategy.” In Economics and Austerity in Europe: Gendered Impacts and Sustainable Alternatives, edited by Hannah Bargawi, Giovanni Cozzi, and Susan Himmelweit, 40–57. London and New York: Routledge. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. Seguino, Stephanie. 2000. “The Effects of Structural Change and Economic Liberalization on Gender Wage Differentials in South Korea and Taiwan.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 24 (4): 437–59. ———. 2010. “Gender, Distribution, and Balance of Payments Constrained Growth in Developing Countries.” Review of Political Economy 22 (3): 373–404. Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. 2009. “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.” Downloaded on March 21, 2019. https:// ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/118025/118123/Fitoussi+Commission+report. Tejani, Sheba, and William Milberg. 2016. “Global Defeminization? Industrial Upgrading and Manufacturing Employment in Developing Countries.” Feminist Economics 22 (2): 24–54. Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.

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37 GENDERING THE ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC CRISES Jill Rubery

Introduction Feminist economists have been uncovering the gender-differentiated impacts of business cycles and economic crises since the 1980s. In the Global North the key issue was the impact on women’s position in the wage labor market while in the Global South key contributions identified the impact of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) on women and social reproduction. These two approaches have come together in the more recent crisis as austerity has hit the Global North. This chapter starts by examining some recent work on how gender shapes the origin of crises and the financialization of the world economy before reviewing three more long-standing debates on state responses to crises, the role of women as a reserve army of labor, and the impact of business cycles on labor market outcomes for women and men.

Gender and the origins of crises Feminist economics research on the role of gender in the origins and causes of major crises or business cycles is relatively underdeveloped. Current contributions have focused on three main issues: (i) women’s exclusion from the decision-making in finance and government that has given rise to crises, (ii) the contribution of gender inequality to the cause of economic crises, and (iii) a gender critique of international and national policymakers’ focus on GDP-focused growth strategies. Support for the notion that gender exclusion from decision-making contributed to the recent crisis came in fact from Lagarde, who later became the first female head of the IMF, when she hypothesized that if Lehman brothers had been Lehman sisters, greater caution would have been exercised (Lagarde 2018). Although this argument falls into the trap of assuming essentialist differences by gender, others have documented the remarkable degree of exclusion or underrepresentation of women in both the finance sector itself and in its regulators (Arestis, Charles, and Fontana 2013). Furthermore, women, as only very minority wealth holders, hardly participated in the lobbying for financial deregulation that brought about the 2008 financial crisis (Fukuda Parr, Heintz, and Seguino 2013). Women’s exclusion from finance jobs has been attributed to their risk aversion (for a feminist critique see Nelson 2012) but it is the recklessness of finance sector employees, spurred on by enormous rewards, that was a partial cause of the financial crisis. 360

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Feminist economists have also pointed to the paradoxical role played by low-income households in initiating the recent crisis in the US (Dymski, Hernandez, and Mohanty 2013; Fukuda Parr, Heintz, and Seguino 2013). These low-income groups, which included many women, particularly single parents, along with racial-ethnic minority groups, were both encouraged to use credit to meet basic needs and became the targets for predatory lending on housing in the sub-prime mortgage market that fueled the financial bubble and precipitated the crash. When the boom burst, it was the larger banks and financial institutions that were bailed out while the low-income vulnerable groups including many women lost their housing and often their jobs. However, improving gender representation, regulating credit or even reducing inequality would not make the economy fully crisis resistant. Instead feminist economists are calling for a more fundamental reorientation of economic policy goals away from growth, measured by GDP or shareholder value, in favor of a more people-centered approach to economic management. For some this reorientation involves, following Sen (1985), enhancing the capabilities of all citizens (Fukuda Parr, Heintz, and Seguino 2013) while others call for a Polanyian conception of embedding the market within the society, so that finance and production would serve the needs of the social reproduction sphere rather than vice versa (Elson 2014).

Gender and crisis policies A second issue of concern to feminist economists is how the state responds to economic crises. In the Keynesian demand management era, the expected response of the state to downturns was countercyclical expansionary fiscal or monetary policy. Keynes argued that even using public employment to dig holes in the road and fill them in again would be beneficial. Unfortunately, this construction example appears to have become fixed in policymakers’ minds, for even if most seek to build new infrastructure rather than simply dig holes, their expansionary investment projects almost always focus on physical infrastructure that favors male-dominated sectors. This approach has been challenged by, for example, the UK’s Women’s Budget Group (WBG) that produced Plan F as an alternative approach to promoting growth (WBG 2015), demonstrating that by investing in the care industries instead of construction approximately twice as many jobs would be generated. This approach is feminist as it focuses not only on a sector where most employees are women but also on one that supports the social reproduction sphere, the neglected side of the economy. A related approach was adopted by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies through its “pink” new deal campaign to promote gender equality, including investments in social infrastructure (Corsi 2014). Furthermore, a major report on care by the ILO (ILO 2018) showed that investment in the care economy could be a major source of new jobs worldwide. Thus, one contribution of feminist economics has been to expand the options available for countercyclical investment policies. However, even more problems of gender bias emerged when the macroeconomic focus changed from how to expand the economy to how to reduce public expenditure and deregulate economies. This anti-Keynesian twist emerged first in the 1980s following the Latin American crisis and again in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s (Elson 2014). In return for the IMF loans needed to survive the crisis, the most affected countries had to agree to implement SAPs and reign in public expenditure. However, as pointed out in Elson’s (1991) well-known gender critique, these policies did not consider the impact on social reproduction. The implicit assumption was that any cuts in public service provision—including, for example, failure to maintain water supplies—would be resolved through more unpaid labor on women’s part (e.g., walking further to fetch water). This uncosted increase in unpaid labor for women also came on top of pressure to increase their wage work to compensate for reduced men’s earnings in the crisis. 361

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This critique of SAPs, however, failed to influence responses to the global financial crisis of 2008, particularly after it was converted from 2010 onwards into a sovereign debt crisis. Countries were pressurized to implement austerity policies, a new term for SAPs. The extent by which the financial crisis morphed into a sovereign debt crisis varied by country as did the mechanisms by which private debt was converted into public debt (Karamessini 2013). Where banks were bailed out by taxpayers, public expenditure cuts were implemented to offset the higher debt levels, thereby passing much of the burden onto those most dependent on public expenditure, whether in the form of direct transfers, public sector employment or state-funded public services. Women are a majority of those affected by cuts on each of these indicators in most of the Global North. Austerity policies have involved cuts in benefits and transfers; women often dominate among pensioners, as well as among carers reliant on benefits, though the number of men affected also increased along with the loss of jobs in male-dominated sectors (Karamessini and Rubery 2013). Not only did all countries effectively fail to analyze the gender impact of austerity but also even the official policy commitment to reducing gender inequality disappeared from the European agenda in the immediate aftermath of the crisis (Smith and Villa 2013). Many European countries were required to freeze or restrict both recruitment and pay for the female-dominated public sector workforce, yet the impact on gender equality was not referred to or explored (Rubery 2013). The effects of the public services’ squeeze depended on the state of development of welfare systems; in some cases it involved dismantling care systems (e.g., in the UK) while in others it postponed or halted plans to expand provision to address the care infrastructure deficits (e.g., Spain). Only the wealthier households have the opportunity to use private sector services as a substitute for public provision but this group in practice often relies on the use of informal private services provided by underpaid women. For those unable to access private services the cutbacks could only be met by increased unpaid labor in the f­amily—mainly by women—or by reductions in care. The latter is a very real outcome in countries where it was not feasible for families to fill the gap. For example, in the UK the cutbacks to home-based social care for the elderly have resulted in bed blocking in hospitals in part because the family is unable to fully substitute, either because of geographical dispersion or the now high rate of female employment. Most attention on the impact of austerity has focused on those southern and eastern European countries that came under pressure from the EU and the IMF to cut public expenditure. However, a study of 128 countries in the Global South found that public expenditure was also cut during the austerity period, following expansionary policy in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis (Ortiz and Cummins 2013). Furthermore, Elson (2010a) developed a framework for both the Global South and the North to consider the interactions between finance, production and social reproduction in response to the financial crisis. The analysis of how austerity processes have affected both paid and unpaid work and the overall provision of care has highlighted both the policymakers’ neglect of the social reproduction system and their expectation that they can still rely on women to compensate for gaps in provision. Interestingly, policymakers in Europe have sometimes had to rethink their care policies particularly with respect to childcare, as women have increased their commitment to wage work despite cutbacks. For example, despite being responsible for major cuts to childcare in the 2010–15 period, by the 2015 election the Conservative party was offering employed parents 30 hours of free childcare for children aged three as they feared losing women’s votes (WBG 2018). However, willingness to reverse or adjust austerity policies to minimize the impacts on the vulnerable depends on the political orientation of the government. For example, the leftwing Greek government succeeded in implementing a major expansion in childcare provision 362

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(Hatzivarnava-Kazassi and Karamessini 2018) despite facing the most severe fiscal retrenchment requirements by making creative use of European social funds. The motivation, however, was to address child poverty, not gender equality per se. A comparison of Canada and Spain has also revealed the importance of the policy orientations of the national governments (Lahey and de Villota 2013). The Canadian conservative government was already slashing expenditure before the crisis while the Spanish socialist government tried to mitigate the impact on women. Lahey and De Villota (2013) found that had the Spanish socialist government remained in power past 2011 and continued its policies, the adverse impact on women would have been greater in Canada than in Spain, despite the more favorable overall economic conditions.

Crises and women’s labor force participation The initial feminist explorations of women’s labor force participation during crises relied on the Marxist industrial reserve army theory (Bruegel 1979). Although Marx did not specifically identify women as a source of the industrial reserve army, for many economists—both Marxist and mainstream—they constitute the apparently ideal flexible labor force, to be drawn in to fill labor shortages in the boom and expelled in the downturn. This flexible supply both limits workers’ power in the upturn as mobilizing new supplies of labor reduces the risk that labor shortages will lead to industrial unrest (Kalecki 1943) and reduces the risks of high open unemployment in the downturn as the dismissed women are assumed to return to domestic work. Feminist economists have challenged this conceptualization of female labor as a constantly available flexible resource on a number of grounds. First, Humphries (1983) criticized the construction of the industrial reserve army thesis as applied to women as the cyclical reserve army. This she considered a distortion of Marx’s theory of the constant reproduction of relative surplus population that acted as the floating part of the reserve army to provide potential substitutes for those currently employed in order to exert pressure on them to work intensively and accept low wages or face substitution and displacement. From a Marxist perspective the objective of integrating women into the wage labor force was more for long-run secular reasons not for cyclical flexibility, namely to convert them into the floating reserve, to act as a potential threat to men’s jobs and working conditions. However, the extent to which women act in practice as either a cyclical or secular reserve army has also been shown to be restricted once a gender perspective is adopted. One of the restrictions is the pattern of gender segregation in the labor market which restricts the potential for women to act as either a buffer or a substitute for men in employment (Bruegel 1979; Rubery and Tarling 1982; Rubery 1988). A second critique of the cyclical reserve army thesis is that the women’s integration into wage work induces changes in both household organization and in women’s expectations and aspirations which make any reversal unlikely. This approach regards the system of social reproduction as developing “relatively autonomously” from the system of production (Humphries and Rubery 1984). The reversal of women’s participation may thus be constrained by new social norms of higher shares of wage goods in household consumption, by associated changes in relative prices and productivity between domestically produced and wage goods and services, and the changing expectations and aspirations of women, reinforced by investments in their skills and education. This persistence of women’s active participation even under low labor demand could result in women acting as a secular reserve army, threatening substitution for men’s jobs, as has been feared by trade unions at various points in history, particularly after the world wars (Milkman 2016). However, this substitution threat again depends, as I review below, on the potential for desegregation of jobs and on whether women do act as a low wage reserve army. In countries where women are fully integrated into the wage labor market and 363

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institutions ensure a high level of gender equality in work, the threat from women as a substitute labor supply may be considerably reduced. These critiques of women acting as a cyclical reserve have largely been accepted by Marxist or other nonmainstream economists but it is mainstream economists that have relied more on the notion of women continuing to act as a contingent labor supply in their modeling, thereby implicitly regarding women everywhere to be mothers first. Not only are women assumed only willing to participate in employment if this is compatible with their prior care responsibilities but they are also assumed to be ready to return to full-time unpaid care work if demand for female wage labor declines. This approach was taken to extremes by Bertola, Blau, and Kahn (2007) who argued that trade unions would prioritize raising pay in sectors where the displaced workers—mainly women or young people—would be happy to return to other activities (care work or studies respectively) and to be maintained by other family members, thereby reducing the social costs of the resulting reduced labor demand (see Rubery 2011 for critique). Such grand generalizations of both trade union strategies and women’s behavior lack plausibility; not only are trade-union strategies far from centrally coordinated in many countries but also women’s willingness to return to unpaid care work will depend both upon their expectations and aspirations and on their access, for example, to unemployment benefits, training and redeployment opportunities. Women in Sweden who enjoy strong rights for flexible working and maternity leave benefits provided they are in employment are unlikely to willingly exit the labor market. Moreover, taking breaks from employment during periods of child raising has been declining across all European countries, except when funded through long-term parental leave schemes. Feminist economists stress the importance of context in assessing women’s participation response to economic crises, as attention to context opens up the possibility for change in gender relations, in contrast to mainstream economists’ search for universal sexrelated behavioral responses (see Rubery 2011). Feminist scholars have also examined the impact of crises at the individual household level on time spent in paid work and unpaid work. These micro level and household-specific responses may have aggregate impacts on overall labor supply but these may be small if the added-worker effects in some households are offset by discouraged-worker effects in others. In the recent global crisis and austerity period there is evidence of significant added-worker effects that often outweighed discouraged worker effects. In one study of 28 transition economies, Khitarishvili (2013) distinguished between a household-specific added-worker effect and an aggregate discouraged worker effect induced by the less favorable macro environment; while the ­discouraged-worker effect dominated among men, the added-worker effect dominated women’s responses. One study in Spain (López Andreu and Rubery 2018) found significant evidence of added-worker effects that occurred through various mechanisms, involving reduced labor market quits for domestic reasons, increased flows from inactivity to unemployment as well as employment, and increased take up of part-time work but on an involuntary basis as full-time work could not be found. A comparative study of Spain and Portugal of women from lowincome households found that despite decreases in pay, security and work-life balance, women’s attachment to the labor market strengthened, induced in part by the increasing importance of women’s earnings to household income (Tavora and Rodríguez-Modroño 2018). Berik and Kongar (2013) also found evidence in the US of narrowing gender gaps in both paid and unpaid work as men’s paid work declined and women substituted paid hours of work for unpaid hours (while men’s total work hours declined). In countries with large informal sectors the alternative to formal sector work may be engaging in the informal sector. Chandrasekhar and Ghosh (2009) found that women entered informal employment in all the countries affected by the Asian crisis and consequently suffered from falling rates of remuneration, a pattern that was 364

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repeated in the 2008–09 crisis (Ghosh 2013). Although evidence on impacts on unpaid work hours is limited, one can anticipate that many women are under pressure to increase both paid and unpaid working hours to offset both lower men’s earnings and reduced public services. In a study of six low- and middle-income countries, Elson (2010b) found that women were increasing unpaid work hours but this was not providing anything like full compensation for the decline in household income. In some countries, austerity policies are also being used to extend the pressure on those with heavy care responsibilities such as lone mothers to engage in wage work (Whitworth and Griggs 2013). It is also employment among older women that is rising fastest across Europe under requirements to work longer for pension entitlements due to women’s interrupted careers and the ending of the social norm that women should be able to retire earlier than men. In the decade up to 2018 employment rates of those aged 55–64 rose in the EU28 by 10.7 percentage points for men but by 15.9 percentage points for women (Eurostat 2019). These efforts to increase participation may be interpreted as both an austerity policy to reduce welfare costs and a strategy to increase work discipline (Greer 2016).

Crises, segregation and gendered labor market outcomes One of the key critiques of the cyclical reserve army characterization of women has been that women and men are not straightforward substitutes in the labor market due to the prevalence of gender segregation. Gender segregation by type of firm and occupation constrains women’s roles as a cyclical reserve in a number of ways. First, where the crisis has uneven sectoral impacts it is highly likely that the immediate pattern of job loss will be shaped by the pattern of gender segregation by sector prior to the downturn. Gender segregation may thus either protect women from or expose women to job loss. In the 2008 crisis, initially male-dominated segments, such as manufacturing and construction, were most seriously affected, leading to the crisis being called a “man-cession,” but the following austerity-driven crisis threatened key areas of women’s employment such as the public sector leading to often more job losses or other losses of income for women workers (Karamessini and Rubery 2013). These effects of gender segregation are thus contingent on the nature of the crisis. In other respects, the pattern of gender segregation may be considered itself in part shaped by cyclical and long-term restructuring of the production system. The cyclical reserve army hypothesis might expect women to be concentrated in those occupations that face the heaviest job losses, for example in manufacturing in the more labor-intensive processes (Bettio 1988). The concentration of women in such vulnerable employment areas may be related both to their relative disposability and to their availability at low wages. This buffer hypothesis with respect to gender segregation was tested for the 1970s/80s recessions for the UK, US, Italy, and France and the overall result found some evidence of women acting as a buffer in some manufacturing industries, but not overall or in services (Rubery 1988). In the more recent crisis, not only has manufacturing declined in significance but also results suggest that young people and migrants were more often the buffer labor force than women (Bettio et al. 2013). Gender segregation not only acts to constrain and facilitate women’s role as a buffer in the business cycle but also shapes the potential for women to be a substitute for male labor—that is, to act as a secular reserve army. Although a lack of new job creation in times of crisis is the main constraint on substitution, the expected pattern of gender segregation (Milkman 1976) may also limit the potential. However, substitution processes may increase in importance once recovery begins. Job creation may be focused on non-standard forms of employment as a means to offer lower pay and security and women may be overrepresented in such jobs. The crisis 365

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may also induce some companies to consider more radical transformation of the organization of production with direct or indirect consequences for gender segregation. For example, companies may switch from direct employment to outsourcing and to platform-type work to save on labor costs. More women than men may be employed in these low-paying supplier companies or as freelancers for the growing platform economy. Companies may also restructure internal career paths with women introduced into and concentrated into the lower paying segment (Reskin and Roos 1990; Crompton and Sanderson 1990). Indeed, the entry of women into a range of professions has been associated with the creation of new and devalued segments within the profession—for example in law (Bolton and Muzio 2007) and in banking (Crompton and Sanderson 1990). However, these processes are long run and it is an empirical issue if they are accelerated or delayed by economic cycles.

Conclusion Feminist economists have introduced gender into the analysis of the causes and consequences of economic cycles and considered the role of the business cycle in the long-term integration of women into the wage economy and in the changing nature of gender relations. The research to date has revealed not only strong but also variable and context-specific relationships between gender and the business cycle. This suggests that this area will remain a fertile ground for future research aimed at understanding how gender relations both shape and are shaped by cyclical and longer-term trends in the economy. It is even more pressing to continue developing the feminist critique of the underlying organization of the economic, social and political systems that prioritizes growth in the production and finance spheres to the neglect of social reproduction and at the cost of economic crises that result in the passing of the costs onto the most vulnerable groups in society including many women.

References Arestis, Philip, Aurélie Charles, and Giuseppe Fontana. 2013. “Financialization, the Great Recession, and the Stratification of the US Labor Market.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 152–80. Berik, Günseli, and Ebru Kongar. 2013. “Time Allocation of Married Mothers and Fathers in Hard Times: The 2007–09 US Recession.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 208–37. Bertola Guiseppe, Francine Blau, and Lawrence Kahn. 2007. “Labor Market Institutions and Demographic Employment Patterns.” Journal of Population Economics 20 (4): 833–67. Bettio, Francesca. 1988. The Sexual Division of Labour. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bettio Francesca, Marcella Corsi, Carlo D’Ippoliti, Antigone Lyberaki, Manuela Samek Lodovici, and Alina Verashchagina. 2013. The Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Situation of Women and Men and on Gender Equality Policies. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Accessed July 2019. https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/4a10e8f6-d6d6-417e-aef5–4b873d1a4d66/ language-en. Bolton, Sharon, and Daniel Muzio. 2007. “Can’t Live with ‘Em; Can’t Live without ‘Em Gendered Segmentation in the Legal Profession.” Sociology 41 (1): 47–64. Bruegel, Irene. 1979. “Women as a Reserve Army of Labour: A Note on Recent British Experience.” Feminist Review 3 (1): 12–23. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour: A Note on Recent British Experience Women as a Reserve Army of Labour: A Note on Recent British Experience. Chandrasekhar, C. P., and Jayati Ghosh, eds. 2009. After Crisis: Adjustment, Recovery and Fragility in East Asia, New Delhi: Tulika Press. Corsi, Marcella. 2014. “Towards a ‘PINK NEW DEAL’.” Foundation for European Progressive Studies, Brussels. Accessed July 2019. www.feps-europe.eu/Assets/Publications/PostFiles/271_1.pdf. Crompton, Rosemary, and Kay Sanderson. 1990. Gendered Jobs and Social Change. London: Unwin Hyman. Dymski, Gary, Jesus Hernandez, and Lisa Mohanty. 2013. “Race, Gender, Power, and the US Subprime Mortgage and Foreclosure Crisis: A Meso Analysis.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 124–51.

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Gendering the analysis of economic crises Elson, Diane. 1991. Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2010a. “Gender and the Global Economic Crisis in Developing Countries: A Framework for Analysis.” Gender and Development 18 (2): 201–12. ———. 2010b. “Economic Crises and Unpaid Work in Low and Middle Income Countries: A Gender Analysis.” Institute for Economic Growth Distinguished Lecture 3 Delhi, India. Accessed July 2019. http://iegindia.org/upload/pdf/dedlecture.pdf. ———. 2014. “Economic Crises from the 1980s to the 2010s.” In New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy, edited by Shirin Rai and Georgina Waylen, 189–212. Abingdon, Oxford. Eurostat. 2019. “People Work More Years before Retirement.” https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/ products-eurostat-news/-/WDN-20191111-1. Fukuda-Parr Sakiko, James Heintz, and Stephanie Seguino. 2013. “Critical Perspectives on Financial and Economic Crises: Heterodox Macroeconomics Meets Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 4–31. Ghosh, Jayati. 2013. Economic Crises and Women’s Work. New York: UN Women. Greer, Ian. 2016. “Welfare Reform, Precarity and the Re-Commodification of Labour.” Work, Employment and Society 30 (1): 162–73. Hatzivarnava-Kazassi, Evi, and Maria Karamessini. 2018. “Economic Crisis and Austerity, Work-Life ­Balance Policy for Working Parents and Parental Behaviour in Greece.” Economía y Sociología. Revista del Ministerio de Empleo y Seguridad Social, Gobierno de España 136: 79–106. Humphries, Jane. 1983. “The ‘Emancipation’ of Women in the 1970s and 1980s: From the Latent to the Floating.” Capital and Class 7 (2): 6–28. Humphries, Jane, and Jill Rubery. 1984. “The Reconstitution of the Supply Side of the Labour Market: The Relative Autonomy of Social Reproduction.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 8 (4): 331–47. ILO (International Labour Organization). 2018. Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Kalecki, Michael. 1943. “Political Aspects of Full Employment.” Political Quarterly 14 (4): 322–30. Karamessini, Maria. 2013. “Introduction-Women’s Vulnerability to Recession and Austerity: A Different Crisis, a Different Context.” In Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, edited by Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 3–16. London: Routledge. Karamessini, Maria, and Jill Rubery, eds. 2013. Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality. London: Routledge. Khitarishvili, Tamar. 2013. “The Economic Crisis of 2008 and the Added Worker Effect in Transition Countries.” Working Paper No. 765, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, New York. Accessed July 2019. www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_765.pdf. Lagarde, Christine. 2018. “Ten Years After Lehman—Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead.” IMF blog. Accessed July 2019. https://blogs.imf.org/2018/09/05/ten-years-after-lehman-lessons-learnedand-challenges-ahead/. Lahey, Kathleen, and Paloma de Villota. 2013. “Economic Crisis, Gender Equality, and Policy Responses in Spain and Canada.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 82–107. López-Andreu, Marti, and Jill Rubery. 2018. “Austerity and Women’s Employment Trajectories in Spain and the UK: A Comparison of Two Flexible Labour Markets.” Economic and Industrial Democracy. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X18760988. Milkman, Ruth. 1976. “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression.” Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (1): 73–97. ———. 2016. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Nelson, Julie. 2012. “Are Women Really More Risk-Averse than Men?” Working Paper No. 12–05, Global Development and Environment Institute Tufts University. Accessed July 2019. www.ase.tufts. edu/Gdae/Pubs/wp/12-05NelsonRiskAverse.pdf. Ortiz, Isabel, and Matthew Cummins. 2013.“Austerity Measures in Developing Countries: Public Expenditure Trends and the Risks to Children and Women.” Feminist Economics 19 (3): 55–81. Reskin, Barbara, and Patricia Roos, eds. 1990. Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rubery, Jill, ed. 1988. Women and Recession. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 2011. “Towards a Gendering of the Labour Market Regulation Debate.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (6): 1103–26. ———. 2013. “Public Sector Adjustment and the Threat to Gender Equality.” In Public Sector Shock. The Impact of Policy Retrenchment in Europe, edited by D. Vaughan-Whitehead, 23–43. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office, and Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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38 DEGROWTH Corinna Dengler

Introduction In the face of the ecological crisis, degrowth—an interdisciplinary academic discourse and a lively social movement that aims for a broad transformation toward a more socially just and environmentally sound system—enjoys increasing popularity. While being most prominent in the European context, degrowth forms part of a broader environmental justice agenda and supplements bottom-up and bottom-linked approaches to the socio-ecological crisis around the world (Escobar 2015; Dengler and Seebacher 2019). Despite these emancipatory claims and the fact that the relevance of a (more) feminist degrowth approach has been acknowledged by many of its advocates, degrowth scholarship so far lacks a consistent feminist stance in its theorizing (Bauhardt 2014; Picchio 2015). Integrating feminist economics and degrowth is a project in the making that can inform both streams of thought and activism, and pave the way for more sustainable and gender-just livelihoods. This chapter gives a brief introduction to degrowth scholarship, reviews the key contributions of feminist economics to degrowth, highlights the implications of closer engagement with degrowth for feminist economics, and suggests steps toward a common research agenda.

Conceptualization of degrowth The English term “degrowth” has observed quite an upswing since the first international degrowth conference 2008 in Paris. Originally stemming from the French word décroissance, it has been used as a self-designated umbrella term and interpretative frame for a second wave of radical growth critique that gained momentum in the early 21st century. It strongly builds on the foundations of the first wave, which can be traced back to the late 1960s and 1970s when ecological economics emerged as a heterodox critique of environmental economics (Georgescu-Roegen 1971; Daly 1973; Røpke 2004) and Donella Meadows and colleagues (1972) published The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. These contributions decidedly acknowledge that economic growth and sustainability contradict each other, as there cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet. Over the next decades, however, this “impossibility theorem” (Daly 1973) fell into oblivion and was replaced by a firm belief in the basic compatibility of growth and sustainability (e.g., in the 1987 369

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Brundtland Report). In discussions on green growth, technological fixes in the production process are meant to solve the multiple crises we are faced with by reconciling the social, the ecological, and the economic sphere. However, extensive research has shown that the strategy of greening our economies has only had limited success: whereas reducing the negative environmental impacts of production has succeeded in relative terms (e.g., more efficient cars), the ecological gains of increased efficiency have constantly been offset by “rebound effects” (e.g., an increase in the volume of production and consumption of more efficient but also bigger, faster, and more comfortable cars). In consequence, pressure on the environment keeps rising in absolute terms (Santarius 2012; Parrique et al. 2019). Degrowth scholarship and activism emerged as a critique of the notion of “growth for sustainability” (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015, 391), and instead of mere growth alternatives, it focuses on alternatives to growth. Degrowth must be neither confused with negative growth within a growth paradigm (i.e., a recession) nor equated with a comprehensive reduction of material throughput (which measures the overall amount of material and energy that is generated in the economic cycle from resource extraction to final disposal) in every sector and world region. Rather, degrowth scholarship problematizes growth drivers (e.g., the interest-based monetary system) and questions the very paradigm in which economic growth is considered “good, imperative, essentially limitless, and the principal remedy for a litany of social problems” (Dale 2012). While calling for an overall reduction of material throughput, degrowth scholars clearly advocate for the selective, qualitative growth (flourishing) of sectors, which contribute to what Pérez Orozco (2014) calls “sustainability of life,” such as the care sector. Specifically, instead of quantitative economic (pseudo-)growth (e.g., by shifting unpaid care work to the paid care sector), degrowth promotes qualitative growth in the sense of more time for preventive and holistic care, fair wages, and dignified working conditions. It seeks to curtail the “imperial mode of living” of global elites, who are mostly (but not exclusively!) located in the Global North. Imperial mode of living refers to lifestyles and identities that “rely heavily on (i) the unlimited appropriation of resources; (ii) a disproportionate claim to global and local ecosystems and sinks; and (iii) cheap labour from elsewhere” (Brand and Wissen 2017, 152). Hence, degrowth aims at alleviating the (deeply gendered!) global injustice that the ecological crisis hits those who have contributed least to it, first and hardest (Harvey 2003; Agarwal 1992). It thereby liberates conceptual and material space for countries of the Global South to aspire toward their own ways of living a good life (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015). It is crucial to understand that degrowth is not a purely economic concept. In its call for a broad socio-ecological transformation, degrowth has a strong commitment to interdisciplinarity within and beyond academia. Degrowth scholarship unites natural and social scientists, and moreover has close ties to social movements. Summer schools, which are often linked to climate camps and/or direct action for climate justice, blur the boundary between science and activism (Demmer and Hummel 2017). Instead of regarding technological fixes and climate summits, such as the 2015 COP21 in Paris, as a panacea for environmental challenges, degrowth scholars and activists call for bottom-up and bottom-linked solutions for the socio-ecological crisis (Muraca 2012). The biannual International Degrowth Conferences in Paris (2008), Barcelona (2010), Venice (2012), Leipzig (2014), Budapest (2016), Malmö (2018), and Manchester (2020), the International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas in Montreal (2012), the First North-South Conference on Degrowth-Descrecimiento in Mexico City (2018), and the Post-Growth Conference in the EU Parliament in Brussels (2018) are culmination points for these discussions. There is a wide range of degrowth positions, which mainly promote complementary transformation strategies. Within Europe one could schematically distinguish (a) Anglophone 370

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discourses (Jackson 2009; Raworth 2018), which focus on macroeconomic analysis and the broader field of post-growth that encompasses “a-growth” (van den Bergh 2011), the “steady state economy” (Daly 1973), and degrowth; (b) the German discourse on Postwachstum, which puts an emphasis on individual agency and sufficiency to reduce consumerism (Welzer 2011; Paech 2012); and (c) the French and Southern European discourses, which are more prone to political economy and political ecology analyses of intersecting structures of oppression and aim at systemic alternatives (Latouche 2009; Kallis 2018). Whereas (a) seems to be more prominent in institutional contexts and policy-making, it is arguably (c) that is most relevant for international degrowth discussions and dialogues with transformative movements and streams of thought around the world. In their groundbreaking book Degrowth—A Vocabulary for a New Era, D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis (2015) distinguish historical and conceptual roots of degrowth (e.g., bioeconomics, critiques of development, and political ecology), core concepts within degrowth (e.g., autonomy, care, and entropy), concrete degrowth policies and lived alternatives (e.g., eco-communities, public money, and work sharing), and possible allies for degrowth (e.g., buen vivir, feminist economics, and ubuntu). Dengler and Strunk (2018) argue that the classification of feminist economics as mere ally ignores that the feminist critique of science, economics, and growth is an essential source for degrowth scholarship and activism. Acknowledging feminist economics and ecofeminist contributions as intellectual roots and hence an integral part of degrowth scholarship opens up the possibility for a mutually enriching, deep integration of the two discourses.

Feminisms within degrowth Although being feminist is an attribute that most degrowth scholars and activists would see as consistent with the emancipatory nature of degrowth, in early degrowth scholarship feminism often seemed to be an add-on rather than an integral part of degrowth reasoning (for a noteworthy exception, see D’Alisa and Catteano 2013). Feminist scholars have voiced criticism that in degrowth scholarship there is limited acknowledgment of feminist scholarship as essential underpinning for degrowth and little awareness that degrowth runs the risk of reproducing prevailing asymmetries if the existing hierarchical gender relations are not explicitly addressed, problematized, and condemned (Bauhardt 2014; Picchio 2015). The goal of making degrowth more feminist is widely acknowledged among degrowth advocates, and there are already first contributions that highlight synergies between the two discourses (e.g., Akbulut 2017; Hoffmann 2017; Dengler and Strunk 2018; Dengler and Seebacher 2019; Perkins 2019). The formation of the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) at the 2016 degrowth conference in Budapest was a major step in problematizing the secondary importance attributed to gender issues, giving visibility to feminist contributions that have informed or could inform degrowth scholarship and pushing for a (more) feminist degrowth approach. Feminist theories of the economy display a wide range of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory positions with respect to degrowth, making it self-evident that not all feminisms are equally compatible with degrowth ideas. For instance, the liberal feminist notion of female emancipation as integration into an undisputed category of paid employment has little in common with degrowth reasoning. On the contrary, approaches that advocate for systemic alternatives to the capitalist status quo and focus on non-exploitative societal relations with nature, de-patriarchalization, and de-colonization, such as the subsistence approach (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1999; Mies 1986), materialist (eco-)feminism (Salleh 2009; Gaard 2017), feminist political ecology (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996; 371

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Bauhardt and Harcourt 2019), postcolonial feminisms (Charusheela and Zein-Elabdin 2004; Quiroga Díaz 2015), and growth-critical parts of feminist economics (Waring 1988; Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Seguino 2009), share important ideas with the degrowth discourse. In line with the focus of this Handbook, this chapter concentrates on the growth-critical parts of feminist economics and identifies two interlinked strands of discussion as especially relevant to the degrowth discourse, namely the feminist economics critique of neoclassical economics and feminist economics contributions to ecological economics (on the latter, see Perkins, this volume).

Feminist economics critique of neoclassical economics There are three foundational debates in the feminist economics critique of neoclassical economics that deserve particular attention in degrowth, namely the feminist critique of (1) the gross domestic product (GDP), (2) the narrow concept of work, and (3) the homo economicus. The first one, which is the feminist GDP critique based on Waring (1988), holds that GDP is structurally blind to the indispensable (yet unaccounted) contribution that ecological processes and unpaid caring activities make to each (counted) production process in the monetized economy. Degrowth can sharpen its growth critique by profoundly engaging with the feminist GDP critique and their search for alternative indicators that conceptualize well-being beyond income. For example, Berik (2018) explores the potential for using the Genuine Progress Indicator, which relies on monetary valuation for aggregation, as part of a process where broader voices are incorporated. Along these lines, debates on relying on capabilities as concept and measure of well-being (Power 2004) or on distinguishing “ ‘creative’ and ‘destructive’ production” (Waring 1988, 291) in national accounting can enrich discussions about other languages of valuation in the degrowth discourse. The second feminist critique deals with the narrow conceptualization of work in neoclassical (but also Keynesian and classical Marxist) economics, which focuses on only wage work being productive and hence proper work. This side effect of having GDP as universal measurement for economic activity structurally devalues all other forms of socially necessary, reproductive forms of work (e.g., unpaid care work, subsistence work, and community work), which, due to the still-prevailing gendered division of labor, are mostly carried out by women (e.g., Budlender 2010). It is imperative for degrowth scholarship to take this critique into account and not to unintentionally reproduce the “work = wage work” narrative. Rather, degrowth should aim to show that people provision themselves, their families, and their communities through closely interlinked paid and unpaid economic activities (Power 2004; Biesecker and Hofmeister 2010). The third feminist critique dismantles the central player in neoclassical economics, that is, the always rational, selfish, and independent economic agent homo economicus, as deeply androcentric (e.g., Ferber and Nelson 1993; Habermann 2008). This critique should serve as an important warning for degrowth scholarship not to construct an eco-sufficient, lonesome hero as its role model. Rather, it is important to discuss how “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2005) reproduces unsustainable lifestyles (e.g., cars and meat consumption as status symbols) and, more generally, the growth paradigm. Elliott’s (2016) assessment of “caring masculinities,” Nelson’s (2016) narrative of “husbandry,” and Hultman and Pulé’s (2018) notion of “ecological masculinities” resemble each other in putting relationality, interdependence, and care at the core of subjectivities that overcome hegemonic masculinity and the gendered division of labor. Thereby, they give hints at how masculinities have to be transformed in a degrowth society in order to overcome the structural devaluation of care and make possible its (re-)distribution between all members of society. 372

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Feminist contributions to ecological economics Feminist ecological economists have been at the forefront of conceptualizing the sphere of both (feminized) social and ecological reproduction as the foundation of every production process in the monetized economy. In the pathbreaking Ecological Economics special issue on Women, Ecology, and Economics edited by Perkins (1997), Jochimsen and Knobloch (1997) argue that ecological processes and (unpaid) caring activities resemble each other in being devalued and destroyed by industrial economic thought and action. O’Hara (1997) and Pietilä (1997) illustrate and deepen the conversation about the dichotomy of what is and what is not considered economics, a debate that is closely linked to feminist GDP critique. In addition, various contributions in the special issue envision alternatives that go beyond this dichotomy. For example, “sustaining production” (O’Hara 1997), a “caring economy” (Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997), and the “free economy” (Pietilä 1997) all put non-monetary but life-serving activities at the very core rather than at the margins of the economy, and instead of structurally devaluing and destroying, these concepts aim at promoting and sustaining them. In a recent Feminist Economics symposium on Ecology, Sustainability, and Care (Nelson and Power 2018), feminist degrowth scholars Dengler and Strunk (2018) built upon these contributions to conceptualize a boundary between the monetized and the maintaining, where social and ecological provisioning takes place. In the current economic system, this boundary, which in national income accounting has often been termed “production boundary,” runs along the lines of what is counted in GDP. The authors argue that overcoming this boundary is a prerequisite for a caring economy that is, however, not feasible in a growth paradigm. Whether degrowth offers a window of opportunity for overcoming this boundary requires more research and crucially depends on taking feminist insights on the gendered division of labor and hierarchical gender relations seriously. As unequal gender relations are pervasive, it is crucial to comprehend them as a cross-cutting theme that needs to be considered in every form of degrowth scholarship and activism.

Degrowth within feminist economics Degrowth is a rather new topic in feminist economics. Although aligning well with some core elements of feminist economics scholarship, degrowth is likely to become a controversial topic. Apart from the growth-critical parts of feminist economics, there is a whole range of feminist macroeconomists who take the desirability of economic growth as an indicator for (economic and social) well-being in the Global North and as a path to development in the Global South as an a priori assumption. Various studies (with mixed outcomes) empirically assess the question whether gender equality promotes or hinders economic growth (for an overview, see Kabeer and Natali 2013); however, few critically reflect on the vice versa relation. Is economic growth actually beneficial for gender equality? And who is actually profiting from economic growth— all women or are inequalities reproduced along the race-class-gender nexus? While in the current system it may indeed be easier to generate resources for feminist policies in a growth scenario (see Seguino, this volume), it cannot be dismissed that gender inequality (e.g., women subsidizing the economy with labor-intensive unpaid care work) is highly efficient if the objective is accumulation. Berik, van der Meulen Rodgers, and Seguino (2009, 24) state that the next step in feminist economics is “to problematize the nature of growth more broadly by using the principle of sustainability as the yardstick and goal in the pursuit of equality.” Yet much of feminist economic writing does not question the ecologically unsustainable growth paradigm (Purdey 2009) and overlooks its downsides from a gender perspective. Let us consider the 373

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example of care. The question how to make unpaid care work—the lion’s share of which is still done by women—visible and socially valued is one of the core concerns in feminist economics. Dengler and Strunk (2018) argue that in a growth paradigm, in which the production boundary delineates what is counted in GDP, the principal strategy by definition must be the valorization of unpaid caring activities in monetary units. There are, however, downsides to such an inclusion strategy, especially if the monetization goes hand in hand with a commodification. Among other things, monetization subordinates interpersonal care relations to the logics of efficiency and profit-making, creates “pseudo-growth” (Knobloch 2019, 262), widens the realm of money- and accumulation-driven social relations, reproduces gender injustices along the intersections of class, race, and ethnicity (Hochschild 2004), reinforces the centrality of GDP, and ultimately upholds the status quo of a “valorised but not valued” (Dowling 2016, 452) care sector. While estimating the monetary value of household labor in national accounts may be innocuous, as Dowling (2016, 460) reminds us “calls to recognise social reproduction and make it visible and ‘count’ in national economies have often ended up preparing the ground for its commodification and marketization.” Degrowth creates conceptual space (and time!) for tackling the issue of redistributing unpaid care work between genders rather than monetizing and/or commodifying it—for example, by proposing a general reduction of hours spent in wage work, the decoupling of basic material security from wage labor, and, in more general terms, languages of valuation that put the sustainability of life at the center of analysis (Pérez Orozco 2014; Hoffmann 2017). An emancipatory, incremental de-commodification of care and the proposal of commoning care in a degrowth society (Akbulut 2017; Dengler and Lang 2019) stimulate discussions on largely unpaid yet socially recognized collective care beyond the public/private split (Nicholson 1986). This reasoning about collective care is inspired by postcolonial feminisms in the Global South and by communities that (re-)create commons around the world (Quiroga Díaz 2015; Hossein 2018; Federici 2019). Degrowth scholarship can inspire feminist economics to think about alternative modes of reproduction that disrupt the boundary between the monetized economy and the economy of social and ecological provisioning in times of ecological crisis.

Toward a feminist economic degrowth research agenda For a more fruitful alliance of degrowth and feminist economics, degrowth scholarship needs to become integrally more feminist, while at the same time feminist economics should be aware of approaches that discuss gender justice beyond dominant economic narratives of growth, progress, and development. This chapter hinted at topics and questions that might be picked up in a tentative feminist economic degrowth research agenda. What is a feminist degrowth conceptualization of care? How can masculinities be transformed to promote a gender-just distribution of unpaid care work in a feminist degrowth society? How to change economic theory to socially recognize and actually value the reproductive sphere in economic analysis instead of merely valorizing it in monetary terms? Which non-monetary languages of valuation can pave the way for such a transformation? And what is it that postcolonial feminisms can contribute to these discussions? These are all important questions that should inspire future conceptual and empirical research in feminist economics and degrowth alike. However, a feminist economic degrowth research agenda needs to aim at cross-fertilization between feminist economics and degrowth to a degree that allows for a deep integration of the two streams of thought. Similar to how Spash (2012) systematizes the “preanalytic vision” of ecological economics, a combined consideration 374

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of feminist economics and degrowth should make its ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical assumptions explicit, that is, reach a shared basic understanding of metatheoretical and ethical assumptions. Groundwork in both feminist economics and degrowth scholarship paves the way for such an endeavor. For example, feminist philosophy of science, with its strong focus on epistemological matters and its assessment of knowledge as historically grounded, situated, partial, and embedded in socio-cultural contexts, lays the foundation for a feminist degrowth approach (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991; Barker and Kuiper 2003). Critical Realism as philosophy in science that combines ontological realism and epistemological relativism, and in particular its earlier conversations with both feminist and ecological economics (Lawson 1999; Nelson 2003; Mellor 2005; Spash 2012; Mussell 2018), could ontologically underpin these epistemological considerations. On methodological grounds, degrowth’s strong commitment to interdisciplinarity within and beyond academia and participatory methodologies, which disrupt prevailing dichotomies such as fact/value, theory/practice, and science/ activism, are instructive (Tuhiwai Smith 2013; Dengler and Seebacher 2019). Moreover, Knobloch (2019) holds that a feminist economic ethics can morally underpin degrowth scholarship and activism. Given these preliminary conversations, both degrowth advocates and feminist economists should spare no efforts to continue the dialogue on convergences and push for a feminist economic degrowth preanalytic vision and research agenda.

Conclusion In the face of the intensifying ecological crisis, the degrowth discourse is gaining importance in activist milieus and critical social science all over the world and is certainly a terrain for fruitful collaboration with feminist economics. In degrowth scholarship, the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) is gaining traction and pushes for an acknowledgment of the feminist roots of degrowth scholarship. While there is limited consideration of degrowth in feminist economics, there are promising synergies. A next step for a feminist economic degrowth research agenda is to develop a framework that comprehends economic growth as closely linked to the devaluation and exploitation of nature and feminized unpaid care work. By doing so, a feminist economic degrowth approach should call for both social and ecological sustainability, as well as gender and environmental justice, without prioritizing one over the other.

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Degrowth Kallis, Giorgos. 2018. Degrowth. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing. Knobloch, Ulrike. 2019. “Feminist Economics and Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Economics, edited by Mark White, 248–69. Oxford: University Press. Latouche, Serge. 2009. Farewell to Growth. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Lawson, Tony. 1999. “Feminism, Realism, and Universalism.” Feminist Economics 5 (3): 127–33. Meadows, Donella, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Mellor, Mary. 2005. “Ecofeminist Political Economy: Integrating Feminist Economics and Ecological Economics.” Feminist Economics 11 (3): 120–26. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on the World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books. Muraca, Barbara. 2012. “Towards a Fair Degrowth-Society: Justice and the Right to a ‘Good Life’ Beyond Growth.” Futures 44: 535–45. Mussell, Helen. 2018. “Who Dares to Care? (In the World of Finance).” Feminist Economics 24 (3): 113–35. Nelson, Julie. 2003. “Once More, With Feeling: Feminist Economics and the Ontological Question.” Feminist Economics 9 (1): 109–18. ———. 2016. “Husbandry: A (Feminist) Reclamation of Masculine Responsibility for Care.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 40 (1): 1–15. Nelson, Julie, and Marilyn Power. 2018. “Ecology, Sustainability, and Care: Developments in the Field.” Feminist Economics 24 (3): 80–88. Nicholson, Linda. 1986. Gender and History. The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. New York: Columbia University Press. O’Hara, Sabine. 1997. “Toward a Sustaining Production Theory.” Ecological Economics 20: 141–54. Paech, Niko. 2012. Befreiung vom Überfluss. München: Oekom. Parrique, Timothée, Jonathan Barth, François Briens, Christian Kerschner, Alejo Kraus-Polk, Anna Kuokkanen, and Joachim Spangenberg. 2019. Decoupling Debunked: Evidence and Arguments against Green Growth as a Sole Strategy for Sustainability. Brussels: European Environmental Bureau. Pérez Orozco, Amaia. 2014. Subversión Feminista de la Economía: Aportes para un Debate sobre el Conflicto Capital-Vida. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Perkins, Patricia Ellie. 1997. “Introduction. Women, Ecology and Economics: New Models and Theories.” Ecological Economics 20: 105–06. ———. 2019. “Climate Justice, Commons, and Degrowth.” Ecological Economics 160: 183–90. Picchio, Antonella. 2015. “Feminist Economics.” In Degrowth: Vocabulary for a New Era, edited by Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis, 208–11. New York: Routledge. Pietilä, Hilkka. 1997. “The Triangle of the Human Economy: Household—Cultivation—Industrial Production: An Attempt at Making Visible the Human Economy in Toto.” Ecological Economics 20: 113–27. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–19. Purdey, Stephen. 2009. Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations. New York: Routledge. Quiroga Díaz, Nathalie. 2015. “Decolonial Feminist Economics: A  Necessary View for Strengthening Social and Popular Economy.” Viewpoint Magazine, October 31. Raworth, Kate. 2018. Doughnut Economics. Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Random House. Rocheleau, Dianne, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, eds. 1996. Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. New York: Routledge. Røpke, Inge. 2004. “The Early History of Modern Ecological Economics.” Ecological Economics 50 (3–4): 293–314. Salleh, Ariel. 2009. Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. London: Pluto Press. Santarius, Tilman. 2012. Green Growth Unravelled: How Rebound Effects Baffle Sustainability Targets When the Economy Keeps Growing. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation and Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Spash, Clive. 2012. “New Foundations for Ecological Economics: Methodological and Ideological Options.” Ecological Economics 77: 36–47. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 2013. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Welzer, Harald. 2011. Mentale Infrastrukturen: Wie das Wachstum in die Welt und in die Seelen kam. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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39 CARE REGIMES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION Janneke Plantenga

Introduction At the level of the European Union, the adult-worker model, which assumes that both men and women are active in the labor market (Lewis 2001; Lewis and Giullari 2005), is promoted for both social and economic reasons. Increasing the labor force participation rate is favored as a means to both promote gender equality and social inclusion, as well as increasing economic competitiveness and broadening the tax base of European welfare states. To achieve these goals, the Europe 2020 strategy, enacted in 2010, aimed to reach an overall employment rate of 75 percent (of the population aged 20–64) by 2020 (EC 2010). The goal of a high employment rate of both men and women requires a major shift in thinking about paid and unpaid work, and its gendered distribution. The focus is no longer on families and specialization but rather on individuals and reconciling different roles and opportunities. This shift necessitates a redesign of welfare state arrangements of all EU Member States. The tax system and the system of social security have to become more individualized, for example, and working hours more flexible. It also means investing in a care infrastructure, particularly in leave entitlements and childcare services. Redesigning the welfare state is, however, complicated due to intrinsic difficulties in organizing long-term and large-scale transitions, financial constraints, and conflicting visions on the welfare state, the individual, and the family. Care policies in particular are closely related to the national identities, based on differing views on what is considered the most desirable organization of society (Alber 1995; Bettio and Plantenga 2004). In practice, the actual policy mix may not always be coherent or targeted toward a higher employment rate of both women and men. To illustrate this point, this chapter presents an overview of the current care policies of the 28 EU Member States, focusing on leave entitlements and childcare services. Despite the emphasis on increasing female labor supply and the common trend toward a higher female employment rate, the actual care policies vary substantially across the EU countries. Although some countries have broadly comparable care policies, national policies are also inspired by historical and institutional circumstances, resulting in a highly diverse policy landscape.

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Changing patterns of female labor force participation Increasing women’s employment rate is paramount to meeting the Europe 2020 headline target for an employment rate of 75 percent of the population aged 20–64. Figure 39.1 shows the 2017 employment rates and the gender gap in employment. Several EU Member States have already met the 2020 target; Sweden scores highest with an employment rate of 81.8 percent. Low employment rates are recorded in the Eastern and Southern Member States (Croatia, Italy, Greece). In all countries the female employment rate is lower than men’s. Although the relation is not perfect, countries with a lower employment rate have on average larger gender gaps, indicating that within Europe the variation in men’s employment rates is smaller than that of women. It must be noted that the target of 75 percent does not specify the number of working hours. Recalculating the country scores in full-time equivalents would increase the gender gap in all countries. The increase would be most considerable in the Netherlands, given the high rate of women working part-time, but also in Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the UK, where the female part-time employment rate is high. An important reason for the gender difference in employment rates is of course women’s disproportionate care work burden. This is illustrated in Figure 39.2, which shows the share of population that are not in the labor force because of family/care responsibilities. While family/ care responsibilities have only a small effect on men’s employment across all EU Member States, their impact on women is considerable: an average of 8 percent of all women (aged 20–64) report being inactive because of family/care responsibilities. Perhaps even more interesting is the variation across the Member States. The largest impact is in Malta, Ireland, and Cyprus (>15 percent). Only in Sweden and Denmark family/care obligations seem to play a minor role in explaining women’s non-participation. Given the considerable gender gap in employment rates, in several EU documents the Member States are urged to increase female employment “and move toward a dual model where both 100 80

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men and women can be earners and carers” (EU 2017, 1). The next section investigates whether these exhortations are matched by commensurate efforts to support the adult-worker model.

Care policies Redesigning the welfare state to support the adult-worker model requires a redesign of the tax system as well as family and care policies, and more flexible work schedules (Jaumotte 2003; Thévenon 2013). For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on care policies—namely, leave entitlements and childcare services.

Leave entitlements In 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the first Maternity Protection Convention in 1919, specifying a right to paid maternity leave of 12 weeks. The rationale behind this Convention was the health of the mother and her newborn child. Gradually, paid maternity leave was implemented in most industrialized countries (Neyer 2003; Bennett and Tayler 2006). Since the 1970s, parental leave policies have also been increasingly implemented across EU countries. The rational here is to enable employed parents to care for their young children (Daly 1997). In most instances, both parents are eligible for parental leave, usually following the maternity leave. At the EU level, directive 2010/18/EU states that EU Member States must provide a minimum length of four months of parental leave, to which both parents are entitled, but it does not specify the payment level. Parental leave is an individual right and should “in principle be provided on a non-transferable basis”—that is, if not used, this entitlement is lost (clause 2). 380

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Figure 39.3 Total amount of post-natal parental leave available to the family in EU Member States, in months, 2017 Source: Blum et al. (2018). Note: Data for Cyprus n.a.

In practice, conditions of parental leave vary across the EU Member States by the length of the leave, payment level, and whether the entitlement is family or individual based (see Blum et al. 2018). Figure 39.3 show the parental leave available to the family by the level of payment; the entitlement varies between four months (the United Kingdom) and 72 months (Germany). Most EU countries offer at least a short period of well-paid parental leave, with “well-paid” being defined as receiving at least two-thirds of salary. However, countries such as Belgium, Croatia, Italy, and the Slovak Republic offer only a low payment (less than two-thirds of salary), while Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Greece, and the UK do not provide any payment. Parental leave is a family entitlement in eight countries, to be split between parents as they choose (Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia). In 15 countries it is an individual entitlement (Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK). In most cases the individual entitlement is non-transferable. However, in the case of Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia, a part of the unused entitlement can be transferred to a partner. Finally, Latvia, Romania, and Sweden have a mixed system (part family, part individual), while in Malta the entitlement is different for the public (family) and the private sector (individual) (see, for more detail, Blum et al. 2018). The ability of parents to take leave depends to a large extent on the level of payment. Figure  39.4 provides information on the total amount of well-paid leave (at least two-thirds of salary) available to a family, covering maternity, paternity, and parental leave. Hungary and the Czech Republic have the highest score on this indicator, with well-paid leaves of more than two years per family. At the lower end are Latvia, Greece, the UK, and Ireland, with less than three months of well-paid leave per family. 381

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Figure 39.4 Overall amount of well-paid leave available to the family in EU Member States (benefits at least two-thirds of salary), in month, 2017 Source: Blum et al. (2018). Note: Data for Cyprus n.a.

Childcare services Affordable and quality childcare is an important element of the adult-worker model. Childcare services ease the burden of care, increase time available for paid work, and enable caregivers to earn incomes and pensions (Pascall and Lewis 2004). In most European countries, daycare facilities emerged in the second half of the 19th century. Large textile mills, for example, opened daycare centers to attract female workers; churches and private welfare organizations were also involved in these early initiatives to provide assistance and care for the working poor (Kamerman 2006). During the 19th century, there was a growing emphasis on the importance of education of the youngest children; pedagogues like Fröbel introduced the kindergarten, which later became a well-integrated part of the educational system. Nurseries or childcare facilities for children under the age of 3, however, were more contested and in general not part of the social infrastructure. It is only since the rise of female labor supply in the 1990s that countries started to invest in childcare services. At the EU level, targets have been set at the 2002 Barcelona summit. Confirming the goal of equal opportunities in employment, the European Council agreed that Member States should remove disincentives to female labor force participation and strive, taking into account the demand for childcare facilities and in line with national patterns of provisions, to provide childcare by 2010 for at least 90 percent of children between 3 years old and the mandatory school age and at least 33 percent of children under 3 years of age”. (see for more details, Plantenga and Remery 2009a; EC 2013) Childcare services for children under age 3 are presented in Figure 39.5. Formal arrangements include the following services: pre-school or equivalent, compulsory education, centerbased services after school hours, a collective crèche or another daycare center including family daycare, publicly or privately organized/controlled. 382

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According to Figure 39.5, Denmark has the highest share of children under the age of 3 in a formal childcare facility (71.7 percent). In the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Sweden, and France at least 50 percent of children under the age of 3 are in a formal childcare facility. At the lower end are the Eastern European countries. In Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, less than 10 percent of children under the age of 3 are in a formal childcare facility. The cross-country variation increases when hours of childcare use are taken into account. In Denmark 66  percent of all children under the age of 3 are in a formal childcare facility for 30 hours or more per week. In contrast, in the Netherlands most of the childcare is on a part-time basis. Similarly, in Spain, Malta, Greece, Austria, and Romania childcare services are mostly utilized for less than 30 hours.

Comparing European care models The transition toward the adult-worker model implies more emphasis on the individual and less on the family. It also implies that the traditional links which “joined men to women, cash to care, income to carers have been fractured” (Pascall and Lewis 2004, 373). The tax system has become more individualized, policies to support unpaid work have been introduced, and working hours have become more flexible. Several studies have analyzed the key policy logic of this transition and mapped the changing welfare state configuration within Europe, focusing especially on care policies. A common finding is that actual care policies are rather heterogeneous. Leitner (2003), for example, following up on Esping-Andersen’s notion of de-familialization develops a gender-sensitive theoretical concept of familialism which allows to identify realworld variation of familialism within Europe. Familialization in this respect is described as “the extent to which the caring function of the family is promoted” (Leitner 2003, 354). An important conclusion of her analysis is that countries cluster differently for different care policies. 383

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Figure 39.6 Relationship between overall well-paid leave (maternity, paternity, parental leave) and percentage of children using formal care, 2018 Source: Based on Figures 39.4 and 39.5. Note: Data for Cyprus and Ireland n.a.

In the same vein, covering 28 OECD countries, Thévenon (2011) examines cross-country difference in state support to families, focusing on leave entitlement, cash benefits, and the provision of services. The differences in family policies are partly explained by different stages of development and partly by the fact that family policies are rooted in particular historical and institutional circumstances. As a result, there is some clustering of countries but also considerable dispersion within each cluster. Nor does the trend necessarily indicate cross-national convergence. Adema, Ali, and Thévenon (2014), for example, illustrate that within OECD and EU countries life expectancy, marriage, and fertility rates are becoming more similar across countries, as are levels of educational attainment and female labor supply. Yet family support policies remain very different across countries, indicating that the degree of convergence in family policy over the last decades is noticeably smaller than the convergence in family outcomes. The different configurations are also illustrated by Figure 39.6, which combines the data on well-paid leave and childcare services as presented in Figures 39.4 and 39.5 in order to identify care models in EU countries. Although we should be cautious in defining care models based on only two dimensions, the actual mapping of the EU Member States in Figure 39.6 illustrates some familiar clustering. On the left-hand side, for example, we find the “Visegrad” countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), focusing on policies for parents to stay at home to care for their children. In line with this “familialistic” policy (Leitner 2003; Michoń 2008), the use of childcare services is limited. In fact, in Hungary, while children under the age of 3 are entitled to childcare services, most children enter kindergarten at the age of 3 due to limited capacity (Gábos 2018; Frey 2013). Parents can extend the well-paid leave of two years for another year receiving a low flat-rate benefit (see Figure 39.3). In Poland parents are entitled 384

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to a well-paid leave period of slightly more than 12 months. This includes a fully paid paternity leave for two weeks (Kurowska, Michoń, and Godlewska-Bujok 2018; Michoń 2015). At the other end of the spectrum are Denmark, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. With a relatively low score on the leave indicator, and a high coverage rate of childcare facilities, their policies aim to provide equal labor market opportunities for women and men. In Denmark, children are entitled to childcare services at six months; thus, there is no gap between parental leave and childcare entitlements (Bloksgaard and Rostgaard 2018). In the Netherlands, the care infrastructure is highly correlated with flexible work arrangements and the high share of women in part-time employment. Part-time employment gives easy access into the labor market, while at the same time lowering the need to make use of leave entitlements and childcare services for infants. Estonia, Germany, and Finland have high scores on both dimensions. German parents have a (individual and nontransferable) leave entitlement up to three years after childbirth (of which 14 months are well-paid). At the same time, there is an entitlement to childcare services for children older than one year. However, this entitlement does not specify hours per day/week; many services in Western Germany are only part-time, though full-time services are the norm in Eastern Germany (Reimer, Erler, and Blum 2018). In the Finnish case the well-paid leave entitlement is a little over 11 months. At the end of the leave period, parents are entitled to childcare services; since August 2016 the entitlement is restricted to 20 hours per week unless both parents are employed full-time or are full-time students. In addition, Finnish parents can extend the leave period by taking up “home care leave” (until the child’s third birthday), thereby reducing the need for childcare services for the youngest children (Salmi, Närvi, and LammiTaskula 2018). In Estonia, the total amount of well-paid leave is almost 19 months. Municipalities are obliged to provide a place in childcare services starting at the age of 18 months. Yet there is no individual right; in fact, not all municipalities are able to meet this obligation (Pall 2018). Southern European countries have a low score on leave entitlements and a moderate score on childcare facilities—although the childcare scores of Portugal and Spain are much higher compared to Greece and Italy. Especially in the south of Europe, the recent economic crisis had an adverse impact on care policies (Rubery 2015). Spain, which was catching up in the new millennium, experienced a decline in family and children expenditures in real terms with the onset of the crisis (León and Pavolini 2014). In Italy, care policies have remained unchanged for the most part, due to the persistence of traditional gender norms, large public deficits, and the elderly biased social policy (León and Pavolini 2014; Verashchagina and Capparucci 2014). In Greece, minimum wages have been substantially lowered during the crises, affecting the benefit level of, for example, maternity leave (Kazassi and Karamessini 2013). These examples illustrate the fact that national care policies reflect country-specific contexts and specifically the prevailing gender norms with respect to paid and unpaid work. At the same time, these policies create an incentive structure, which in turn shapes and exacerbates these gender norms. In Hungary, care policies reflect the view that parents (especially mothers of young children) are seen as full-time caretakers. As a result, there is an elaborate system of leave provisions facilitating parents’ (mothers’) time off. Leave entitlements provide an opportunity for (full-time) care work for employed parents in a labor market that is still organized along fulltime work hours (Plantenga et al. 2012, 200). At the same time, this specific care policy is also consistent with goals other than encouraging female labor participation, namely with increasing the fertility rate and preserving a traditional gender division of labor. As a result, the leave policy has clear costs in terms of the female employment rate and career opportunities (Vajda 2012). In the Netherlands, the emphasis is on parents as (part-time) workers. Family policies complement the flexible Dutch labor market and provide part-time (unpaid) leave with part-time childcare facilities. As a result, the employment rate is high, yet women are not integrated into the labor 385

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market on the same footing as men (Plantenga 2002; Plantenga and Remery 2009b). In Germany (and Finland) parents have a choice, in the sense that they can either opt for (extended) leave entitlements or use childcare facilities without making use of parental leave. High-waged (highly educated) women are more likely to use daycare services as the opportunity cost of being a full-time caregiver is higher for them compared to their low-waged counterparts. Conversely, low-waged (less educated) women are more likely to take leave. Consequently, the actual policy design might deepen inequality among women, in the sense that it hinders the career prospects and future earning power of the already disadvantaged low-waged/less educated women. In sum, while the adult-worker model EU policies aspire to require a focus on the individual and to encourage a more equal gender division of paid and unpaid work, in reality, in the EU Member States there is the rise of the “dual earner, gender specialized, family model” (Daly 2011, 19). In other words, actual developments do not suggest an unequivocal move toward an individualized adult-worker model but rather a middle way between the family and the individual. The current political climate also suggest that the actual state of affairs is not just the result of an incomplete transformation. In several EU Member States, there is also a certain ambiguity regarding the benefits of a modern, individualized society. Increasing labor market participation of women is all too easily brought into line with decreasing fertility figures. The perceived tension is not solved by investing in (for example) child care, taking gender equality as the point of departure, but rather in longer leaves, thereby confirming a traditional gender division of paid and unpaid work.

Conclusions Europe 2020 strategy aims to reach an overall employment rate of 75 percent. This goal has important implications for the structure of the welfare state, because it requires a change in the organization of paid and unpaid work and its gendered division. It also requires a change in family policy. In a breadwinner model, the policy facilitates the traditional gender division of labor with the male breadwinner and the female caregiver. This model is supported by child benefits and/or home care allowances. In contrast, in an adult-worker model adults, regardless of gender, are assumed to perform both paid and unpaid work. The focus of the welfare state is therefore no longer on specialization but rather on reconciling different roles and opportunities, by creating a care infrastructure of leave entitlements and childcare. Feminist researchers have analyzed the key policy logic of the actual changes and the impact of these changes on the organization of unpaid work, the employment rate, and gender equality. An important conclusion of this research is that there is still a large gap between the implicit assumptions of the adult-worker model and the actual reality of most European Member States. Only a few Nordic countries have developed a system of leave entitlements and childcare facilities that allow mothers and fathers to fully participate in labor markets. Other countries have invested in policies that allow for long leaves from the labor market, still others facilitate the combination of employment and care work by introducing part-time working hours, while some countries even seem to refrain from investing in a care infrastructure, indicating a low commitment to gender equality. It is tempting to speculate whether this European diversity will survive in the near future. The policy goals at the level of the EU implicitly assume that inter-country differences will diminish, yet the actual set of instruments (directives, recommendations, action plans) is limited and to a large extent based on soft laws, which do not have a legally binding force. Especially when it comes to care policy, national particularities may prevail because “ideas and ideals” about care are at the core of individual national identities (Bettio and Plantenga 2004; Thévenon 2011). 386

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National particularities might also survive, despite common demographic trends, despite economic integration, and despite EU regulation. Richard Freeman (1998), when studying labor market institutions, concluded that “there is no law of one institution: capitalism allows variety.” The same argument might hold for care policies. Also in this case different sets of policy may be compatible with economic integration and an open, global economy. Yet, if there is room for variety, there is room for political engagement. Many women have attained the highest level of education, have entered the labor market, and have become important players in public life. The next step is to continue to fight traditional gender norms and to strive for a coherent national care policy, taking gender equality as the point of departure.

References Adema, Willem, Nabil Ali, and Olivier Thévenon. 2014. “Changes in Family Policies and Outcomes: Is There Convergence?” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 157, OECD, Paris. Alber, Jens. 1995. “A Framework for the Comparative Study of Social Services.” Journal of European Social Policy 5 (2): 131–49. Bennett, John, and Colette P. Tayler. 2006. Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Bettio, Francesca, and Janneke Plantenga. 2004. “Comparing Care Regimes in Europe.” Feminist Economics 10 (1): 85–113. Bloksgaard, Lotte, and Tine Rostgaard. 2018. “Denmark Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2018, edited by Blum, Sonja, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss. www.leavenetwork.org/lp_and_r_reports/. Blum, Sonja, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss, eds. 2018. “14th International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research 2018.” International Network on Leave Policies and Related Research. www.leavenetwork.org/fileadmin/user_upload/k_leavenetwork/annual_reviews/Leave_ Review_2018.pdf. Daly, Mary. 1997. “Cash Benefits in European Welfare State.” Journal of European Social Policy 7 (2): 130–46. ———. 2011. “What Adult Worker Model? A Critical Look at Recent Social Policy Reform in Europe from a Gender and Family Perspective.” Social Politics 18 (1): 1–23. EC (European Commission). 2010. Strategy for Equality between Women and Men 2010–2015. Brussels: European Commission. ———. 2013. Barcelona Objectives. The Development of Childcare Facilities for Young Children in Europe with a View to Sustainability and Inclusive Growth. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. EU (European Union). 2017. “European Semester Thematic Factsheet.” Women in the Labour Market. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/european-semester_thematic-factsheet_labour-forceparticipation-women_en_0.pdf. Freeman, Richard. 1998. “War of the Models: Which Labor Market Institutions of the 21st Century?” Labor Economics 5 (1): 1–24. Frey, Mária. 2013. “The Labour Market Impact of the Economic Crisis in Hungary through the Lens of Gender Equality.” In Women and Austerity, The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, edited by Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 166–86. Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics Series. Abingdon: Routledge. Gábos, András. 2018. “Hungary Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2018, edited by Blum, Sonja, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss. www.leavenetwork.org/ lp_and_r_reports/. Jaumotte, Florence. 2003. Female Labour Force Participation: Past Trends and Main Determinants in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD. Kamerman, Sheila B. 2006. A Global History of Early Childhood Education and Care. Background Paper for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2007: Strong Foundations: Early Childhood Care and Education. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001474/147470e.pdf. Kazassi, Hatzivarnava, and Maria Karamessini. 2013. “Greece Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2013, edited by Peter Moss. www.levenetwrok.org/lp_and_r_reports. Kurowska, Anna, Piotr Michoń, and Barbara Godlewska-Bujok. 2018. “Poland Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2018, edited by Blum, Sonja, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss. www.leavenetwork.org/lp_and_r_reports/.

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Janneke Plantenga Leitner, Sigrid. 2003. Varieties of Familialism. The Caring Function of the Family in Comparative Perspective, European Societies 5 (4): 353–75. León, Margarita, and Emmanuele Pavolini. 2014. “ ‘Social Investment’ or Back to ‘Familism’: The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Family and Care Policies in Italy and Spain.” South European Society and Politics 19 (3): 353–69. Lewis, Jane. 2001. “The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model. Implications for Work and Care.” Social Politics 8 (2): 152–70. Lewis, Jane, and Susy Giullari. 2005. “The Adult Worker Model Family, Gender Equality and Care: The search for New Policy Principles and the Possibilities and Problems of a Capabilities Approach.” Economy and Society 34 (1): 76–104. Michoń, Piotr. 2008. “Familisation and Defamilisation Policy in 22 European Countries.” Poznan University of Economics Review 8 (1): 34–54. ———. 2015. “Waiting for the Incentives to Work: Comparative Analysis of the Parental Leave policies in the Visegrad Countries.” Community, Work and Family 18 (2): 182–97. Neyer, Gerda. 2003. “Family Policies and Low Fertility in Western Europe.” Journal of Population and Social Security (Population) 1: 46–93. Pall, Katre. 2018. “Estonia Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2018, edited by Sonja Blum, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss. www.leavenetwork.org/ lp_and_r_reports/ 2. Pascall, Gillian, and Jane Lewis. 2004. “Emerging Gender Regimes and Policies for Gender Equality in a Wider Europe.” Journal of Social Policy 33 (3): 373–94. Plantenga, Janneke. 2002. “Combining Work and Care in the Polder Model: An Assessment of the Dutch Part-time Strategy.” Critical Social Policy 22 (1): 53–71. Plantenga, Janneke, and Chantal Remery. 2009a. The Provision of Childcare Services: A Comparative Review of Thirty European Countries. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. ———. 2009b. “The Netherlands: Bridging Labour and Care.” In The Politics of Parental Leave Policies. Children, Parenting, Gender and the Labour Market, edited by Sheila B. Kamerman and Peter Moss, 175–90. Bristol: Policy Press. Plantenga, Janneke, Chantal Remery, and Judith Takács. 2012. “Public Support to Young Families in the European Union.” In Work, Family Policies and Transitions to Adulthood in Europe, edited by Trudie Knijn, 180–201. Hampshire: Palgrave. Reimer, Thordis, Daniel Erler, and Sonja Blum. 2018. “Germany Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2018, edited by Sonja Blum, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss. www.leavenetwork.org/lp_and_r_reports/ 2. Rubery, Jill. 2015. “Austerity and the Future of Gender Equality in Europe.” Industrial and Labour Relation Review 68 (4): 715–41. Salmi, Minna, Johanna Närvi, and Johanna Lammi-Taskula. 2018. “Finland Country Note.” In International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2018, edited by Sonja Blum, Alison Koslowski, Alexandra Macht, and Peter Moss. www.leavenetwork.org/lp_and_r_reports/2. Thévenon, Olivier. 2011. “Family Policies in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis.” Population and Development Review 37 (11): 57–87. ———. 2013. Drivers of Female Labour Force Participation in the OECD, no. 145. Paris: OECD Publishing. Vajda, Róza. 2012. “Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire. Hungarian Parental Leave Policies from a Gender Equality Perspective.” In The Cost of Children. Parenting and Democracy in Contemporary Europe, edited by David G. Mayes and Mark Thomson. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Verashchagina, Alina, and Marina Capparucci. 2014. Living through the Crisis in Italy: The Labor Market Experiences of Men and Women. In Women and Austerity, The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality, edited by Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 166–86. Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics Series. Abingdon: Routledge.

Country codes EU European Union AT Austria BE Belgium BG Bulgaria 388

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HR Croatia CY Cyprus CZ Czech Republic DK Denmark EE Estonia FI Finland FR France DE Germany EL Greece HU Hungary IE Ireland IT Italy LV Latvia LT Lithuania LU Luxembourg MT Malta NL Netherlands PL Poland PT Portugal RO Romania SK Slovakia SI Slovenia ES Spain SE Sweden UK United Kingdom

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40 THE FRAGMENTED STATE OF WORK-FAMILY POLICIES IN THE US Randy Albelda

Introduction Women’s caregiving roles often preclude, shape, and limit their employment opportunities, which results in lower wages relative to men and the reproduction of women’s roles as caregivers. Workfamily policies intend to reconcile the demands of paid employment with caregiving responsibilities and have been at the forefront of a feminist economic policy agenda. They directly address gender inequality and family well-being resulting from unpaid care responsibilities by either providing resources or structuring employment to accommodate unpaid caregiving. Work-family policies can expand women’s and men’s capabilities in combining employment and caregiving. And while feminist economists see work-family policies as a crucial ingredient in enhancing women’s equality with men and in promoting family well-being, there is not always agreement on the best approaches to achieving these ends. The debate centers on whether to promote policies that require employers to accommodate workers’ time to care for family members with paid time off and/or flexible work arrangements; policies that promote publicly paid caregivers which in turn allow women more time in employment; or providing cash assistance for adults that care for family members. While the debate around US work-family policies highlights its potential to reduce gender inequalities, these policies also have implications for other forms of inequality, in particular, those faced by low-income women, single-mother families, and women of color, with the potential to reduce or to reproduce these intersectional forms of gender inequality, depending on how they are structured.

US work-family policies US work-family policies are notoriously sparse, especially regarding two policies considered most critical in reconciling work and family: paid leave for new mothers and public childcare expenditures. Through the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, the US allows for up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected medical leave (including maternity leave for pregnancy) and family leave (bonding with a new child or care of a family member with a serious health condition) for workers that have worked at least 1250 hours over the previous year and work in firms that employ 50 or more people (within a 75-mile radius), covering about 60 percent of all workers. Employers can choose to provide paid family leave, but only 15  percent of 390

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workers receive it, with low-wage workers the least likely to have access to it (US Department of Labor 2019, Table  32a). The US is one of only two countries with no national requirement to provide paid maternity leave (International Labour Organization 2014). However, as of 2020, nine states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington) and Washington, DC provide or have enacted legislation to provide paid medical maternity leave for pregnancies as well as paid family bonding leaves for both fathers and mothers (A Better Balance 2021). In terms of public expenditures on childcare, there are tax deductions for childcare expenditures, the Head Start childcare program for children in poor families, and a block grant to states to help subsidized childcare for low-income families, which some states augment. And even while low-income parents are eligible for childcare assistance, it does not mean they receive it. Because of lack of funding, about 16 percent of income-eligible children are in federally subsidized childcare in 2013 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2017). Most states provide some funding for preschool education and care through public schools but only 33 percent of all four-year old and 5 percent of three-year-old children are enrolled in these programs (National Institute for Early Education Research 2018). As a result, most families pay for early education and care on their own. Both finding and securing childcare is difficult and is often expensive, even though wages for childcare workers are notoriously low. Full-time, year-round working parents pay an average of 9.7 percent of their income for center-based childcare, while low-income parents (200 percent or less of the US poverty income threshold) pay 27.8 percent of their income (Institute for Child Youth and Family Policy 2019). Some researchers point to the lack of US work-family policies as one reason why women’s labor force participation rates have stagnated for the past two decades (Daly et al. 2018; Blau and Kahn 2013). The data in Table 40.1 include a range of measures related to work-family policies and inequality in the US and 10 other advanced/developed countries among the original 20 members of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). The countries included in the table provide a sense of the US’ relative ranking on various indicators related to work-family policies compared to other English-speaking countries, a mix of Continental European countries, and a couple of Nordic nations. They are grouped into welfare state regime categories (discussed below) of liberal, conservative, and social democratic regimes. As the table depicts, the US is a complete outlier when it comes to paid time off for new mothers. Further, the per child public spending on early education for children ages 0–5 (in US dollars using purchasing parity power exchange rates) is the lowest among this group of countries. Not surprisingly then, less than 2 out of every 5 three-year old in the US are enrolled in any childcare, compared to almost all children that age in the comparison countries in Table 40.1. The lack of key work-family policies in the US means that families must find individual solutions. But because the US has a great deal of income inequality by class, marital status and race, this results in highly uneven and unequal access to and usage of both paid leave and childcare. The ratio of US household income (equalized by size) of those in the 80th percentile is almost nine times as high as those in the 20th percentile, the largest spread of the countries listed in Table 40.1. But beyond inequality across the income ladder, there is also a high degree of inequality between employed childless two-adult and one-parent families. In the US, employed single parents on average earn just less than 60 percent of two adult families without children, the smallest among the countries featured in Table 40.1. Almost one-third (32.1 percent) of US families with children are headed by a single parent, the highest among this group of countries. And while there are not comparative statistics available by ethnicity or race, the US has a long legacy of racial inequality, with growth of wage inequality between White women and women of color over the last 40 years (Wilson and Rodgers 2016). 391

Total weeks paid leave weeks available to mothers (includes maternity, parental and home care), 2016

Public spending on early childhood education and care per child ages 0–5 in US$ PPP, 2013 Percent of 3-yearold enrolled in early childhood education and care, 2016

392

  8.7 6 5.5 5.2 5.9 6.6 4.6 4.4 4.4 4.1 3.6

75.7 74.8 74.8 69 52.2 83.1 82

80/20 Income share ratio disposable household income (adjusted for family size), 2014

  65.7 67.1 62.9 73.7

Maternal employment rates for women ages 15–65 years old with at least one child ages 0–14, 2014

NA: Not available

Source: OECD Family Database n.d. (Tables CO2.1.A, CO2.1.B, SF1.1.A, PF2.1.A, PF3.1.B, PF3.2F, LMF1.2.D)

Liberal Regime (Anglophone)    US 0 2400 38.4 UK 39 4000 100 Australia 18 3700 64.3 Canada 52 NA NA Conservative Regime (Continental and Souther n Europe) Portugal 30.1 1800 82.8 Spain 16 2700 96.2 Netherlands 16 5400 88.3 France 42 6800 99.4 Ger many 58 5100 91.5 Social Democrat Regime (Nordic) Sweden 55.7 10300 94.6 Denmark 50 9200 96.6

Countries

Table 40.1 Work-family policies and inequality measures in 11 OECD countries

63.6 91.8

71.2 84.3 69.8 62.8 68.6

  59.8 60.5 75.5 68.7

Mean income of employed single mother as percent of childless 2 adult with head employed, 2015

21.4 21.9

16.3 16.3 17.7 22.1 21.1

  32.1 27.6 25.1 28.1

Percent single parents of all families with children, 2011

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Fragmented state of US policies

The US system of work-family policies is also fragmented by place. The lack of federal policies means that some states have pursued their own, leaving a patchwork of paid leave policies and highly uneven childcare coverage. Workers in high-paying jobs are much more likely to have an employer that provides paid leave as well as allow for flexible work hours while low-wage workers, disproportionately women of color, not only have less income to purchase quality childcare or the sets of goods and services that save time, they are much more likely to work non-standard hours than higher wage workers, making balancing work and family even more difficult (Enchautegui 2013). Employed single parents, 80 percent of which are mothers, are at a particular disadvantage as they must juggle employment and care responsibilities with one primary adult and often not much in the way of support from employers or government. Further, women of color are disproportionately employed in low-wage service jobs, including care work. While low-wage women workers stand the most to gain from work-family policies, they must be structured in such a way that low-wage workers can take advantage of them. Further, child- or elder-care policies would need to assure that care workers receive living wage.

Work-family policy and social welfare regimes The rich literature on comparative gender policy regimes, for example Ann Orloff (1993, 2009), spurred by the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), delineates approaches taken by Western countries to their social welfare policies—the sets of policies that supplement or replace wages when adults cannot engage in paid work. These not only include policies for unemployed, disabled, or retired workers such as unemployment insurance and old age and disability programs but also, as feminists have argued, include work-family policies such as paid leave, child- and elder-care policies, and cash assistance for single parents that facilitate adults whose employment is shaped by caregiving responsibilities. These social welfare regimes develop based upon already existing forms of social stratification, including gender inequality, and economic/political ideology. Esping-Andersen identified three distinct regimes: liberal, conservative, and social democratic. By thinking about work-family policies in the context of social welfare regimes, feminist economists place them within a larger interdisciplinary literature on this topic as well as place work-family policies within the broader perspective of political economic policies, norms and trajectories, including the role of the market versus the state, social welfare policies in general, and the ways gender relations are embedded in these policies and how they promote or impede gender equality. The US epitomizes the liberal welfare state when it comes to work-family policies with its heavy reliance on individual families, the market, and voluntary employer generosity. The liberal regime (recalling 19th century liberalism) largely characterizes the English-speaking countries, which promote individual-based economic sufficiency guided by the market. These countries are also highly stratified by income as well as race/ethnicity. Liberal regimes tend toward employment-based social welfare programs (some are voluntary while others are mandatory) for most but not all workers coupled with more meager means-tested (based on level of income) programs designed for those that at the time of the policy development were not expected to be employed—notably single mothers and disabled adults. These regimes also embody a heteronormative bias in that unwaged or partially waged married women are typically expected to gain access to programs through husbands. Conservative regimes, characteristic of continental and southern European countries, develop policies that seek to preserve pre-capitalist hierarchies of family, church, and bureaucracies while the social democratic regimes (Nordic nations) were built on a set of political coalitions that sought universal coverage for all individuals. 393

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As Table 40.1 indicates, compared to the social democratic regimes (which strive for universality), levels of income equality, maternal employment, both paid leave for mothers and public spending on childcare are much lower in liberal regimes (reinforcing the market solutions) while childcare spending is lower in conservative regimes (reinforcing women’s traditional roles as mothers).

Work-family policy tools and the feminist economic debate There are different sets of work-family policies that can help reconcile the tensions between employment and caregiving. One set seeks to transform employment in order to provide workers the time to care for their own families. The policies that fall into this category of policies include paid time off to have and bond with a new child or to care for a family member with a serious health condition; part-time work; flexible work arrangements; and reduced hour work week. A second set of work-family policies socialize the cost of care work through public provisioning, so that adults with caregiving responsibilities can more easily perform paid work. Examples of public provision of care through paid caregivers include publicly financed early education and care, out-of-school care, and elder care. A third type of support, which is more in line with a no (or low)-earner, single-carer household would be to transfer money to families as compensation for their care work, such as children’s allowance, cash assistance, or a caregivers’ stipend, which in effect substitutes for paid employment. In this case work-family tensions are resolved by focusing on family, rather than employment, and receiving compensation for it. And while the dearth of all three types of work-family policies in the US argues for the need for each of them (see for example Boushey 2016 and Women’s Committee of 100 in Himmelweit et al. 2004), there is a debate over which best promotes women’s equality. Many feminist scholars argue for changing employment to fit caregiving needs through paid time off, reduced hours, and flexible work arrangements. Notably Williams (2000) argues that mothers face employment discrimination and jobs need to be transformed so that men and women can be both workers and caring family members across the income spectrum. She (and others) argue the job structure in the US is built on an edifice of gendered norms in which the jobs that pay well are filled by men unencumbered by care. These “ideal” workers, unlike mothers, can work long hours, travel frequently, and change their schedules flexibly to accommodate work. An ideal worker with a child requires either a very large bank account to pay for round-theclock care or a wife/partner with no job or a job that allows for caregiving. These set of work arrangements are baked into the job structure and support a male-breadwinner model. Only by changing the structure of work to recognize that all workers want and need time outside of employment (or that no one really has a “wife” anymore), the argument goes, will encourage men to take on more caregiving and support women’s employment, enhancing gender equality. Bergmann (2000), a vociferous proponent of paid care, argues that time out of employment to care ultimately reinforces gender roles as women are more likely to take that time than men, and harms women’s wages and wage trajectories. Since wages are usually not fully replaced when on leave, women experience reduced wages when they leave. Further, leaving work in order to care for children or other family members weakens women’s employment stability and advancement, which reduces future wages. For these reasons, Bergmann and others argued for very short maternity and bonding leaves but extensive childcare polices, especially for single mothers (Himmelweit et al. 2004). This solution leaves the structure of jobs unchanged and tends to rely on an army of low-paid caregivers. The third option, cash assistance for caregiving, is a form of the pre-1990s program for poor single mothers (the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program developed in the 394

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1930s), referred to as “welfare” in the US. And while this program was far too meager to fully support families, it did allow mothers to care for children at times when raising children took on higher priority than low-wage employment. With the major changes to the welfare program in 1996, the federal government required employment for poor mothers receiving cash assistance and imposed time limits for use, making relying on cash assistance difficult for most mothers. The strains of work and family are most keenly felt by single parents, especially those earning low wages. And while childcare provision and transforming employment would certainly help a great deal, the current nature of public supports for low-income families and low-wage and part-time work in the US make these incomplete solutions (Albelda 2011). For example, lowwage workers are much more likely to work non-standard hours than other workers, which even publicly provided childcare might not be able to accommodate. This is why the Women’s Committee of 100 (Himmelweit et al. 2004), a group of feminist academics mobilized against US welfare reform, in 1995 argued for including caregiver allowances as a third leg of support as there may be periods of time in which taking care of family members matter more than a low-wage job. Over decades of this debate, complemented by the research of the impacts of various workfamily policies discussed below, there is some agreement among feminist economists that some combination of the first two sets of policies provide the best approach. Together these two sets of work family policies form the basis for creating what Gornick and Meyers (2003) call a dualearner, dual-carer society or what Fraser (1994) in her thought experiment about welfare states that promote gender equity calls a universal caregiver model. Although, some feminist political economists also argue that these alone are not enough; there must also be a set of employment reforms especially for low-wage and part-time workers as well as policies and changed social norms that promote men’s caregiving (e.g., Rubery 2015). The third approach of longterm cash payments for care (including long-term paid leaves) makes many feminist economists uneasy as it reinforces women’s role as caregiver over that of worker, which is seen as a major source of gender inequality.

What do we know about the effectiveness of work-family policies? Cross-country research of high-income countries suggests that paid medium length (20–30 weeks) job-protected maternal leave promotes job retention and does not affect earnings for women with either high or low educational attainment (Hegewisch and Gornick 2011; Ferragina 2019), although these policies perform less well in countries where childcare is not available (Cukrowska-Torzewska 2017). Longer leaves seem to reduce mothers’ employment and long-term earnings (Hegewisch and Gornick 2011; Ferragina 2019). Cross-country analysis finds that job-protected paid leave reduces the employment gap and earnings gap between men and women (Blau and Kahn 2013; Olivetti and Petrongolo 2017). The impacts on family wellbeing of paid maternal leave are overall positive, especially concerning maternal and child health (Nandi et al. 2018). It also improves self-reported happiness of all adults but parents show the greatest improvement (Glass, Simon, and Andersson 2016). Impacts do, however, vary depending on a host of country-specific features, including the details of the policy (e.g., how generous are financial benefits of paid leave), the interaction with other work-family policies, and cultural attitudes toward women’s work. The gendered impacts of the public provision of childcare are consistent and strongly positive. The availability of publicly provided childcare increases women’s employment, boosts wages and reduces poverty (Hegewisch and Gornick 2011) while increasing happiness among parents and non-parents (Glass, Simon, and Andersson 2016). It reduces the employment and 395

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earnings gap between men and women (Olivetti and Petrongolo 2017) and for mothers with younger children it reduces the employment gap between mothers and non-mothers (Boeckman, Misra, and Budig 2015). The policy is especially important in reducing poverty among single mothers (Misra, Moller, and Budig 2007). There are some important research gaps. We do not know how these policies may or may not reduce income inequality among women, although there are some indications of the differential impacts of paid leave policies on high educated versus low educated, that the higheducated benefit more. There is almost no information on how these policies might reduce racial inequality. There is very little research on the public provision of elder care or leave to take care of elders on any of the outcomes discussed earlier.

Getting there: state and local work-family policies that might meet the goals of reducing gender, income, and racial inequalities in the US Despite the introduction of federal-level legislation for paid family and medical leave, the right to request work schedules, and universal childcare, there seems to be no appetite yet for the US to enact comprehensive work-family policies. However, there has been movement and policy changes at the state level. Highlighted here are some of those policies with attention to ways in which they might meet the goals of also reducing income and racial inequalities in the US. As of 2020, nine states and Washington, DC have paid maternity (medical) and family leave legislation. The provisions for length, wage replacement, and job protection vary widely; however, none of these jurisdictions allow for more than 26 weeks for new mothers, combining maternity and bonding leave (absent medical complications). While the studies of these programs on employment effects are currently underway, surveys of California employers found nine out of 10 of them reported a positive or no effect of paid family leave on employee costs or productivity (Milkman and Appelbaum 2013). The programs in Washington state and Massachusetts could serve as models for other states and a national program as they use a slidingscale wage replacement (providing lower wage workers with close to full wage replacement) and provide job-protected leaves, both of which are important for low-wage workers to participate in these programs, which in turn should reduce the current racial and income-based disparities when the need for a leave arises. There is great need for publicly funded education and care for young children in the US. Several states and cities are beginning to grapple with extending current education and care services, although funding is a major impediment. In addition to generating funds, there are other critical issues facing advocates for childcare that they need to consider if these policies are to enhance income and racial equality in addition to gender equality. First, childcare workers, especially outside of public-school settings, earn very low wages. Wages must be improved to assure an adequate supply of qualified teachers and carers and to value the work of caring for children. And while public school settings do tend to provide higher wages to educators (largely because most are unionized), the local provision of K-12 education in the US has led to a highly income- and racial-segregated education system. Tackling this will require assuring high quality care in a range of care and educational settings. There are a range of ways in which work arrangements legislation could ease the tension of work and family. These include the right to request changes in schedules; right to a minimum number of work hours or ability to refuse overtime; advanced notification of schedules; part-time work with pro-rated wages and benefits; flexible work start and stop times; telecommuting; and a 30–35-hour work week for all. Some employers may offer some of these while 396

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unions typically bargain over these provisions. Together, though, these arrangements are not widely available. For low-wage workers, the issue of unpredictability of hours looms large (McCrate 2012), which makes planning around care nearly impossible. In theory, unions are the best vehicle for negotiating most of these provisions tailored to employees and employers in the industries represented. The sets of provisions needed to increase union representation is beyond the scope of this chapter, however unions are and will remain a crucial vehicle for securing work-family policies. There are a few policy experiments with employee-controlled job flexibility legislation across US cities and states, which are particularly targeted at lowincome workers. San Francisco passed an ordinance in 2014 (shortly followed by Seattle, WA and Emeryville, CA) that requires larger retailers to post schedules at least 2 weeks in advance, must offer more hours to part-time employees before hiring new employees, and provide parttime workers with the same hourly wages and pro-rated benefits as full-time workers (City and County of San Francisco n.d.). As adults live longer, the issue of elder care is increasingly an important concern. Paid leave and flexible work arrangements are helpful, but often not well-suited to tending to people with chronic illness, punctuated by unpredictable medical and care needs. Families almost always need and use paid caregivers to help with these needs. This workforce is disproportionately women of color (often immigrants) and is very low paid. Some provisions of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people in the US, allow for community, in-home, and nursing-home care, although only available to low-income seniors with few assets. Unions, like SEIU 1199, that organize healthcare-aid workers have been somewhat successful in promoting funding for state programs (including Medicaid programs) to boost care workers’ pay while improving the quality of care, often working in tandem with familycare providers. And while these state initiatives are promising, they are fragmented by where you live and if you are covered by a union. Without a larger federal role in passing work-family legislation, setting a high bar of minimum standards, and commitment to improving the work conditions and wages or paid caregivers, the US will remain an outlier when it comes to policies that help reconcile work and family and perpetuate highly unequal access. Polls indicate a very strong desire for paid family leave and universal early education and care and there seems to be new political momentum for achieving them, so there is hope on the horizon.

References Albelda, Randy. 2011. “Time Binds: US Antipoverty Policies, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Single Mothers.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 189–214. doi:10.1080/13545701.2011.602355. Bergmann, Barbara R. 2000. “Subsidizing Child Care by Mothers at Home.” Feminist Economics 6 (1): 77–88. doi:10.1080/135457000337688. A Better Balance. 2021. “Comparative Chart of Paid Family and Medical Laws in the United States.” Accessed January 21, 2021. www.abetterbalance.org/resources/paid-family-leave-laws-chart/. Blau Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. 2013. “Female Labor Supply: Why Is the United States Falling Behind?” American Economic Review 103 (3): 251–56. Boeckman, Irene, Joya Misra, and Michelle J. Budig. 2015. “Cultural and Institutional Factors Shaping Mothers’ Employment and Working Hours in Postindustrial Countries.” Social Forces 93 (4): 1301–33. Boushey, Heather. 2016. Finding Time: The Economics of Work—Life Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. City and County of San Francisco, Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. n.d. “Formula Real Employee Rights Ordinances.” Accessed March 2019. https://sfgov.org/olse/formula-retail-employeerights-ordinances. Cukrowska-Torzewska, Ewa. 2017. “Cross-Country Evidence on Motherhood Employment and Wage Gaps: The Role of Work—Family Policies and Their Interaction.” Social Politics 24 (2): 178–220.

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Randy Albelda Daly, Mary C., Joseph H. Pedtke, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, and Annemarie Schweinert. 2018. “Why Aren’t US Workers Working?” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter 2018–24. Accessed February 2019. www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/el2018-24.pdf. Enchautegui, Maria. 2013. “Nonstandard Work Schedules and the Well-Being of Low-income Families.” Low-Income Working Families Paper 26, Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/research/ publication/nonstandard-work-schedules-and-well-being-low-income-families. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferragina, Emanuele. 2019. “Does Family Policy Influence Women’s Employment?: Reviewing the Evidence in the Field.” Political Studies Review 17 (1): 65–80. doi:10.1177/1478929917736438. Fraser, Nancy. 1994. “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State.” Political Theory 22 (4): 591–618. Glass, Jennifer, Robin W. Simon, and Matthew A. Andersson. 2016. “Parenthood and Happiness: Effects of Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in 22 OECD Countries.” AJS; American Journal of Sociology 122 (3): 886–929. doi:10.1086/688892. Gornick, Janet C., and Marcia Meyers. 2003. Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment. New York: Russell Sage. Hegewisch, Ariane, and Janet C. Gornick. 2011. “The Impact of Work-Family Policies on Women’s Employment: A  Review of Research from OECD Countries.” Community, Work  & Family 14 (2): 119–38. doi:10.1080/13668803.2011.571395. Himmelweit, Susan, Barbara Bergmann, Kate Green, Randy Albelda, and Charlotte Koren. 2004. “Lone Mothers: What Is to Be Done?” Feminist Economics 10 (2): 237–64. doi:10.1080/135457004 2000217793. Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy. 2019. “diversitydatakids.org, Rankings.” Accessed February 2019. www.diversitydatakids.org/data/ranking. International Labour Organization. 2014. “Maternity and Paternity at Work: Law and Practice Across the World.” Accessed July  12, 2019. http://ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-dgreports/-dcomm/-publ/ documents/publication/wcms_242615.pdf. McCrate, Elaine. 2012. “Flexibility for Whom? Control Over Work Schedule Variability in the US.” Feminist Economics. 18: 39–72. Milkman, Ruth, and Eileen Appelbaum. 2013. Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of US Work-family Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Misra, Joya, Stephanie Moller, and Michelle J. Budig. 2007. “Work—Family Policies and Poverty for Partnered and Single Women in Europe and North America.” Gender and Society 21 (6): 804–27. doi:10.1177/0891243207308445. Nandi, Arijit, Deepa Jahagirdar, Michelle C. Dimitris, Jeremy A. Labrecque, Erin C. Strumpf, Jay S. Kaufman, Ilona Vincent et al. 2018. “The Impact of Parental and Medical Leave Policies on Socioeconomic and Health Outcomes in OECD Countries: A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature.” The Milbank Quarterly 96 (3): 434–71. doi:10.1111/1468-0009.12340. National Institute for Early Education Research. 2018. “State Preschool Yearbook.” Rutgers Graduate School of Education. Accessed July 12, 2019. http://nieer.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Stateof-Preschool-2017-Full-7–16–18.pdf. OECD Family Database. n.d. Accessed February 2019. www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm. Olivetti, Claudia, and Barbara Petrongolo. 2017. “The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31 (1): 205–30. https://doi.org/www.aeaweb.org/jep/. Orloff, Ann. 1993. “Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States.” American Sociological Review 58 (3): 303–28. ———. 2009. “Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda.” Sociological Theory 27 (3): 317–43. Rubery, Jill. 2015. “Regulating for Gender Equality: A Policy Framework to Support the Universal Caregiver Vision.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 22 (4): 513–38. US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. 2017. “Factsheet: Estimates of Child Care Eligibility and Receipt for Fiscal Year 2013.” Accessed February 2019. https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/258491/ChildCareSubsidyEligibility.pdf.

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41 CARE POLICIES IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Valeria Esquivel

Introduction Care is a crucial dimension of human well-being. We need care throughout our lives in order to survive. Caregiving has long been considered to be the “natural” responsibility of women: around the world it is still the case that women provide most of the unpaid care and perform most of the domestic work, and the majority of care workers are women (Addati et al. 2018). Gender inequalities in the distribution of unpaid care work and in the labor markets are deeply intertwined. On the one hand, unpaid care work restricts women’s ability to undertake employment and the types and quality of jobs to which they have access. On the other, the fact that unpaid care work is provided for free in households and communities—though it is certainly not costless—leads to the undervaluation of paid care work and to poor working conditions in care sectors. Care policies, broadly defined as public policies that assign resources to support caregiving, are key to break this vicious circle. Care policies entail subsidies to persons who need to purchase care services for themselves, for example to carry out activities of daily living; care services that cater to care recipients, like early childhood education and care (ECEC) and long-term care (LTC) of elderly persons; and time off from paid work to care, in the form of maternity, paternity or parental leave; and the regulation of caregivers’ working times. Care policies therefore encompass health, education, social protection and labor market policies, as well as care-related infrastructure, like water and sanitation. They are designed to serve multiple goals, including poverty reduction, enhanced labor force participation, employment creation and the expansion of future generations’ human capabilities. Ultimately, care policies (or their absence) determine who provides care, who receives care, and who is bearing the costs of care provision (Esquivel 2014). Care policies in the Global South are distinct from those in the Global North, as populations, labor markets, and in general the social and political contexts in which they emerge differ. Carerelevant infrastructure is emphasized in sub-Saharan African countries, as lack of infrastructure makes caregiving take longer times and greater effort, particularly in rural areas. In Asia and in Latin America, care services, in particular ECEC services, are prioritized, given the significant numbers of children in the population and relatively low women’s labor force participation. Cash transfers to caregivers, for example those caring for HIV/AIDS orphans, have also been 400

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implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. In Latin America, some conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) offer complementary care services to avoid disincentivizing women’s labor force participation; and the same is true for some public work programs (Esquivel and Kaufmann 2017). Sometimes care policies are firmly situated within gender equality agendas, but in other cases they often take instrumentalist framings, which in turn shape the design and implementation of care policies. Global advocacy for care policies has been strong, including in making the macroeconomic case for expanding care policies in the Global South, but this has not necessarily been reflected yet at national and regional levels. This chapter reviews the definition, framing and claiming of care policies in the Global South, and their institutionalization in the case of Latin America, building on both feminist economics and feminist social policy contributions.

Care policies from a Global South perspective This chapter’s definition of care policies builds on the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Target 5.4 calls for countries to “recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies” (United Nations 2015)—in other words, by means of care policies. In several dimensions, this definition is broader than care policies in the literature for the Global North (Daly 2001; Sainsbury 2013). First, with this definition, care policies include but extend beyond work-family policies or those comprised by care regimes in the Global North (Albelda, this volume, Plantenga, this volume), whose beneficiaries are (or are mostly cared for by those) in formal and protected employment. Where informal employment is pervasive, or where women experience barriers to entering the labor force, employment-based care benefits might only reach limited sections of the population. For example, very few countries in the Global South meet International Labour Organization (ILO) standards on maternity leave (28 percent in Asia, 25 percent in Africa) and effective coverage of women giving birth is even lower (Addati et al. 2018). Indeed, widespread informality calls for complementary public and universal provision of care services that are not tied to formal employment (Benería 2008; Moussié and Alfers 2018). Second, following target 5.4, care policies aim at recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid care and domestic work, the so-called “Triple R” framework. This framework is a reinterpretation of Fraser (1997) initially proposed by Elson (2008) (see Esquivel (2011) for elaboration and Esquivel (2013) for practical applications to policy.) ECEC and LTC services indeed redistribute some of the care previously provided by households and by women in them, and demands around their provision have long been articulated from a gender perspective in the Global North. There is, however, also a dimension of care provision both in other educational levels and in other health services. Gaps in healthcare coverage and its quality and in primary and secondary education are still prevalent in the Global South, failing to fulfill the rights of care recipients and increasing unpaid carers’ workloads, thus justifying a broad understanding of care services. Similarly, context-specific care issues, like caring for persons living with HIV in many African countries, are also associated with inordinate amounts of unpaid care work and merit explicit consideration (Esquivel and Kaufmann 2017). Moreover, the challenges care workers in ECEC and LTC face are no different from many other care workers in health and education and underscore the strong relationship between unpaid and paid care work (Addati et al. 2018). Third, feminist scholarship on the Global North has emphasized the relational aspect of unpaid care work and its irreplaceability, as opposed to that of housework, which is conceived as 401

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a set of instrumental, commodifiable tasks through which people would no longer demonstrate relatedness. However, this separation is artificial especially in the Global South (Esquivel 2011). Around the world housework remains the main component of all unpaid care and domestic work by far (81.8 percent), underscoring the fact that able-bodied adults also require housework (Addati et al. 2018). The degree of actual commodification of housework depends on household income, as commodification means having the income to buy substitutes for this work. Income inequality (within and between countries) is the single most powerful explanatory variable associated with the prevalence of high numbers of domestic workers, frequently migrants (Addati et al. 2018; Gammage this volume). And domestic workers perform both housework and care of persons, the work content of their jobs accommodating the needs of the employer’s household (Esquivel 2010). Fourth, the explicit mention of infrastructure in target 5.4 recognizes that deficits in water and sanitation, electricity, roads and transportation increase women’s and children’s unpaid care and domestic work. Lack of infrastructure creates heavy workloads in fetching water, which is a time-consuming activity typically done by women and girls, justifying the expansion of safe water and basic sanitation that saves women’s time and reduces water-related illnesses (Brown 2010). Similarly, lack of access to electrical power and modern fuel for cooking across sub-­ Saharan African countries means that women and girls spend long hours collecting firewood that can be saved by improved stoves (Esquivel and Kaufmann 2017). These deficits make unpaid care work more onerous, thereby making infrastructure a pre-condition for care provision in the Global South, particularly in rural areas (Fontana and Elson 2014; Seguino and Were 2014). Lastly, target 5.4 indicates social protection policies can also reduce and redistribute unpaid care work, bringing a “care lens” with which to analyze them in the Global South. Social protection systems comprise universal health care and increasingly LTC (ILO 2017). Other carerelated social protection policies explicitly acknowledge women’s role in providing care, and/ or the care needs of children, older persons and persons with disabilities by providing transfers in cash or in kind. They include tax rebates and cash-for-care transfers (typically in the Global North), as well as the recognition of care work in pension schemes, cash transfer programs and public work programs with specific care components (typically in the Global South). For example, in Latin America, CCTs, which expanded considerably in the years 2000s, have tied conditionalities to the provision of care. However, by taking for granted that women will fulfill the care duties implicit in the conditionalities (like health check-ups and guaranteeing school attendance), CCTs fail to recognize women’s unpaid care and domestic work (Esquivel 2016; Sepúlveda Carmona 2013). In South Africa and in India, certain public works programs have incorporated some care dimensions. In South Africa, the Expanded Public Works Program includes skill-training initiatives aimed at training care workers, although it provides no support in the form of jobs or placement in ECEC services after they receive their qualifications (Parenzee and Budlender 2015). India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scheme recognizes women’s unpaid care and domestic work, and has a tailored component on childcare provision for working women (Rao 2018).

Transformative care policies From a social justice perspective, care policies are “transformative” when they are able to simultaneously guarantee the rights, agency, autonomy and well-being of both care receivers and caregivers, be them unpaid or paid (Esquivel 2016). The rights, agency, autonomy and well-being of care receivers and caregivers are frequently presented in tension—higher wages of care workers against users’ fees that care receivers pay, persons with disabilities who face care arrangements 402

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that deprive them of their agency, childcare provision imposing penalties on mothers’ labor force participation and wages (ILO 2018; Addati et al. 2018). But these are false dichotomies: the wages and working conditions of care workers are positively associated with the quality of care provided (Folbre 2006; Neuman, Josephson, and Chua 2015); disability movements and care workers working on disability have developed converging agendas, including on resisting welfare cuts (Shakespeare and Williams 2018); and women’s rights to paid work and to a decent living do support the claims for public childcare provision as a matter of gender justice (Esquivel and Kaufman 2017; Addati et al. 2018). Transformative care policies acknowledge that the unequal distribution of unpaid care and domestic work is a powerful driver of gender inequality, and that excessive care workloads can be impoverishing in terms of time and earnings (Antonopoulos, Masterson, and Zacharias 2012; Antonopoulos et al. 2016). Transformative care policies can contribute to the fulfillment of women’s rights, particularly the rights of women living in poverty (Sepúlveda Carmona 2013), and mitigate other dimensions of inequality such as class, caste, ethnicity or sexual orientation. They can have positive effects in governance, citizenship and social accountability (Molyneux, Jones, and Samuels 2016). Transformative care policies bring care workers to the fore, as providing good quality care and decent work for care workers are two sides of the same coin. Migration policies, labor policies and the coverage and design of care policies ultimately determine how care workers fare in comparison with other workers. Moreover, domestic workers are the “default” care workers when care services are insufficient. Inequality makes domestic workers affordable for affluent sections of the population, yet results in poor employment relationships in households, which call for regulation, specifically for countries to ratify the ILO Domestic Workers Convention (No. 189, 2011). A review of the working conditions of care workers across the world finds that public provision of care services is associated with better working conditions for these workers while unregulated private provision tends to worsen them—reinforcing target 5.4’s mandate for public care services provision also from the standpoint of care workers. The strength of care workers’ organizations, and the existence and coverage of collective bargaining are also conducive to strengthening the position of care workers. The “5R” normative framework for transformative care policies complements the “Triple R” framework with the decent work agenda. It also calls for rewarding care workers properly, improving their numbers and working conditions, and representing them in social dialogue and collective bargaining (Addati et al. 2018).

Framing care policies in the Global South Care policies play out in a contested terrain, within particular institutional and political settings. In particular contexts, transformative goals compete with conservative ones that restrict the place of women in society to their roles as mothers. Social justice perspectives are in tension with efficiency perspectives that rely on instrumental arguments. Efficiency perspectives tend to support the expansion of care policies but focus on the role of care in the production of “human capital,” or in the efficiency gains of women’s participation in the labor market when care services are in place, frequently combining a targeted approach with a disregard for women’s broad equality claims (Esquivel 2014). Indeed, while transformative care agendas have made significant progress at the global level, as reflected in target 5.4, this is not necessarily the case at regional or national levels in the Global South. Instrumental arguments are clear in ECEC policies in Africa, where the focus is primarily on child development, emphasizing their future productivity gains but neglecting 403

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the present needs of unpaid carers. Most governments in the Asian and Pacific countries (except in North and Central Asia and in the small Pacific countries) single out the provision of childcare services as one of the “achievements in women’s economic empowerment”—that is, to generate the conditions for women to engage in employment. Where instrumental arguments are not applicable—in the case of elder care, for example—familialistic framings are widespread, often backed by arguments citing “tradition” and culture, both in African and in several Asian countries. These framings imply care-related responsibilities beyond childcare are expected to be solved within families, meaning by the women and girls in them (Esquivel and Kaufmann 2017). In contrast, care policies in Latin America are firmly framed in a rights-based approach to care, which recognizes women and care receivers as right-holders, and positions the state as a duty-bearer in legal frameworks and in policy documents orienting policy design and implementation (Sepúlveda Carmona and Donald 2014). Latin America’s framing of care policies derives from a well-developed gender equality agenda at the regional level, which has provided the frameworks and tools needed for policy progress, coupled with a strong rights-based approach to social protection (Esquivel 2017a). A focus on caregivers, both paid and unpaid, situates gender equality as central to the advancement of care policies, as meeting the care needs of persons in dependent situations is as important as how they are met.

Claiming care policies in the Global South Care policies in the Global South, their definitions and framings, cannot be understood without taking into account the politicization of care. Care policies are not necessarily on the agendas of women’s movements in the Global South, contrary to their integration at the international level as reflected in the negotiations over the SDGs (Gabizon 2016). There are regional and national differences in how feminist organizations and women’s movements make claims around care policies. In most sub-Saharan African countries, women’s movements mobilize around issues other than care policies. This is sometimes a strategic decision, to frame advocacy for care policies within other political agendas that might gain more traction, like children’s rights or the right to social security. Mobilization around infrastructure provision such as WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) or demands for state action in the context of HIV/AIDS do not typically include the unpaid care work burdens in them (Esquivel and Kaufmann 2017). Similarly in Asia the unpaid care and domestic work concept is rarely found in feminist advocacy and mobilization (Rao 2018). Pervasive norms that naturalize women’s caring responsibilities can explain the absence of claims around unpaid care work. For example, in Nepal, practitioners were skeptical that unpaid care work was an issue, because it is “what women do” (Chopra and Sweetman 2014). The same is true in India, where feminist activists felt that mobilizing around care was difficult, given how deeply internalized and private the distribution of care responsibilities are (Chigateri, Zaidi, and Ghosh 2016). The fact that care policies are high in the public agenda in several Latin American countries is certainly an achievement of the feminist movement in the region. It reflects the evolution of the movement, which has professionalized, has forged alliances with other social movements and has increasingly engaged with the state in order to influence public policies (Montaño and Sanz Ardaya 2009). It also reflects the contribution of feminist academics, who have succeeded in framing care as a public and political issue (Rodríguez Gustá and Madera 2015). Feminist NGOs have envisioned strategies to explicitly position care in the public agendas. This is the case of the Argentinean “Care in the public agenda” (ELA, ADC and CIEPP 404

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2016) initiative, which combines knowledge production and incidence interventions, and the Uruguayan “Gender and Family Network” (Fassler 2009)—an NGO that set in motion an incidence strategy—including knowledge-generation activities, public campaigns and lobbying female politicians—to make care prominent in the public agenda that culminated in the law that passed the Uruguayan National Care System (Sistema Nacional Integrado de Cuidados (SNIC)) (Aguirre and Ferrari 2014).

Institutionalizing care policies: the Latin American experience The Uruguayan SNIC includes both existing policies on health, education and social security and new policies for priority populations, in particular groups with special care needs including those with disabilities, and young children. For the latter, the SNIC aims at providing universal care services coverage for three-year-olds and growing coverage for children under two, and the extension of parental paid leave and the possibility of part-time employment over the newborn’s first 6 months for both mothers and fathers. From a rights-based perspective, not only does the SNIC define new rights for persons who are in dependent situations broadly, with the duty “to fulfil the rights of persons in dependent situations, sufficiently and according to needs” falling on the state; but it also identifies all caregivers, both paid and unpaid, as rights holders. In including unpaid caregivers, who are mostly women, this legal framework is true to its “gender and generational perspective . . . [aimed at] overcoming the cultural sexual division of labor . . . and valuing paid care work” (Junta Nacional de Cuidados 2015, 7). In paying attention to care workers, including their professionalization and participation, the SNIC emphasizes the centrality of care workers to deliver quality care (Esquivel 2017a). The Uruguayan SNIC exemplifies the emergence of “care systems” in Latin America (UNDP 2016). Care systems are established by law, are universal in ambition, aim to overcome fragmentation and entail the institutionalization of inter-sectoral coordination mechanisms. Moreover, they are firmly rooted in social protection systems (Cecchini et al. 2015). In the case of Uruguay, the SNIC aims to become the “fourth pillar” of Uruguay’s social protection system, along with health, education and social security (Sistema de Cuidados 2019). Other Latin American countries, like Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Mexico, have also implemented care policy coordination mechanisms within government, including officials from social development ministries, who specifically focus on children, women, and persons with disabilities, and representatives from the education, health and social security sectors (ECLAC 2016). Colombia has included the development of a National Care System in its National Development Plan for 2018–2022 (Departamento Nacional de Planeación 2019, 854).

Making the macroeconomic case for care policies in the Global South Demographic pressures have historically been among the main elements behind the emergence of care agendas in the public domain in the Global North. These pressures are starting to prompt care policies in the Global South. The case of Uruguay is again illustrative: an ageing population (the oldest in Latin America) and a tight labor market are underpinning efforts to guarantee care provision for both the older population and young children and increasing women’s labor force participation. The impacts of care policies on the labor market, however, extend beyond women’s increased labor force participation. While the orthodox macroeconomic (and instrumental) case for the expansion of care policies assumes that women’s greater labor force participation automatically 405

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translates to growth—without factoring in the necessary expansion of aggregate demand for that to happen—the heterodox case focuses precisely on positive demand-side labor market impacts (Esquivel 2017b). Indeed, care policies can generate employment, in particular women’s employment, and have the potential to create decent jobs at a higher rate than other investments, notably on physical infrastructure (De Henau et al. 2017). A recent macroeconomic simulation that includes countries from the Global North and South has evaluated employment impacts in the context of the SDGs. As a result of the expansion of population, ECEC and LTC services, and education and health services will need to expand by 2030 quite significantly to keep current levels of coverage: investments will have to go from 8.7 percent of GDP to 14.9 percent, and such expansion could create 358 million jobs (directly and indirectly), 153 million more than in 2015. Meeting the SDGs in health and in education requires an investment of 18.3 percent of GDP (doubling current levels of investment) that could generate a total of 475 million decent jobs, 117 million more than in the scenario where SDGs are not met, and with all care workers enjoying decent pay and working conditions. This virtuous circle would also trigger an expansion in fiscal revenues (Addati et al. 2018). Care policies can also impact long-run economic growth by raising economy-wide productivity, as public investment in physical and social infrastructure builds human capabilities that support progressive development processes (Heintz 2019).

Conclusion Care policies have emerged and expanded in the Global South in forms distinct but connected to the ones observed in the Global North. Progressive framings developed at the global and national levels in some countries, premised on women’s and care receivers’ rights and wellbeing, have contributed to firmly situating care policies within a gender equality agenda. For this to happen, the concerted efforts of women’s movements, in alliance with other social and labor movements, have been indispensable. Lately, the costing efforts and the macroeconomic case for the expansion of care services have helped moving from design to implementation—or at least countering the argument that care policies are good but fiscally infeasible. The institutionalization of care policies and systems and their establishment by law—in the case of Uruguay, unanimously passed—is possibly the best safeguard against backlash whenever the political tide turns.

References Addati, Laura, Umberto Cattaneo, Valeria Esquivel, and Isabel Valarino. 2018. Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. Aguirre, Rosario, and Fernanda Ferrari. 2014. La construcción del Sistema de Cuidados en el Uruguay: En busca de consensos para una protección social más igualitaria [Building a Care System in Uruguay: Searching for Consensus Towards a More Egalitarian Social Protection]. Santiago de Chile: ECLAC. Antonopoulos, Rania, Valeria Esquivel, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias. 2016. “Measuring Poverty in the Case of Buenos Aires: Why Time Deficits Matter.” Working Paper Collection 865, Levy Economics Institute, New York. Antonopoulos, Rania, Thomas Masterson, and Ajit Zacharias. 2012. “The Interlocking of Time and Income Deficits: Revisiting Poverty Measurement, Information Policy Reponses.” Undoing Knots, Innovating for Change Series, UNDP, Panama. Benería, Lourdes. 2008. “The Crisis of Care, International Migration, and Public Policy.” Feminist Economics 14 (3): 1–21. Brown, Rebecca. 2010. “Unequal Burden: Water Privatisation and Women’s Human Rights in Tanzania.” Gender & Development 18 (1): 59–67.

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Care policies in the Global South Cecchini, Simone, Fernando Filgueira, Rodrigo Martínez, and Cecilia Rossel. 2015. “Towards Universal Social Protection. Latin American Pathways and Policy Tools.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2699403, Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY. Chigateri, Shraddha, Mubashira Zaidi, and Anweshaa Ghosh. 2016. “Locating the Processes of Policy Change in the Context of Anti-Rape and Domestic Worker Mobilisations in India.” UNRISD, Geneva, Switzerland. Chopra, Deepta, and Caroline Sweetman. 2014. “Introduction to Gender, Development and Care.” ­Gender & Development 22 (3): 409–21. Daly, Mary E., ed. 2001. Care Work: The Quest for Security. London: International Labour Office. De Henau, Jerome, Susan Himmelweit, Zofia Łapniewska, and Diane Perrons. 2017. Investing in the Care Economy. Simulating Employment Effects by Gender in Countries in Emerging Economies. Brussels: International Trade Union Confederation. Departamento Nacional de Planeación. 2019. “Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 2018–2022. Pacto por Colombia, Pacto por la Equidad.” [National Development Plan 2018–2022: Pact for Colombia, Pact for Equality]. DNP, Bogotá. ECLAC. 2016. “Inclusive Social Development: The Next Generation of Policies for Overcoming Poverty and Reducing Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Regional Conference on Social Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (2015) LC.L/4056 (CDS.1/3). ECLAC, Santiago de Chile. ELA, ADC and CIEPP. 2016. “El cuidado en la agenda pública” [Care in the Public Agenda]. Accessed December 2019. http://elcuidadoenagenda.org.ar/. Elson, Diane. 2008. “The Three R’s of Unpaid Work: Recognition, Reduction and Redistribution.” Paper presented at the Expert Group Meeting on Unpaid Work, Economic Development and Human Well-Being, UNDP, New York, November 16–17. Esquivel, Valeria. 2010. “Care Workers in Argentina: At the Crossroads of Labour Market Institutions and Care Services.” International Labour Review 149 (4): 477–93. ———. 2011. “Sixteen Years after Beijing: What Are the New Policy Agendas for Time-Use Data Collection?” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 215–38. ———. 2013. Care in Households and Communities: Background Paper on Conceptual Issues. Oxford: Oxfam. ———. 2014. “What Is a Transformative Approach to Care, and Why Do We Need It?” Gender & Development 22 (3): 423–39. ———. 2016. “Care Policies: Realizing Their Transformative Potential.” In Policy Innovations for Transformative Change. UNRISD Flagship Report 2016. UNRISD, Geneva, Switzerland. ———. 2017a. “The Rights-Based Approach to Care Policies: Latin American Experience.” International Social Security Review 70 (4): 87–103. ———. 2017b. “Efficiency and Gender Equality in Growth Theory: Simply Add-Ons?” Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue Canadienne d’études Du Développement (November): 1–6. Esquivel, Valeria, and Andrea Kaufmann. 2017. Innovations in Care. New Concepts, New Actors, New Policies. Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Fassler, Clara, ed. 2009. Hacia un sistema nacional integrado de cuidados [Towards an Integrated National Care System]. Serie Políticas públicas. Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce. Folbre, Nancy. 2006. “Demanding Quality: Worker/Consumer Coalitions and ‘High Road’ Strategies in the Care Sector.” Politics & Society 34 (1): 11–32. Fontana, Marzia, and Diane Elson. 2014. “Public Policies on Water Provision and Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC): Do They Reduce and Redistribute Unpaid Work?” Gender & Development 22 (3): 459–74. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Gabizon, Sascha. 2016. “Women’s Movements’ Engagement in the SDGs: Lessons Learned from the Women’s Major Group.” Gender & Development 24 (1): 99–110. Heintz, James. 2019. “Public Investments and Human Investments: Rethinking Macroeconomic Relationships from a Gender Perspective.” In Gender Equality and Inclusive Growth: Economic Policies to Achieve Sustainable Development, edited by Diane Elson and Anuradha Seth, 107–22. New York: UN Women. ILO. 2017. World Social Protection Report 2017–19 Universal Social Protection to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office. ———. 2018. Global Wage Report 2018/19: What Lies behind Gender Pay Gaps. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office.

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Valeria Esquivel Junta Nacional de Cuidados. 2015. Plan Nacional de Cuidados 2016–2020 [National Care Plan 2016–2020]. Montevideo: Junta Nacional de Cuidados. Molyneux, Maxine, Nicola Jones, and Fiona Samuels. 2016. “Can Cash Transfer Programmes Have ‘Transformative’ Effects?” The Journal of Development Studies 52 (8): 1087–98. Montaño, Sonia, and Mariana Sanz Ardaya. 2009. “Movimientos Sociales de Mujeres. El Feminismo.” In Movimientos Socioculturales en América Latina. Ambientalismo, Feminismo, Pueblos Originarios y Poder Empresarial, edited by Fernando Calderón, 81–129. Cuaderno de Gobernabilidad Democrática 4. New York: PNUD. Moussié, Rachel, and Laura Alfers. 2018. “Women Informal Workers Demand Child Care: Shifting ­Narratives on Women’s Economic Empowerment in Africa.” Agenda 32 (1): 119–31. Neuman, Michelle, Kimberly Josephson, and Peck Gee Chua. 2015. A Review of the Literature: Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Personnel in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Paris: UNESCO. Parenzee, Penny, and Debbie Budlender. 2015. Who Cares? South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme in the Social Sector and Its Impact on Women. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Rao, Nitya. 2018. “Global Agendas, Local Norms: Mobilizing around Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in Asia.” Development and Change 49 (3): 735–58. Rodríguez Gustá, Ana-Laura, and Nancy Madera. 2015. “Feminist Movements and the Gender Economic Agenda in Latin America.” IDS Bulletin 46 (4): 41–46. Sainsbury, Diane. 2013. “Gender, Care, and Welfare.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seguino, S., and M. Were. 2014. “Gender, Development and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of African Economies 23 (suppl 1): i18–61. Sepúlveda Carmona, Magdalena. 2013. Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights: Unpaid Care Work and Women’s Human Rights. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Human Rights Council. Sepúlveda Carmona, Magdalena, and Kate Donald. 2014. “What Does Care Have to Do with Human Rights? Analysing the Impact on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality.” Gender & Development 22 (3): 441–57. Shakespeare, Tom, and Fiona Williams. 2018. Care and Assistance: Issues for Persons with Disabilities, Women and Care Workers. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization. Sistema de Cuidados. 2019. Rendimos Cuentas. 2015–2020 [Accountability Report 2015–2020]. Montevideo: Sistema de Cuidados. UNDP. 2016. Multidimensional Progress: Well-Being Beyond Income. Regional Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: UNDP. United Nations. 2015. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations.

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42 COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND UNIONS IN THE US Tanima Ahmed and Ariane Hegewisch

Introduction Labor unions unite workers to collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. Union coverage raises wages compared to non-union workers (Aidt and Tzannatos 2002). In countries like the US, where benefits depend on the employer, union coverage also improves access to pension plans, health insurance, and paid leave, benefits that are of particular relevance to women (Hartmann, Spalter-Roth, and Collins 1994). Unions began to play an important role in US employment from the onset of industrialization in the early 1800s, and women workers have actively organized through unions since the early 1840s when the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in Massachusetts formed and actively campaigned for the ten-hour day (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 2008). Yet, historically, predominantly male unions organized to restrict women’s entry to predominantly male occupations, promoted women’s secondary position in the labor market through the norm of male breadwinners, and condoned lower earnings in predominantly female fields (see Boston 2015; Milkman 2016). Men organized through unions to restrict women to lower wage jobs, and this inferior labor market position re-enforced women’s dependent role in the family (Hartmann 1976). Since the rise of the women’s and civil rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s, women’s representation in unions has improved, and union bargaining agendas more actively promote issues of particular concern to women workers (Cobble 1993; Bronfenbrenner 2005). In the US, women are now almost as likely as men to be covered by union contracts; if historical trends persist, women will constitute the majority of union members by 2023 (Schmitt and Woo 2013). This chapter focuses on the US to examine trends in union coverage and its advantages by gender, updating earlier analysis by Hartmann, Spalter-Roth, and Collins (1994). Analyzing data from the US Current Population Survey, we examine trends between 1989 and 2018 on union coverage by gender, race and ethnicity, sector and education, highlighting the dramatic decline of union coverage in the US during the last three decades. We show the continuing role of occupational and sector segregation in understanding gender differences in union membership, and the growing role of the public sector, and women’s work in this sector, for the

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union movement in the US. We then present data on the union wage and benefits advantage. We conclude with a discussion on the role of unions for equality.

Trends in union coverage In 2018, union coverage was slightly lower for women than for men (11.1 compared with 12.2 percent; Figure 42.1). As Figure 42.1A illustrates, union coverage has declined sharply since 1989. For men, union membership declined in both relative and absolute terms, falling from 11.9 million in 1989 to 8.8 million in 2018, even though over the same period the size of the total US workforce expanded considerably. While coverage has slightly increased for women in absolute terms, from 7.2 million in 1989 to 7.5 million in 2018 (Figure 42.1(B)), it fell in relative terms compared to workforce growth. As a result of the decline in coverage of men and the increase in coverage of women, women’s share of the union covered workforce has increased sharply, from 38  percent in 1989 to 46  percent in 2018. With the exception of Asians, women are less likely than men to be covered by a union contract in each major racial and ethnic group (Figure 42.2). Union coverage fell from 1947 onward, and rapidly since the 1980s (Jones and Schmitt 2014). Deindustrialization, the decline of employment in sectors where unions traditionally were strong, and the growth of employment in the service sector where traditionally they had little presence played a significant role in explaining the decline in union coverage (Farber and Western 2002). Government policies in the early 1980s also made union organizing more difficult. While the likelihood of union coverage fell for women and men of each racial-ethnic groups since 1989, the magnitude of decline varies substantially among women. In 1989, both Black and Asian women had substantially higher coverage rates than Hispanic and White women. White women’s coverage declined from 13.6  percent in 1989 to 11.3  percent in 2018, and

A.

B.

25%

Women Men Total

20%

20.0

15%

Women Men Total

Millions

15.0

10%

10.0

1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016

2017

2013

2009

2005

0.0

2001

0%

1997

5.0

1993

5%

1989

Percent

25.0

Figure 42.1 Trend of unionization, 1989–2018. A. Union coverage as a percentage of female, male, and total workers. B. Union coverage by year Source: Authors’ analysis of data from IPUMS-CPS, Flood et al. (2018). Notes: Includes workers aged 16 and older. Union coverage is defined as workers covered by union contracts irrespective of union membership.

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Figure 42.2 Union coverage by gender, race, and ethnicity, 2018 Source: See Figure 41.1. Notes: Includes workers aged 16 and older. Racial categories include Hispanics, and Hispanics may be of any race. Asians do not include Pacific Islanders. For the definition of union coverage, see notes to Figure 42.1.

Hispanic women’s from 14.4 percent to 9.6 percent, compared with a decline for Black women’s from 22.6 percent to 12.9 percent, and Asian women’s from 17.2 percent (in 1994, first available year) to 9.8 percent in 2018 (authors’ calculations, not shown).

The public sector effect Historically, union members were low-skilled, mostly men who worked in the private industry. Unionization developed against the background of industrialization, and at least in the US never gained a strong foothold in private services. Men’s as well as Black and Hispanic women’s union coverage fell as manufacturing employment declined. The growth of the service sector provided employment for the growing number of women from the 1970s onwards. Yet as coverage declined in the private sector, it increased in the public sector. According to pooled data for 2016–2018, 37.4 percent of women public sector workers are covered by union contracts compared to 5.7 percent of women in the private sector (for men it is 38.2 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively; Table 42.1). While White women are most likely to work in public sector positions that are covered by union contracts, differences between public and private sector coverage are of a similar magnitude for women of color. Public sector workers make up 48 percent of the unionized workforce but only 15 percent of the overall workforce. Women are more likely than men to work in the public sector (18 percent and 13 percent, respectively, of all workers), and public sector workers are a clear majority of union women (59  percent) but just 39  percent of covered men (Table  42.2). Differences in private and public sector union coverage may reflect different potential for collaboration and common interest between management and workers in the sectors; unlike in the private sector, unions in the public sector can become strategic partners for managers through lobbying legislators to improve resources to spend on the quality and quantity of services (Freeman 2005). In the private sector, unions have little role in expanding demand for a product, and relationships with management are more narrowly concerned with the distribution of profits. 411

Tanima Ahmed and Ariane Hegewisch Table 42.1  Union coverage and membership by gender, race, and ethnicity, 2016–2018 Women

Public Sector White Black Asian Hispanic Others All public Private Sector White Black Asian Hispanic Others All private

Men

All

% Covered by Union

% Union Member

% Covered by Union

% Union Member

% Covered by Union

% Union Member

  39.1 32.7 35.3 36.8 29.1 37.4   5.1 7.8 6.8 5.6 5.6 5.7

  36.6 30.4 33.7 34.8 27.1 35   4.5 6.9 6.0 4.8 4.8 4.9

  38.1 38.1 35.4 41.3 33.5 38.2   8.8 11 5.8 7.7 8.6 8.6

  36.1 35.9 33.8 39.2 31.3 36.2   8.1 10 5.1 6.9 7.9 7.9

  38.7 34.8 35.4 38.7 31 37.7   7.1 9.3 6.3 6.8 7.1 7.2

  36.4 32.5 33.7 36.7 28.9 35.5   6.4 8.4 5.5 6 6.4 6.5

Source: See Figure 41.1. Notes: Includes workers aged 16 and older. Calculated using three years of data (2016, 2017, and 2018) to have a sufficient sample size. For the definition of union coverage, see notes to Figure 42.1. For the definition of racial categories, see notes to Figure 42.2.

Union coverage by age, education, and occupation The unionized sector of the economy is less likely to add jobs than the non-union sector, and hence workers entering the workforce have fewer opportunities to be in union job. Union coverage is substantially more likely for older workers. Fifty-three percent of women covered by union agreements are 45 years or older, compared to just 43 percent of the general workforce (41 percent and 48 percent, respectively, for women and men); on the other hand, only 25 percent of covered women are younger than 35, compared to 37 percent in the overall workforce (28 percent and 37 percent, respectively, for men; authors’ calculation, not shown). There is no evidence that younger workers are less likely than older ones to want to join unions; they just rarely encounter unions (Heery 2015). To recruit younger generations, unions should concentrate resources on sectors where younger workers work, but may also need to change the way young women and men are represented in unions, and the way union bargaining agendas and advocacy address and represent issues around diversity, sexuality, and identity (Hodder and Kretsos 2015). Recent membership trends in the US suggest that younger generations are turning to unions, with three-quarters of workers joining unions in 2017 being younger than 35 (Schmitt 2018). Women covered by unions are more educated than men. Fifty-six percent of covered women have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to just 32 percent of covered men. Gender differences for BA holders in the general workforce are much less stark (39 percent and 35 percent, respectively; Table 42.2). These gender differences in educational attainment of covered workers reflect differences in gender distribution across occupations. Fifty-four percent of covered women work in professional and related occupations (such as teachers and nurses), reflecting the high share of public sector employment for many of these occupations. Men, on the other hand, are both less likely 412

Collective bargaining and unions in the US Table 42.2  Characteristics of the workforce and the workers covered by unions, 2016–2018 Workers

By Gender Women Men Total Education High School or Less Some College or Associate Degree Bachelor and above Total Type of Occupation Agriculture/Construction/Transportation/ Installation and Repair Production Financial/Business Management Professional and Related Office and administrative support Sales/Service Total Type of Industry Agriculture/Mining/Construction/ Transportation and Warehouse/Utility Manufacturing Finance/Information/Business Service Educational/Health Services Public Administration Trade/Leisure/Hospitality/Other Services Total Sector Private Public Total

Covered by Union

Union Membership

Women Men All Women

Men All Women

Men All

%

%

%

%

. . . . . . 100

. . . 46 . . . . . . 54 . . . 100 100 100     36 29 20 32 28 24 32 43 56 100 100 100     35 21 5

. . . 45 . . . 55 100 100

  30 31 39 100   3

. . . 48 . . . . . . 52 . . . 100 100 100       39 34 20 27 29 24 35 37 56 100 100 100       26 15 5

4 15 29 19 31 100   5

8 6 3 15 15 7 19 24 54 7 13 15 24 28 17 100 100 100       21 13 7

9 7 3 6 7 7 21 36 55 7 11 14 21 19 17 100 100 100     32 21 7

10 7 6 6 20 36 8 11 21 19 100 100

7 18 38 5 28 100   82 18 100

15 11 4 19 18 5 12 24 64 6 5 12 28 28 9 100 100 100       87 85 41 13 15 59 100 100 100

13 9 4 7 6 4 19 40 64 17 14 12 12 10 9 100 100 100     61 52 40 39 48 60 100 100 100

14 9 7 6 19 40 17 14 11 10 100 100

%

%

%

%

%

37 29 33 29 31 42 100 100 36

33

22

21

61 51 39 49 100 100

Source: See Figure 42.1. Notes: Includes workers aged 16 and older. Calculated using three years of data (2016, 2017, and 2018) to have a sufficient sample size. For the definition of union coverage, see notes to Figure 42.1.

to work in professional and related occupations than women (19 percent of all men) and less likely to work in such positions when covered by unions (21 percent; Table 42.2). Low union coverage in the financial and business services industries, of just 3.2 percent of workers in those occupations, illustrates the point made earlier: jobs in the private service sectors expanded since the 1970s, and expansion in these sectors was the basis for much of women’s growing labor force participation but with few exceptions remaining outside of the sphere of unionization. These figures illustrate how deeply occupational segregation continues to structure union membership for women and men. Arguably, one reason for gender differences in educational 413

Tanima Ahmed and Ariane Hegewisch

attainment among union members are the barriers faced by women in well-paid occupations that do not require a college degree. More than a third of all covered men, compared with 26 percent of all men, work in technical and manual occupations in construction, transportation, and installation. Whether covered by unions or not, these occupations employ only a small proportion of women (7 percent of covered and 5 percent of all women workers; Table 42.2). These primarily are “middle-skill” occupations, requiring training beyond a high school diploma but not a college degree. Such jobs can provide decent earnings. Women’s underrepresentation in such occupations is a substantial contributor to the gender wage gap (Hegewisch et al. 2016). Berik and Bilginsoy (2000, 2002 and 2006) find that women training for construction jobs in union-covered apprenticeship programs have higher chances of joining high-skill construction work in the US than women training in non-union programs. Women are slightly more likely than men to be a union member in the construction trades, and union apprenticeship programs are doing better in attracting women to these occupations than non-union programs (Hegewisch and Ahmed 2019). Construction unions are beginning to address issues that are particularly relevant to women, such as harassment, maternity benefits, and pregnancy discrimination (National Center for Women’s Employment Equity in Apprenticeships and Employment 2019).

The union wage and benefits advantage In 2018, the union wage advantage was 27  percent for women and 17  percent for men (Table 42.3). The union wage differential for women and the gender difference in the union advantage reflect the differences in the demographic composition of the union workforce discussed earlier, as well as geography, and that states with higher rates of union coverage also tend to have higher median earnings (Shaw and Anderson 2018). Yet, even though the union wage differential among women shrinks after controlling for age, education, industry, and residence, it remains significant. The adjusted union wage advantage is substantial for Hispanic women, at $91.4 per week (and $153.5 for Hispanic men); it is least strong for White women, who are more likely to be able to access well-paid jobs in the non-union sector than other women. Altogether, union coverage significantly increases the median weekly earnings of all women by 3.9 percent and of all men by 8 percent (see Table 42.3, Column f). Women in unions also face less of a gender wage gap. This is partly a reflection of greater transparency over wage-setting mechanisms within the union sector (Hegewisch, Drago, and Williams 2011). It also reflects union women’s concentration in the public sector. During the 1980s, 20 of 50 US state governments had set up equal pay commissions to address the systematic undervaluation of typically female skills and tasks (Hartmann and Aaronson 1994). While these efforts were not always welcome by male unions who perceived them as potential threats to collective bargaining, they led to a reduction in gender earnings differentials in the public sector (Steinberg 1990). Comparable worth initiatives internationally have been championed since by Public Services International (PSI), the international federation of public sector unions (Public Services International 2018). Retirement or pension plans provide economic security in old age; this is particularly so for women who have higher life expectancy than men, and are more likely than men to outlive retirement resources and face poverty (Hess et al. 2015). Almost 64 percent of women and men covered by union contracts have a retirement plan, almost twice as likely as coverage of the nonunion workforce (Figure 42.3). Union advantage remains even after controlling for factors such as age, education, and industry. Women covered by union contracts are 18.9 percentage points more likely to have a pension/retirement plan than similar women not covered by a union, and the likelihood of coverage for men is 22 percentage points higher (Figure 42.3). 414

Collective bargaining and unions in the US Table 42.3  Union wage advantage for full-time workers by gender, race, and ethnicity, 2016–2018  

Women White Black Asian Hispanic Others/ Mixed Men White Black Asian Hispanic Others/ Mixed

Unadjusted Median Weekly Earnings

Adjusted Median Weekly Earnings

Union Covered

Non-Union

Union Wage Advantage

Percent of Union Wage Advantage

Union Wage Advantage

Percent of Union Wage Advantage

a

b

c = (a – b)

d = c/b

e

f

$971 $1040 $742 $1095 $837 $906

$762 $827 $644 $943 $592 $670

$209 $213 $99 $153 $245 $236

27% 26% 15% 16% 41% 35%

$34.3*** $16.4*** $46.1*** $62.5*** $91.4*** $19.0

3.9%*** 1.9%*** 6.9%*** 5.5%*** 12.2%*** 3.7%

$1105 $1183 $876 $1178 $946 $1085

$943 $1062 $711 $1247 $690 $789

$163 $122 $165 $-69 $256 $296

17% 11% 23% −6% 37% 37%

$76.4*** $51.8*** $85.3*** −$7.6 $153.5*** $94.0***

8.0%*** 5.7%*** 10.0%*** 0.6% 18.8%*** 10.3%***

Source: See Figure 42.1. Notes: Includes full-time workers aged 16 and older. Calculated using three years of data (2016, 2017, and 2018) to have a sufficient sample size. For the definition of union coverage, see notes to Figure 42.1. Weekly earnings for 2016 and 2017 are adjusted to 2018 values using CPI-U series from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019). Regression analysis in (e) and (f) is estimated using median regression of wage (W) and log of wage (ln W) respectively, controlling for age, age-squared, education, industry and state fixed effects; see Methodological appendix, model 1 and 2, for more detail. ***1%, **5%, and *10% level of significance.

Since the Affordable Care Act came into force in 2014, the rate of the uninsured has fallen to approximately 8  percent of the population (Berchick, Hood, and Barnett 2018). Women covered by union contracts are still slightly more likely than others to have healthcare coverage, with 96.3 percent of women covered by unions and 93.2 percent of non-union women having health insurance (authors’ calculations, not shown). Moreover, healthcare plans that are collectively bargained tend to be more comprehensive and are provided at lower costs to workers than other plans (Gabel et al. 2015).

Discussion and conclusion Since the late 1980s, unionization rates have fallen for both women and men, but the fall has been much more substantial for men. Women’s share of all workers covered by unions is now almost the same as women’s share of the total workforce. While the number of men covered by unions fell in absolute terms, the number of women covered by unions is higher than it was 3 years ago. The decline in union coverage has mainly been a decline in union coverage in the private sector. At least partly due to male unions’ efforts to exclude women from better jobs, women’s coverage in the private sector historically has been lower than men’s. Consequently, their union 415

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Figure 42.3 Union pension plan advantage of the workers by gender, 2016–2018 Notes: Includes workers aged 16 and older. Calculated using three years of data (2016, 2017 and 2018) to have a sufficient sample size. Worker has a pension/retirement plan (=1) if s/he is included in the pension plan at work, and 0 if the worker is not included in a pension plan at work or even if there is a pension plan at work, s/he is not included. For the definition of union coverage, see notes to Figure 1. Marginal effects are estimated using a probit model after controlling for age, age-squared, education, industry and state fixed effects; see Methodological appendix, model 3, for more detail. ***1%, **5%, and *10% level of significance. Source: See Figure 42.1.

coverage was less impacted by deindustrialization than men’s, with the notable exception of Black women, whose decline in union coverage was of a similar magnitude as men’s. The public sector has become increasingly important for union membership, especially for women. Well over half of all women covered by union contracts work in the public sector and well over half of all men in the private sector. Unionization benefits women by increasing earnings and access to benefits such as pensions and healthcare coverage. The wage gains from unionization are particularly substantial for women of color. While the positive impact of unions on gender equality within the union sector is clear, there is more of a debate of the impact of unions on wage equality in economies overall. There is some empirical support for the positive effect of unions on aggregate wage equality (Hayter and Weinberg 2011). However, the evidence is less conclusive (and less extensive) for lower-income economies. While collective bargaining may not eliminate the undervaluation of women’s work, the penalties for working in female-dominated occupations tend to be smaller in economies with strong collective bargaining (Rubery and Johnson 2019). Evidence from the US also suggests that unions reduce household income inequality (Farber et al. 2018) as well as intergenerational inequality (Freeman et al. 2015). In the US, and internationally, women’s share of union members is rising, although women continue to be underrepresented in union leadership positions (King 2018). Women in the US were at the forefront of recent strikes (Bhattacharya et  al. 2018). Women are also very involved in informal labor organizing in low-wage service sector jobs, through organizations such as the Restaurant Opportunity Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, or Justice for Janitors. Such organizing activities have provided new forms for collective action and labor organizing which have placed women’s economic security and working conditions, 416

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including freedom from harassment and sexual violence at work, at the center of organizing. Even though it is too early to tell what the impact of these organizing activities will be, such more women-centered bargaining and organizing priorities are increasingly shaping the traditional union movement.

References Aidt, Toke, and Zafiris Tzannatos. 2002. Unions and Collective Bargaining: Economic Effects in a Global Environment. Washington, DC: World Bank. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. 2008. “Women in Labor History Timeline.” www.afscme.org/for-members/womens-leadership-training/leadership-tools/body/Women_ in_Labor_History_Timeline.pdf. Berchick, Edward R., Emily Hood, and Jessica C. Barnett. 2018. Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2017. Washington, DC: US Census Bureau. Berik, Günseli, and Cihan Bilginsoy. 2000. “Do Unions Help or Hinder Women in Training? Apprenticeship Programs in the United States.” Industrial Relations 39 (4): 600–24. ———. 2002. “Unions and Women’s Training for the Skilled Trades in the US.” The Review of Black Political Economy 29 (4): 97–122. ———. 2006. “Still a Wedge in the Door: Women Training for the Construction Trades in the USA.” International Journal of Manpower 27 (4): 321–41. Bhattacharya, Tithi, Eric Blanc, Kate Doyle Griffiths, and Lois Weiner. 2018. “Return of the Strike: A Forum on the Teachers’ Rebellion in the United States.” Historical Materialism 26 (4): 119–63. Boston, Sarah. 2015. Women Workers and the Trade Unions. London: Lawrence and Wishart Limited. Bronfenbrenner, Kat. 2005. “Organizing Women: The Nature and Process of Union Organizing Efforts among U.S. Women Workers since the Mid-1990s.” Work and Occupations 32 (4): 441–63. Cobble, Dorothy S. 1993. Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership. New York: ILR Press Books. Farber, Henry S., Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu. 2018. “Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data.” Working Paper 620, Princeton University Industrial Relations. http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01gx41mm54w. Farber, Henry S., and Bruce Western. 2002. “Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Declining Union Organization.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 40 (3): 385–401. Flood, Sarah, Miriam King, Renae Rodgers, Steven Ruggles, and J. Robert Warren. 2018. “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 6.0 [dataset].” IPUMS, Minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V6.0. Freeman, Richard. 2005. “What Do Unions Do? The 2004 M-Brane Stringtwister Edition.” Working Paper 11410, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). www.nber.org/papers/w11410.pdf. Freeman, Richard, Eunice Han, David Madland, and Brendan V. Duke. 2015. “How Does Declining Unionism Affect the American Middle Class and Intergenerational Mobility?” Working Paper 21638, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). www.nber.org/papers/w21638. Gabel, Jon R., Heidi Whitmore, Jennifer L. Satorius, Jeremy Pickreign, and Sam T. Stromberg. 2015. “Collectively Bargained Health Plans: More Comprehensive, Less Cost Sharing Than Employer Plans.” Health Affairs 34 (3): 461–66. Hartmann, Heidi. 1976. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.” Signs 1 (3): 137–69. Hartmann, Heidi, and Stephanie Aaronson. 1994. “Pay Equity and Women’s Wage Increases: Success in the States, a Model for the Nation.” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 1: 69–88. Hartmann, Heidi, Roberta Spalter-Roth, and Nancy Collins. 1994. “What Do Unions Do for Women?” Challenge 37 (4): 11–18. Hayter, Susan, and Bradley Weinberg. 2011. “Mind the Gap: Collective Bargaining and Wage Inequality.” In The Role of Collective Bargaining in the Global Economy, edited by Susan Hayter. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. Heery, Edmund. 2015. “Foreword.” In Young Workers and Trade Unions: A Global View, edited by Andy Hodder and Lefteris Kretsos. England: Palgrave Macmillan. Hegewisch, Ariane, and Tanima Ahmed. 2019. “Growing the Numbers of Women in the Trades: Building Equity and Inclusion Through Pre-Apprenticeship Programs.” National Center for Women’s Employment Equity in Apprenticeships and Employment Briefing Paper. Chicago Women in the Trades, Chicago. Accessed November 2019. http://womensequitycenter.org/best-practices/.

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Tanima Ahmed and Ariane Hegewisch Hegewisch, Ariane, Marc Bendick, Barbara Gault, and Heidi Hartmann. 2016. Pathways to Equity: Narrowing the Wage Gap by Improving Women’s Access to Good Middle-Skill Jobs. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Hegewisch, Ariane, Robert Drago, and Claudia Williams. 2011. Pay Secrecy and Wage Discrimination. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Hess, Cynthia et al. 2015. “Poverty & Opportunity.” The Status of Women in the States: 2015 Report, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Washington, DC. Hodder, Andy, and Lefteris Krestsos, eds. 2015. Young Workers and Trade Unions: A Global View. London: Palgrave McMillan. Jones, Janelle, and John Schmitt. 2014. “Union Advantage for Black Workers.” Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Washington, DC. Accessed February  2019. http://cepr.net/documents/ black-union-2014-02.pdf. King, Chidi. 2018. “Count Us In! Women Leading Change.” Equal Times Special. Report, International Trade Union Confederation. Accessed October  2019. www.equaltimes.org/IMG/pdf/women_in_ leadership_en_final.pdf. Milkman, Ruth. 2016. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. National Center for Women’s Employment Equity in Apprenticeships and Employment. 2019. “Best Practices.” Chicago Women in the Trades. Accessed November  2019. http://womensequitycenter. org/best-practices/. Public Services International. 2018. “Equal Pay-Wage Justice.” Accessed November 2019. www.world-psi. org/en/IWD2018. Rubery, Jill, and Matthew Johnson. 2019. “Closing the Gender Pay Gap: What Role for Trade Unions?” International Labor Organization ACTRAV Working Paper. www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/ed_dialogue/-actrav/documents/publication/wcms_684156.pdf. Schmitt, John. 2018. Biggest Gains in Union Membership in 2017 were for Younger Workers. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. www.epi.org/publication/biggest-gains-in-union-membership-in2017-were-for-younger-workers. Schmitt, John, and Nicole Woo. 2013. “Women Workers and Unions.” Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Washington, DC. Accessed February  2019. http://cepr.net/documents/unionwomen-2013-12.pdf. Shaw, Elyse, and Julie Anderson. 2018. “The Union Advantage for Women.” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Washington, DC. Accessed February 2019. https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ C463_Union-Advantage-Fact-Sheet-February-2018–1.pdf. Steinberg, Ronnie J. 1990. “Social Construction of Skill: Gender, Power, and Comparable Worth.” Work and Occupations 17 (4): 449–82. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019. “Historical Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPIU).” Accessed January 2019. www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/supplemental-files/historical-cpi-u-201904.pdf.

Methodological appendix Data When analyzing Current Population Survey microdata from IPUMS-CPS (Flood et al. 2018) by race, ethnicity, occupation, and industry, we combined three years of data (2016, 2017, and 2018) to ensure sufficient sample sizes. Dollar values are adjusted to 2018 equivalents using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019). We also used sample weights throughout the analysis to represent the population.

Econometric models The union wage, and pension and health-insurance benefits advantage for men and women is analyzed by controlling for the individual and regional characteristics through quantile (median) regressions to measure the union wage advantage in both absolute terms and the percentage increase in wages. Furthermore, we estimate probit models to assess union benefits of pension plan. 418

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The model specifications for the quantile regressions and probit models are as follows:

Model 1: Wi = X i βθ + uθi X i βθ = (Quantile )θ (Wi|X i )

Model 2: ln Wi = X i βθ + uθi X i βθ = (Quantile)θ (ln Wi |X i )

Model 3: Y* = Xi′β + ui Y = II(Y* > 0) where W is weekly earnings and In W is the natural log of weekly earnings; Y is workers participation in the pension/retirement plan =1 and 0 otherwise; Xi is a vector of variables which contains the variable of interest, unionization (covered by union =1, and 0 otherwise) and a set of control variables—age, age-squared, education, industry, and state fixed effects. βθ is the vector of parameter with (Quantile)q (Wi|Xi) or (Quantile)q (ln Wi|Xi) is the 0.5th conditional quantile of W or In W given X; b is the vector of parameters in probit models.

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43 THE QUEST FOR INCLUSION IN ECONOMICS IN THE US Fifty years of slow progress Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe Introduction The American Economic Association (AEA), the largest professional association for economists, establishes and supports career-enhancing programs and services, and has the primary responsibility for promoting diversity and inclusion. For over 50 years, the economics profession has had initiatives to diversify the profession by race, ethnicity, gender, and school of thought. These efforts include facilitating the formation of affinity groups, implementing mentoring and training programs, revising the profession’s code of conduct, declaring a set of best practices for conducting research, serving as colleagues, working with students, and leading departments and workplaces. However, lack of diversity in the profession and exclusion of women scholars, scholars of color, and other marginalized groups persist to date. The AEA conducted a climate survey in 2018, which found that 39 percent of Asian women, 49 percent of Black and White women, and 54 percent of Latinas reported experiencing gender discrimination (AEA 2019a). At the intersection of race-ethnicity and gender, 44 percent of Asian women, 62 percent of Black women, and 58  percent of Latinas reported discrimination due to race/ethnicity and gender. Although men reported low percentages of discrimination due to gender, 22 percent of Asian men, 43 percent of Black men, and 15 percent of Latino men reported discrimination based on race or ethnicity. In this chapter, I first review the efforts in the profession to increase diversity and inclusion and provide data on the changing demographics of degrees conferred and of the faculty. I  then recommend the next steps toward a more inclusive economics profession, arguing that diversity and inclusion matter in economics for three reasons. First, if we are to have an inclusive and equitable society, the economics profession must reflect the economic experiences of the diverse social groups we examine with the goal of improving the well-being of all peoples. Second, the diversity of the profession dictates the type of research that is conducted and deemed credible by scholarly communities; therefore, to generate strong objectivity in scholarship we must have perspectives of scholars from diverse backgrounds. Finally, the diversity of the profession increases awareness of social provisioning from the perspective of various social groups (Power 2004), thus creating knowledge that improves the well-being of marginalized groups.

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History of diversity efforts At the December  1969 AEA meetings, the Caucus of Black Economists, now the National Economic Association, met to discuss the underrepresentation of Black economists in the AEA and the broader economics profession (Spratlen 1970). As a result of this meeting, the Caucus of Black Economists presented the AEA with a “Suggested Bill of Particulars,” requesting the following: (1) appoint an Associate Secretary, designated by the Black Caucus, whose principal function would be to give direction to activities designed to improve the status of economists from Black and other ethnic groups; (2) implement and finance a plan to increase the number of Black economists; (3) arrange for greater participation by Black economists in the policy-­making and programming activities of the Association; (4) provide financial support for programs administered by the Black Caucus and designed to increase the number of undergraduates majoring in economics; and (5) publish a “Statement of Concern” prepared by the Black Caucus in the 1970 Papers and Proceedings (Williamson 1970). In 1970, in response to the Caucus of Black Economists’ “Bill of Particulars” and “Statement of Concern,” the AEA created the following committees: Committee on Formation of Institute for Black Students, Advisory Committee to the Black Caucus, and The Committee on the Education and Training of Minority Group Economists (American Economic Association 1971). By 1973, these committees seem to have been subsumed by the Advisory Committee on Minority Group Economists. In 1974, the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups became a standing committee of the AEA (Report of the Secretary 1975), albeit a report from this Committee does not appear as part of the Papers and Proceedings issue of the American Economic Review until 1989 (Oaxaca 1990). The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) was formed in 1971 as one of the proposed six resolutions of the Women’s Caucus, which were moved and seconded by AEA membership. Since its creation, CSWEP has had AEA standing committee status and has provided the AEA with a separate committee report each year. CSWEP “works to assure that women’s issues are considered in the committee work of the AEA, makes an annual report to the AEA on the status of women in the economics profession, and engages in other efforts to promote the advancement of women in the economics profession” (American Economic Association n.d.). Each year, CSWEP surveys departments to gather information about the representation of women on the faculty by rank and tenure status, women in the doctoral program, and the job market placement of women. The results of the survey are published each year in the Papers and Proceedings issue of the American Economic Review and are an excellent source for tracking the progress of women. In addition, the  American Society of Hispanic Economists  (ASHE), a professional association of economists who are concerned with the under-representation of Hispanics in the economics profession, and the Association for Economic Research of Indigenous Peoples, a professional association of economists, political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars who are interested in economics research related to Indigenous peoples across the globe, were created to respond to the increasing diversity of the economics profession and to address the specific ways the represented groups are marginalized in society. Since 2013, the National Economic Association (NEA) and ASHE have held a joint social justice conference to focus on social and economic justice issues particular to Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people. Organizations focused on diversifying the economics profession are not limited to race, ethnicity, and gender identities. Some organizations focus on diversifying perspectives in the profession. Founded in 1968, the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) has a mission with two

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primary goals: to promote a new interdisciplinary approach to political economy and to develop new courses and research areas that reflect the urgencies of the day and a new value premise. URPE advocates for the use of a broad framework to analyze current economic problems. The International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), another organization focused on diversifying economic perspectives, has a mission to further gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis to enhance the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities (IAFFE n.d.). IAFFE advocates for diversity in theoretical perspectives to advance gender-based research on contemporary global economic issues. Over the years, members from the above professional organizations have created and been influential in mentoring programs. Marcus Alexis, a founding member of the Caucus of Black Economists, designed and organized the first cohort of Summer Program for Minority Students, which met at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. The Summer Program for Minority Students, now the AEA Summer Training Program and Scholarship Program, has over 1100 alumni and has been influential in increasing the number of minority economists. The AEA Mentoring Program was created by Susan Collins, Chair of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP), and the inaugural Director was Cecilia A. Conrad, former president of both the NEA and IAFFE. The Mentoring Program matches new doctorates and students accepted or enrolled in a Ph.D. program in economics with a mentor who provides advice about navigating critical stages of graduate education and employment. There are also mentoring programs for faculty. The CSWEP operates CeMENT workshops that offer two tracks, one aimed at mentoring female faculty in tenure-track positions at doctorate granting economics departments or institutions with similar research expectations, and the other aimed at faculty at nondoctoral institutions. The Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE), created by William “Sandy” Darity and Rhonda V. Sharpe in 2007, offers workshops that facilitate a successful transition from junior faculty status to tenured associate professor for economists from underrepresented groups (especially Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans). The growing concern about diversity has led to the creation of two initiatives in the 2010s, the Sadie Collective and Diversifying and Decolonising Economics. The Sadie Collective seeks to address the dismal representation of Black women in the quantitatively demanding fields such as public policy, economics, data analytics, and finance. Diversifying and Decolonising Economics’ mission is to promote inclusiveness in economics both in terms of equal representation by identity, theoretical, and methodological approach and by addressing Eurocentrism. These organizations minimize professional isolation. They provide a community for likeminded economists similarly situated in the profession to discuss and support each other’s work. Referring to URPE, a cofounder, Sam Bowles, said, “It formed an intellectual ferment that helped us become better economists because we met each other” (Kim 2018, 475). This statement applies to all the aforementioned organizations.

Reflective diversity All the organizations and initiatives discussed earlier have the goal of increasing the representation of racial and ethnic groups and women in the economics profession. The success of these organizations can be assessed in terms of what I refer to as reflective diversity: does the percentage of each group as the share of degrees conferred or the share of the faculty equal the group’s share of the US population? 422

The quest for inclusion Table 43.1  Economics bachelor’s degrees conferred by race, ethnicity, and gender (%) Year

 

2000

2005

2010

2015

2018

Gender Race/Ethnicity Degree U.S Pop Degree U.S Pop Degree U.S Pop Degree U.S Pop Degree U.S Pop (%) (2000) (%) (2005) (%) (2010) (%) (2015) (%) (2017) Women Asian Black Hispanic Native American Other Temporary Resident White   Subtotal Women Men Asian Black Hispanic Native American Other Temporary Resident White   Subtotal Men Total  

6.1 2.3 1.7 0.1

1.1 5.4 3.3 0.4

6.6 2.4 1.9 0.1

1.5 4.8 3.3 0.4

6.5 1.8 2.0 0.1

1.8 5.1 4.1 0.4

5.1 1.6 2.5 0.1

2.0 5.1 4.7 0.4

5.4 1.5 2.9 0.0

2.1 4.9 4.9 0.4

1.3 3.4

0.6 3.4

1.8 3.6

0.1 3.2

2.1 3.9

0.1 3.4

2.1 7.7

0.1 3.2

2.0 8.4

0.1 3.2

18.0 37.9 32.9 52.1

15.9 32.3

39.0 51.0

14.3 30.6

36.8 51.0

11.9 31.0

35.6 51.0

12.2 32.3

35.2 51.0

8.2 3.1 3.3 0.3

1.0 4.4 3.1 0.4

9.3 3.1 3.5 0.3

1.3 3.5 3.0 0.3

9.5 3.2 4.3 0.3

1.5 4.2 4.0 0.0

7.4 3.2 5.7 0.2

1.7 4.0 4.0 0.0

7.6 2.8 6.8 0.1

1.8 4.0 5.0 0.0

2.5 5.3

0.6 3.6

3.8 5.2

0.1 3.2

4.6 5.5

0.0 3.0

4.4 9.5

0.0 3.0

3.9 10.8

0.0 3.0

44.4 34.8 67.1 47.9 100 99

42.6 35.5 67.7 49.0 100 100

42.1 34.0 69.4 49.0 100 100

38.5 33.0 69.0 49.0 100 100

35.7 33.0 67.7 49.0 100 100

Sources: Author’s calculations using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, 2000 US Census, and 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017 American Community Survey

The data on degrees conferred come from two sources: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and Survey of Earned Doctorates. Women have consistently earned about one-third of all bachelor’s degrees conferred but were approximately 50  percent of the US population (Table 43.1). Although men, on average, earned 69 percent of all bachelor’s degrees conferred, White men earned a smaller share of those degrees in 2018 than in 2000, 44 percent compared to 36 percent. Similarly, White women also earned a smaller share of the degrees conferred in 2018 than in 2000. This change suggests more diversity by race, ethnicity, and nativity in the degrees conferred. Temporary resident students were an increasing share of the bachelor’s degrees conferred. This trend also holds at the doctorate level (Table 43.2). White men and women earned fewer doctorates than women who were temporary residents. Although they were 8 to 10 percent of the US citizen population, Black and Hispanic women earned 1 percent or less of all doctorates conferred, while Black and Hispanic men earned 2 percent or less of all doctorates conferred and were 7 to 10 percent of the US citizen population. Women earned 31 percent of all doctorates in 2018, up from 27 percent in 2000. Relative to their share of the US population, Asians were overrepresented in the share of BS degrees and doctorates conferred in economics. The same is true for temporary residents. However, temporary residents increased their share of degrees conferred at a higher rate. 423

Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe Table 43.2  Economics doctorate degrees conferred by race, ethnicity, and gender (%) Year

 

Gender

Race/Ethnicity Degree US Pop Degree US Pop Degree US Pop Degree US Pop Degree US Pop (2000) (2005) (2010) (2015) (2017)

Women Asian Black Hispanic Native American Other Temporary Resident White Subtotal Women Men Asian Black Hispanic Native American Other Temporary Resident White Subtotal Men Total

2000

2005

2010

2015

2018

1.7 0.5 0.3 0.0

1.1 5.4 3.3 0.4

2.2 0.3 0.9 0.0

1.5 4.8 3.3 0.4

2.4 0.3 0.4 0.1

1.8 5.1 4.1 0.4

2.7 0.2 1.2 0.1

2.0 5.1 4.7 0.4

9.6 0.2 0.1 0.7

2.1 4.9 4.9 0.4

1.3 13.0

0.6 3.4

1.8 18.2

0.1 3.2

1.6 19.9

0.1 3.4

2.3 21.0

0.1 3.2

3.0 4.1

0.1 3.2

10.0 37.9 26.8 52.1

7.2 30.5

39.0 51.0

9.3 33.9

36.8 51.0

8.7 36.3

35.6 51.0

0.0 17.7

35.2 51.0

2.7 1.7 1.5 0.0

1.0 4.4 3.1 0.4

2.0 0.5 1.1 0.0

1.3 3.5 3.0 0.3

2.3 0.6 1.6 0.0

1.5 4.2 4.0 0.0

2.3 0.6 1.5 0.2

1.7 4.0 4.0 0.0

57.6 0.5 0.3 1.5

1.8 4.0 5.0 0.0

2.8 39.7

0.6 3.6

2.4 48.7

0.1 3.2

2.9 39.2

0.0 3.0

3.9 34.9

0.0 3.0

13.7 8.7

0.0 3.0

24.9 34.8 73.2 47.9

14.8 69.5

35.5 49

19.4 66.1

34.0 49.0

20.3 63.7

33.0 49

0.0 82.3

33.0 49.0

100

99

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Sources: Author’s calculations using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

Blacks, Hispanics, and White women as the share of bachelor’s degrees or doctorates conferred were less than their share of the US population. White men were a higher share of the doctorates conferred than their share of the US population, but a smaller share of the bachelor’s degrees conferred in economics. Overall, the economics profession fails with respect to reflective diversity.

Faculty The first CSWEP report (Shaw 1973) found that 6 percent of all full-time economics faculty were women. The report found that women were disproportionately represented in the ranks of instructor, 17 percent, and lecturer, 25 percent. Also, the report found that 14 percent of women with economics doctorates were employed in the Federal government. In 2001, 14 percent of economics faculty were women, but only 0.8 percent were Black, Hispanic, or Native American (minority) women (see Table 43.3). By 2017, 23 percent of economics faculty were women, a substantial increase relative to 1972. Black and Hispanic women were 2 percent of all faculty in 2017, with the largest share at the rank of associate professor. Black and Hispanic men were 9 percent of all faculty in 2017, but a larger share of Hispanic men was at the professor

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The quest for inclusion Table 43.3  Faculty rank by race, ethnicity, and gender, 2001  

Women

Faculty Rank

Asian

Minority

White

Subtotal

Rank and Tenured/On tenure track

201

78

1,033

1,312

1.7% 53 0.45% 8

0.7% 6 0.05% 3

8.7% 68 0.57% 192

11.1% 127 1.07% 203

0.07%

0.03% 2

1.62% 71

1.72% 73

0.0% 262 2.2%

0.0% 89 0.8%

0.6% 1,364 11.5%

0.6% 1,715 14.5%

Rank and Not on tenure track Rank/Tenure NA or RANK NA/Tenured Rank N/A and Not on tenure track/ Total  

 

Men Faculty Rank

Asian

Minority

White

Subtotal

Rank and Tenured/On tenure track

987

401

7,273

8,661

9,973

8.3% 84 0.7% 0

3.4% 25 0.2% 87

61.5% 424 3.6% 422

73.2% 533 4.5% 509

84.3% 660 5.6% 712

0.0% 66

0.7% 39

3.6% 305

4.3% 410

6.00% 483

0.6% 1,137 9.6%

0.3% 552 4.7%

2.6% 8,424 71.2%

3.5% 10,113 85.5%

4.1% 11,828 100%

Rank and Not on tenure track Rank/Tenure NA or RANK NA/Tenured Rank N/A and Not on tenure track/ Total  

Source: Generated using Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, Survey of Doctorate Recipients, 2001

rank (see Table 43.4), more than 1 in 5 economics faculty members were Asian men, and nearly 1 in 10 were Asian woman. The profession has been successful in increasing gender diversity; women have increased their share of degrees awarded at all levels and their representation as faculty. However, the profession has struggled with increasing the representation of Blacks and Hispanics. The profession has had the most success diversifying students by national origin, that is, temporary residents. At the faculty level, Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and White women have made progress, but their representation as the share of degrees awarded does not reflect their share of the population. Except for Asians, who are overrepresented, all race- and ethnic-gender groups are underrepresented on economics faculty.

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Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe Table 43.4  Faculty rank by race, ethnicity, and gender, 2017  

Women

 

Faculty Rank Asian

Black

Hispanic

White

Other

Subtotal

Professor

299 1.5% 531

35 0.2% 70

86 0.4% 84

723 3.6% 730

15 0.1% 15

1,158 5.8% 1,430

2.7% 804

0.4% 4

0.4% 88

3.7% 714

0.1% 35

7.2% 1,645

4.0%

0.0% 0.0% 5 0.0% 114 0.6%

3.6% 72 0.4% 69 0.3% 2,308 11.6%

0.2%

0.0% 145 0.7% 1,779 9.0%

0.4% 4 0.0% 7 0.0% 269 1.4%

0.0% 4 0.0% 69 0.3%

8.3% 76 0.4% 230 1.2% 4,539 22.9%

Faculty Rank Asian

Black

Hispanic

White

Other

Subtotal

Professor

2,097 10.6% 1,265

212 1.1% 231

605 3.0% 288

4,508 22.7% 2,307

129 0.6% 24

7,551 38.0% 4,115

8,709 43.8% 5,545

6.4% 1,070

1.2% 112

1.4% 190

11.6% 1,666

0.1% 15

20.7% 3,053

27.9% 4,698

5.4% 20 0.1% 110 0.6% 4,562 23.0%

0.6% 0 0.0% 72 0.4% 627 3.2%

1.0% 6 0.0% 18 0.1% 1,107 5.6%

8.4% 71 0.4% 310 1.6% 8,862 44.6%

0.1%

15.4% 97 0.5% 510 2.6% 15,326 77.2%

23.7% 172 0.9% 740 3.7% 19,864 100%

Associate Professor Assistant Professor Instructor Lecturer Total  

Men

Associate Professor Assistant Professor Instructor Lecturer Total  

0.0% 0.0% 168 0.8%

Source: Generated using Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, Survey of Doctorate Recipients, 2017

Expanding what is deemed credible research Feminist economists have long argued that the diversity of the profession influences the type of research that is conducted and deemed credible. Only when research is subjected to the scrutiny of diverse groups of scholars does it attain “strong objectivity” (Nelson 1995). Journals of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), NEA, and URPE all publish research that aligns with these organizations’ respective missions. These journals provide an invaluable service to the economics profession in terms of increasing the diversity of perspectives. They were the first outlets to embrace research by Black, feminist, and radical economists that challenged conventional economic thinking about racism, sexism, and economic 426

The quest for inclusion

inequality. Jacobsen and Newman (2003) found that female authors were more likely to focus on women in their analysis and specify gender effects, but the same was not true for race/ ethnicity. They attributed these findings to the dearth of non-White economists publishing in the top journals for industrial relations and labor economics. Mason, Myers, and Darity (2005) found that Black authors were overrepresented in their sample of research on racial inequality. This suggests that gender and race may influence the type of research questions asked and influence the methodology used. Since 1969, URPE’s Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) has been an outlet for innovative research in non-orthodox economics, that is, Marxian economics, post-Keynesian economics, Sraffian economics, feminist economics, environmental economics, and radical institutional economics. The RRPE is an important outlet for scholars who are critical of mainstream theory and whose research may not include high-level math. The RRPE addresses the problems of URPE members who seek to have their scholarship understood and legitimized so that they can achieve tenure (Kim 2018). In May 1970, the first issue of the Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE) was published. Robert Browne created the RBPE to provide a “hospitable arena in which black people could explore ideas as to how they might bring about effective and substantial improvement in their collective economic position” (Browne 1970). The RBPE was a medium for distributing the views of Black thinkers. According to Browne (1970: iii): These black thinkers, largely in the academic world, either as teachers or as students, but oftentimes also to be found working close to the people in community organizations or entrepreneurial undertakings, constitute the genuine creative potential for black economic developmental theory. These are the people who combine a familiarity with the tools of economic science with a lifetime of firsthand experience and suffering under the handicaps of being black in a white dominated world. These are the people who live the problem 24 hours every day and who write with conviction and purpose and not merely for the sake of publication. By gathering this thinking into one journal, it can be made far more accessible to the black public, which has little opportunity to encounter these thinkers elsewhere. The journal Feminist Economics, founded by members of IAFFE, created a space that not only legitimized feminist economics scholarship but was where new ideas would be nurtured. In the inaugural issue of Feminist Economics, the editor, Diana Strassmann (1995, 2), wrote, “In recognition of the diversity of feminist thought, the journal will claim no one definition of feminism, and will welcome the multiplicity of feminisms currently present in economics as well as those that may emerge when new voices are drawn into this forum.” The creation of new theoretical frameworks and bold policies by Black, Hispanic, and women economists is a value of diversity. Lewis’s (1954) pioneering scholarship demonstrates how shifting labor from (less productive) agriculture to (more productive) manufacturing can spur economic growth. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1979 for his work, known as the Lewis model or dual-sector model. Oaxaca’s (1973) scholarship allowed for the decomposition of differentials into a portion due to differences in characteristics, referred to as the “explained” difference, and a portion due to differences in market treatment, referred to as discrimination. Darity (2005) introduced the concept of stratification economics 427

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to examine the structural and intentional processes that create hierarchies leading to inequalities between ascriptively different groups.

Diversity influences “social provisioning” Finally, diversity in the economics profession also matters from a social provisioning perspective (Power 2004). There are three tenets of this alternative perspective that help illustrate the value of diversity of the economics profession. First, a diverse profession may provide multiple perspectives to craft a solution(s) that emphasizes the well-being of those marginalized in society. Hong and Page (2004) found that the value of diversity is a function of the diversity of perspectives, functional diversity, which may be influenced by identity diversity. May, McGarvey, and Whaples (2014) found that male and female economists in the US differ greatly on how to solve economic problems within the profession. Although their study did not address other group identities, it is reasonable to assume that the inclusion of economists from marginalized populations will produce more inclusive and equitable public policy. Second, a diverse profession will increase the agency of marginalized economists. Increased agency means, in the spirit of Dr. Phyllis Wallace, that the profession has economists who may not share the dominant values of the White upper-middle-class and who are willing to work for change from within the system (Coles 1970). Third, the increased agency will empower marginalized economists to question the process and mainstream theories that analyze and prescribe solutions to issues affecting these groups. Their lack of power has shaped the lived experiences of economists from marginalized groups. It is this relationship to power that makes them well suited to craft policies and solutions that increase the agency of marginalized groups. A diverse profession may balance the ethical judgments or normative views of a dominant group. Increasing the diversity of the profession expands the set of “what ought to be” outcomes by including the lived experiences of those living in the margins.

Recommendations for a more inclusive profession Recently, the AEA has made two significant efforts to diversify and make the profession more inclusive. In 2018, the AEA adopted a “Code of Conduct.” The following tenet of the Code of Conduct expands a resolution proposed by the Women’s Caucus, which stated that “economics is not a man’s field.” (American Economic Association 1972): The AEA seeks to create a professional environment with equal opportunity and fair treatment for all economists, regardless of age, sex, gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, health condition, marital status, parental status, genetic information, political affiliation, professional status, or personal connections. (American Economic Association 2019) In 2019, the Task Force on Best Practices for Professional Conduct in Economics provided “Best Practices for Professional Conduct in Economics,” which covers four key areas: conducting research, serving as colleagues, working with students, and leading departments and workplaces (American Economic Association 2019b). The Task Force on Best Practices for Professional Conduct in Economics also provides advice on how to implement each best practice. While the recent efforts of the AEA are to be applauded, a definition of diversity and a penalty system for institutions that do not broaden participation are missing. Sharpe (2017) 428

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recommended the profession have an honest conversation about the definition of diversity. Nina Banks notes that the inclusion of African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Native populations is a matter of justice, not diversity (Economic Policy Institute 2019). Hence, a definition of diversity is critical to prioritize the allocation of resources for initiatives or best practices that foster an inclusive profession, and, more importantly, to hold the profession accountable. For over 50 years, the profession has had initiatives to increase diversity with some success. Reports listing departments without women on the faculty of US economics departments do not exist. However, Price and Sharpe (2018) listed several departments that do not or never have had a Black economist. Price and Sharpe (2018) and Sharpe (2017) recommended penalizing departments that fail to broaden opportunities. If the goal is diversity that is inclusive, the profession must create an accountability system that includes penalties for failure to broaden opportunities. In 1921, Sadie Tanner Moselle Alexander earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, becoming the first Black to complete the doctorate in economics (Banks 2005). But due to racism and sexism, Dr. Alexander never formally worked as an economist. Nearly 100 years later, findings from the 2018 AEA climate survey (American Economic Association 2019a) show that racism and sexism are still barriers to the full participation of Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and White women in the economics profession. It is time for the profession not only to welcome but also to respect a diverse set of economists as researchers, policymakers, and thought leaders.

References American Economic Association. 1971. “Report of the Secretary for the Year Ending December  31, 1970.” The American Economic Review 481–85. ———. 1972. “1971 Minutes of the Executive Committee Meetings.” The American Economic Review 470–74. ———. 1975. “Report of the Secretary for Year Ending December  31, 1974.” The American Economic Review 454–59. ———. 2019a.“AEA Professional Climate Survey: Main Findings.” www.aeaweb.org/resources/ member-docs/climate-survey-results-mar-18-2019. ———. 2019b. “AEA Code of Professional Conduct.” American Economic Association, October  25. www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/code-of-conduct. ———. n.d. “Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.” Accessed July 15, 2019. www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/committees/cswep/about/mission. Banks, Nina. 2005. “Black Women and Racial Advancement: The Economics of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander.” The Review of Black Political Economy 9–24. Browne, Robert. 1970. “Publisher’s Preface to the Inaugural Issue.” Review of Black Political Economy iii–iv. Coles, Flourney. 1970. “Recommendations from Nashville Conference on Economic Curriculum in Black Colleges.” The American Economic Review 412–15. Darity, William A., Jr. 2005. Stratification Economics: The Role of Intergroup Inequality. Journal of Economics and Finance 144–53. Economic Policy Institute. 2019. “Changing Thinking in Economics and Changing the Profile of Economists: Women in Economics Forum, DC Edition.” Economic Policy Institute, October 29. Accessed November 2019. www.epi.org/event/changing-thinking-in-economics-and-changing-the-profile-ofeconomists-women-in-economics-forum-dc-edition. Hong, Lu, and Page, Scott E. 2004. Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of highability problem solvers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 16835–39. International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). n.d. Accessed January 2019. www.iaffe.org/ pages/about-iaffe/miss/. Jacobsen, Joyce P., and Andrew E. Newman. 2003. Do Women and Non-economists Add Diversity to Research in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics? Eastern Economic Journal 575–91.

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Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe Kim, Marlene. 2018. URPE at Fifty: Reflections on a Half Century of Activism, Community, Debate and a Few Crazy Moments. Review of Radical Political Economics 468–86. Lewis, W. Arthur. 1954. Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour. The Manchester School 139–91. Mason, Patrick L., Samuel L. Myers, Jr., and William A. Darity, Jr. 2005. Is There Racism in Economic Research? European Journal of Political Economy 755–61. May, Ann Mari, Mary G. McGarvey, and Robert Whaples. 2014. “Are Disagreements Among Male and Female Economists Marginal at Best?: A Survey of AEA Members and Their Views on Economics and Economic Policy.” Contemporary Economic Policy 111–32. Nelson, Julie A. 1995. “Feminism and Economics.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 92: 131–48. Oaxaca, Ronald. 1973. Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets. International Economic Review 693–709. ———. 1990. “Report of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession.” The American Economic Review 485. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point For Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 3–19. Price, Gregory N., and Rhonda V. Sharpe. 2018. “Is the Economics Knowledge Production Function Constrained by Race in the USA?” Journal of the Knowledge Economy 614–29. Sharpe, Rhonda V. 2017. “We’ve Built the Pipe Line: What’s the Problem: What’s Next?” Issue II. ­Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. Accessed February 2019. www. aeaweb.org/content/file?id=5524. Spratlen, Thaddeus H. 1970. “Statement of Concern of the Caucus of Black Economists to the American Economic Association.” The American Economic Review 528–29. Strassmann, Diana. 1995. “Creating a Forum for Feminist Economic Inquiry.” Feminist Economics 1–5. Williamson, Harold F. 1970. “Report of the Informal Meeting of the Black Caucus and American ­Economic Association Representatives.” The American Economic Review 527.

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PART V

International governance and social provisioning

44 GROUP-BASED FINANCIAL SERVICES IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Examining evidence on social efficacy Ranjula Bali Swain and Supriya Garikipati Introduction Women’s community-based savings clubs were observed as early as the late 19th century across the Global South. The first ever record of these in the modern literature was by Ardener (1964, 201), who described them as “an association formed upon a core of participants who agree to make regular contributions to a fund which is given, in whole or in part, to each contributor in rotation.” These types of savings groups, referred to as Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), became the genesis for the later iterations of savings and credit services that were developed for women, with group-based delivery model remaining as the fundamental tenet. Institutional efforts to empower women began only in the 1970s—when microcredit movements began to take hold in Bangladesh, India, and Africa and the momentum continued to be built in the 1980s. Some of these earlier initiatives were called micro-enterprise credit—where essentially small loans were disbursed to groups of women with the intention to enhance selfemployment opportunities—but as the financial services offered by the institutions expanded the term “microfinance” was coined (Roodman 2011). Microfinance promised to provide financial services to the poor (predominantly women in the Global South) that lack access to formal banking. Thus, it has become an important source of entrepreneurial finance (Armendariz and Morduch 2010; D’Espallier et al. 2017; Gul, Podder, and Abu Shahriar 2017). The next two decades were the golden era for microcredit, with 2005 declared the year of microcredit by the UN and Professor Mohammed Yunus (the founder of Grameen, Bangladesh) and Grameen Bank jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. According to a recent assessment, some 3,700 microfinance institutions (MFIs) provide services to around 230 million people in over 100 countries, with over 84 percent of them being women (Gul, Podder, and Abu Shahriar 2017). Microfinance markets have matured, globalized, and experienced remarkable growth in the decades leading up to 2010, due to a large investment flow into the industry, which makes MFIs less dependent on grants, charitable money, donations, concessional funding, and subsidies (Ghosh and Van Tassel 2013). According to Assefa, Hermes, and Meesters (2013), increased patronization and subsidized funding from governments, development agencies, and commercially oriented funders (including commercial banks) are the main drivers of growth in 433

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microfinance operations. Such fast growth has led to increased competition among MFIs, which leads to multiple borrowing, over-indebtedness, and a growing repayment crisis. Although MFIs have a common goal of providing financial services to excluded clients (the poor and women), their performance differs significantly in terms of outreach and financial sustainability (Armendariz and Morduch 2010; Banerjee 2013; Gul, Podder, and Abu Shahriar 2017; Kar and Bali Swain 2018). Microfinance is being implemented by policy-makers and development practitioners, and NGOs in different forms. These diversified range of institutions have incorporated microfinance in their health or education or gender-equity programs to attract funding from commercial markets and other sources. By delivering financial services (both savings and credit) to the poor, microfinance is professed to provide the poor with an opportunity to increase their income, become self-employed, and improve their economic situation. By substituting tangible collateral with “social collateral,” microfinance facilitates access to credit by individuals who otherwise were excluded from the financial markets. Access to financial services leads to consumption smoothing, thereby encouraging potential borrowers to take risks. Finally, microfinance provides the poor with an opportunity to acquire skills and knowledge through learning collectively on the job. It allows them to learn the credit culture and investment experience through the guarantee of a long-term relationship and training provided by MFIs. It is also well established in the literature that there is a strong correlation between financial depth (reflecting the stage of financial development of a country) and economic growth. One of the main achievements of micro-finance has been in creating an inclusive financial sector, which supports the participation and economic integration of the lower-income levels of the population. Along with unprecedented inflows of commercial capital, the sector faced growing controversy around high interest rates and associated profits, unethical collection methods and allegations of suicide among borrowers, and mission drift (Mersland and Strom 2010; Wichterich 2012). These issues attained a new exigency during the microfinance crisis of 2010 that unfolded in India, but its impact was felt across the Global South. Regulatory changes were enforced across the sector in the form of regulation of interest rates, stringent licensing requirements of financial institutions, and so forth. There was also a paradigm shift in the way development finance was considered within the policy and practitioner arena, which led to the idea of financial inclusion taking hold: ensuring that every individual and business had an equal access to a range of affordable financial services became the key mantra of the sector (UNDP 2013; World Bank 2013). To this date the main issue concerning microfinance remains the effectiveness of savings and credit services in alleviating poverty and empowering women (Duvendack et al. 2011; van Rooyen, Stewart, and de Wet 2012; Awaworyi 2014; Vaessen et al. 2015; Brody et al. 2016). In this chapter, we attempt to provide a synthesis of the existing evidence on the impact credit services have had. Our inquiry covers two specific issues: the impact of credit on poverty and its impact on women’s empowerment. We use an analytical framework drawn from a coalescence of basic methodological principles within feminist economics scholarship described by Power (2004) as the “social provisioning approach.” Specifically, we use well-being as a central measure of economic success and the notion that human agency is important. The first component signifies the insufficiency of measuring success merely in terms of income and the necessity to include education, health capabilities, and the ability to live free of violence. The second idea suggests that “processes” as well as “outcomes” should be examined and the questions on power and unequal access to power should form part of the analysis and not merely as an afterthought. The “evidence-based” microfinance literature typically ranks quantitative studies according to methodological rigor and includes only those which have addressed problems of endogeneity 434

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and selection bias. Using a social provisioning framework we are able to evaluate a wider set of studies relevant to the poverty and women’s empowerment outcomes. Note that we exclude studies that rely only on measures of assessment from client’s own experiences because of issues with adaptive preferences (Elster 1983; Sen 1990). We also exclude studies that examine impacts on poverty indices constructed out of subjective study of poverty (such as Imai, Arun, and Annim 2010; Imai et al. 2012), which happen to support the poverty-reducing effect of microfinance, and those that consider micro-savings as a measure of microfinance (Dupas and Robinson 2013).

The social efficacy of group-based financial services From the perspective of a “social provisioning” framework, impact on income alone would give us at best a partial picture on the social efficacy of credit. A more robust assessment would necessitate the study of other associated impacts. With this in mind we examine a range of outcomes for microcredit clients and their households and examine them in line with their importance in the literature. With regard to the poverty-reduction goal of microfinance, a long-standing conclusion that emerges from the literature is the positive impact of microfinance on the non-poor women and their households. Microcredit schemes typically target the poor; however, at times beneficiaries may be from households that are somewhat above the poverty line—the better-off among the poor. Several studies show that across Asia and Latin America microcredit has a positive influence on the incomes, livelihood diversification, risk-mitigation, and overall economic well-being of these households (Hulme and Mosley 1996; Bali Swain and Wallentin 2009; Li, Gan, and Hu 2011; Garikipati 2012). This finding fits with the theoretical expectation that microfinance will have a positive impact if borrowers are better-off and have viable investments and the necessary business skills. There are other arguments that support this empirical finding. For instance, Stewart et al. (2012) propose that any risk from microcredit can be mitigated by clients who have a level of financial security. Zeller et al. (2001) indicate that in rural Bangladesh, access to credit can reduce risk through livelihood diversification, which has the potential to raise incomes—again suggesting that the better-off among the poor are more likely to better reap the benefits of credit. Other studies, however, suggest that with the right type of support and training even the poorest of borrowers can benefit. For example, for the Self Help Bank Linkage program in India, Swain and colleagues find a positive impact of group-based credit delivery mechanism and training of borrowers (Bali Swain and Varghese 2013; Bali Swain and Wallentin 2017). Hulme and Moore (2007) similarly find encouraging results on BRAC’s ultrapoor program called Income Generation for Vulnerable Group Development. Microfinance also has a positive impact on household well-being, proxied in consumption and expenditure measures. This is especially true in the short run. This finding is not surprising since a given injection of credit, whether used for production or consumption, will result in short-run expenditure. Several studies find a positive impact of microfinance on at least one proxy for consumption-based measure of household well-being, such as expenditures on food, health, and schooling (Garikipati 2008; Bali Swain and Floro 2014; Imai and Azam 2012; Kaboski and Townsend 2012). Other studies like Hoque (2004), Banerjee et al. (2009), Augsburg et al. (2012), and Nghiem, Coelli, and Prasad Rao (2012) indicate no such effects, mainly due to the small value of microloans issued. The third result that we find with some consistency is the positive impact that credit has on women’s livelihoods and businesses, which may have further beneficial outcome for their agency. Specifically, microloans that are put into productive use impact positively on the 435

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productivity of microenterprises, especially when borrowers have the essential business skills (Copestake, Bhalotra, and Johnson 2001; McKernan 2002; Tedeschi 2008; Crépon et al. 2014). Furthermore, two factors seem to support better business results—longevity of membership and flexible repayment terms (Copestake, Bhalotra, and Johnson 2001; Copestake et al. 2005). Randomized evaluations, which typically use intention-to-treat method, that is, analysis of the results are based on the initial treatment assignment and not on the treatment eventually received, are the only ones that find negative or no impact on business outcomes (like Banerjee et al. 2009; Attanasio et al. 2011). Another result that is quite strong is microfinance’s impact on the likelihood of women owning household’s productive assets—a significant determinant of their agency and wellbeing. Overall, the literature suggests a positive association. Studies from a variety of developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America suggest that microfinance has a positive impact on women’s asset ownership, although the impact is modest at best and hence may have little economic significance (Cotler and Woodruff 2008; Garikipati 2008; Bali Swain and Varghese 2009; Awaworyi 2014). A few studies namely, Takahashi et al. for Indonesia (2010), Attanasio et al. for Mongolia (2011), and Kaboski and Townsend for Thailand (2012) suggest a negative impact. One of the difficulties with using assets as a proxy for impact on women’s long-term well-being is the lack of longitudinal data that have the information to capture the trade-off in the short-run between consumption expenditure and asset expenditures to generate a sufficiently robust evidence of impact. An increase in profit typically also means an increase in women’s economic contribution to the household—but this linear relationship does not seem to hold in the case of microfinance. Credit may be diverted into consumption expenditure, or as Crépon et al. (2014) finds, business profit increases may be off-set by lost wages from casual work. Poor women are less likely to have access to productive opportunities and necessary skills so the impact of microfinance on their income contributions is likely to be less positive. Several studies, once again, from a variety of geographical contexts, find no significant microfinance impact on women’s income (Cotler and Woodruff 2008; Bali Swain and Varghese 2009; Takahashi, Higashikata, and Tsukada 2010; Imai and Azam 2012; Kaboski and Townsend 2012; Nghiem, Coelli, and Prasad Rao 2012; Crépon et al. 2014). A few even find a negative association (Attanasio et al. 2011 for Mongolia), whereas some studies do find a significant positive impact—like Copestake et  al. (2005) for Peru; and Cuong (2008) for Vietnam. However, even these studies note that clients who leave the program after their first loan tend to be worse off and only those who persevere benefit in terms of higher contributions to household incomes. The second focus of our attempt to systhesize evidence is the question whether microcredit has helped promote gender equality. Given that impact studies use households as a unit of assessment, the question of gender equality is typically examined via the lens of the agency and empowerment of women who are either married or in partnership. Varied definition of these concepts exist, but the most widely accepted notion is one where empowerment is recognized as a process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such ability (Kabeer 1999). Overall, the result on gender inequality suggests that microfinance has helped some women enhance their agency—especially those who use loans on self-­employment initiatives. But these gains are largely limited to women’s improved role in household decision-making. Microfinance has, by and large, failed in helping women shift existing gender inequitable norms embedded in the patriarchal context within which clients operate (Garikipati et al. 2017). Several studies have noted that these norms are much more structural in nature and credit directed at women is inadequate to make a dent on its own (Kabeer 2005 for Bangladesh; Garikipati 2008; Banerjee et al. 2009; Bali Swain and Wallentin 2012 for India). 436

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The potential for positive change on gender relations via microfinance seems to be dependent upon “context, commitment and capacity” (Kabeer 2005). (Studies find that rather than financial elements of the scheme, it is the “credit plus” aspects of microfinance programs that may help women enhance their agency (Bali Swain and Wallentin 2009; Garikipati et al. 2017.) For instance, regular group meetings, which is a feature of several microfinance programs, provide female members an opportunity to break out of their daily routine and discuss problems and issues of common interest. This interaction with a network of women in the microfinance program and officials leads to an increase in the exposure and confidence of women to articulate and pursue their interests (Bali Swain and Wallentin 2009; Garikipati et al. 2017). Women’s capacity to use loans on self-employment represents an atypical experience among microfinance clients (D’Espallier et al. 2017) and seems to have a positive impact on the value of women’s time but may equally lead to longer working hours for microcredit clients when compared to non-clients, further exacerbating women’s time poverty and lack of leisure in regions of south India (Garikipati 2012).

Concluding comments The MFIs operate on a principle of double bottom-lines of lending to the most vulnerable and ensuring financial sustainability. Increased competition leads to increased moral hazard and the information asymmetry problems in the microfinance industry (McIntosh and Wydick 2005; Kar and Bali Swain 2014). It further has a negative impact on MFIs’ outreach, performance, and portfolio quality (Hartarska and Mersland 2012; Hermes and Lensink 2011; Assefa, Hermes, and Meesters 2013). Specifically, with the intensification of competition, the socially motivated MFIs fail to lend to the poorest and the least profitable (predominantly women), who are most in need of the financial services. Any decline in the interest rates charged by the MFIs therefore results in a decrease of profitability of the MFIs (McIntosh and Wydick 2005). The wealthier clients are usually targeted by the for-profit MFIs that also offer larger loans. This in turn diverts the relatively more profitable and productive borrowers of the socially motivated MFIs to the for-profit lenders, resulting in a further worsening of the socially motivated MFIs’ portfolio quality. Increase in competition thus results in mission drift and consequent drift away from the poorer clients, especially women, in terms of the number of clients served and their relative socioeconomic level (Hermes and Lensink 2011; Hulme and Mosley 1996; Cull, DemirgucKunt, and Morduch 2007). Emerging literature suggests that MFIs create a debt burden on the poor due to double-­ dipping or multiple borrowing, which has a greater perceived negative impact on the borrowers, largely due to its institutional nature as compared to a loan from the informal lender (Guérin, Kumar, and Agier 2013). The lack of longitudinal data impedes us from making conclusions on the long-term impact of microfinance. Credit may increase income eventually; however, given that the borrowers incur debts that must be repaid, sometimes starting immediately, the expected positive impacts of microcredit on some economic outcomes may not be immediate or significant (Stewart et al. 2012). Thus, relying on the microfinance to fight poverty is unlikely to work unless major and long-term adjustments are made to microfinance products that focus on enhancing well-being and capabilities of the clients. One example is BRAC’s innovative products designed for the ultra poor that start with in-kind loans of basic subsistence products and gradually develop the credit absorption capacity of their clientele. While the better-off among the poor are in a good position to benefit from microfinance initiatives, the benefits for poor clients are not assured, nor is their direction of change clear. While microfinance is likely to have a positive impact on consumption and expenditure, especially in 437

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the short run, the long-run benefits on income growth and asset creation are uncertain. Moreover, even when these benefits are experienced, they are likely to be modest, which really brings into question the poverty alleviation capacity of microfinance. Where clients use their loans for productive purposes, loans do seem to help with improving profitability, but clients require capacity to remain in the program for long and leaving the program prematurely results in their being worse-off. Recent systematic reviews such as Duvendack et al. (2011) and Awaworyi (2014) arrive at similar conclusions. They suggest a very modest effect of microfinance with little economic importance. With respect to poverty alleviation, the gains from microfinance are measurably small, thus relying on credit at market interest rate to alleviate poverty is somewhat ambitious. The vast global initiative of microfinance can hardly be expected to have one single, consistent impact story over the long assortment of products, regulatory frameworks, institutional variations, and geographical differences (Garikipati et al., 2017). Hunting for generalizations is futile and the focus of debate must move on to understanding the variety of experiences. That is indeed what we derive from the social provisioning framework used to synthesize the literature. To impact clients (predominantly women), microfinance has to move beyond impacting income toward a more comprehensive impact on well-being and capabilities.

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45 THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS Reflections from a feminist economics perspective Shahra Razavi Introduction The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has been celebrated for its transformative vision of development, encompassing economic, social, and environmental dimensions, and democratic deliberation through an open multi-stakeholder process. Feminists were actively involved in ensuring that the “structural foundations of gender-based inequality” (UN Women 2013, 3) are addressed in all their forms—from the pervasiveness of violence against women, and impediments to women’s sexual and reproductive rights, to their disproportionate share of unpaid care work, and limited voice and leadership in public institutions. In an effort to move away from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)-driven notion of development as a North–South project, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are credited for having catalyzed an important normative shift. Re-conceptualizing development as a universal human-centered endeavor, the SDGs recognized that inequality and unsustainable patterns of consumption and production are as much an issue in the North as they are in the South. Four years after the promulgation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with the dust sufficiently settled, a more sober assessment of what the Agenda has achieved is both feasible and necessary. This chapter identifies a number of key dimensions on which the Agenda broke new ground and explains why women’s rights advocates were so heavily invested in its negotiation. It then goes on to look at the reasons why the process of implementation has proven challenging, highlighting both the shifting political and economic contexts and the Agenda’s fixation with indicators at the expense of economic and social policies to combat poverty and inequality and enhance human well-being.

The promise of SDGs Critics such as The Economist did not hide their derision toward the new agenda for being too “sprawling and misconceived” (The Economist 2015), in contrast to the parsimonious MDGs. The MDGs were drawn up by a small group of technocrats—allegedly the Secretary General’s advisers on the 38th floor of the United Nations (UN)—with ties to donor governments and the aid establishment (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2018). Civil society was a limited player in 441

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the MDGs’ formulation, nor did Southern governments have much of a say (Sen 2018). This stands in sharp contrast to the processes put in place for the formulation of the 2030 Agenda that were multi-layered. They encompassed a government-led Open Working Group (OWG) stream that involved 30 UN member states, which eventually increased to 70, working in small groups (called troikas) that shared a seat. These states were tasked with proposing specific goals, targets, and indicators, while the process of negotiation involved the full UN membership. The OWG was different from the standard UN negotiating process: it did not adopt the usual method of negotiation by regional blocs and was deliberately opened up for the participation of civil society and other non-state actors (Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018). A parallel stream, led by the UN Secretariat, involved a High-Level Panel (HLP) appointed by the UN Secretary-General and co-chaired by Prime Minister Cameron of the UK, with a membership that was drawn from governments, civil society, and the private sector. The HLP produced its own report, which was influenced by powerful donor governments (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2018). The UN also led wide-ranging consultations, both face-to-face and on-line, in around 100 countries and on a range of thematic issues. Despite the distance and expense, women’s rights organizations were present and effective in influencing the positions that were hammered out at various meetings, both in the regions and in New York. As one participant explains, civil society organizations, including feminist ones, “could not afford to ignore either the OWG or the HLP” (Sen 2018, 15), nor the indicators discussion, which took a life of its own through the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDGs (IAEG-SDGs). In addition to their skill and agility in using insider-outsider tactics, feminists’ negotiating power was also strengthened by having an umbrella organization with official status, Women’s Major Group, for deliberation and advocacy purposes (Sen 2018). The concept of Major Groups was born in the first Rio conference in 1992 to formalize the participation of nine sectors of society, including women, children, youth, indigenous peoples, local authorities, workers and trade unions, business and industry, the scientific and technological community, and farmers. In the OWG and during the negotiations leading to the 2030 Agenda, these Major Groups were very active, making both oral and written statements. The outcome was impressive: not only did the 2030 Agenda include a stand-alone goal on gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls encompassing nine targets and 14 gender-specific indicators, it also recognized gender equality as a “crucial contribution to progress across all the goals and targets” (UNGA 2015, para. 20). Under the MDGs, gender equality had been reduced to educational parity (Sen and Mukherjee 2014), while sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) were boiled down to a narrow focus on maternal health. The aim had been to communicate a simplified understanding of development, namely ending poverty and meeting basic needs. This, feminists argued, diverted attention from the strategic and structural underpinnings of gender power inequality. With its 17 goals, 169 targets, and 232 indicators—many of which still require reliable data and agreed methodologies—the 2030 Agenda “reverse[s] the MDG approach to global goal setting and the misplaced belief in the virtues of simplicity, concreteness, and quantification” (Fukuda-Parr 2016, 43). Instead, it puts forth an integrated and universal vision of sustainable development, encompassing economic, social, and environmental dimensions, acknowledging the complexity of transformative social change. In stark contrast to MDGs, the commitment to gender equality is both cross-cutting and comprehensive. The specific goal on gender equality (Goal 5), for example, encompasses all forms of violence against women, harmful practices, and sexual and reproductive rights, as well as gender inequalities in both the economic sphere (including land and property rights, unpaid care work) and political institutions (including participation in national and local governments). 442

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Yet a gender perspective is unevenly applied across the 2030 Agenda and is particularly weak to nonexistent when it comes to the environmental goals (Goals 12, 14, and 15)—the jewel in the crown of an agenda for sustainability. This is, at least in part, a reflection of the inherent difficulties of translating a gender analysis of complex systemic issues like climate change and environmental degradation into simple quantifiable indicators. The inevitable reductionism that ensues is also evident in some of the other goals—for example, Goal 16 on inclusive and peaceful societies. The gender indicators under this goal suffer from the privileging of crime victims—women as victims of intentional homicide, conflict-related deaths, human trafficking, and sexual violence—a distortion that fails to provide an assessment of access to justice “from the people’s perspective” (Satterthwaite and Dhital 2018, 96), including from women’s perspective. There is close to no attention to the complex and process-oriented institutional dimensions of women’s concerns with justice institutions, whether with respect to inheritance rights, the right to divorce and child custody, or labor-related claims, which would have provided a more comprehensive picture of the gender-responsiveness of justice institutions. This speaks to the difficulties of relying exclusively on quantitative indicators to capture the largely contextspecific and qualitative dimensions of gender equality envisioned by the Agenda (Razavi 2018). It reinforces the point made by feminist economists that quantitative methods need to be complemented with contextual, qualitative, and reflexive methods (Nelson 1993; Berik 1997). This is, however, only part of the story. While Goal 5 includes targets on unpaid care work (5.4) and on equal rights to economic resources, including access, ownership, and control over land and other forms of property (5.A), both targets are diluted with the addition of provisos: “as nationally appropriate” and “in accordance with national laws,” respectively. In fact, across many goals, and not only with respect to gender equality, “slippage occurred when the targets were set and indicators selected” (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2018, 10). In some cases, the slippage was due to the genuine difficulties in defining an indicator able to capture the full meaning of a particular goal. In other instances, however, where there was contestation about the agenda, indicators were used to distort or dilute the goal, frequently by watering down the ambition of the goals. This was starkly evident in the deliberations on inequality (Goal 10), which had faced stiff opposition to having its own stand-alone goal. Once the goal was accepted, contestation shifted to the selection of targets and indicators. The eventual insertion of the “shared prosperity” indicator—which came from the World Bank (2018) and focuses on the income growth of the bottom 40 percent compared to the national average—rather than distribution measures such as Gini or Palma ratio, effectively diverts attention away from the concentration of wealth and extreme inequality, by focusing on the poor and excluded (Fukuda-Parr 2018). Having said this, it is also important to recognize that unlike the MDGs, an effort was made not to compromise by having weak indicators with the excuse of data unavailability. Across many goals where indicators with accepted standards and methodologies were not available to measure the selected targets, work is underway to develop the methodologies for the development of new indicators (Tier III indicators). Of the indicators that have agreed international standards and methodologies, many do not have data that are regularly produced by countries (Tier II indicators). The large number of Tier II and Tier III indicators shows how much work still needs to be done before all global indicators can be used to track progress. Under Goal 5, for example, out of the 14 indicators selected to monitor the goal, only two are classified as Tier I indicators, meaning that data are widely available and supported by internationally accepted standards for measurement (UN Women 2018). On the positive side, the 2030 Agenda has given a much-needed push to the development of methodologically sound indicators and the strengthening of data sources. This is particularly 443

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important in the area of gender statistics, where due to severe underinvestment many of the indicators needed to capture crucial dimensions of gender inequality—from the prevalence of violence against women to the measurement of women’s work—remain underdeveloped and/ or backed by paltry data bases. For example, only 24 percent of the data needed to monitor the gender-specific indicators in the 2030 Agenda is recent, that is, from 2010 or later; and only 17 percent of this data is available for two or more points in time—making it possible to monitor trends (UN Women 2018). With their focus on indicators and data, the SDGs have incentivized investments in gender statistics. However, a less salutary outcome of the “governance by numbers” (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2018, 6) ushered in by the SDGs is the inherent limitations of quantification, and the risk that watered-down indicators will compromise the implementation of an ambitious agenda set in the goals. As Yamin suggests with regard to SRHR, “Although rights, and SRHR in particular, are apparently taken into account, there is a danger that measurement based on abstracted data systematically obscures structural obstacles to achieving those rights, and displaces the political energy needed to combat injustice” (Yamin 2018, 52). But the ultimate impact of the SDGs is still an open question and may depend on whether governments and other actors “focus on the spirit of the SDGs or merely ‘check the boxes’ of the individual indicators” (Elder and Olsen 2018, 80).

Turning promises into action: what happened to structural change? We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind (UNGA 2015).

How is the pledge to leave no one behind being taken forward? To answer this question, this section looks at three areas: data and measurement; governance and accountability; and policy and finance. First, with respect to measurement and data, while the MDGs were rightly criticized for not looking behind national averages, the 2030 Agenda is diligent about the need to disaggregate data, “by income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and other characteristics relevant in national contexts” (UNGA 2015) to identify those who are being left behind. The IAEG-SDGs, which carried out the work on indicators, has shown interest in pursuing work on data disaggregation, and under its purview a working group has been set up for this purpose. While data disaggregation is likely to be politically sensitive for some countries—given the controversies around ethnic, racial, and other inequalities—it is also being resisted by most countries for practical reasons, namely concerns about the growing workload that the Agenda is placing on national statistical offices, which have limited capacity and funding. Second, while the availability of disaggregated data is critical to show who is being harmed by, or is not benefiting from, development policies and processes, better data and evidence do not in and of themselves translate into greater responsiveness on the part of decision-makers. Having adequate safeguards in place for those most at risk of being left behind and implementing improved policies and remedies require a sea change in democratic governance. Yet the call to leave no one behind comes at a time when political space for civil society is closing in too

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many countries while growing xenophobia and discriminatory attitudes are fanning attacks on specific groups, be it migrants, ethnic and religious minorities, or LGBTI persons. One of the cornerstones of the human rights framework is the principle of accountability, or the obligation of those in authority to take responsibility for their actions, to answer for them by explaining and justifying them to those affected, and to be subject to some form of enforceable sanction if their conduct and explanation is found wanting. (OHCHR and CESR 2013, 10) If evidence and data are to bring about policy responsiveness, those who monitor policies need to be heard by decision-makers and those in authority need to be answerable. One of the most contested issues in the run-up to the 2030 Agenda was about how implementation of the Agenda was to be monitored and accountability assured. The final print of the Agenda makes it clear that implementation would be country-owned and country-led. As a non-binding political commitment, the 2030 Agenda lacks enforceability: there are no defined consequences if countries fail to make serious efforts to meet the goals and targets. This is quite unlike Security Council resolutions, for example, which are enforceable, or the agreements that borrower governments enter into with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) with policy conditionalities that are tied to the loans they receive. Given the difficulty of implementing an expansive agenda with 169 targets, especially in the context of an austerity financing regime, and in the absence of accountability and enforcement mechanisms, the risk of dilution and selectivity in implementation looms large. Even if gender equality is given some attention where women’s rights advocates are effective in drawing attention to it, governments may opt for low-hanging fruits or targets that are more aligned with their own conservative outlooks. During the negotiations, member states, regardless of their political and ideological affiliations, were united in opposing a more stringent peer review process and/or scrutiny by civil society organizations—for example, by taking the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism of the Human Rights Council as an example or by inviting independent “shadow reports” from civil society organizations, as is the practice of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and some other human rights treaty bodies. Instead, they agreed to a watered-down, voluntary process of follow-up and review. At the global level, a High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) convenes on an annual basis in New York to oversee the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Its lynchpin, the “voluntary national reviews” (VNRs) are prepared by governments, ideally in consultation with other stakeholders. Thus far around 140 VNRs have been presented at the HLPF with large governmental and civil society delegations in attendance, but the quality of engagement presents serious flaws (Donald 2019). Civil society organizations have been adamant about the need for a reformed and strengthened HLPF, with more time and resources, and space for civil society organizations to present their reports. Third, in the absence of enforceable mechanisms to incentivize implementation, the implicit assumption is that countries will be inspired by the Agenda and competition with their peers to implement it. It would be both dangerous and foolish to think that global goals can, or should, offer policy prescriptions. However, given the urgency of addressing growing inequalities and unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, does the 2030 Agenda offer any pathways for structural change aimed at transitioning to sustainability, or resources to incentivize and boost national efforts?

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Despite the integration of environmental issues into the 2030 Agenda, the SDGs have been criticized for trying to pursue both economic growth and environmental sustainability, based on an optimism that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth (Elder and Olsen 2018). Despite the recognition of unpaid care work (target 5.4) and the integration of environmental sustainability throughout most SDGs, these ideas were not enough to “persuade many governments to adopt a new concept of human well-being and prosperity” that would take them beyond GDP growth (Elder and Olsen 2018, 76). A  further indication of the Agenda’s attachment to business as usual is the advice to Global South countries to “significantly increase” their exports (target 17.11), ignoring the deteriorating terms of trade inherent in such advice, which gives rise to immiserizing growth (UNCTAD 2002) and adverse wage implications for women who are the workforce of choice in export-oriented industries (Seguino 2000), not to mention the adverse health and safety implications, and environmental hazards. Nor does the 2030 Agenda offer sufficient caution against the prevailing global financial and investment processes premised on deeply entrenched neoliberal policies that “push people behind” by destroying their livelihoods and causing extensive deprivation among those who already lack economic, social, and political power (Elson 2018). Whether in the form of largescale private and public land investments (also known as “land grabs”) that are concocted behind closed doors, trade deals that invariably benefit large corporations at the expense of their workers, or under-regulated global financial flows, there are rarely sufficient safeguards in place to protect livelihoods and people’s standard of living (Elson 2018). To its credit, the 2030 Agenda endorses the social protection floor (target 1.3), including both income transfers and public services. However, there is a limit to how much a social protection system can compensate for the fallouts of economic policies that deprive people of land and work (Elson 2018). While social protection systems can go some way in addressing poverty and inequality, sustainable routes out of poverty also require economic policies that boost the quality and quantity of jobs and livelihoods. Social and economic policies need to work in tandem: investments in social protection transfers as well as health, education, and care services produce long-term economic benefits, but economic policies also need to include social considerations by generating livelihoods and the fiscal resources needed to finance social policies (UN Women 2015; Heintz 2019). The SDGs in fact propose an agenda of extensive social investments, including in essential services on which millions of women and girls depend. Services such as water and sanitation, health care, early childhood education and care, and legal services and shelters for survivors of gender-based violence, among others, are chronically underfunded or simply unavailable in many countries. Preliminary estimates based on sectors such as health, education, food security, and water and sanitation suggest that meeting the SDG commitments would require an investment of between US$2 and US$3 trillion per year (Schmidt-Traub and Sacks 2015). The SDGs place much hope on domestic resource mobilization through taxation (target 17.1). Indeed, domestic resource mobilization holds the potential to bridge funding gaps in the Global South to meet the SDGs and must be the backbone of national fiscal outlays. However, national efforts to mobilize resources are often undercut through tax evasion and avoidance practices that have their roots in the globalized economy. Harmful tax competition among countries in order to attract capital has led to a drop in corporate tax rates worldwide, on average from 38 percent in 1993 to 24.9 percent in 2010 (CESR and Christian Aid 2014). Multinational corporations use a variety of accounting techniques to lower their overall tax contribution. Estimates of the annual tax revenue lost to Global South countries due to trade mispricing put it at between $98 and $106 billion, nearly 446

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$20 billion more than the annual capital costs needed to achieve universal water and sanitation coverage by 2015 (Hollingshead 2010). Global South countries and civil society organizations tried hard to give more bite to global coordination efforts on development finance by advocating for the establishment of an intergovernmental body within the UN to oversee international cooperation in tax matters. However, this did not get very far, largely due to the intransigence of the Global North. This impasse, together with the wave of austerity responses sweeping across countries (Ortiz et al. 2015), cast a dark shadow over the prospect of countries mobilizing the resources needed for the SDGs. Global taxes, such as the global financial transaction tax, which have been proposed at different junctures, including in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, constitute a potential source of external finance for the SDGs. Another possible source of revenue is to shift resources away from military spending, which stood at $1.8 trillion in 2018 (SIPRI 2019). The demand for disarmament has been a long-standing item on the agenda of women’s peace activism to promote human security, reduce militarism, challenge violent masculinities, and achieve sustainable peace. These proposals require global coordination, which would have made them particularly suited to a global development agenda. But neither global taxes nor a reduction in military spending found a place in the 2030 Agenda. Instead, much hope continues to be pinned on private finance and increasing private sector engagement. However, private sector investment in infrastructure and services is unlikely to reach those who are most left behind. To take one example, piped water and sanitation are among the most needed infrastructure services, and their dearth adversely affects women’s time-use and well-being in low-income contexts. Such services, however, are the least likely to be financed through private finance or public–private partnerships (PPPs) (UNCTAD 2015). PPP infrastructural investment has been concentrated in a relatively small number of middle- and high-income economies, and in only a handful of sectors where profitability can be assured, most notably telecoms and energy. In fact, Global South governments continued to finance around 70 percent of the investment in infrastructure during the 2000–2005 period, and closer to 90 percent in the case of the lowest-income countries. Private sector involvement has often meant even greater neglect and exclusion of rural and remote areas. This is not surprising as the initial capital investment and set-up costs in remote villages and informal settlements tend to be substantial while full cost-recovery through service charges is unlikely given the low incomes of residents.

Concluding remarks The shifting geopolitical, economic, and normative contexts, this chapter suggests, have provided an environment that is resistant to even tinkering with, let alone transforming, development patterns that are rooted in short-term financial calculus that underlies austerity and the interests of a small elite of powerful actors and corporations. Combined with the resurgence of regressive nationalisms that are deeply inimical to women’s rights and human rights more broadly and the closing down of spaces for civil society contestation, the transformative ambitions of the 2030 Agenda remain stillborn. While feminists were successful in bringing critical aspects of gender equality into the 2030 Agenda, the macroeconomic context within which it is being implemented is unchanged and one that feminists have long criticized for being inimical to women’s rights (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015). The chapter has also raised concerns about the way in which “governance by numbers” has shifted the focus away from a concern with structural change. There are nevertheless reasons for cautious optimism. First, the extensive incorporation of critical aspects of gender inequality into a mainstream global development agenda, thanks to 447

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feminist engagement with the process, constitutes an important normative and discursive shift. Further, by encouraging countries to domesticate the 2030 Agenda through regular and inclusive reviews at the national and sub-national levels, it may be possible for power dynamics at the country level to counterbalance at least some of the shortcomings of global metrics. In the case of Tunisia, for example, civil society organizations working with the government were able to include a number of critical indicators under the governance goal (SDG 16), including the right to information and survey-based indicators to capture people’s confidence in the justice system (Laberge and Touihri 2018). Finally, while the turn to indicators and numbers may have diverted attention away from the urgency of structural change, it has also had a more salutary outcome, bringing much-needed attention (and funding from both philanthropic organizations and some donor governments) to indicators and data on gender equality. Down the line, stronger evidence in the hands of savvy feminist advocates may in turn reinforce the need for structural change.

References Beneria, Lourdes, Gunseli Berik, and Maria S. Floro, eds. 2015. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, 2nd ed. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Berik, Gunseli. 1997. “The Need for Crossing the Method Boundaries in Economics Research.” Feminist Economics 3 (2): 121–25. CESR (Center for Economic and Social Rights) and Christian Aid. 2014. A Post-2015 Fiscal Revolution: Human Rights Policy Brief. New York and London: CESR and Christian Aid. Donald, Kate. 2019. Technocratic Fiddling While the Planet Burns: Towards a Higher Level of Ambition for the HLPF. New York: Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR). The Economist. 2015. “The 169 Commandments.” www.economist.com/leaders/2015/03/26/ the-169-commandments. Elder, Mark, and Simon Hoiberg Olsen. 2018. “The Design of Environmental Priorities in the SDGs.” Global Policy 9 (4): 70–80. Elson, Diane. 2018. “Push No One Behind.” CPD Background Paper No. 43, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko. 2016. “From the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals: Shifts in Purpose, Concept and Politics of Global Goal Setting for Development.” Gender and Development 24 (1): 43–52. ———. 2018. “Keeping Out Extreme Inequality from the SDG Agenda—The Politics of Indicators.” Global Policy 9 (4): 61–69. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, and Desmond McNeill. 2018. “Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs: Introduction to Special Issue.” Global Policy 9 (4): 5–15. Heintz, James. 2019. The Economy’s Other Half: How Taking Gender Seriously Transforms Macroeconomics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hollingshead, Ann. 2010. The Implied Tax Revenue Loss from Trade Mispricing. Washington, DC: Global Financial Integrity. Kamau, Macharia, Pamela Chasek, and David O’Connor. 2018. Transforming Multilateral Diplomacy: The Inside Story of Sustainable Development Goals. New York: Routledge. Laberge, Marie, and Nadia Touihri. 2018. “Can SDG 16 Data Drive National Accountability? A Cautiously Optimistic Note.” Global Policy 9 (4): 153–56. Nelson, Julie A. 1993. “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics.” In Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, 23–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. OHCHR (United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and CESR (Center for Economic and Social Rights). 2013. Who Will Be Accountable? Human Rights and the Post-2015 Development Agenda. New York and Geneva: United Nations. Ortiz, Isabel, Matthew Cummins, Jeronim Capaldo, and Kalaivani Karunanethy. 2015. “The Decade of Adjustment: A Review of Austerity Trends 2010–2020 in 187 Countries.” ESS Working Paper No. 53, ILO, Geneva.

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Sustainable Development Goals Razavi, Shahra. 2018. “Indicators as Substitute for Policy Contestation and Accountability? Some Reflections on the 2030 Agenda from the Perspective of Gender Equality and Women’s Rights.” Global Policy 9 (4): 149–52. Satterthwaite, Margaret L., and Sukti Dhital. 2018. “Measuring Access to Justice: Transformation and Technicality in SDG 16.3.” Global Policy 9 (4): 96–109. Schmidt-Traub, Guido, and Jeffrey D. Sachs. 2015. “Financing Sustainable Development: Implementing the SDGs through Effective Investment Strategies and Partnerships.” Working Paper, Prepared for the Third Conference on Financing for Development, Addis Ababa, July 13–16. Seguino, Stephanie. 2000. “Gender Equality and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis.” World Development 28 (7): 1211–30. Sen, Gita. 2018. “The SDGs and Feminist Movement Building.” Discussion Paper No. 27, UN Women, New York. Sen, Gita, and Avanti Mukherjee. 2014. “No Empowerment Without Rights, No Rights without Politics: Gender Equality, the MDGs and the Post-2015 Development Agenda.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 15 (2–3): 23–37. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). 2019. “Trends in Military Expenditure, 2019.” SPRI Fact Sheet April 2019. SIPRI, Stockholm. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 2002. Trade and Development Report 2002. Geneva: UNCTAD. ———. 2015. Trade and Development Report 2015: Making the International Financial Architecture Work for Development. Geneva: UNCTAD. UN General Assembly (UNGA). 2015. “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” A/RES/70/1. UN Women. 2013. A Transformative Stand-Alone Goal on Achieving Gender Equality, Women’s Rights and Women’s Empowerment: Imperatives and Key Components. New York: UN Women. ———. 2015. Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights. New York: UN Women. ———. 2018. Turning Promises into Action: Gender Equality in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: UN Women. World Bank. 2018. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yamin, Alicia E. 2018. “Power, Politics and Knowledge Claims: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the SDG Era.” Global Policy 9 (4): 52–60.

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46 GLOBAL SOCIAL POLICY Corina Rodríguez Enríquez

Introduction Social policy and social protection systems were conceived as tools to address social risks and manage systemic asymmetries in capitalist societies. These institutions have undergone uneven development in different regions and countries around the world. The differences derived from their designs, the capacity of the states that carried them forward, and the context in which they operated, including economic structures, labor markets, and social structures. While in Europe there is a welfare state that, with variations, provides income protection to those experiencing unemployment, illness, old age, and so forth, in the United States these protections are provided primarily by the market (and the option to purchase private insurance) complemented with weak welfare policies. In most of the Global South the welfare regime is incomplete, insufficient, segmented, and disjointed. Even where social protection is more extensive and robust, it fails to address inequalities, including gender inequalities (Ungerson and Kember 1997; Pascall 1996; Orloff 1993; Sabates-Wheeler and Kabeer 2003; Holmes and Jones 2013). In social insurance systems built on contributory schemes that covered wage-earners (thus mostly men), gender inequalities characteristic of the world of paid work were transferred to social protection. For example, given women’s predominance in low-waged jobs without benefits and precarious forms of employment, women had less access to social welfare protection and lower benefits when they accessed them. In addition, women’s unpaid work burden limits their labor market opportunities and therefore their ability to contribute to social insurance. In turn, that unpaid work is not recognized as a job and deprives women from receiving other types of social benefits, such as health coverage, or even the right to pension. Further, women’s disproportionate unpaid work burden reproduces gender inequalities in the labor market and has been identified as a main contributor to income poverty among women (Antonopoulos 2008; Gammage 2010; Bardasi and Wodon 2010; Sepúlveda 2013). Contemporary capitalism increases social risks for several reasons (Sen and Durano 2015). First, it increases inequality. Piketty (2014) provides perhaps the most extensive evidence and analysis of the dynamics of increasing income inequality in 20th-century capitalism. Other studies highlight additional dimensions of inequality, in terms of both the diverse meaning and lived experiences of inequality in the Global North and the Global South and the intersection 450

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of class inequalities with gender, race, and ethnic inequalities (Moeller 2016; Perrons 2014; Seguino 2015). Second, contemporary capitalism increases economic instability and vulnerability while limiting the state’s ability to implement public policy. The deregulation of the movement of financial flows increases the vulnerability of countries (mainly those with more open economies and greater external dependence) to external shocks. Likewise, fiscal austerity, which is promoted as the main recipe to confront financial and economic crises, leads to the contraction of public policy space of the states (Antonopoulos 2014; Ghosh 2009). Third, contemporary capitalism promotes a race to the bottom in terms of labor, fiscal, and environmental standards. Countries compete with each other to attract foreign investment and do so by offering more tax incentives, more flexible labor-protection frameworks (with the goal of achieving lower labor costs), and weak environmental standards with very low enforcement (Sen and Durano 2015). Flexible labor arrangements deteriorate the conditions of paid work, in particular salaried work, that could address social risks (ILO 2019). All of these trends contribute to the process of increasing migratory flows, both for economic reasons and for displacements linked to political conflicts and environmental issues. They also contribute to the feminization of poverty in some countries and regions, in terms of higher incidence of income poverty among women compared to men and the particular way that women suffer and face poverty. The last few decades have also witnessed the feminization of anti-poverty public policies in the form of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs (Aguilar 2011; Chant 2015; Onu Mujeres 2017). This context confronts us with new challenges and dilemmas regarding social protection: what are, from a feminist point of view, the benefits and limitations of current forms of antipoverty policies that are intended to serve people excluded from the central bodies of social protection? How have CCT schemes fared in alleviating poverty and reducing gender inequality? Can the universal basic-income proposal be compatible with a feminist agenda? Does it properly address issues regarding sexual division of labor, women’s participation in the labor market, and recognition and redistribution of unpaid care work? Are social protection floor schemes suitable for current conditions, and do they have the potential to reduce gender and socioeconomic inequality? Are current reforms on social protection aligned with the basic principles of social protection floors?

CCT programs Since the late 1990s, CCT programs have been implemented to address income poverty in the short run, to interrupt the intergenerational reproduction of poverty in the long run, and to promote women’s economic empowerment. They have been a response to the weakness of social protection systems to serve the population with structural difficulties to participate in the labor market and therefore largely excluded from the central bodies of social protection. These programs, spread throughout the world, have been analyzed from a feminist economics perspective (Tabbush 2010; Rodríguez Enríquez 2011; Martínez Franzoni and Booven 2012; Fultz and Francis 2013; Molyneux, Jones, and Samuels 2016). Feminist scholars recognize the positive impacts of CCTs on the lives of women that can lead to a reduction in gender inequality. Based on a review of empirical studies, Rodríguez Enríquez (2011) identified the following conclusions: (i) CCTs express recognition of the existence of large contingents of population structurally excluded from social protection; (ii) they consolidate money transfers as a legitimate way of assisting population living in poverty; (iii) they have in effect resulted in an allocation of public budgets to poor women, heretofore nonexistent, 451

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which in most circumstances resulted in an improvement of the material living conditions of these women and their households; (iv) since CCTs provide regular income in many countries through bank institutions, they have also served as support or guarantee access to other financing mechanisms (such as bank loans); (v) although the evidence is mixed in this regard, in some circumstances these programs have strengthened the position of women in the bargaining processes over economic resources within households; (vi) in some circumstances, they have also given women better conditions to face and escape from situations of intimate partner violence. But at the same time feminist scholars also recognize that (i) despite being highly feminized programs, gender awareness has been absent in the design, implementation, and monitoring of CCTs; (ii) CCTs consolidate the maternalistic bias of social policy, which implies that women are viewed as mothers (and not as women) and are a conduit for distributing rights for their sons and daughters; (iii) conditionalities linked to the education and health of children reinforce the care role of women; and (iv) the conditionalities can discourage women’s participation in the labor market, or they may reinforce informality of women’s employment. The controversial and ambiguous nature of CCT programs for women has enabled discussions on how their positive aspects can be enhanced and their negative aspects reviewed. Part of the discussion includes an analysis of the possibility of moving toward universal unconditional cash transfer schemes, such as universal basic income (UBI). This proposal, as theoretically articulated, among others, by Van Parijs (1992), envisions implementing a system of universal and unconditional cash transfers, whose access is mediated only by the condition of citizenship (and not by situations of lack of income or employment), and that is financed with a progressive income tax system.

Feminist debate on UBI The central question in the feminist debate is whether basic income (BI) will increase women’s economic autonomy (Withorn 1990; Pateman 2004; Robeyns 2008; Bergmann 2008; Elgarte 2008; Katada 2010; Rodríguez Enríquez 2013). The answer depends on the impact of such a scheme on the following: (i) the degree to which BI can incentivize women’s participation in the labor market; (ii) the extent to which it can improve women’s employment conditions; and (iii) whether it can help redistribute unpaid care work. I examine each of these next.

BI and labor market participation One of the recurrent objections to a BI proposal is that it disincentivizes labor force participation, by increasing its opportunity cost, for two reasons. First, the cost of participation may be too high as would be the case, for instance, for women with care responsibilities in a context of unaffordable quality care services. Second, additional benefits from a potential labor market income might be lower than that of the BI, for instance, for women with low educational attainment whose average labor income is relatively low. From this perspective, a BI would not incentivize women’s participation in the labor market as a means of strengthening their autonomy (Bergmann 2008; Orloff 1990). On the other hand, a UBI can help access care services provided by the market, which would free up time for paid work. It can finance vocational training time that improves women’s skillset for employment. A UBI can also potentially improve women’s position within the home (by raising her autonomy vis-à-vis not having any income) and therefore help redistribute care responsibilities in the household and enable women’s labor market participation (Pateman 2004; Robeyns 2008; Rodríguez Enríquez 2013). 452

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BI and employment conditions There is also a controversy about the impact of a UBI on employment conditions. Some hold that a UBI will strengthen the fallback position of (female) workers to demand better labor conditions. Women in poor working conditions (e.g. domestic services, self-employed street vending, paid work outsourced to the home, part-time jobs) can choose to turn down these kinds of employment if they are guaranteed a basic minimum income (Robeyns 2008; Rodríguez Enríquez 2013; Elgarte 2008). Others claim that a BI could increase the space for accepting poor labor conditions, insofar as it would already guarantee a BI floor to which to add other income, even if it is coming from informal or precarious work. Women in low-wage jobs could add the BI to their low labor incomes in order to improve their already minimum living standards, which would undermine the need to demand better labor conditions (Bergmann 2008; Orloff 1990).

BI and the distribution of unpaid care work BI could be understood as compensation for socially useful activities that are not remunerated due to the market logic that regulates society (McKay 2001; Pateman 2004; Katada 2010; Rodríguez Enríquez 2013). According to this perspective, BI creates room for the possibility of a broader understanding of work. The proposal aims to recover the very notion of occupation, referring to the activities that people do. Thereby, it promotes the right to live according to the proper meaning of occupation, rather than pursue the right to employment, which under certain institutional arrangements means an obligation to work in any kind of job. In turn, the notion of recognizing and appreciating nonmarket activities (unpaid work, training, volunteer social work) besides those performed on the market goes hand in hand with the necessity of discussing new forms of organization of time. Taking the economic security provided by a UBI as the starting point, people could choose a different and broader set of activities, including part-time employment, domestic or care work, educational activities, and even leisure. According to this point of view, a BI could lead to a more equal distribution of income, paid work, unpaid care work, and leisure time between men and women. Thus, a BI would function like an “emancipation allowance,” which would improve especially poor or less-educated women’s bargaining power vis-à-vis their employers and spouses, encouraging their spouses to engage in part-time jobs and dedicate some of their time to unpaid care instead (McKay 2001; Robeyns 2008; Rodríguez Enríquez 2013). However, in contexts where care responsibilities are very demanding (for instance, due to the presence of many dependents in the household), or where the symbolism attributed to productive and reproductive tasks by men and women is deeply rooted, a UBI could indeed lead to a consolidation of the traditional gendered division of work. A UBI would then function as a “housewife salary” that would permit women to fulfill their “natural” care responsibilities under less economically restricting conditions—a prospect that has been criticized by some feminist scholars (Orloff 1990; Bergmann 2008). On the whole, the impact of UBI on labor force participation, employment quality, and the distribution of unpaid work depends on a number of factors and the combination of them: (i) the BI transfer level compared to the level of salaries, both in general and for the more specific occupations, that will determine whether one will complement the other or replace it; (ii) labor market conditions, which will be key to whether BI will work as an incentive for labor market participation; (iii) working conditions in occupations that are feminized; (iv) existence of policies that enforce laws against gender discrimination in the labor market; (v) gender norms; (vi) the availability of accessible care services, key to set the opportunity cost of entering the labor market. 453

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Given that there is no actual implementation of a UBI scheme, at least not in its ideal theoretical form, it seems impossible to reach a conclusion on which is the most reasonable position in this debate from a feminist point of view. Perhaps, it is not necessary to reach this point of agreement. Rather, these feminist debates can illuminate the key elements for a structural transformation of contemporary social protection systems, which can seek to guarantee inclusive protection while allowing for the removal of the basic dynamics that perpetuate inequalities.

Feminist considerations on basic social protection floors Both CCT programs and the UBI proposal intend to assure some BI guarantee for everybody, in the first case, on the premise that there is population facing structural barriers to access labor income and, in the second one, on the basis of a “right to existence.” In line with the objective of guaranteeing basic living standards for all people, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been promoting the paradigm of basic social protection floors, which it formalized in the Social Protection Floors Recommendation 202, of 2012. As the first international social protection standard of the 21st century, this Recommendation “embodies a new international consensus on the crucial role of social protection in furthering human dignity, social cohesion, equality, social justice, as well as sustainable social and economic development” (ILO 2019: iv). Several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) align with the suggestions in this recommendation and are a means to creating or strengthening basic social protection floors (see Razavi, this volume)—in particular, SDG1 through SDG4, linked to eradicating hunger and poverty and ensuring access to health and education, as well as SDG8, linked to decent employment. SDG8 includes target 8.5 (by 2030, achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value) and target 8.8 (protect labor rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment). All of these features are incorporated and complemented in SDG5, which aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. SDG5 includes target 5.4 (recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies, and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate). Therefore, UN member governments that adopted the Agenda 2030 have committed to advance these goals and are therefore expected to review their social protection systems in order to guarantee full and even access to decent work and social protection. These reforms would in turn bring them closer to fulfilling their human rights obligations. ILO’s global survey on social protection floors, which reports good practices and experiences from 114 governments and observations submitted by 11 employers’ and 44 workers’ organizations, reveals that some basic principles should be adhered to when constructing social protection floors (ILO 2019). First, the design of inclusive policy instruments requires the allocation of adequate resources through public budgets. The construction of social protection floors is constrained by fiscal restrictions and austerity policies that many governments implement and that not only delay the guarantees of basic security floors to mitigate social risks but also worsen the living conditions of women and widen the inequality gaps (ONU Mujeres, PNUD, OIT 2013). In contrast, many governments report the positive effects of investment in social security on economic growth and stability, including linkages between increased levels of social protection and economic performance (ILO 2019). Second, universality is the principle to guarantee basic protection floors for all. This is even more true where there is greater reliance on the market for access to income, goods, and services. 454

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As established by ILO (2019), universal social protection can only be achieved through nondiscriminatory, inclusive, and responsive social protection systems that meet the needs of a diverse population in a manner that ensures respect for the rights and dignity of all protected persons. Many countries have established legal frameworks as well as designed and implemented policies and mechanisms that aim to ensure equality of treatment and protection against discrimination in the provision of social security. However, broad inequalities in access and quality remain in countries at all levels of income. Therefore, much work is still needed to ensure that gender, disability, national origin, and ethnicity do not prevent people from being protected. Third, social solidarity, mostly expressed in the financial aspects, is a prerequisite for universal social protection. Again, such solidarity is even more necessary when mechanisms of reproduction of inequalities are more deeply rooted, for example, when market mechanisms determine the access to basic social services, but by the same token difficult to achieve. Current social security reforms in many countries that introduce mandatory or voluntary individual savings mechanisms that shift economic and financial risks onto individuals go against this principle, unless they are complemented by a broader system that includes institutions based on risk-pooling and collective financing. In this sense, the profile of social security financing is also crucial and requires going not only beyond strict contributory schemes but also toward a progressive tax system that avoids any type of gender bias in taxation. Social protection systems are tools for redistribution and for setting the foundation of more equitable societies. Fourth, social protection floors must include the issue of care as one of its central axes (Onu Mujeres et al. 2013). Universal access to public care services is essential to dismantle the basic sources of reproduction of gender inequality. The provision of care based on the principle of universality, while respecting people’s diverse needs, is key to guaranteeing the right to care and to generate the necessary conditions for the redistribution of care responsibilities. These services must include not only those for children but also those for the elderly, chronically ill, and disabled people, and must guarantee decent work conditions for paid care workers. The construction of basic social protection floors can follow different strategies. There are in fact multiple experiences that provide good examples to address the inclusion of women in these schemes and to reduce gender gaps. For instance, pension reforms that implement universal pension components have been shown to have been effective in the inclusion of women and the improvement of the material living conditions of older women, who are often alone to face social risks (Arza 2015; Cepal 2019). Examples are the Pensión Básica Solidaria de Vejez (Basic Old-Age Solidarity Pension) in Chile, the Renta Universal de Vejez “Renta Dignidad” in Bolivia (Universal Old Age Income “Dignity Income”), or the pension moratorium system in Argentina. The progressive construction of comprehensive national care systems is another example of expanding protection floors with a sense of universality and solidarity (Aguirre and Ferrari 2014; Esquivel and Kaufman 2016). Such is the case of the National Care System in Uruguay, formally created in 2015, based on principles of universality, solidarity, and progressivity, which is expanding care services for children under three, the elderly, and people with disabilities. All these initiatives require, of course, political will, social consensus, and the allocation of the necessary resources.

Toward feminist global social policy In various parts of the world feminism has become an increasingly active and progressive social force. The feminist agenda has been driving central questions on the dynamics of reproduction of inequality and denouncing the central conflict of our societies: that between the accumulation of capital and the sustainability of life (Pérez Orozco 2014). The logic of capital accumulation, driven by extractive forms of production and consumption is incompatible with the 455

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sustainability of life, as illustrated, for example, by the Global Footprint Network estimate that we would need 1.7 worlds to keep current patterns of consumption and production (www. footprintnetwork.org). Moreover, the deepening of inequality that is promoted by this mode of accumulation is incompatible with the feminist aspiration for a more egalitarian society and for women’s greater autonomy. Building a feminist global social policy can be a useful tool to address part of these conflicts. For that, some key elements are essential. To begin with, a contextual analysis is needed that reveals the differences between countries’ development levels and within-country inequalities—an analysis that recognizes not only differences but also commonalities. These commonalities are explained by deepening fiscal austerity and labor precarity both in the Global North and in the South (Razavi and Staab 2019). There is still a need for feminist research that examines and makes visible the links between macroeconomic policies and social outcomes, as well as between macroeconomic policies, fiscal pressures, and the prospects of social protection systems. A feminist global social policy should be based on human rights principles, including the right to care. A  feminist approach to global social policy needs to incorporate the voice of women and diverse identities, identifying the multiple and diverse needs of people and respecting their own view of what is needed and how those needs should be handled. Moreover, intersectionality needs to be considered as a political strategy to build feminist global social policy. It is important to produce not only a sound analysis on social policy but also a grassroots benchmark to the strategy of political coalition-building in order to support transformative social policy (Williams 2019). Such policy should not only guarantee basic standards of living for all but also modify the roots of inequality reproduction, such as the sexual division of labor, the precarity of paid work, and the concentration of income. More feminist research on what has worked and what has not worked in this regard might be useful. Social reproduction and care should be at the center of a feminist global social policy. This implies not only considering care provision as a key element of any social protection system but also understanding how all social policy interacts with the social organization of care. As such, social policy can either deepen traditional sexual division of labor and cultural norms or, on the contrary, can be a strong tool to challenge them. To think about these connections from a global perspective requires paying special attention to global care chains and the multiple vulnerabilities that women migrants face through them (see Gammage, this volume). Social rights of migrants are a specific dimension of global social policy. A feminist perspective to social policy needs to address the role of employment in social protection. It needs to explain both gender inequalities in employment (Rubery and Figueiredo 2019) and the structural exclusion of women from accessing contributory social security systems and the still remaining difficulties of recognizing through social policy the contribution of unpaid care work. A broader approach to work should be the basis of global social policy institutions, which should serve to transform the global social organization of work and care. Mobilizing resources to build the proper institutions for a feminist global social policy is a key strategy. Therefore, the discussion on this topic should go hand in hand with the debate about alternative financing for development, which necessarily approaches the broader issues of tax justice, global tax cooperation, and macroeconomic policy.

References Aguilar, Paula. 2011. “La feminización de la pobreza: conceptualizaciones actuales y potencialidades analíticas” [Feminization of Poverty: Current Conceptualization and Analytical Possibilities]. Revista Katálysis 14 (1): 126–33.

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Global social policy Aguirre, Rosario, and Fernanda Ferrari. 2014. La construcción del sistema de cuidados en el Uruguay: En busca de consensos para una protección social más igualitaria [The Building of the Care System in Uruguay. Searching for Agreements for a More Egalitarian Social Protection]. Santiago: ECLAC. Antonopoulos, Rania. 2008. The Unpaid Care Work-Paid Work Connection. Annandale-On-Hudson: Levy Economics Institute. ———, ed. 2014. Gender Perspective and Gender Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis. New York: Routledge. Arza, Camila. 2015. “Gender Dimensions of Pension Systems: Policies and Constraints for the Protection of Women.” Discussion Paper 1, UN Women, New York. Bardasi, Elena, and Quentin Wodon. 2010. “Working Long Hours and Having No Choice: Time Poverty in Guinea.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 45–78. Bergmann, Barbara. 2008. “Basic Income Grants or the Welfare State: Which Better Promotes Gender Equality?” Basic Income Studies 3 (3). www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss3/art5. DOI:10.2202/1932-0183.1128 Cepal. 2019. De beneficiarias a ciudadanas. Acceso y tratamiento de las mujeres en los sistemas de pensiones en América Latina [From Beneficiaries to Citizens. Access and Treatment of Women in Pension Systems in Latin America]. Santiago: Cepal. Chant, Sylvia. 2015. The Feminization of Poverty: A Reflection 20 Years After Beijing. Geneva: UNRISD. Elgarte, Julieta. 2008. “Basic Income and the Gendered Division of Labour.” Basic Income Studies 3 (3). www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss3/art4 DOI: 10.2202/1932–0183.1136. Esquivel, Valeria, and Andrea Kaufman. 2016. Innovation in Care: New Concepts, New Actors, New Policies. Berlin: UNRISD and Friedrich Ebert Stitfung. Fultz, Elaine, and John Francis. 2013. Cash Transfer Programmes, Poverty Reduction and Empowerment of Women: A comparative Analysis. Experiences from Brazil, Chile, India, Mexico and South Africa. Geneva: ILO. Gammage, Sarah. 2010. “Time Pressed and Time Poor: Unpaid Household Work in Guatemala.” Feminist Economics 16 (3): 79–112. Ghosh, Jayati. 2009. After Crisis: Adjustment, Recovery, and Fragility in East Asia. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Holmes, Rebecca, and Nicole Jones. 2013. Gender and Social Protection in the Developing World: Beyond Mothers and Safety Nets. London: Zed Books. International Labour Office (ILO). 2019. Universal Social Protection for Human Dignity, Social Justice and Sustainable Development. Geneva: ILO. Katada, Kaori. 2010. “Basic Income and Feminist Citizenship(s): In Terms of De-Commodification and De-Familialization.” Paper presented at BIEN Congress, Sao Paulo. Martínez Franzoni, Juliana, and Koen Booven. 2012. “Blacks, Whites or Grays? Conditional Transfers and Gender Equality in Latin America.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 50 (2): 67–100. McKay, Ailsa. 2001. “Rethinking Work and Income Maintenance Policy: Promoting Gender Equality through a Citizens Basic Income.” Feminist Economics 7 (1): 93–114. Moeller, Kathryn. 2016. “A  Critical Feminist and Race Critique of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 37: 810–22. Molyneux, Maxine, Nicola Jones, and Fiona Samuels. 2016. “Can Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes Have “Transformative” Effects? Journal of Development Studies 52 (8): 1087–98. ONU Mujeres. 2017. El Progreso de las Mujeres en América Latina y el Caribe 2017. Women’s Progress in Latin America and the Caribbean 2017] Panamá: Onu Mujeres. ONU Mujeres, PNUD, OIT. 2013. Combatiendo la desigualdad desde lo básico: Piso de protección social e igualdad de género [Fighting Inequality From the Basic: Social Protection Floor and Gender Equality]. Santo Domingo: ONU Mujeres—PNUD—OIT. Orloff, Ann Shola. 1990. “Comment on Ann Withorn, is One Man’s Ceiling Another Woman’s Floor?” Paper presented at the conference, Basic Income Guarantees: A New Welfare Strategy? University of Wisconsin, Madison. ———. 1993. “Gender and Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States.” American Sociological Review 58 (3): 303–28. Pascall, Gillian. 1996. Social Policy: A New Feminist Analysis? London: Routledge. Pateman, Carole. 2004. “Democratizing Citizenship: Some Advantages of a Basic Income.” Politics & Society 32 (1): 89–105. Pérez Orozco, Amaia. 2014. La subversión feminista de la economía [Feminist Subversion of Economics]. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. Perrons, Diane. 2014. “Gendering Inequality: A Note on Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” The British Journal of Sociology 65 (4): 667–77.

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Corina Rodríguez Enríquez Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: The President and Fellows of the Harvard College. Razavi, Shara, and Silke Staab. 2019. “Rethinking Social Policy: A Gender Perspective From the Developing World.” In Handbook of Gender and Social Policy, edited by Sheila Shaver, 74–89. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Robeyns, Ingrid. 2008. “Introduction: Revisiting the Feminism and Basic Income Debates.” Basic Income Studies 3 (3), www.bepress.com/bis/vol3/iss3/art3 DOI: 10.2202/1932–0183.1137 Rodríguez Enríquez, Corina. 2011. “Programas de Transferencias Condicionadas de Ingreso e Igualdad de Género. ¿Por dónde anda América Latina?” [Conditional Cash Transfers Programs and Gender Equality. Where does Latin America stand?]. Cepal, Santiago. Serie Mujer y Desarrollo 109. ———. 2013. “Should Citizen’s Income Become a Goal for Feminis in Latin America?” In Citizen’s Income and Welfare Regimen in Latin America, edited by Rubén Lo Vuolo, 187–210. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubery, Jill, and Hugo Figueiredo. 2019. “Gender, Employment and Social Policy.” In Handbook on Gender and Social Policy, edited by Sheila Shaver, 129–52. Chentelham: Edward Elgar. Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel, and Naila Kabeer. 2003. Gender Equality and the Extension of Social Protection. Geneva: ILO. Seguino, Stephanie. 2015. “Financialization, Distribution and Inequality.” In The Remaking of Social Contracts: Feminist in a Fierce New World, edited by Gita Sen and Marina Durano. London: Zed Books. Sen, Gita, and Marina Durano, eds. 2015. The Remaking of Social Contracts: Feminist in a Fierce New World. London: Zed Books. Sepúlveda, Magdalena. 2013. “Unpaid Care Work, Poverty and Women’s Human Rights: Challenges and Opportunities for the Post-2015 Agenda.” Paper prepared for the Expert Group Meeting on Structural and Policy Constraints in Achieving the MDGs for Women and Girls, UN Women, México City. Tabbush, Constanza. 2010. “Latin American Women’s Protection after Adjustment: A Feminist Critique of Conditional Cash Transfers.” Oxford Development Studies 38 (4): 437–59. Ungerson, Clare, and Mary Kember, eds. 1997. Women and Social Policy: A Reader. London: Macmillan. Van Parijs, Philippe. 1992. Arguing for Basic Income. Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform. London: Verso Books. Williams, Fiona. 2019. “Inersectionality, Gender and Social Policy.” In Handbook of Gender and Social Policy, edited by Sheila Shaver, 37–54. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Withorn, Ann. 1990. “Women and Basic Income in the US: Is One Man’s Ceiling Another Woman’s Floor?” Journal of Progressive Human Services 4 (1): 29–43.

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47 GENDER BUDGETING Diane Elson

Introduction Government budgets are likely to have different impacts on women and men because of the different economic and social positions of women and men. Because women tend to have greater responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work than men, women tend to make more use than men of public services. Because women tend to have lower incomes than men from employment and asset ownership, they tend to receive more social security/welfare benefits than men and contribute a lower share of tax revenue than men. Cuts to expenditure on services and benefits tend to have a great adverse impact on women, especially on the most disadvantaged women. Cuts to tax rates and thresholds tend to benefit men more than women, especially the richest men. From a feminist perspective, gender budgeting means the design and implementation of government budgets in ways that support rather than undermine gender equality, looking at overall fiscal policy as well as individual programs and taxes. Since mid-1990s the idea of gender budgeting has been widely endorsed throughout the world and promoted by international organizations and NGOs. Feminist economists have contributed to gender budgeting by developing tools for analysis; advising and training officials, elected representatives and ministers; and working with NGOs that act as budget watch dogs. Many governments claim to have adopted gender budgeting though what they mean by this varies greatly. This chapter discusses the origins and spread of gender budgeting, techniques of gender budget analysis, the impact of gender budgeting, and the challenges of transformational gender budgeting. It shows how what began as a feminist initiative has in many cases been watered down by governments and international financial institutions (as with the feminist initiatives for gender mainstreaming) so that the transformational potential has been lost, and suggest that we now need to talk about a feminist fiscal policy that focuses on the macroeconomic dimensions of the budget.

Origins of gender budgeting The pioneer of gender budgeting was the federal government of Australia, in 1984, as part of a process of economic and social reform introduced by a Labor government in which feminists had a strong voice. Up until 1996, when that government lost office, an annual Women’s 459

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Budget Statement was produced alongside the budget, setting out the impact of each Department’s policies and spending on women and men. Sharp and Broomhill (2002) argue that the production of these Women’s Budget Statements had three goals: to raise awareness of the gendered impacts of the budget and the policies it funds; to make governments accountable for their commitments to gender equality; and to bring about changes to policies and budgets that would raise the social and economic status of women and further gender equality. They find that there was some degree of success in achieving these goals, but Women’s Budget Statements faced various resistances—for instance, to analyzing the revenue side of the budget. The biggest challenge was the turn to neo-liberal economic policies and downgrading of gender equality objectives by more conservative governments after 1996, that preferred to issue a short of list the budget initiatives that they considered of benefit to women, rather than analyze the impact of the budget. The idea of more transformative gender budgeting was kept alive by women’s organizations and feminist scholars and would have been reintroduced in 2019 had the Labor Party won the election (Sharp, personal communication, IAFFE Conference, June 27, 2019. Inspired by the pioneering Australian example, parliamentarians, NGOs and researchers in South Africa set up a Women’s Budget Initiative in 1994. It aimed to enable the post-­ apartheid generation of parliamentarians to scrutinize government budgets from a gender equality perspective and to hold the government accountable for its gender equality commitments (Budlender 2000). The Women’s Budget Initiative produced several influential volumes of analysis and helped to secure some gender-equitable policy changes, such as the introduction of the child support grant, and an increase in funding to support for microenterprises. However, as the focus of the South African government moved from equality to economic growth, and more neo-liberal economic policies were introduced, the South African government did not incorporate gender budgeting into the budgetary process on a regular basis (Budlender 2006). However, as in Australia, the idea of gender budgeting was kept alive and the South African government adopted gender budgeting in 2019 (Gifford 2019). Another pioneer was the government of the Philippines, which adopted a very different approach. In 1995, a provision was introduced in the General Appropriations Act mandating all government agencies to set aside at least five percent of their funding for projects designed to address gender issues. This was known as the Gender and Development (GAD) Budget and was monitored by the government office responsible for women, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW), who reported that in 1999, the GAD budget amounted to 0.6 percent of total government spending (NCRFW 1999). This limited form of gender budgeting was reported to be still in place in 2015 (Chakraborty 2016).

International spread of gender budgeting In 1995, gender budgeting was endorsed in the Beijing Platform for Action, the outcome document of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, in paragraphs 345 and 346, which called for governments to integrate a gender perspective in budgetary decisions and adjust budgets to ensure equality of access to public sector expenditures (UN 1995). Women activists who gathered at the parallel NGO conference were concerned that without this mandate many of the commitments in the Platform for Action would not be funded. They wanted to be able to “follow the money” to see who was benefiting (and who was not) from government budgets. Since then gender budgeting ideas and practices have spread to large numbers of countries, with an ongoing tension between narrow approaches that confine themselves to a focus on expenditures that are explicitly targeted to women and girls and/or gender equality objectives, and more comprehensive approaches that analyze policies and expenditure across a wide range 460

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of sectors. There has been relatively less attention to taxation and not much attention to the macroeconomics of the budget. Because of the huge variation in practices it is not possible to cite one study that shows definitively how gender budgeting is done. Gender budgeting has been promoted by a number of international organizations, beginning with the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1995 (Budlender et al. 2002), as a follow up to its critical analysis of the gendered impact of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank stabilization and structural adjustment policies. United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) began supporting work on gender budgeting in 1998 (UNIFEM 2002) and its successor organization, UN Women, has continued to be a key supporter of gender budgeting, arguing that gender-equitable government budgets are important for empowering women and realizing their rights. There has been considerable variation in the types of gender budgeting activities supported by UN Women, shaped by local economic, political and social conditions. Examples are available at (UN Women 2019). Feminist economists Rhonda Sharp and I were advisers to the Commonwealth Secretariat gender budget initiative and to UNIFEM and UN Women. We aimed to transform budgeting processes, expand the understanding of the economy to include unpaid care and domestic work, and engage with macroeconomic policy (Elson 1999; Sharp 2003) but governments tended to prefer a much narrower focus on a limited range of expenditures, and did not engage with the impact on unpaid care and domestic work nor with the gender implications of macroeconomic policy. Gender budgeting also became a focus of attention in some Western European countries, from civil society in some cases and from governments in others (O’Hagan and Klatzer 2018). For instance, in the UK, beginning in 1989, an independent network of feminist researchers and activists, the Women’s Budget Group (WBG), analyzed and publicized the gender impacts of government budgets, with a focus on taxation and social security (Himmelweit 2002). In Austria, the government began gender analysis of selected budget items in 2005, and integrated gender budgeting in the overall budget process when performance-based budgeting—a system in which allocations are linked to the achievement of specific objectives—was introduced beginning in 2009 (Klatzer, Brait, and Schlager 2018). Rather late in the day, the IMF discovered gender budgeting and in 2014 a research project on gender budgeting was initiated at the IMF by Janet Stotsky with a focus on how gender budgeting can make public spending more efficient as well as more equitable. Stotsky argued that the rationale for gender budgeting is that budgets may not adequately take into account the full economic benefits of women’s development and gender equality (Stotsky 2016, 9). This project surveyed gender budgeting efforts in all regions of the world (Chakraborty 2016; Christie and Thakur 2016; Pérez Fragoso and Rodríguez Enríquez 2016; Quinn 2016; Stotsky, Kolovich, and Kebhaj 2016). It found that by 2016 more than 80 countries had experienced some variant of gender budgeting practices, and identified 23, spread across all regions where it considered there had been the most substantive gender budgeting efforts. Policy implications were drawn for governments, but not for the policy conditions that the IMF attaches to its loans (Stotsky 2016). The IMF has conducted a number of training workshops for government officials and given advice on gender budgeting to a number of governments. However, there does not seem to be any rethinking of the IMF’s own fiscal policy conditions (Burgisser 2019). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considers gender budgeting to be a contribution to good governance (Downes, von Trapp, and Nicol 2016, 4). The OECD conducted a survey of gender budgeting in OECD countries in 2016 and found that while the majority of the 34 OECD governments do not explicitly undertake gender budgeting and there was little consensus on what gender budgeting actually entails, nevertheless, 461

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12 countries had introduced gender budgeting and half could point to positive achievements in terms of changes in policies and outcomes (Downes, von Trapp, and Nicol 2016). The OECD has an ongoing program of work on gender budgeting, including expert groups meetings, and inclusion in the OECD’s standard Budget Review.

Gender budget analysis Feminist economists have made major contributions to the wide range of resources on gender budget analysis, including academic articles and books, tool kits on how to do gender analysis of budgets, and reports of international agencies. One of the first academic articles, Elson (1998), reviews ways in which budgets may be analyzed from a gender perspective, drawing on Budlender (1996), Cagatay, Elson, and Grown (1995), and Sharp (1997). While this is not a manual for how to do gender budget analysis, it laid the foundations on which many manuals have been constructed. The gender perspective includes use of gender-disaggregated beneficiary assessments that seek people’s views of the adequacy of provision of public services; assessments of the potential interaction between services and infrastructure and unpaid domestic and care work; and assessments of the contribution of public sector to reduction of gender gaps in employment and pay, directly through public sector employment and indirectly through public sector procurement. Other tools are gender disaggregated incidence analysis of expenditure, taxation and income transfers; and identification of gender bias in the tax system. Among the ways to provide gender analysis of the macroeconomic strategy embedded in the budget is to incorporate the unpaid care and domestic economy into macroeconomic modeling, using data from time-use surveys that reveal unpaid as well as paid work. This approach would ensure that the sustainability of the aggregate budget deficit or surplus would be assessed not only in financial terms but in social terms, revealing for instance depletion of women’s capacities and undermining of the social framework through budget deficit reduction strategies that place too much reliance on women’s unpaid work to substitute for public services and income transfers. However, governments that claim to do gender budgeting have not pursued this approach in practice. Research to further develop such tools has been conducted by a project on Care Work and the Economy led by feminist economist Maria Floro (see www.careworkeconomy.org). I subsequently built on some of these ideas to produce a set of six tools for gender budget analysis of expenditure (Commonwealth Secretariat 1999). These tools have been widely disseminated by other international agencies and modified in various ways to address different national contexts. They have mainly been used to assess expenditure, not taxation or the overall fiscal stance of the government. The lack of gender-disaggregated data (and lack of willingness of governments to invest more in collecting such data) has been a barrier to realizing the potential of these tools, as has the fact that some of these tools require technical expertise that is often not available. Budlender and Sharp (1998) produced a widely used training handbook, making these tools more accessible, and designed to help officials to prepare a gender-sensitive budget statement. Some of these tools have been used by NGOs, such as the UK WBG (WBG 2018). An example of feminist gender budget analysis is the gender-disaggregated expenditureincidence analysis developed by Austen et al. (2013) for education in Timor Leste. Subsequently Christie and Thakur (2016) found that the analysis had helped to inform Ministry of Education in developing a social inclusion policy to address gender gaps in schooling consistent with the recommendations of Austen et al. (2013). Gender analysis of the revenue side of the budget has been developed in a multi-country study that considered both direct and indirect personal taxation (Grown and Valodia 2010). The 462

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study conducted some simulations of policy reforms and concluded that VAT could be made more supportive of gender equality by reducing or zero-rating basic food items, removing VAT on children’s clothing and footwear, and reducing VAT on kerosene and paraffin. Ideally an incidence analysis would consider the net impact of both expenditure and taxation on incomes and the standard of living. The UK WBG (WBG 2017) has done this looking at the impact of cuts that have been announced to spending on social security/welfare benefits and public services and changes in personal taxation in England for the period 2010 to 2020. While individual level data are available in the UK for incomes, payments of direct taxes and receipt of social security/welfare benefits, it is not available for the use of public services, so the study adopts a similar approach to that used in Grown and Valodia (2010) and examines households differentiated by demographic and gender characteristics. It examines the impact on living standards as measured by disposable cash incomes plus the value of public services received (as measured by public expenditure on these services). It finds that lone mothers will be worst affected, losing on average 18 percent of the value of their 2010 living standard by 2020. Those least affected are working-age couples with no children, though even they lose around 5 percent. Data availability allowed analysis of incidence of the cuts to social security/welfare benefits and tax changes on individuals by gender, race and income group. The greatest losses will be borne by low-income women of Asian ethnic origin, who stand to lose 19 percent of their individual disposable income by 2020. Of course, analysis of incidence of cuts does not reveal the stress of those experiencing the cuts. For that qualitative research is needed. The WBG conducted qualitative research with women in two English cities so that they could make public their personal experiences of the difficulties the cuts had created for them. The combination of statistics and stories was effective in getting media coverage and attention from parliamentarians. However, it did not persuade the government to abandon its austerity program. There are no examples available of governments that have conducted this kind of comprehensive gender impact analysis. The IMF research project on gender budgeting reported that 80 or so governments have in some way engaged with gender budgeting, of which only 23 countries had a substantive engagement. Of these, 19 countries included a gender budgeting statement in budget documentation, 21 included gender budgeting in planning and programming and 17 provided explicit reporting on gender equality spending. But there was no detail on what tools of analysis were used (Stotsky 2016, 15). Some governments, such as the government of India, focused on developing a budget classification system that could identify allocations considered to be for gender equality and women’s empowerment. The government of India reported such spending as ranging from 2.79 percent to 6.22 percent of the total spending of the Indian government in the period 2005/6 to 2015/16 (Chakraborty 2016, 19). This is labeled the “gender budget” in the budget documents and is calculated as expenditure on programs specifically for women and girls; and expenditure on programs with “Pro-women allocations,” in which at least 30 percent of beneficiaries are supposed to be women. However, there is no clear way of verifying how much of this expenditure actually goes to women and whether it supports their empowerment (Mishra and Sinha 2012). A different approach was adopted in Rwanda, where UNIFEM/UN Women had provided support for gender budgeting (Stotsky, Kolovich, and Kebhaj 2016, 19–21). From 2011/12 all Ministries were asked to prepare a Gender Budget Statement that begins with gender analysis, then identifies outputs and activities required to improve gender equality and women’s empowerment, and gender sensitive indicators of success in achieving these outputs, and finally, reports the amount of money allocated. This provides a stronger link with policy than the approach adopted in India. 463

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The report on gender budgeting in OECD countries classifies gender budgeting approaches in ways that cover, among other things, what kinds of analysis is being used (Downes, von Trapp, and Nicol 2016, 15). It found that of the 12 countries that had introduced gender budgeting 75 percent had conducted ex ante gender impact assessment of individual budget measures, in advance of their inclusion in the budget. A  gender-needs assessment had been conducted by 33 percent. Gender-related incidence analysis of the budget’s overall impact had been conducted by 50 percent. An ex post gender impact assessment had been conducted by 58 percent. Thus, it is possible that some of the tools recommended by feminist economists are being used. However, it is impossible to be sure because the report did not specify how the assessments had been carried out. The report did however find that the rigor with which they were conducted and their impact on the budget process appear to be variable (Downes, von Trapp, and Nicol 2016, 3).

Has gender budgeting had any impact on outcomes for women? There are difficulties in coming to a general conclusion because of the wide variety of forms of gender budgeting that have been tried out, many of which have lacked a strong link to policy. Much of the literature focuses on the ways that budget procedures have been changed, including use of sex-disaggregated data, but does not focus on outcomes. Considering the situation in the early 2000s, drawing on her deep personal knowledge, Budlender (2006) acknowledged that gender budgeting initiatives had produced relatively few budget changes. She points out that in any case policies seldom change because of availability of new and better analysis. Moreover, most of the officials involved in gender budgeting training had no power to change budgets. In many of the poorest countries it was the aid donors and international financial institution that had greatest power over the budget. Gender budgeting, she concluded, faces many constraints and must not be seen as a panacea. The IMF research project tried to assess impact in a selection of countries with substantive gender budgeting experience by examining a range of country gender equality indicators for health, education, employment etc. before and after introduction of gender budgeting, in comparison with similar countries that had not introduced gender budgeting (Kolovich 2018). However, there is a problem of attribution: if maternal mortality falls and gender gaps in education fall in a country that has adopted some form of gender budgeting, how far can that be attributed to gender budgeting and how far do other factors play a role, such as economic growth and poverty reduction? Attribution is not such a problem if attention is focused on intervening variables such as use of gender equality indicators in the budget process and changes in budget allocations. For instance, gender budgeting in Rwanda did lead to use of gender equality indicators in the budget process and to allocation of finance to improve women’s access to water, health services, and to support women farmers (Kolovich 2018, 15). The OECD reported that of the 12 OECD countries that had introduced gender budgeting, half were able to point to specific examples where it had brought about significant changes in budget allocations and/or policies (Downes, von Trapp, and Nicol 2016, 22). For instance, in 2015, the government of Iceland proposed to simplify the income tax system, moving from three bands to two and abolishing permission for the higher income partner of a couple to benefit from unused tax credit of the lower income partner. The parliamentary budget committee initially proposed a continuation of the permission to use the tax credit of lower income partner. However, owing to its gender budget analysis, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs was able to point out that this would mainly benefit men, since they are the higher income partner in 75 percent of marriages, and so their disposable income would increase as would 464

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the gender income gap, contrary to the goal of economic equality between men and women. Thanks to this information the budget committee accepted the tax reform. A study of 21 gender-budgeting initiatives in Latin America, covering examples not only at national level, but also subnational and local levels, found that eleven had achieved a re-­ orientation of policies and programs to address gender gaps more effectively; and sixteen had resulted in increased amounts explicitly allocated for gender equality (Barba and Coello 2017, 129). However, the study does not provide information on how big the increases were in relation to total expenditure and whether there had been any rethinking of mainstream expenditures. A study of gender budgeting in Asia Pacific found gender budgeting had led to increases in expenditures targeted to gender equality, both absolutely and as a proportion of total expenditure, in Indonesia, Nepal, and at local level in the Philippines. However, in India and Bangladesh there had been no significant increases (Mishra and Sinha 2017, 164). Differences in how governments defined expenditures for gender equality means it is not possible to say unambiguously which government are doing best (in terms of share of the budget). In only one case, the Indian state of Kerala, was it possible to identify changes to allocations and outputs in sectors that typically neglect gender issues, such as transport (Mishra and Sinha 2017, 166). Overall it appears that while gender budgeting undertaken by some governments has had some impact on allocations for specific programs that are particularly relevant for gender equality, there is a need for more systematic case study research on the impacts of gender budgeting, distinguishing between different types of gender budgeting, and between inputs of finance, outputs of programs, and outcomes for different groups of women as compared to men, as well as on the gender dimensions of taxation.

Challenges for transformational gender budgeting There are two key challenges that must be addressed if the transformational potential of gender budgeting is to be realized. The first is to ensure that the whole budget is addressed, not just those expenditures that are explicitly targeted to gender equality. Investments in water and sanitation, in transport, in clean energy, in health and education services and care services and in social security/welfare benefits, are all capable of reducing gender gaps and improving women’s lives if planned and implemented in a gender-responsive way (Seguino 2017). The second is to address the macroeconomics of the budget. Globalization of trade, investment and finance has led to a squeeze on fiscal space, restricting the ability of individual governments to raise revenue and manage international borrowing, as import duties are cut, corporation tax is cut to attract multinational companies and financial liberalization has led to unstable inflows and outflows of finance and financial crises (Elson 2006; Seguino 2017). This has been compounded by austerity policies, often undertaken as conditions of IMF loans, which respond to the rising budget deficits that have been induced by financial crises by cutting public expenditure (Seguino 2017). Gender budget analysis needs to show how this leads not only to increasing gender inequality, but also false economies, preventing public investment that would both support gender equality and also increase employment, output and tax revenues (Seguino 2017). But this is not the kind of analysis that most governments, and the IMF, have been interested doing. Many governments, and the IMF, have interpreted gender budgeting in ways that limit its transformative potential, concentrating on the budget only at the level of specific programs. Improved tools and data would be useful but will not be decisive. The barriers to a more transformative use of gender budgeting are primarily political. When more progressive governments are in power, gender budgeting is used in ways that are more likely to have a widespread positive 465

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impact. As feminist economists we need to be ready to seize opportunities to work with progressive political forces to secure a truly feminist fiscal policy.

References Austen, Siobhan, Monica Costa, Rhonda Sharp, and Diane Elson. 2013. “Expenditure Incidence Analysis: A Gender-Responsive Budgeting Tool for Educational Expenditure in Timor-Leste?” Feminist Economics 19 (4): 1–24. Barba, Lorena, and Raquel Coello. 2017. “Gender Responsive Budgeting in Latin America: Regional Learning to Advance Financing for Gender Equality.” In Financing for Gender Equality, edited by Zohra Khan and Nalini Burn, 105–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Budlender, Debbie. 1996. The Women’s Budget. Cape Town: Institute for Democracy in South Africa. ———. 2000. “The Political Economy of Women’s Budgets in the South.” World Development 28 (7): 1365–78. ———. 2006. “Expectations versus Realities in Gender-Responsive Budget Initiatives.” In Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context, edited by Shireen Hassim and Shahra Razavi, 322–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Budlender, Debbie, Diane Elson, Guy Hewitt, and Tanni Mukhopadhyay. 2002. Gender Budgets Make Cents. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Budlender, Debbie, and Rhonda Sharp. 1998. How to Do Gender-Sensitive Budget Analysis. Contemporary Research and Practice. London: Commonwealth Secretariat and AusAid. Burgisser, Emma. 2019. “The IMF and Gender Equality: Operationalizing Change.” Bretton Woods Project, London. www.brettonwoodsproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/OperationalisingChange.pdf. Cagatay, Nilufer, Diane Elson, and Caren Grown. 1995. “Introduction to Gender, Adjustment and ­Macroeconomics.” World Development 23 (11): 1827–36. Chakraborty, Lekha. 2016. “Asia: A  Survey of Gender Budgeting Efforts.” IMF Working Paper WP/16/150, IMF, Washington, DC. Christie, Tamoya A. L., and Dhanaraj Thakur. 2016. “Caribbean and Pacific Islands: A Survey of Gender Budgeting Efforts.” IMF Working Paper 16/154, IMF, Washington, DC. Commonwealth Secretariat. 1999. Gender Budget Initiative. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Downes, Ronnie, Lisa von Trapp, and Scherie Nicol. 2016. “Gender budgeting in OECD countries.” OECD Journal on Budgeting 3: 1–37. Elson, Diane.1998. “Integrating Gender Issues into National Budgetary Policies and Procedures: Some Policy Options.” Journal of International Development 10 (7): 929–41. ———. 1999. Gender Neutral, Gender-Blind, or Gender-Sensitive Budgets? Changing the Conceptual Framework to Include Women’s Empowerment and the Economy of Care. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. ———. 2006. “Gender Equality, Public Finance and Globalization.” In Human Development in the Era of Globalization, edited by James Boyce, Stephen Cullenberg, Prasanta Pattanaik, and Robert Pollin, 239–56. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar. Gifford, Katherine. 2019. Update re: South Africa and GRB. Email to author. 30 July. Grown, Caren, and Imraan Valodia, eds. 2010. Taxation and Gender Equity. London: Routledge. Himmelweit, Susan. 2002. “Making Visible the Hidden Economy: The Case for Gender-Impact Analysis of Economic Policy.” Feminist Economics 8 (1): 49–70. Klatzer, Elizabeth, Romana Brait, and Christa Schlager. 2018. “The Case of Austria: Reflections on Strengthening the Potential of Gender Budgeting for Substantial Change.” In Gender Budgeting in Europe. Developments and Challenges, edited by O’Hagan, Angela and Klatzer, Elizabeth, 137–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kolovich, Lisa, ed. 2018. Fiscal Policies and Gender Equality. Washington DC: IMF. Mishra, Yamini, and Navanita Sinha. 2012. “Gender Responsive Budgeting in India: What Has Gone Wrong?” Economic and Political Weekly 47 (50): 50–57. ———. 2017. “Gender Incursions in the Domain of Budgets: The Practice of GRB in Asia Pacific.” In Financing for Gender Equality, edited by Zohra Khan and Nalini Burn, 141–75. London: Palgrave Macmillan. National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women. 1999. Planning and Budgeting for Gender Equality: The Philippine Experience. Manila: NCRFW.

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Gender budgeting O’Hagan, Angela, and Klatzer, Elizabeth, eds. 2018. Gender Budgeting in Europe. Developments and Challenges. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pérez Fragoso, Lucia, and Corina Rodríguez Enríquez. 2016. “Western Hemisphere: A Survey of Gender Budgeting Efforts.” IMF Working Paper 16/153, IMF, Washington, DC. Quinn, Sheila. 2016. “Europe: A Survey of Gender Budgeting Efforts.” IMF Working Paper 16/155, IMF, Washington, DC. Seguino, Stephanie. 2017. “Financing for Gender Equality: Reframing and Prioritizing Public Expenditure to Promote Gender Equality.” In Financing for Gender Equality, edited by Zohra Khan and Nalini Burn, 5–24. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sharp, Rhonda. 1997. “A  Framework for Gathering Budget Information From Government Departments and Authorities’’. Faculty of Business and Management, University of South Australia, Mimeo, Adelaide. ———. 2003. Budgeting for Equity. Gender Budget Initiatives within a Framework of Performance-Oriented Budgeting. New York: UNIFEM. Sharp, Rhonda, and Ray Broomhill. 2002. “Budgeting for Equality: The Australian Experience.” Feminist Economics 8 (1): 25–47. Stotsky, Janet G. 2016. “Gender Budgeting: Fiscal Context and Current Outcomes.” IMF Working Paper WP/16/149, IMF, Washington, DC. Stotsky, Janet G., Lisa Kolovich, and Suhaib Kebhaj. 2016. “Sub-Saharan Africa: A  Survey of Gender Budgeting Efforts.” IMF Working Paper 16/152, IMF, Washington, DC. UN. 1995. Fourth World Conference on Women. Platform for Action and Beijing Declaration. New York: UN Department of Public Information. UNIFEM. 2002. Gender Budget Initiatives. Strategies, Concepts and Experiences. New York: UNIFEM. UN Women. 2019. “Financing for Gender Equality.” Accessed September  19, 2019. https://genderfinancing.unwomen.org/en. Women’s Budget Group. 2018. “Women Count.” A Casebook for Gender Responsive Budgeting Groups. Accessed September 19, 2019. https://wbg.org.uk. Women’s Budget Group and the Runnymede Trust. 2017. “Intersecting Inequalities.” The Impact of Austerity on Black and Minority Ethnic Women in the UK. Accessed July 27, 2019. https://wbg.org. uk/analysis/intersecting-inequalities/.

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48 SMART ECONOMICS Elisabeth Prügl

Introduction “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” is the title of the World Bank’s 2007 to 2010 Gender Action Plan. The plan significantly broadened the Bank’s traditional approach to gender as a matter of social policy concerning mostly areas such as health and education and instead mainstreamed gender into the Bank’s core mandate—that is, economic development and growth. Smart Economics has since become a shorthand for policies and programs that make the business case for gender equality. The Smart Economics approach has generated considerable resonance. It has received enthusiastic acclaim from businesses, with whom the Bank at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos launched the Global Private Sector Leaders Forum to support the goals of the Gender Action Plan (The Global Private Sector Leaders Forum n.d.). International organizations also have embraced its framing: thus, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has taken on some of the Bank’s conceptualizations in its own work on gender (FAO 2011), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has begun to pay long-overdue attention to gender in macroeconomic policies (e.g., Elborgh-Woytek et al. 2013). Moreover, governments have welcomed the new approach as a significant push forward in the struggle for gender equality, and even NGOs have jumped on the bandwagon (Chant 2016). But the Smart Economics approach has also garnered fierce criticism from feminist academics who have diagnosed it as an instance of feminist movement ideas being co-opted into neoliberal orthodoxy. The approach subordinates the goals of gender equality to gains in economic efficiency and redefines women as rational economic actors who can be integrated into a capitalist economy without changing the structural inequalities intrinsic in this economy (Roberts and Soederberg 2012; Calkin 2015c; Esquivel 2017). My purpose in this chapter is to provide an overview of the Smart Economics approach, embedding it historically in international gender policies, outlining the contours of its propositions together with critiques, and highlighting the way it has been embraced by businesses. I argue that the approach is more than a World Bank gender mainstreaming strategy: instead, it is the ideological component of a hegemonic project to give neoliberalism a feminist face (Roberts 2015; Prügl 2016). The approach incorporates feminism into neoliberalism, coopting feminist ideas; but these ideas also come to inflect neoliberalism, creating potential openings for feminist agendas. 468

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The origins of Smart Economics in neoliberalism and gender mainstreaming The World Bank’s engagement with gender equality emerged in the parallel contexts of the UN Decade for Women and the rise of neoliberal policy orthodoxy. Labeled “the Washington Consensus” this orthodoxy redefined the role of the state as limited to creating the institutional environment for the emergence of free markets and put forward prescriptions for privatization, the dismantling of developmentalist and welfare schemes, and the promotion of an ethos of individual responsibility. It provided the death knell to “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982), in which the social costs of the free market economy were buffered with social welfare programs. In the Global South neoliberalism was applied to “fixing” highly indebted economies that, battered by instabilities in exchange rates in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime, found themselves on the brink of default. The Washington Consensus prescribed “structural adjustment”—that is, more market solutions—creating severe economic hardship and leaving a legacy of rapidly increasing inequality. At the height of structural adjustment, neoliberal Bank orthodoxy framed women’s issues as a social matter, fundamentally separate from economics. Thus, when the Bank started to introduce gender considerations into its projects in the late 1980s, it paid little attention to the investment and structural adjustment programs that represented at least a third of Bank lending at the time (Long 2006, 43). At the end of the century, proliferating evidence of the negative impacts of structural adjustment on the poor led to a modification of neoliberal policy approaches and the formulation of a “post-Washington Consensus” that recognized the need for flanking social protection programs to accompany free market policies, and gender issues came to be associated with social policies. The reorientation opened up discursive and policy space to consider gender equality in economic development more broadly, and in the new century, the Bank gradually mainstreamed gender considerations into its core business. The decisive shift came with the adoption of its second Gender Action Plan in 2007. Following a broad gender mainstreaming logic, the Plan squarely prioritized issues of economic development, including previously neglected sectors, “such as infrastructure, agriculture, private sector development, and labor markets” (World Bank, Independent Evaluation Group 2016, 1). It identified four “action areas”: mainstreaming operations and technical assistance in economic sectors; engaging in results-based initiatives; improving research and statistics; and undertaking a targeted communications campaign (World Bank 2006, 9). With regard to the first action area, superficial success was achieved quickly. In the fiscal year 2013, staff reported that 98 percent of Bank lending was “gender-informed,” that is, project appraisals (which typically precede project implementation) ascertained that gender had been considered at this stage (Development Committee 2013, 3). However, internal and external evaluations diagnosed problems with regard to quality and depth of gender mainstreaming, suggesting that it is “at least somewhat a paper-based activity . . . rather than significantly altering project design” (Kenny and O’Donnell 2016, 13; World Bank, Independent Evaluation Group 2016). With regard to results-based initiatives, the Bank managed to include gender as one of four special themes in the strategic plan of the International Development Association (which funds poverty-oriented operations) and, in 2014, designated gender as a “cross-cutting solution area.” In this way, the topic became an institutional priority and part of its strategic planning process. Efforts to improve knowledge and statistics led to a number of publications, including the 2012 World Development Report (World Bank 2011) and a new series on legal and institutional 469

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barriers to gender equality (Bedford 2009; World Bank 2018). And a new “Gender Data Portal,” launched in 2012, pulled together sex-disaggregated demographic, economic, and social data from a variety of sources (Gender Data Portal n.d.). But perhaps most importantly, the Bank engaged in a significant communications campaign, generating awareness not only inside but also outside the organization. One key effort was to bring business on board as a partner in support of the goals of the Gender Action Plan. The creation of the Global Private Sector Leaders Forum and its launch at Davos were part of this effort; the Forum included CEOs from major companies, such as Goldman Sachs, Cisco Systems, Nike, Boeing, Hindustan Unilever, and the large international accounting firms, who all pledged to include women’s empowerment into their corporate social responsibility initiatives. Nike became a particularly important partner that joined the Bank in its adolescent girls initiative. Private foundations, such as the Gates and Clinton foundations, fell in line and joined the chorus of liberal elites ready to make women fit for capitalism and capitalism fit for women. A number of circumstances converged to make the Smart Economics agenda resonate. The Bank’s communications campaign fortuitously coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, which spawned gender anxieties as reports of sexism in finance and macho hubris on Wall Street hit the news in conjunction with news of the economic damage wrought by reckless male gambling (Prügl 2012). Messages about the potentially moderating influence of supposedly more risk-averse women flourished in parallel and may have created a certain receptiveness among policymakers to issues of gender equality. Moreover, an increasing number of governments demanded gender mainstreaming at the World Bank, including through contributions to a special trust fund set up for the matter in 2005. The Dutch and Norway led the way and were joined in the course of the late 2000s by Sweden, Canada, Germany, the UK, Australia, Iceland, and Spain (World Bank 2008). Smart Economics is thus more than a World Bank plan; it is part of a hegemonic project to adjust neoliberalism to new economic and political realities. As a slogan, it captured a zeitgeist profoundly marked by the financial crisis, but also anchored in the post-Washington understanding that social concerns belonged to economic policymaking, and recognizing that gender mainstreaming is what a global organization committed to a liberal economic future needed to do. The project entailed no less than the integration of gender equality goals into an economy governed by classical principles yet open to moderation. The outlines of this neoliberalism with a feminist face are the topic of the next section.

Smart Economics at the World Bank: neoliberalism with a feminist face The core innovation of Smart Economics is that it makes the struggle for gender equality compatible with the World Bank’s quest for economic growth. Making a win-win argument, gender equality becomes a matter of efficiency, benefiting the economy, businesses, and society all at once (Berik 2017a). Orthodox economics and liberal feminism are both anchored in liberalism and share many of its assumptions, including the core value of equality. In the neoclassical tradition, markets are most efficient when all economic actors have equal opportunities. Moreover its neoliberal version suggests also the converse, that is, that markets will root out inequalities because they are inefficient: discriminating employers will not survive competition. But other branches of economics and feminism are skeptical of this mutual imbrication of markets and equality. In particular, heterodox feminist economists who subscribe to the social provisioning approach 470

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(SPA) favored in this Handbook and feminist political economists are critical of the silencing of nonmarket care work, goals of welfare (rather than efficiency and individual utility maximization), and questions of gender, class, and race/ethnic inequalities in neoclassical formulations, expecting rather that unfettered competition deepens social divisions (Power 2004; Roberts and Elias 2017). Although for Smart Economics the neoclassical suggestion that equal opportunities drive growth is central, it also selectively incorporates ideas from heterodox feminist economics. It recognizes that institutions matter and that it is necessary to eliminate not just individual biases but also institutional discrimination. In addition, it requires ensuring equal access to resources, investments in women’s education and health, and empowering them economically and politically. Smart Economics thus is not only a matter of feminism being co-opted into neoliberal logics but also a case of feminist ideas subverting orthodoxy. The details of this Janus-faced character are outlined in the following.

Making gender equality compatible with economic growth Feminist critiques of development policies have long questioned the Bank’s tendency to define development as market-based growth. Feminist economists have argued that such development has benefited men disproportionately and that the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s came at the expense of women’s unpaid labor (Beneria, Berik, and Floro 2015). The demand for gender equality thus has seemed to stand in tension with the Bank’s single-minded focus on economic growth, a tension that the Bank could safely ignore as long as its gender equality policies mostly focused on improving women’s “human capital,” that is, education and health. But once the Bank committed to mainstreaming gender into its core business, that is, economic development (defined as growth), it had to take seriously this feminist critique and square it with its core values. For the Bank, the suggestion that growth advances gender equality was intuitively evident from the fact that richer countries typically are more gender equal than poorer countries. But its development economists were not able to show convincingly that economic growth is either good or bad for gender equality (Kabeer and Natali 2013; Nallari and Griffith 2011; Morrison, Dhushyanth, and Sinha 2007). Indeed, for semi-industrialized countries heterodox feminist economists documented a correlation between gender wage inequality and export-led growth (Seguino 2019, 2000; Berik, Rodgers, and Zveglich 2004). In light of this difficulty, the Bank shifted its research to the micro level of households and reversed the logic of the argument; if growth cannot be shown to produce gender equality, perhaps can gender equality be shown to produce growth? Here it found abundant evidence, documented in the 2012 World Development Report, confirming that households and firms are better off when women are empowered: gender equality in labor force participation, education, and access to resources and assets increases individual productivity and efficiency, presumably with ramifications for aggregate performance (World Bank 2011). However, the issue of unequal wages dropped off the radar (Berik 2017b). Focusing on microeconomics sidestepped feminist critiques of gender biases in the Bank’s macroeconomic approach and overlooked the way growth has thrived on the backs of women (Elson and Cagatay 2000; Berik and van der Meulen Rodgers 2012). Drawing on feminist knowledge selectively, the Bank was able to hold on to its core commitment to neoclassical economics, to expanding capitalist markets and growing economies via such markets. Smart Economics elaborates how to make markets work for women and how to make women fit for capitalist markets (World Bank 2006). 471

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Making markets work for women The idea of making markets work for women draws on new institutional economics, rehearsing well-known recommendations emerging from the Bank’s good governance agenda of the 1990s, such as the need to simplify rules for business. However, it also brings into view a range of rules traditionally regarded as private and supposedly irrelevant to markets. These include most importantly family law, such as inheritance rights, but also issues such as the freedom to choose where to live, the requirement to obey a husband, regulations pertaining to marital property, such as the recognition of nonmonetary contributions to marital property and the right to administer such property. And they also encompass discriminatory laws, such as prohibitions for women to engage in certain jobs, differential evidentiary weight given to testimonies in court, and customary law that contradicts constitutional provisions for equality (World Bank 2018). Even though these discriminatory provisions may pertain to the private sphere, Bank gender experts argue that they have economic consequences: they constitute obstacles to women’s economic participation and contribute to creating markets that are inequitable and inefficient. The corresponding regulatory changes proposed are often contentious for states, but most come with little financial cost and are thus in line with the idea that governments should largely play a supportive role to the market. However, the institutionalist logic also has led Bank gender experts to make a forceful argument for government policies on childcare. And far from considering childcare a distorting and costly government intervention in the free market, as suggested by neoliberal economists, it emerges as a key ingredient for gender equality, and thus for economic growth. Embedding gender issues into the Bank’s good governance agenda thus subsumes gender equality goals under a neoliberal logic of the primacy of the market; it also opens up space for feminist politics to ameliorate disadvantages resulting from the gender division of labor.

Making women fit for markets A second line of argument in the Bank’s gender expertise addresses women’s subjectivity, recognizing that they need expanded agency and empowerment in order to be able to compete in markets. Bank gender expertise suggests that women lack not only physical capital, including land, fertilizer, and credit, but also human capital that can be derived from access to training, governmental institutions, and networks. These lacks lead to “gender gaps” that require government intervention. Closing gender gaps thus sets a male standard and seeks to raise women’s endowments to that level. But Bank expertise does not just construe women as passive objects of intervention. Following Sen (1985), it considers agency as a basic development freedom, which requires not only endowments (whether physical or human capital) but also freedom from violence, political voice, and the ability to organize and make claims collectively. Approaching women as bearers of rights has allowed the Bank’s gender experts to take up topics not typically associated with a narrowly defined notion of development as economic growth. Importantly, it has given them a language to address violence against women and reproductive rights (World Bank and International Finance Corporation 2013; Hanmer and Klugman 2016). And recognizing that women need to have “voice,” not just in household decision-making but also in politics, has led to recommending instruments ranging from gender quotas to collective mobilization. In treating women as citizens, Smart Economics again allows openings for feminist agendas. Can we observe similar dynamics in the discourses and practices of Smart Economics outside the Bank? 472

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Corporations and Smart Economics In their review of the 2012 World Development Report, Roberts and Soederberg (2012) note similarities between the Bank’s Smart Economics discourse and Goldman Sachs’ “womenomics” framework. Both make the business case for women’s empowerment, instrumentally framing gender equality as good for growth. Roberts and Soederberg also suggest that it may be no coincidence that the Smart Economics agenda was rolled out under the Bank presidency of Robert Zoellick, a former managing partner at Goldman Sachs. In later work, Roberts goes on to identify these frameworks as part of “an emerging politico-economic project” that she calls “transnational business feminism” (Roberts 2015, 211, italics in original). Smart Economics and womenomics provide the ideological underpinnings of this project, which is driven by transnational social forces, including corporations and international intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations. The project’s knowledge base does not just include World Bank research but is fleshed out by data and reports from international accounting firms, such as McKinsey and Ernst & Young. Corporations participate in transnational business feminism in two distinct ways. First, empowered by neoliberal notions that bring market principles into governance, they join public bodies in global public–private partnerships for a variety of purposes. They participate in governance initiatives, such as the UN’s Women’s Empowerment Principles for Business, not only contributing to international rule-making but also submitting to voluntary codes (Bexell 2012; Prügl and True 2014). More commonly, they provide funding and know-how to existing development initiatives and organizations (such as UN Women), or they create and implement their own initiatives in collaboration with public agencies. A study of 170 such joint initiatives under the auspices of the Association for Women in Development (AWID) found “a total of USD 14.6 billion in commitments pledged between 2005–2020 to support women and girls” (Miller, Arutyunova, and Clark 2013, 9). A full 35 percent of these had women’s economic empowerment and entrepreneurship as their focus, making this the most common theme. Examples of such initiatives include Nike’s widely discussed “Girl Effect” campaign (with the World Bank and others); Goldman Sachs’ “10,000 Women” initiative, which partners with business schools around the world to provide business training to promising women candidates; or Coca Cola’s “5by20” campaign, which set itself the goal of empowering five million women in their role as small entrepreneurs by 2020 (Bexell 2012; Calkin 2015a, 2015b; Roberts 2015; Chant 2016; Tornhill 2016, 2019). The second way in which corporations participate in transnational business feminism is by integrating a concern for women’s empowerment and gender equality into their core business practices, targeting their own employees, supply chains, or marketing practices. This type of approach appears to be less common, at least in large projects. In a study of 31 of the largest corporate-funded women’s economic empowerment programs, most participating companies reported that they sought to achieve “general impact” with their projects; only 13 focused on their suppliers, six on employees, four on customers, and three on communities (Dalberg and ICRW 2014, 13). The focus on suppliers and employees often involves brand-conscious consumer product companies, such as Unilever and Kraft, or companies in the garment industry, such as Gap and Levi-Strauss. An example is the “HERproject,” which Levi-Strauss supports through Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and which connects MNCs with NGOs in countries where they have supplier factories in order to deliver healthcare services and increase health awareness among women garment workers. Styled as a win-win effort in the mode of Smart Economics, the project benefits workers while also reducing absenteeism and staff turnover. Another example is Unilever’s Shakti program, which has established a network of close to 473

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100,000 “Shakti Amma,” women who sell Unilever products to rural consumers in South Asia. It is again described as a win-win situation: women gain income while they help the company enter a growing, difficult-to-access market, as well as promote public health and hygiene as they introduce Lifebuoy soap to rural populations (Cross and Street 2009; Prügl 2015). Yet contradictions abound in the way businesses approach gender equality and women’s empowerment. Like the World Bank discourse, their initiatives are Janus-faced. On the one hand, they bring resources and visibility to the issue; on the other hand, they do so in a deeply individualistic fashion, focusing on women as separate from their families and communities and seeking to turn them into responsible and aspiring agents, preferably entrepreneurs. It is significant that only 27 percent of the public–private initiatives in the AWID survey included women’s organizations, and only 9 percent of these organizations received direct financial support (Miller, Arutyunova, and Clark 2013, 16). Apparently, businesses seek to steer clear of feminist politics. Moreover, while the voluntary codes of conduct and employee initiatives of companies are clearly welcome, they are a far cry from assuring living wages and employment conditions that meet international standards, which companies sought to escape in search of cheap and flexible labor in the first place (Pearson 2007). Similarly, the Shakti Amma may gain income, but as multinationals gain market shares, they displace traditional soap makers, promote marketable goods as solutions to public goods problems (rather than, for example, access to clean water), and introduce competition into women’s solidarity groups (Thekkudan and Tandon 2009). And last but not least, companies carry with them the sexist and racialized values that many of their products and services embody. What should one make, for example, of the Unilever skin-whitening products in the Shakti Amma’s assortment? And what should one make of Goldman Sachs establishing itself as the White knight coming to women’s rescue given its sordid role in the global financial crises and its profiting from predatory lending practices to low-income women? To become credible allies of feminists, companies thus may have much further to go than the World Bank. Yet just as scholars have warned of treating World Bank discourse as an instance of total co-optation, so they have cautioned against a one-dimensional approach to business feminism (Calkin 2015c; Bergeron 2016; Grosser and McCarthy 2019).

Conclusion Smart Economics is part of a hegemonic project of gilding neoliberalism with a feminist brush. There are both gains and pitfalls in the selective borrowing of feminist ideas and their insertion into orthodox economics and associated business logics, as specified, and it may be difficult to judge the outcomes for individual women and low-income people. However, we should be asking ourselves the political questions of what kinds of agendas and values does neoliberalism with a feminist face promote, who gets to define these agendas, and how are decisions being made in projects that privilege private actors and free-market logics. We should be concerned about the exclusiveness and profound lack of transparency and accountability that characterizes such projects (Prügl and True 2014). And we should worry about the way they are blind to issues of power and process that a rights-based approach to development would foreground (Carella and Ackerly 2017). Smart Economics thus needs to be a site of contestation that includes feminist voices and takes seriously critical analyses of neoliberalism with a feminist face.

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49 INTERNATIONAL LABOR STANDARDS AND TRIPARTISM David Kucera

Introduction In the 1990s groups concerned about deterioration of working conditions in the context of internationalization of production sought to add a “social clause” to international trade agreements, to make market access and trade preference contingent on compliance with so-called “core” labor standards. These core labor standards address forced labor, child labor, freedom of association and collective bargaining, and discrimination at work. One proposal was for the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) to cooperate in enforcing the social clause. At least within the confines of the WTO, however, the social clause was set aside at its first Ministerial Conference in Singapore in 1996, in which the Ministerial Declaration identified the ILO as the body to set and deal with these standards (WTO 1996). While the debate on trade-labor standards linkages no longer garners the attention it once did, it has by no means disappeared. This is evidenced by a sharp increase in the number of preferential trade agreements since the early 1990s, a growing share of which link trade preference with labor provisions, notably with core and other international labor standards (Raess and Sari 2018). Amidst the heated debates on the social clause, Çağatay (1996) argued that neither the policy prescriptions of labor market deregulation, favored by neoclassical economists, nor trade-linked schemes, favored by institutionalist economists, would lead to improved working conditions for women. While seeing a positive role for trade unions Çağatay rather advocated a feminist approach to international labor standards, which would give a central role to the gender division of labor particularly as regards unpaid domestic and care work as the source of poor working conditions faced by women in the labor market. It soon became apparent, though, that there would be no feminist approach to international labor standards. On the contrary, there developed a contentious debate among feminists on trade-labor standards linkages and on international labor standards more generally. Central to this chapter is the debate among feminists on international labor standards. The debate is wide-ranging, addressing trade-labor standards linkages and the institutional arrangements for these linkages, how labor standards could best be improved either as a complement or substitute to these linkages, the particular challenges to improving labor standards in global value chains (GVCs) and the informal economy, and the role of national and international trade 477

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unions. The ILO also figures centrally, ineluctably so, given that its defining characteristics are its mandate on international labor standards and its tripartite governance structure, which make it unique among international organizations.

The role of the ILO The ILO has been a Specialized Agency of the United Nations (UN) since 1946 but was established in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of World War I amidst sweeping revolutions and social unrest. Indeed, its Constitution is part of the Treaty of Versailles. Tripartism—governance by representatives of governments, employers and workers—was very much a response to this turmoil. As stated by Rodgers et al. (2009, 13), tripartism “translated to the international sphere a means of resolving conflict through negotiation rather than confrontation.” One hundred years on, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate how ground-breaking tripartism then was and in a sense still is. Yet the language in the ILO Constitution is prosaic rather than declarative in this regard. Tripartism and the ratio of representation of 2:1:1 for representatives of governments, employers and workers respectively are addressed in Article 3 of the ILO Constitution in reference to the ILO’s General Conference—now generally referred to as the International Labor Conference (ILC)—in which all ILO Member States meet annually to adopt international labor standards and the ILO’s program (ILO 1919). For the committees of the ILC, in which much substantive negotiation takes place, the ratio of representation is 1:1:1. Employers and workers are, respectively, represented at the ILC as well as in the ILO’s Governing Body by the International Organization of Employers (IOE) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC, resulting from a 2006 merger between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor). Employers’ and workers’ organizations are referred to as the ILO’s social partners and together with governments make up the ILO’s tripartite constituents. While Article 3 of the ILO Constitution also states, “When questions specially affecting women are to be considered by the Conference, one at least of the advisers should be a woman,” as Rodgers et al. (2009) point out, ILO member states did not generally abide by this rule. The ILO’s Governing Body is the executive body of the ILO that meets more regularly than the ILC and follows the 2:1:1 representation ratio. Within the International Labor Office—the secretariat of the International Labor Organization—employers and workers are represented by the Bureau for Employers’ Activities (ACTEMP) and the Bureau for Workers’ Activities (ACTRAV), whose individuals are employees of the Office. Though tripartism makes the ILO’s governance structure more representative than that of other international organizations, in which governments govern exclusively, it is not without its critics. The representativeness of the ILO’s tripartism has been called into question in light of declining trade union membership particularly in the Global South (Rodgers et al. 2009). Employers’ and workers’ organizations generally represent the formal rather than informal economy, and large numbers of workers and employers work in the informal economy. At the same time, as discussed below, the ILO’s two most recent Conventions address home workers and domestic workers, who are predominantly informal and women. International labor standards are embodied in the ILO’s Conventions and Recommendations, adopted by the ILO’s tripartite International Labor Conference. Conventions can be ratified by Member States and upon ratification become legally binding. Recommendations are non-binding and often supplement a Convention, providing detailed guidelines for application. Conventions and Recommendations are developed by the ILO’s tripartite constituents. The merits of tripartism are particularly evident in the development, adoption and application of 478

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international labor standards, by taking into account the everyday realities faced by the ILO’s tripartite constituents. In the wake of the social clause debate with its emphasis on core labor standards, the ILC adopted the 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (FPRW) which defines core labor standards (ILO 1998). The Declaration obliges all ILO Member States by virtue of their membership in the ILO to comply with the eight fundamental Conventions underlying the four FPRW, whether or not they have ratified these Conventions. Compliance for non-ratifying countries is monitored through the Country Baselines under the Declaration Annual Review, a report created specifically for this purpose. The Declaration on FPRW has been influential in policy discussions of international labor standards and is the second most commonly referred labor provision in preferential trade agreements, after the enforcement of domestic labor laws (Raess and Sari 2018). The fundamental Conventions—sequenced by the four FPRW and including their year of adoption—are as follows: Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (No. 29); Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, 1957 (No. 105); Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138); Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, 1999 (No. 182); Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention, 1948 (No. 87); Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98); Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100); Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111) (ILO 2019c). Occupational safety and health, embodied in Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 1981 (No. 155), is conspicuous by its absence from the FPRW. This shortcoming of FPWR was underscored particularly in the aftermath of the deadly Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed 1,133 garment workers—the deadliest tragedy in the entire history of the garment industry. The issue was taken up in the ILO’s 2019 Centenary Declaration on the Future of Work, which requests the ILO’s Governing Body “to consider, as soon as possible, proposals for including safe and healthy working conditions in the ILO’s framework of fundamental principles and rights at work” (ILO 2019a). In addition to Conventions 100 and 111 on equal remuneration and discrimination, several ILO Conventions have a marked gender dimension and reveal how the ILO’s views on gender equality have evolved over time. In the early years of the ILO, particularly before World War II, many of these Conventions were decidedly paternalistic, reinforcing the male breadwinner model. For instance, several ILO Conventions prohibited women’s night work and underground work in mines. Nor are these Conventions contentious only in hindsight. As Rodgers et al. write, “Many women’s organizations [in the interwar period] feared that they would further weaken the already unfavourable position of women in the labor market” (Rodgers et al. 2009, 58). Women’s increased labor force participation in the context of World War II, provided the background to the adoption of Conventions 100 and 111. Convention 100 states that ratifying Member States shall “ensure the application to all workers of the principle of equal remuneration for men and women workers for work of equal value.” Convention 111 extends the purview of the elimination of discrimination beyond pay, obliging ratifying Member States to implement national policies that promote “equality of opportunity and treatment in respect of employment and occupation, with a view to eliminating any discrimination in respect thereof.” Also relevant are the Workers with Family Responsibilities Convention, 1981 (No. 156) and Night Work Convention, 1990 (No. 171), which provide gender-neutral replacements of outdated ILO Conventions. There are two ILO Conventions that specifically address homeworkers and domestic workers, predominantly women and among the most vulnerable workers in the informal economy 479

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(ILO 2013): the Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177) and the Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189). The Home Work Convention aims to promote equality of treatment between homeworkers and other workers, with the Convention referring specifically to “homeworkers’ right to establish or join organizations of their own choosing and to participate in the activities of such organizations.” The Domestic Workers Convention provides that domestic workers have the same basic labor rights as other workers with respect to the FPRW but also limits on hours of work and payments in-kind and clarity about terms and conditions of employment. The Convention emphasizes freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights, making explicit that both domestic workers and employers of domestic workers have the right to join workers’ and employers’ organizations as well as federations and confederations of these organizations. Worth noting in this regard is that a number of different unions of domestic workers as well as street vendors have been created in the Global South, while the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India was recognized as a union by the Indian Government in 1972 and joined the ITUC in 2006 (Kucera and Roncolato 2008). The ILO Convention that followed the Domestic Workers Convention also has important gender implications. This is the Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190), supplemented by the Violence and Harassment Recommendation, 2019 (No. 206). The Convention provides definitions of violence and harassment as well as gender-based violence and harassment, and addresses not just the workplace but also work-related commuting and communications.

The feminist debate on international labor standards A key point of contention among feminists has been whether market access and trade preference should be made contingent on compliance with international labor standards, particularly with core labor standards. Most contentious by far in these debates have been FACB rights. A  recurring theme in the debate among feminists is the extent to which these standards as well as trade unions and other workers’ organizations are relevant to workers in the informal economy and benefit women workers (Espino, this volume). Recent evidence shows that larger shares of women than men are in informal employment on average in lower-middle income countries (84.5 and 83.4 percent of women and men, respectively) and low-income countries (92.1 and 87.5 percent of women and men, respectively), though this is not globally the case (ILO 2018). A number of contributors on both sides of these debates have also proposed policies as alternatives or complements to trade-labor standards linkages to promote compliance with international labor standards. Opposition to trade-labor standards linkages is generally based on the view that compulsory compliance with international labor standards would result in higher labor costs and lesser export competitiveness and so lower employment. This is a particular concern in labor-­ intensive, price-sensitive industries like garments where workers are predominantly women (Singh and Zammit 2014; Kabeer 2004). Singh and Zammit (2014)—originally published as Singh and Zammit (2003)—focus on FACB rights and argue against trade-labor standards linkages largely on conventional neoclassical grounds. Invoking the insider-outsider hypothesis (Lindbeck and Snower 1988), they argue that stronger FACB rights are likely to lead to higher wages for union members in the formal economy leading to a decrease in formal employment and an increase in informal employment alongside growing wage inequality between an “aristocracy of labor based on extraction of rents by union members” and other workers (Singh and Zammit 2014, 23). However, the evidence indicates that unions generally contribute to greater overall wage equality (Hayter and Weinberg 2011). 480

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Singh and Zammit (2014, 22) also argue that FACB rights imposed through trade-labor standards linkages could result in violence and social instability, on the grounds that “autocratic employers” in the Global South may “use violent methods to stop the formation of unions and their activities,” which would be met by counter violence by unions. Though they purport these to be arguments against trade-labor standards linkages, they read more as arguments against FACB rights. The authors also argue that ILO Conventions 87 and 98 on FACB rights are flawed and that they need to be redrafted to include workers in the informal economy. Reading these Conventions makes clear that there is nothing in them that excludes workers in the informal economy, and indeed the definitions of workers and employers and their organizations in Convention 87 are explicitly all-inclusive (Articles 2 and 10). Kabeer (2004) and Kabeer and Mahmud (2004) focus on women workers making garments for export, particularly in Dhaka where much of the industry is based. They find that the garment industry in Dhaka has employed and so benefited poorer women from rural areas; that jobs in the industry were better paid than other available wage jobs and had generally better working conditions, with long working hours the notable exception; and that these jobs enabled women workers to become more self-reliant. In short, the authors argue that these jobs have been generally beneficial to women in Bangladesh. While Kabeer acknowledges the possibility of wage-led growth, she argues that this might hold for a less open country with a large domestic market like India but would be unlikely for Bangladesh. Skeptical of the role of unions in the South Asian context, Kabeer argues that they have traditionally acted as an “industrial appendage of their political parties rather than as representatives of workers” (2004, 22). By way of contrast, Kabeer refers to the positive examples of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in addressing the concerns of garment workers in Bangladesh, but also to the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers’ Union, which more recently became an affiliate of the IndustriALL Global Union (founded in 2012). As an alternative to trade-labor standards linkages, Kabeer argues that the international labor movement should mobilize simultaneously around both workers’ rights and a universal social floor providing the basic needs of informal and formal workers and non-workers alike in all countries. Indeed, Kabeer argues that compliance with international labor standards that is “compatible with the principles of justice” likely depends on creating such a universal social floor (2004, 31). Other contributors to these debates acknowledge that compliance with international labor standards might lead to higher labor costs (Seguino 2006; Berik and van der Meulen Rodgers 2010; Berik 2017). Yet they argue that possible negative effects on employment can be offset by international coordination among countries and by industrial policies to reduce non-labor costs and to shift toward sectors that are less sensitive to higher labor costs. In this sense, compliance with international labor standards is consistent with progressive structural transformation toward higher productivity sectors and higher per capita incomes as well as sustainable development more generally. These contributors also emphasize the positive roles that trade unions and stronger FACB rights can play in improving working conditions and reducing gender earnings inequality. While Seguino (2006) does not take an explicit position on trade-labor standards linkages, she argues for the simultaneous implementation of international labor standards among competitor countries. Compliance with international labor standards is likely to strengthen the bargaining power of women workers in the Global South who are segregated in footloose labor-intensive, export-oriented industries. She argues for additional policy measures to ensure that compliance with international labor standards does not result in losses in export competitiveness and employment. These are coordination among South countries to ensure stable relative export prices, industrial policy to shift toward less labor-intensive and price-sensitive exports, engagement with international anti-sweatshop campaigns, and constraints on firm mobility. 481

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Comparing the working conditions and compliance with international labor standards in the garment industry in Bangladesh and Cambodia, Berik and van der Meulen Rodgers (2010) find that while in Bangladesh poor working conditions persisted, in Cambodia these improved somewhat in a number of respects, though violations of FACB rights persisted and possibly worsened between the late-1990s and mid-2000s. They attribute the modest improvements in Cambodia to the 1999 bilateral trade agreement between Cambodia and the US that linked access to the US market to improved compliance with international labor standards, alongside Cambodia’s participation in the “Better Factories Cambodia” program. This program was established in 2001 as a partnership between the ILO and the International Finance Corporation (the latter a member of the World Bank Group). Based on the comparison between Bangladesh and Cambodia, Berik and van der Meulen Rodgers (2010) argue in favor of trade-labor standards linkages in the form of trade agreements that link trade incentives to compliance with national labor regulations and international labor standards. Like Seguino (2006), they argue that this approach should be implemented simultaneously among competitor countries and complemented by industrial policy to diversify exports. Regarding industrial policy, they emphasize the importance of enforcing the ILO Convention on discrimination in employment and occupation to ensure that women are able to equitably access new jobs created through technological upgrading. They also suggest that it may be important to reduce non-labor costs, particularly through investments in infrastructure, to offset increases in labor costs that might result from improved compliance with international labor standards. Finally, they argue that both lead firms in GVCs and international agencies should share in the costs of monitoring compliance. Berik (2017) provides an overview of the debates among feminists on international labor standards, informed by the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013. Based on her field research in Bangladesh, Berik calls into question some key conclusions of Kabeer and Mahmud (2004). While acknowledging that women have benefited from jobs in the garment industry, Berik documents that the reason jobs in the garment industry were better paid than other available wage jobs was because of extremely long working hours, often 72 hours per week with only two days off per month, in violation of Bangladesh’s labor law. Berik also points to the problems of the sizeable gender earnings gap in the garment industry, the delayed payment of monthly wages, and the prevailing wages of garment workers being far below estimates of a living wage meeting the basic needs of a family. Moreover, real wages declined in the period leading up the Rana Plaza tragedy despite large increases in export earnings per worker. Berik reflects on Kabeer’s proposed universal social floor and considers it improbable because of the difficulty in funding it. Building on the policy recommendations of Berik and van der Meulen Rodgers (2010), Berik, emphasizes FACB rights and the role of national and international trade unions. She writes that “the key lever to move the Bangladesh economy toward a higher-productivity, higher-wage economy and for workers to improve their labor conditions is for garment workers to organize and exercise their union rights, with the support of international activism” (Berik 2017, 211). Berik recognizes, however, that the poor working conditions in the garment industry in Bangladesh result not only from weak FACB rights but also from the purchasing practices of brands and retailers in GVCs that prioritize lowering costs and shortening delivery times, which she argues requires international-level initiatives and governance reforms. The purchasing practices of brands and retailers pose a particular challenge to improving working conditions in supplier firms in GVCs, in which the often considerable asymmetry in market power between lead firms and supplier firms—especially those in the lower tiers of 482

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value chains—can limit the ability of the latter to improve working conditions even when they desire to do so. This dynamic between employers—in addition to that between employers and ­workers—is a defining characteristic of GVCs. The prevalence of international production structured by GVCs calls into question the potential effectiveness of trade-labor standards linkages as well as corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Notably, Barrientos (2007, 247) argues that in the GVC context, “Trade agreements . . . put the onus on supplying countries, and not the pressures exerted on suppliers by regional and global buyers.” In addition, labor provisions in trade agreements and CSR initiatives typically address only final goods trade and the upper tiers of GVCs, whereas the poorest working conditions are often in the lower tiers. Recent evidence supports Barrientos’s contention: In spite of the growing number of labor provisions in trade agreements, the evidence of their effectiveness in improving working conditions is mixed at best (e.g., Marx, Lein, and Brando 2016; ILO 2017). A landmark international initiative in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza tragedy is the 2013 Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally binding agreement among over 220 brands and retailers, two international unions (IndustriALL Global Union and UNI Global Union) and eight national unions affiliated with these international unions, with four labor NGOs as witness signatories. The Accord legally obliges signatory brands and retailers to pay for the administration of the Accord and associated safety inspection and training costs, to help pay suppliers for safety upgrades and building repairs, and to pay workers’ wages for resultant downtime. The Accord requires participating brands and retailers to negotiate commercial terms with their suppliers “which ensure that it is financially feasible for the factories to maintain safe workplaces and comply with upgrade and remediation requirements instituted by the Safety Inspector [appointed by the Accord’s Steering Committee].” The Accord expired in 2018 but was followed up by the Transitional Accord, with the intention of ultimately handing over the functions of the Accord to the Government of Bangladesh. Though the focus of the Accord is on occupational safety and health, it provides a model that could be extended to address other international labor standards (Anner, Bair, and Blasi 2013). Significantly, the Accord established the principle that brands and retailers have what Anner, Bair, and Blasi (2013) refer to as “joint liability” for labor violations in the garment industry in Bangladesh. This fundamentally differs from the corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach, which treats labor violations as factory-level problems. Anner, Bair and Blasi argue that Accord-type agreements would be complemented by stronger FACB rights and the inclusion of labor standards in trade agreements.

Concluding remarks In the debates among feminists on international labor standards, FACB rights have featured most prominently and contentiously. This holds even though the ILO fundamental Conventions on FACB rights are not explicitly about gender, in evident contrast with the ILO fundamental Conventions on equal remuneration and discrimination. That FACB rights should prove so contentious is perhaps surprising in that they are considered “enabling rights” that, as the ILO puts it, “make it possible to promote and realize decent conditions at work” (ILO 2019b). FACB rights as defined by the ILO have also been accepted by UN Member States as the basis of the UN Social Development Goal (SDG) indicator 8.8.2 on labor rights (Kucera and Sari 2019). This gives considerable prominence to FACB rights in the broader context of UN global governance, with country compliance reported on annually up the year 2030. In the spirit of the SDGs, the hope is that giving such visibility to FACB rights will contribute to greater compliance over time. 483

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In light of these considerations, it seems fitting to close this chapter by addressing some implications of FACB rights for gender equality, more specifically regarding the role of trade unions and collective bargaining in reducing wage inequality and closing gender pay gaps. Higher union density and wider collective bargaining coverage are generally associated with greater overall wage equality in the Global North and South, at odds with the insider-outsider hypothesis (Hayter and Weinberg 2011). In terms of gender pay gaps, Rubery and Johnson (2019, 5) highlight that unions have been active in campaigning for minimum wage legislation, and higher minimum wages are also associated with smaller gaps, thus contributing indirectly to closing gender pay gaps by pushing for more “inclusive and egalitarian labor markets.” Trade unions have also promoted direct measures to close gender pay gaps and contribute to gender equality, such as initiatives in the public sector (e.g., promoting procurement practices that respect gender equality) and in GVCs (e.g., the Bangladesh Accord) and with respect to domestic workers (e.g., ILO Convention No. 189) and informal workers more generally. The decline in trade union membership alongside the growth of inequality and insecure working arrangements in both the Global North and South have resulted in a great deal of existential questioning about prospects for the renewal of trade unions and organized labor more generally as well as the relevance of traditional conceptions of industrial relations (e.g., Hayter 2015; Sen and Lee 2015; Ahmed and Hegewisch, this volume). In light of these trends it is all the more compelling that Rubery and Johnson (2019) argue that the promotion of gender equality can provide trade unions with a revitalizing agenda, increasing its relevance for workers in the informal economy and GVCs and the Global South more generally, while expanding its membership and leadership.

References Anner, Mark, Jennifer Bair, and Jeremy Blasi. 2013. “Toward Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root Causes of Labor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks.” Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 35 (1): 1–43. Barrientos, Stephanie. 2007. “Gender, Codes of Conduct, and Labor Standards in Global Production Systems.” In The Feminist Economics of Trade, edited by Irene van Staveren, Diane Elson, Nilufer Çağatay and Caren Grown, 239–56. London: Routledge. Berik, Günseli. 2017. “Revisiting the Feminist Debates on International Labor Standards in the Aftermath of Rana Plaza.” Studies in Comparative International Development 52 (2): 193–216. Berik, Günseli, and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2010. “Options for Enforcing Labor Standards: Lessons from Bangladesh and Cambodia.” Journal of International Development 22 (1): 56–85. Çağatay, Nilufer. 1996. “Gender and International Labor Standards.” Review of Radical Political Economics 28 (3): 92–101. Hayter, Susan. 2015. “Introduction: What Future for Industrial Relations?” International Labour Review 154 (1): 1–4. Hayter, Susan, and Bradley Weinberg. 2011. “Mind the Gap: Collective Bargaining and Wage Inequality.” In The Role of Collective Bargaining in the Global Economy: Negotiating for Social Justice, edited by Susan Hayter, 136–86. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Office; Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. ILO. 1919. “International Labour Organization Constitution.” www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p= 1000:62:0::NO:62:P62_LIST_ENTRIE_ID:2453907:NO. ———. 1998. “International Labour Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.” www.ilo.org/declaration/thedeclaration/textdeclaration/lang-en/index.htm. ———. 2013. Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Office. ———. 2017. Handbook on Assessment of Labour Provisions in Trade and Investment Arrangements. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Office.

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International labor standards and tripartism ———. 2018. Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, 3rd ed. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Office. ———. 2019a. “International Labour Organization Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work.” www. ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-ed_norm/-relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_711288.pdf. ———. 2019b. “ILO Website.” www.ilo.org/declaration/principles/freedomofassociation/lang-en/ index.htm. ———. 2019c. “ILO Website.” www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12000:::NO:::. Kabeer, Naila. 2004. “Globalization, Labor Standards, and Women’s Rights: Dilemmas of Collective (In) Action in an Interdependent World.” Feminist Economics 10 (1): 3–35. Kabeer, Naila, and Simeen Mahmud. 2004. “Globalization, Gender and Poverty: Bangladeshi Women Workers in Export and Local Markets.” Journal of International Development 16 (1): 93–109. Kucera, David, and Leanne Roncolato. 2008. “Informal Employment: Two Contested Policy Issues.” International Labor Review 147 (4): 321–48. Kucera, David, and Dora Sari. 2019. “New Labor Rights Indicators: Method and Trends for 2000–2015.” International Labor Review 158 (3): 419–46. Lindbeck, Assar, and Dennis Snower. 1988. The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marx, Axel, Brecht Lein, and Nicolás Brando. 2016. “The Protection of Labour Rights in Trade Agreements: The Case of the EU-Colombia Agreement.” Journal of World Trade 50 (4): 587–610. Raess, Damian, and Dora Sari. 2018. “Labor Provisions in Trade Agreements (LABPTA): Introducing a New Dataset.” Global Policy 9 (4): 451–66. Rodgers, Gerry, Eddy Lee, Lee Swepston, and Jasmien Van Daele. 2009. The International Labor Organization and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labor Office. Rubery, Jill, and Mathew Johnson. 2019. “Closing the Gender Pay Gap: What Role for Trade Unions?” ILO ACTRAV Working Paper, International Labor Office, Geneva, Switzerland. Seguino, Stephanie. 2006. “Taking Gender Differences in Bargaining Power Seriously: Equity, Living Wages, and Labor Standards.” In Feminist Economics and the World Bank: History, Theory and Policy, edited by Edith Kuiper and Drucilla Barker, 94–116. London: Routledge. Sen, Ratna, and Chang-Hee Lee. 2015. “Workers and Social Movements of the Developing World: Time to Rethink the Scope of Industrial Relations?” International Labour Review 154 (1): 37–45. Singh, Ajit, and Ann Zammit. 2003. “Globalisation, Labor Standards and Economic Development.” In Handbook of Globalisation, edited by Jonathan Michie, 191–215. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. ———. 2014. “Globalisation, Labor Standards and Economic Development.” MPRA Paper No. 53096, Munich Personal RePEc Archive, Munich. WTO. 1996. “World Trade Organization Singapore Ministerial Declaration.” www.wto.org/english/ thewto_e/minist_e/min96_e/wtodec_e.htm.

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Introduction Unfolding economic, social, and ecological crises around the world have spurred interest in alternative business ownership models and enterprises that are driven by social and environmental values, beyond the singular pursuit of profit. Such alternatives have been assigned umbrella terms that vary across contexts, including alternative economy, third sector, community economy, solidarity economy, and social economy (Loh and Shear 2015). The concept of social and solidarity economy (SSE) has been privileged within the United Nations (UN) system in recent years, as exemplified in the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on the Social and Solidarity Economy. The SSE comprises enterprises and organizations that engage in production while pursuing both economic and social aims and fostering solidarity (ILO 2009). It includes cooperatives, mutual benefit societies, associations, foundations, and social enterprises, among others. SSE entities are often member- or user-owned, democratically controlled initiatives that work to serve the needs of their members and the wider community. Since the mid-19th century, cooperatives and the wider SSE enterprises have been closely associated with social justice movements. The number of cooperatives and other SSE organizations tend to increase during economic crises, as has been the case in the aftermath of the 2007 economic crisis. These are also among the times when cooperatives and the wider SSE enterprises are used as safety valves to absorb the unemployed. Racial/ethnic minorities, informally employed, migrants, and women who have faced discrimination have opted for them as alternative pathways to access labor markets (Birchall and Hammond Ketilson 2009). Integration of gender issues into the heterodox economics literature has meant that issues that were not recognized as worthy of economic analysis, such as unpaid nonmarket transactions, care, cooperation, volunteer work, have been brought into focus. These spaces of economic justice, nonmarket production and provision of care, cooperation, and interdependence are also where cooperatives and other SSE organizations tend to engage. Feminist economists have often put their focus on social transformation–related issues that are central to both gender equity and SSE (Bergeron and Healy 2015). Some feminist economists have also highlighted the insider-outsider problems associated with cooperatives, in relation to those within the cooperatives compared to those outside them. These researchers have noted how such dynamics can 486

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become further complicated when put in the context of the larger SSE ecosystem of self-help groups and collectives with different degrees of formal institutionalization (Agarwal 2015). This chapter assesses the potential of cooperatives and the wider SSE in advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality around the world. It discusses why women join or establish cooperatives and evaluates the growing phenomenon of women-only cooperatives. It draws on academic and policy research that provides insights on how women fare in cooperatives as founders, leaders, members, and workers. In addition to a global overview, the empirical focus is on the care, agricultural, financial, and retail sectors, with a specific attention to institutional and policy implications. These sectors are selected for their relevance to feminist readers with respect to the gender division of labor, pay equity, and the extent women participate in them and benefit from them.

Global overview Cooperatives constitute the largest segment of SSE with the longest history, dating back to the mid-19th century. In 1844, the Rochdale Pioneers, who were textile workers in the UK, founded a cooperative in order to provide an affordable alternative to poor-quality and adulterated food and provisions. Since then, cooperatives have existed in law and practice, across the globe and encompassing all sectors of the economy. Set up in 1885, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) is the largest representative body for cooperatives. In 2016, it estimated its membership at more than 1.2 billion persons, and its workforce at about 279 million workers (Eum 2017). The ILO has recognized cooperatives as critical to advancing its mandate for social justice since its foundation in 1919. It established a unit specific to cooperatives in 1920. Cooperatives have their own international labor standard, the ILO Recommendation, 2002 (No. 193) on the Promotion of Cooperatives. It defines a cooperative as an “autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise” (ILO 2002). The Statement on Cooperative Identity, adopted by ICA in 1995, upholds cooperative values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity, as well as the following cooperative principles to put the values into practice: voluntary and open membership; democratic member control; member economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training, and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community (ICA 1995). Cooperative values and principles can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with diversity and inclusion. The first cooperative principle which is on open and voluntary membership without gender, social, racial, political, or religious discrimination and the second one on democratic control on the basis of one member one vote are examples. At the global level, the ICA established an International Cooperative Women’s Guild in 1921. In 1963, the guild became a Committee of the ICA. In 1995, the year that the UN Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on Gender Equality was adopted, the ICA launched a Strategy for Promoting Gender Equality. The chair of the ICA gender equality committee has become a part of the ICA board in 2019. ICA Americas elected a woman president in 2019. Six out of the 16 board members of the ICA were women in 2019, four of them coming from Europe and North America. The European regional board of the ICA achieved gender parity for the first time in 2017. Two of the ICA regional directors in Africa and Europe were also women in 2019. At the national level, the membership and leadership of cooperative movements, represented by national confederations of cooperatives, still tend to be dominated by men. There are only a few sectors where women make it to leadership of the secondary- and tertiary-level organizations of cooperatives (ICA 2019). These instances are presented here. 487

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Women’s participation in cooperatives is often motivated by the desire to improve their access to income and employment beyond individual entrepreneurship (Raniga 2018). Cooperatives contribute to women’s economic participation by providing a structure that allows for pooling of resources that produce and market goods and services. Women’s access to employment and livelihoods can be further facilitated by cooperatives through affordable and accessible services such as housing, finance, and a range of care services. Women can also gain collective voice and negotiation power in cooperatives with public authorities and other private sector institutions. Through democratic governance, cooperatives can serve as spaces where women can engage in decision-making and power sharing. Cooperatives often promote education and training of their members as a key tool for the success of their businesses. Women who work or participate in cooperatives can benefit from opportunities for professional development, skill training, and leadership building. The economic benefits of cooperatives may further contribute to improvements in other areas of women’s lives. Women who are engaged in cooperatives may be better positioned to address personal and communal needs such as freedom from violence and environmental protection (ILO and ICA 2015).

Women-only cooperatives In contexts where social and cultural norms may restrict women’s engagement in the public sphere, emergence of women-only cooperatives is observed. Cooperatives that are created for and by women may help overcome social and cultural constraints which might otherwise limit women’s participation in the workforce and can be particularly relevant in gender-segregated contexts. In countries like Iran and Jordan women-only cooperatives are mainly active in food processing, crafts, and care services. These cooperatives provide work opportunities for the women involved while also creating a social outlet (Duguid, Durutaş, and Wodzicki 2015; SDC and JNCW 2016). Women-only cooperatives also emerge in sectors where women are traditionally the main producers of goods and services in terms of the gender division of labor like home-based work in Nepal, domestic work in Trinidad and Tobago, argan-oil production in Morocco and shea-butter production in Nigeria and Ghana (Wanyama 2014). In alleviation of impediments to women’s labor market integration and providing opportunities for improved livelihoods, cooperatives can have a positive impact. In many women-only cooperatives childcare needs, health, life, and crop insurance are among the services provided for members (Duguid and Weber 2016). In the Turkish case, women-only cooperatives have been receiving technical, financial, and in-kind support from local governments, regional development agencies, women’s organizations, and international donors as a means for providing livelihoods for women and addressing issues of women’s unemployment. Often, these cooperatives are set up before their products and services and business plans are determined. In addition, these cooperatives often tend to duplicate very similar product lines and market their products in similar markets. Such unsustainable financial and organizational practices run the risk of failure for women’s cooperatives. This can then result in the conclusion that cooperatives do not work for women or women-only cooperatives are bound to fail. Only in a few instances have these women’s cooperatives managed to develop diversified and quality product lines creating unique market niches for themselves. While cooperatives are organizations that can contribute to agency and solidarity, they are also enterprises that need to have viable business plans for ensuring returns to their members. This needs to be borne in mind by those setting up these cooperatives, or technically and financially supporting them (Duguid, Durutaş, and Wodzicki 2015). 488

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Domestic-worker unions in a number of countries, such as Trinidad and Tobago, have been setting up cooperatives as membership-based, collective enterprises for their members to improve their access to markets and negotiate better terms and conditions of work. These cooperatives provide a range of services for their members, including job matching (in some cases, using online applications), skills training, accountancy, and awareness-raising. In some cases, the lack of knowledge among the union leaders on cooperative management and governance has posed a challenge to ensuring the sustainability of these cooperatives. In the US, migrant domestic workers have been setting up cooperatives in states such as New York and Florida and have been incubated by community-based organizations where they receive the legal, managerial advisory support they need to achieve financial and institutional sustainability (Eşim and Matthew 2015). Founded in 2008 by 17 immigrant women in Brooklyn, New York, Beyond Care Childcare Cooperative is a worker-owned cooperative that provides full-time and part-time childcare, nanny share for multiple families, on-call and emergency childcare and group childcare for organizations (COPAC 2017). The cooperative offers quality jobs that pay a living wage and provide a healthy working environment for employees. As of 2016, 38 cooperative members had completed specialized training courses, including business development and nanny training (ILO 2017). In November 2018, the New York State Attorney General’s office approved the Brightly® franchise, the first worker cooperative franchise in the US dedicated to expanding business ownership for low-income domestic workers through cooperatives. Currently, three Brightly® worker cooperatives operate in New York City, with a fourth and fifth in the making. Plans are also underway to move the franchise beyond the borders of New York (ILO 2019). The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a national union of 1.8 million informal women workers in 14 states of India founded in 1972 (ILO and SEWA 2018). SEWA operates through unions and cooperatives democratically run by women members. Since the establishment of its savings and credit bank in 1974, SEWA has supported 115 cooperatives across the country, of which 106 are in Gujarat in artisanal, dairy and agricultural activities; in domestic work, construction, recycling; and in healthcare, childcare and insurance services. These cooperatives’ members are all women who have limited formal education and skills and come from economically poor backgrounds. Often, the informal economic activities promoted through these cooperatives have in many cases been “first-time” efforts toward organizing and formalizing them. The federation helps women organize and register their own cooperatives, supports new cooperatives, builds women’s capacities to run their businesses, advocates at the political level for cooperative support, and offers mentoring, marketing, and networking opportunities. SEWA’s role in relation to these cooperatives has been multi-fold. In addition to being an incubator for the nascent cooperatives, the federation links the members of the cooperatives to the services of other cooperatives within the SEWA network as per needs (e.g., health, childcare, insurance, and other financial services). As a result, up to 80 percent of SEWA-supported cooperatives have achieved financial and organizational sustainability. The remaining cooperatives linked with the SEWA Cooperative Federation continue being incubated until they become self-sufficient. The federation also conducts policy advocacy for the women members of the cooperatives, keeping them linked to the wider labor, cooperative, and women’s movements. SEWA’s experience demonstrates that cooperatives can be effective strategies to organizing informal workers and formalizing their work. Not only can members earn regular incomes, start saving, and take loans when needed, but they can also practice economic democracy firsthand (ILO and SEWA 2018). While women’s cooperatives can create economic and social opportunities for their members, there may be a tendency to romanticize what are called “successful examples.” Putting aside 489

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cases like SEWA Cooperative Federation, most women-only cooperatives tend to stay small in capital, membership, and volume of business, and face both internal (financing, expertise and know-how) and external (inadequacies of the policy and regulatory framework, lack of connectedness to the cooperative movements, and their support structures) challenges. There is also concern when these cooperatives are set up based on external push fulfilling the requirements and priorities of funding sources rather than from members’ understanding of and conviction in working in cooperatives. In such instances, external financial and institutional support can result in creating dependencies and risking the autonomy and independence of these women’s cooperatives. While having an ecosystem of supportive institutions, such as community-based organizations, larger cooperative movements, and local governments, may be critical to the survival of women-only cooperatives, such support needs to take note of sustainability of these cooperatives and focus on building capacities and establishing market links to allow for them to stand on their own (Eşim and Omeira 2009).

Sectoral highlights Cooperatives operating in the provision of care services predominantly have women as founders, members, beneficiaries, and workers. In response to demographic changes, cooperatives have been emerging as community responses providing multiple care services with the participation of local governments, workers, and beneficiaries. Care provision through cooperatives can range from day care for children and homecare for the disabled and the chronically ill to elderly care. Cooperatives providing care services can encourage beneficiaries to actively participate in care plans that address their physical, mental, and social needs in a more holistic manner than public and other private sector providers. These cooperatives can also provide improved wages and benefits and facilitate the formalization and professionalization of workers, especially when they are members of a cooperative (ILO 2016). Consorzio Copernico is a consortium of six social cooperatives established in 1997 in the Piemonte region of Italy. The cooperatives either produce educational and social welfare services for children, adolescents, families, immigrants, and asylum seekers or provide job opportunities to people with challenges for securing work, such as people with learning difficulties or disabilities, people who have addictions, offenders who are given the chance to work outside prison, or long-term unemployed people. The consortium was formed in order to be able to create economies of scale to qualify for bidding for public procurement of care services by the local government, as the primary cooperatives would not qualify for the scale requirements. The six cooperatives employ more than 200 people, 76 percent of whom are women, where 18 percent face some type of disadvantage (ILO 2017). While the women members and workers in cooperatives providing care may feel a strong sense of ownership, the risks of burnout are high (ILO 2016). In supporting women’s engagement in cooperatives as members and workers, it is important to be cognizant of how livelihoods are produced not only inside but also outside the cooperative. This requires paying attention to issues like time-poverty that women face (Alarcón and Sato 2019). There is an often-held perception that because of their principles and values, cooperatives contribute to equality in general and gender equality in particular. However, as is the case in most instances, values and principles are not enough on their own. They need to be transmitted to leaders, members, and workers in cooperatives. Even then, multiple challenges remain since cooperatives are embedded in the social and economic contexts in which they exist. For instance, the ICA adopted a declaration on decent work and against violence and harassment at work aligned with the recent ILO convention and recommendation on harassment and 490

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violence at work in 2018. It is not clear, however, how these political commitments are then operationalized into concrete actions at the sectoral and national levels (ILO and International Cooperative Alliance 2015). Much of the research on women’s participation in cooperatives is in the form of case-studies mainly from the Global South, with a focus on agriculture, finance, and retail. In these sectors where cooperatives are prominent even when women are among the founders or join cooperatives as members, existing horizontal and vertical gender divisions of labor are often reproduced. While in agriculture women may constitute the majority of the labor force, as family and waged workers, they are much less likely to be represented in agricultural cooperatives as members and leaders. In agricultural cooperatives, land ownership and household headship requirements often keep women out of membership ranks. In Ethiopia and Paraguay, less than one-fifth of agricultural cooperative members are women. In many countries, such as Uganda, women’s membership in agricultural cooperatives is increasing faster than men’s (Wanyama 2014). However, cooperative leadership opportunities for women are still disproportionately low (ILO and International Cooperative Alliance 2015). In Spain, agricultural cooperatives with greater women representation on their boards have shown higher returns and operational risk and lower levels of debt (Hernández-Nicolás, Martín-Ugedo, and Mínguez-Vera 2019). In Italy, more recently established agricultural cooperatives report to having a higher participation of women as members and leaders (Carabini and Digiovanni 2018). Financial cooperatives and saving and credit associations (SACCOs) provide access to affordable financial services for women and men living in poorer households (Bezboruah and Pillai 2015). Quite often, women involved in agricultural or other cooperatives are also members of financial cooperatives or SACCOs. There is a rise in women’s participation in financial cooperatives (Majurin 2012). The growing membership of women in financial cooperatives at the micro level has not translated into increased women in leadership in the larger financial cooperatives, barring a few exceptions, such as the financial cooperatives in Canada (ILO and International Cooperative Alliance 2015). The International Cooperative and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF) reports that it does better on the women-in-leadership front compared to its noncooperative and non-mutual counterparts in the insurance sector. It reports, for instance, that the percentage of women on the boards of directors of mutual and cooperative insurers rose to 20.6 percent in 2015, compared to an insurance industry average of 17.8 percent. Just under 85 percent of ICMIF members had at least one woman director on their board in 2015 and 48  percent had three or more women directors, compared with an industry average of 17 percent (ICMIF 2016). Historically, cooperatives have been prominent in retail with a strong participation of women. From the UK to Japan, women have been on the forefront of setting up consumer cooperatives. In the UK, women had the right to be full members of the Rochdale Pioneers Equitable Cooperative Society from its foundation in 1844 (Robertson 2008). The Women’s Cooperative Guild, established in the UK in 1883, campaigned for women’s rights, including pay equity and maternity protection. In the case of the Seikatsu Club Consumer Cooperative in Japan, women make up more than 80 percent of the board members. However, most consumer cooperatives continue to be managed by men while women constitute majority of the members and the workforce (Duguid and Weber 2016). Recent legislation in the UK has resulted in retail cooperatives with more than 250 employees producing reports on the gender pay gap in their enterprises. According to 2018 figures, out of the 11 retail cooperatives, women’s mean hourly rate, compared to men’s, was lower for all of the cooperative retailers, varying from 30 to 10 percent lower. Women occupied 52 to 60 percent of the jobs in the top quartile and from 72.6 to 83 percent of the jobs in the lowest quartile among the largest cooperative retailers (Cooperative News 2018). 491

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Conclusions The literature at the intersection of cooperatives, SSE, and women’s empowerment and gender equality focuses on the local and micro level. This scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to the ecosystem of support institutions and to policy and legislative considerations. In moving forward, support institutions need to come together to provide education to cooperative members. There is also a need to build the managerial capacity of cooperative board members and leaders to enable them to run cooperatives as viable enterprises, including with respect to promoting gender equality in traditional cooperatives. While developing educational tools and materials for cooperative members, their suitability for adult learners with varied educational backgrounds needs to be ensured. For informed research and policymaking on cooperatives, statistics remain deficient. There is a need for gender-responsive, accurate, reliable, relevant, and comparable statistics on cooperatives and the SSE. Most countries do not have the requisite data collection and analysis systems. There are increasing efforts to address data issues. In 2018, the International Conference of Labour Statisticians adopted guidelines on statistics of cooperatives (ILO 2018). Similar efforts have been initiated to develop statistical guidelines on the SSE (Salathé-Beaulieu, Bouchard, and Mendell 2019). Policy frameworks need to be more conducive to the establishment and growth of cooperatives in general and women-only cooperatives in particular. A major challenge with respect to identifying the policies needed is respecting the autonomy of cooperatives and their independent decision-making. Whereas a supportive policy environment is essential, cooperatives need to function free of government interference and undue donor influence. Engagement of and support from trade unions and women’s organizations are essential. At the same time, such support needs to take into account the need for the transfer of knowledge on cooperative management and governance know-how. Emerging alliances between unions, SSE and cooperative movements, and women’s movements carry the potential of advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality. These alliances can emerge at the local, national, regional, and international levels and can not only be issue-specific but also extend to more systemic issues. Feminist scholarship can undertake critical analysis of women-only cooperatives. Issues of political capture by political parties among women’s cooperatives need a closer investigation. Critical gender analysis is also needed in mainstream cooperative enterprises—for instance, in agriculture, finance, and retail. Research gaps exist in gaining a better understanding on how transitions between cooperatives and other SSE organizations take place and the nature of relations between these different SSE organizations.

References Agarwal, Bina. 2015. “Demonstrating the Power of Numbers: Gender, Solidarity and Group Dynamics in Community Forestry Institutions.” In Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe, edited by Peter Utting, 313–29. London: Zed Books. Alarcón, Jozelin María Soto, and Chizu Sato. 2019. “Enacting Peasant Moral Community Economies for Sustainable Livelihoods: A  Case of Women-led Cooperatives in Rural Mexico.”  World Development 115: 120–31. Bergeron, Suzanne, and Stephen Healy. 2015. “Beyond the Business Case: A  Community Economies Approach to Gender, Development and Social Economy.” In Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe, edited by Peter Utting, 72–85. London: Zed Books. Bezboruah, Karabi C., and Vijayan Pillai. 2015. “Exploring the Participation of Women in Financial Cooperatives and Credit Unions in Developing Countries.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 26 (3): 913–40.

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Cooperatives Birchall, Johnston, and Lou Hammond Ketilson. 2009. Resilience of the Cooperative Business Model in Times of Crisis. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Carabini, Camilla, and Desirée Digiovanni. 2018. WomeNpowerment in Coops: Italian Cooperative Experiences Toward the Achievement of Gender Equality in the World. Rome: Coopermondo and Confcooperative. Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Cooperatives (COPAC). 2017. Cooperative Contributions to SDG 5. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Cooperative News. 2018. “How Do Cooperative Retailers Fare on the Gender Pay Gap?” Accessed September 2019. www.thenews.coop/127946/sector/co-op-retailers-rate-gender-pay-gap/. Duguid, Fiona, Gökçen Durutaş, and Michael Wodzicki. 2015. Current State of Women’s Co-Operatives in Turkey. Washington, DC: World Bank. Duguid, Fiona, and Nadya Weber. 2016. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Co-operatives: A Literature Review. Brussels: ICA. Eşim, Simel, and Lenore Matthew. 2015. “For Many Domestic Workers, Co-Ops Hold the Key to Decent Work.” Accessed December  2019. https://iloblog.org/2015/07/03/for-many-domestic-workers-co-opshold-the-key-to-decent-work/. Eşim, Simel, and Mansour Omeira. 2009. “Rural Women Producers and Cooperatives in Conflicts Settings in the Arab States.” Paper presented at the FAO-IFAD-ILO Workshop on Gaps, Trends and Current Research in Gender Dimensions of Agricultural and Rural Employment: Differentiated Pathways Out of Poverty, Rome, March 31–April 2. Eum, Hyungsik. 2017. Cooperatives and Employment: The Second Global Report. Brussels: CICOPA. Hernández-Nicolás, Carmen María, Juan Francisco Martín-Ugedo, and Antonio Mínguez-Vera. 2019. “The Effect of Gender Diversity on the Board of Spanish Agricultural Cooperatives on Returns and Debt: An Empirical Analysis.” Agribusiness 35 (4): 639–56. International Cooperative Alliance (ICA). 1995. “The Statement on Cooperative Identity.” Accessed September 2019. www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/cooperative-identity. ———. 2019. “About Us: Organigram, Board of Directors, Regional and Sectoral Organizations, and Committees and Networks.” Accessed December 2019. www.ica.coop/en. International Cooperative and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF). 2016. “Mutual and Cooperative Insurers Lead the Industry in Terms of Gender Diversity on Boards and in Senior Management.”Accessed September 2019. www.icmif.org/mutual-and-cooperative-insurers-lead-industrygender-diversity-boards-and-senior-management. International Labor Office (ILO). 2002. “Promotion of Cooperatives Recommendation. (No. 193).” In International Labour Conference. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2009. Plan of Action for the Promotion of Social Economy Enterprises and Organizations in Africa. ­Johannesburg: ILO. ———. 2013. “Leveraging the Cooperative Advantage for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality.” Brief Series No. 1, Cooperatives and the World of Work, ILO, Geneva, Switzerland. ———. 2016. Providing Care Through Cooperatives 1: Survey and Interview Findings. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2017. Providing Care Through Cooperatives 2: Literature Review and Case Studies. Geneva, ­Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2018. “Guidelines Concerning Statistics of Cooperatives.” Adopted by the 20th International Conference of Labor Statisticians. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ———. 2019. “Brightly®—Scaling Up Worker Cooperatives Through the Franchise Model.” Accessed December 2019. www.ilo.org/global/topics/cooperatives/news/WCMS_732825/lang-en/index.htm. ILO and International Cooperative Alliance (ICA). 2015. Advancing Gender Equality: The Co-operative Way. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. ILO and Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). 2018. Advancing Cooperation Among Women Workers in the Informal Economy: The SEWA Way. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Loh, Penn, and Boone Shear. 2015. “Solidarity Economy and Community Development: Emerging Cases in Three Massachusetts Cities.” Community Development 46 (3): 244–60. Majurin, Eva. 2012. How Women Fare in East African Cooperatives: The Case of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. Raniga, Tanusha. 2018. “Poverty Alleviation, Social Protection Policy and Sustainability of Economic Development Cooperatives: Voices of Women Residing in Bhambayi, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.” Social Work 54 (4): 395–406. Robertson, Nicole. 2008. “Women as Organised Consumers: The Case of the Co-Operative Movement.” Working Papers 8008, Economic History Society, London.

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494

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. abortion 184, 288 – 90, 330 – 2 accounting for women’s work project 27, 92; see also Accounting Project Accounting Project 28 Africa 11, 26, 100, 149, 198, 200, 203, 216 – 21, 264 – 5, 275, 294, 313 – 14, 321, 323 – 4, 331, 333 – 5, 357, 401 – 3, 433, 436, 460, 487 ageing 148 – 9, 405 agency 3 – 4, 7 – 8, 12, 16 – 19, 44, 47 – 9, 63 – 6, 81, 99 – 102, 104 – 5, 109, 119, 141, 146, 158 – 9, 191 – 2, 213, 217, 225, 230, 235 – 40, 248, 252, 307, 323, 330, 371, 402 – 3, 428, 434 – 7, 472, 478, 486, 488 agricultural economies 208, 342 asset ownership 4, 14, 17, 278, 312 – 13, 315 – 17, 323 – 5, 327, 436, 459 austerity 10, 15, 18, 30, 35, 38, 84 – 7, 95 – 6, 174, 176, 202, 227, 356 – 7, 360, 362, 364 – 5, 445, 447, 451, 454, 456, 463, 465 bargaining framework 13 Black feminism 118 – 19; see also Black Feminist Theory Black Feminist Theory 118 bodily integrity 14, 330 breadwinner 11, 46, 48, 112, 174, 189 – 90, 193 – 4, 226, 229 – 30, 258, 281, 284, 287, 289 – 90, 297, 386, 394, 409, 479

capitalism 34 – 40, 53, 92, 119, 180 – 1, 288, 296, 387, 450 – 1, 470; see also capitalist capitalist 4 – 7, 11 – 12, 16, 26, 28 – 9, 31, 35 – 40, 47, 53 – 6, 58 – 9, 66, 92, 113, 119 – 20, 157, 180 – 1, 236, 254, 258, 342, 371, 393, 450, 468, 471 care policies 14 – 16, 18, 96, 362, 378, 380, 383, 385, 387, 393, 400 – 6 care sector 30, 94 – 6, 370, 374, 400 caring spirits 35 childcare 12, 16, 46, 59, 74, 90, 93, 95, 149 – 51, 153, 180 – 1, 183, 185, 211, 226, 229, 245 – 6, 250, 255 – 7, 259 – 60, 265, 277, 280, 287 – 8, 294 – 5, 297 – 8, 316, 331, 362, 378, 380, 382 – 6, 390 – 1, 393 – 6, 402 – 4, 472, 488 – 9 China 4, 12, 152, 154, 208, 235, 243 – 51, 252n2, 254, 259 conditional cash transfers 16, 452 contingent work 190 – 3 cooperatives 19, 55 – 7, 133, 198, 213, 268, 288 – 9, 296, 304 – 6, 322, 486 – 92 credit 95, 115, 165, 183, 200, 247, 314, 317, 334, 336, 343, 361, 433 – 8, 446, 464, 472, 489, 491 crisis 3, 6, 12, 14 – 16, 29 – 30, 38, 48, 58, 64 – 5, 67, 84 – 7, 94 – 6, 123, 173 – 4, 176, 199, 218, 229, 251, 347, 351, 353, 360 – 5, 369 – 70, 374 – 5, 385, 434, 447, 470, 486 crisis of care 94

capabilities approach 82, 238; see also capability approach capability approach 4, 6, 72 – 3, 100, 158 – 9, 161, 163 – 4, 276

decolonization 65, 67; see also decolonizing decolonizing 17 degradation 13, 28, 56, 265 – 6, 443 deindustrialization 410, 416

495

Index deregulation 11, 18, 150, 212, 360, 451, 477 direct care 7, 91, 94 discrimination 7, 11, 16, 35, 37, 39, 53, 66, 81 – 2, 87, 119 – 20, 122, 161 – 2, 170, 176, 179 – 86, 193, 198, 201, 204, 208 – 11, 237, 247, 251, 258, 277, 294, 299, 325, 343 – 4, 394, 414, 420, 427, 445, 453, 455, 471, 477, 479, 482 – 3, 486 – 7 diversity 17, 66 – 7, 72, 74, 77 – 8, 104, 130, 135, 181, 221, 269, 386, 412, 420 – 9, 487

gender division of labor 26, 36, 78, 90, 100, 120, 123, 161, 245, 265, 284, 289, 293 – 6, 322, 347, 385 – 6, 477, 487 – 8 Gender Equality Index 158, 163, 164, 175 gender equity 213, 249, 395, 434, 486 gender gap: in employment 379; gender earnings gap 482 (see also gender wage gap); in labor force participation 170, 175, 207, 246, 344; gender wage gap 7, 10 – 12, 15, 163, 183, 185, 208, 210 – 13, 248, 256, 286, 312, 324, 343, 346 – 7, 351, 355, 414 gender identity 13, 237, 294, 299, 306, 428 Gender Inequality Index 158 – 9, 159, 175, 276 Genuine Progress Indicator 158 – 9, 160, 160, 345, 372 gig economy 4, 11, 189 – 90, 192 – 5 Global Gender Gap Index 158, 163, 164, 175 Global North 7, 11 – 13, 15, 27, 30, 37 – 9, 91, 94, 121, 124, 149, 152, 198, 202, 209 – 10, 225 – 7, 230, 267, 287 – 8, 295, 306, 330 – 2, 360, 362, 370, 373, 400 – 2, 405 – 6, 447, 450, 456, 484 Global South 5, 7, 11 – 18, 26, 28 – 9, 37, 39, 91, 94, 103, 105, 150, 152 – 4, 191, 198 – 9, 202 – 3, 207 – 11, 225 – 7, 230, 264 – 5, 267, 275, 295 – 6, 298, 304, 309, 312, 314, 326, 330 – 6, 341, 343 – 6, 353, 360, 362, 370, 373 – 4, 400 – 5, 433 – 4, 446 – 7, 450, 469, 478, 480 – 1, 484, 491 Great Depression 12, 174 Great Recession 34, 38, 295, 347

Eastern Europe 4, 12, 94, 254, 256, 259, 259, 260, 362, 383 ecofeminism 62, 266 – 7 ecofeminist 62 – 6, 267, 371 ecological economics 5, 28, 62 – 6, 67n1, 369, 372 – 5 ecosystems 6, 10, 62 – 7, 264, 270, 345, 356, 370, 487, 490, 492 education 15, 18, 29, 54, 56 – 8, 63, 65, 72, 75, 78, 83 – 6, 91 – 3, 101, 138, 141, 149, 158 – 9, 161 – 3, 170, 172, 174, 180, 183 – 4, 190, 193 – 5, 200 – 1, 204, 212 – 13, 228, 237, 244, 247, 250, 250 – 1, 254 – 5, 257 – 8, 261, 276, 280, 286 – 7, 289 – 91, 293, 296, 303 – 4, 306 – 7, 322 – 3, 325 – 6, 332 – 5, 341 – 5, 348, 354, 356 – 7, 363, 382, 384, 387, 391, 394 – 7, 400 – 1, 405 – 6, 409, 412 – 14, 419, 421 – 2, 434, 442, 446, 452 – 4, 462, 464 – 5, 468, 471, 487 – 90, 492 empowerment 7, 18, 57, 59, 99 – 102, 106, 148, 154, 158 – 9, 163, 169 – 70, 175, 203 – 4, 240, 281, 296, 306, 323, 325 – 7, 330, 332, 334 – 6, 404, 434 – 6, 442, 451, 463, 470, 472 – 4, 487, 492 engendering macroeconomics 30, 154 environment 10, 17, 20, 28, 54, 63, 67, 113, 115, 135, 158, 218, 267, 341, 364, 370, 428, 447, 469, 489, 492 European Union 38, 87, 163, 258, 378

homemaker 12, 45, 152, 284 homeworkers 18, 203, 479 – 80 homo economicus 8, 108, 113, 372 household work 9, 55, 64, 86, 90 – 1, 92 – 3, 95, 124, 151, 160, 179, 201, 204, 228, 294, 298, 353 human development 44, 73, 157 – 9, 255, 276 human rights framework 78, 81 – 4, 86, 88, 445 immigrant 38, 91, 94, 123 – 4, 142, 150, 181, 194, 227, 294, 397, 489 – 90; see also immigration immigration 38, 124, 181, 228, 235 income poverty 13, 16 – 18, 244, 274, 276, 278 – 9, 450 – 1 industrialization 40, 46, 173, 244, 254 – 6, 294, 409 – 11, 416 informal sector 39 – 40, 105, 198 – 201, 211, 364 informal work 11, 19, 104 – 5, 198 – 203, 346, 484, 489 institutional economics 5, 43, 45, 50, 181, 182, 427, 472 interdependence 4, 296, 372, 486 international labor standards 477 – 83, 487 international trade 140, 201, 207, 209 – 11, 213, 477 – 8, 482

feminist economics 3 – 10, 15, 19, 25, 27, 29 – 31, 37, 43 – 6, 48, 50, 62 – 3, 72 – 9, 81 – 2, 88, 90, 99, 105, 108, 120 – 4, 129 – 30, 132, 134 – 6, 138 – 9, 145 – 6, 172, 182, 207, 225, 234, 236 – 7, 291, 348, 360 – 1, 369, 371 – 5, 401, 422, 426 – 7, 434, 451, 471 feminist institutional economics 5, 43 feminist political economy 5, 34, 54 feminization of labor 10 – 12, 346 fertility 58, 94, 154, 255, 258, 260 – 1, 288 – 9, 295 – 6, 299, 315, 330 – 3, 335 – 6, 342, 344, 357, 384 – 6 gender and development 62, 65, 460 gender budgeting 18, 459 – 65

496

Index intersectional 5, 8 – 9, 44 – 5, 53 – 5, 57, 59, 62 – 3, 65, 67, 91, 96, 118 – 22, 124, 131, 134, 141, 204, 230, 294, 390; see also intersectionality intersectional feminism 118, 120 intersectionality 5, 8, 19, 38, 47, 49, 54, 62, 66, 72, 77, 118 – 21, 123, 132, 135, 145, 456 intimate partner violence 138, 304, 316, 321, 452

paid and unpaid work 4, 10, 28, 94, 122, 150, 202 – 4, 243, 245 – 6, 249, 295, 325, 355 – 6, 362, 364 – 5, 378, 385 – 6 paid leave 16, 185, 298, 334, 381, 384 – 5, 390 – 1, 393 – 7, 405, 409 parental leave 12, 14, 16, 74, 95, 204, 287 – 8, 298, 336, 364, 380 – 1, 384 – 6, 400 patriarchal systems 37, 53, 59 patriarchy 37, 53, 59, 119, 122, 296 pluralism 3, 9, 17, 44, 48, 50, 73 – 4, 133 political economy 4 – 5, 34 – 5, 40, 44, 53 – 4, 57, 59, 92, 219, 371, 422, 427 postmodern 12, 234 – 6; see also postmodernism; postmodernist postmodernism 130 postmodernist 130 poverty 9, 13, 16 – 18, 30, 36, 55, 62, 65, 73 – 4, 77, 85, 87, 92, 138, 151, 154, 179, 198 – 200, 203, 217, 221, 228, 244, 257, 259, 259, 274 – 81, 279, 280, 289, 323, 330, 335, 363, 391, 395 – 6, 400, 403, 414, 434 – 5, 437 – 8, 441 – 2, 446, 450 – 1, 454, 464, 469, 490

land rights 105, 165, 218 – 19, 315 Latin America 16, 26, 30, 94, 149, 152, 198, 200 – 3, 285, 295, 313 – 14, 321, 400 – 2, 404 – 5, 435 – 6 LGBT 294; see also LGBTI LGBTI 445 macroeconomic policies 4, 10, 14 – 15, 154, 202, 204, 345, 348, 352, 456, 468 macroeconomics 14 – 15, 18, 25, 29, 30 – 1, 347, 351 – 2, 354, 356 – 8, 461, 465 male breadwinner model 258, 297, 394, 479 marginalization 17, 26, 46, 62, 249; see also marginalized marginalized 8, 15, 17, 19, 25, 38 – 9, 103, 120 – 1, 130, 222, 262, 420 – 1, 428 Marxism 34, 36 – 8, 40; see also Marxist Marxist 5 – 7, 34 – 40, 55 – 6, 92, 179 – 80, 296, 363 – 4, 372 maternity 105, 174, 202, 251, 255, 259 – 60, 287, 333, 364, 380 – 1, 385, 390 – 1, 394, 396, 400 – 1, 414, 491 MDGs 441 – 4 methodology 4 – 5, 8 – 9, 11, 38, 43, 72, 109, 111, 129 – 35, 138 – 9, 142, 143, 144, 146, 325, 346, 353, 427 methods: interpretive 138, 141, 146; qualitative 9, 49, 122, 131 – 2, 141, 144 – 5, 306 microcredit 17, 433, 435 – 7 microeconomics 303 – 4, 471 migration 12, 26, 30, 38 – 9, 91, 94, 100, 102, 122, 124, 146, 150, 154, 181, 217 – 18, 220, 225 – 30, 235, 237 – 9, 243 – 4, 251, 266, 344, 403 mobility 18, 38, 57, 201, 203, 212, 235 – 8, 306, 315 – 16, 481 mortality 58, 159 – 60, 163, 266, 286, 315, 333, 335 – 6

race 4, 6, 8, 10 – 11, 13, 16 – 17, 20, 25 – 6, 38 – 40, 45, 54, 58, 72, 74, 77, 81 – 2, 90 – 1, 94, 96, 99, 115, 118 – 21, 123 – 4, 131 – 2, 135, 145, 159, 181 – 2, 187, 195, 198, 204, 227, 230, 294, 297, 352, 373 – 4, 391, 393, 409, 411, 412, 415, 418, 420 – 1, 423, 423, 424, 425, 425, 426, 427 – 8, 444, 451, 463, 471; see also racialized racialized 17, 38, 45 – 6, 62, 120 – 4, 189 – 91, 227, 236, 474 regimes 12, 19, 216, 219, 229, 239, 285, 294, 297, 313 – 14, 317, 354 – 5, 391, 393 – 4, 445, 450, 469 reproduction: biophysical 5 – 6, 62 – 3; household 255 – 6; of inequalities 455; intergenerational reproduction of poverty 451; social 15, 19, 26, 29, 31, 34, 36 – 40, 47, 55 – 6, 58, 62 – 3, 92, 96, 123 – 4, 152, 176, 222, 343, 351 – 7, 355, 360 – 3, 366, 374, 456; of societies 148 reproductive health 7, 14, 29, 64, 104, 159, 330 – 1, 335 – 6, 442 reproductive rights 29, 184, 186, 441 – 2, 472 rural women 12, 102, 105, 208, 216 – 17, 220, 222, 250, 265, 315, 323 same-sex couples 13, 297 – 8, 306, 309 SAPs 30, 218, 341, 345, 351, 360 – 2; see also structural adjustment programs satellite accounts 10, 27, 93, 149, 152, 353 SDGs 9, 18, 29, 148 – 9, 154, 270, 322, 401, 404, 406, 441 – 2, 444, 446 – 7, 454, 483 sex work 12, 238, 234 – 40 smart economics 18, 468 – 74

neoclassical economics 45, 48, 82, 88, 124, 129, 133, 179, 182, 372, 471; see also orthodoxy neoliberalism 18, 29 – 30, 189, 468 – 70, 474 neoliberal policies 14, 30, 94, 96, 216 – 17, 446 occupational segregation 10, 133, 161, 179, 181, 185, 198, 201, 204, 209, 248, 256, 261, 413 orthodoxy 113, 468 – 9, 471

497

Index SNA 92 – 3, 149, 151 – 2, 352 – 3; see also System of National Accounts social and solidarity economy 19, 486; see also SSE Social Institutions and Gender Index 162, 162 Soviet Union 12, 254 – 6 SSE 486 – 7, 492 structural adjustment programs 7, 14, 341, 469, 471 sub-Saharan Africa 198, 203, 264 – 5, 275, 314, 323 – 4, 331, 333, 400 – 2, 404 sustainability 4, 28, 31, 62, 66, 157, 160, 355, 357, 369 – 70, 373 – 5, 434, 437, 443, 445 – 6, 456, 462, 489 – 90 Sustainable Development Goals 9, 29, 251, 270, 322, 441, 454; see also SDGs System of National Accounts 92, 149, 165, 352

unionization 410, 411, 413, 415 – 16, 419; see also unions unions 16, 18 – 19, 35, 103 – 5, 174, 195, 201 – 2, 213, 228, 249, 258, 288, 293, 315, 363 – 4, 397, 409 – 16, 442, 477 – 8, 480 – 4, 489, 492 United States (US) 8, 11 – 13, 16 – 17, 35, 43, 45, 49, 57, 59, 67n1, 84, 90 – 1, 93, 95 – 6, 114, 119 – 24, 134 – 5, 152, 171 – 5, 179, 182, 185, 189 – 92, 202, 210 – 11, 226, 235 – 6, 275, 277, 284 – 7, 289 – 90, 293 – 9, 309, 323 – 6, 330 – 4, 347, 357, 361, 364 – 5, 390 – 1, 393 – 7, 409 – 11, 414, 416, 422 – 3, 428 – 9, 450, 482, 489 unpaid care and domestic work 91, 148, 401 – 4, 454, 459, 461 unpaid family worker 93, 198

time poor 151, 278, 280; see also time poverty time poverty 13, 18, 77, 92, 151, 274, 277 – 81, 279, 280, 280, 437, 490 time-use surveys 9, 93, 148 – 54, 353, 462 total work hours 364 trade liberalization 11, 208, 211 – 12, 346, 356 transition economies 12, 254, 364

violence against women 56, 64, 105, 162 – 3, 235, 317, 321 – 2, 441 – 2, 444, 472 Western Europe 235, 284, 287, 294, 321, 461 work-family policies 16, 298, 390 – 1, 392, 393 – 6, 401; see also work-life policies work-life policies 12, 95

498