Forthcoming in S. N. Durlauf and L. E. Blume, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Palgrave
Macmillan, reproduced with permission of PalgraveMacmillan. This article is taken from the author's
original manuscript and has not been reviewed or edited. The definitive published version of this
extract may be found in the complete New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics in print and online,
forthcoming.
Feminist Economics
Julie A. Nelson
Global Development and Environment Institute
Tufts University
julie.nelson@tufts.edu
February 2005
Abstract
Feminist economics is a field that includes both studies of gender roles in the economy
from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the economics
discipline. It challenges economic analyses that treat women as invisible, or that serve to
reinforce situations oppressive to women, and develops innovative research designed to
overcome these failings. Feminist economics points out how subjective biases concerning
acceptable topics and methods have compromised the reliability of economics research.
Topics addressed include the economics of households, labor markets, care, development,
the macroeconomy, national budgets, and the history, philosophy, methodology, and
teaching of economics.
Feminist Economics
Feminist economics is a field that includes both studies of gender roles in the economy
from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the content and
methodology of the economics discipline. It challenges economic analyses that treat
women as invisible, or that serve to reinforce situations oppressive to women, and
develops innovative research designed to overcome these failings. Feminist economics
points out how subjective biases concerning acceptable topics and methods have
compromised the reliability and objectivity of economics research and explores more
adequate alternatives.
The origins of feminist economics
Feminist economics in its contemporary form began in the 1970s in response to
the pattern of labor market and household studies up to that the time. Up until the 1960s,
women and women’s traditional activities had been subsumed into the “black box” of the
household within neoclassical economics. Neoclassical theory had defined itself as the
study of choices made on markets by rational, autonomous actors. A household was
generally understood to be represented by its male “head,” whose preferences, it was
assumed, determined household labor supply and consumption decisions. The household
was assumed to enjoy a single utility level, and activities within the household were
classified as “leisure.” Studies of paid labor generally focused on men only, and
household production was (and is) excluded from national accounts. Women, women’s
traditional activities, and the well-being of women and children were invisible.
During the 1960s, issues of labor market discrimination by race and sex began to
be debated. The idea that household activities might include unpaid work as well as
leisure also gained ground. The New Home Economics school sought to extend rational
choice theory to intra-household decisions. Often, however, work by economists on
these issues simply justified traditional sex roles in the family, women’s segregation into
a narrow range of paid occupations, and women’s lesser earnings in the paid labor
market. In general, neoclassical economists of the time argued that the patterns then in
existence resulted from rational choices, with variations between men and women due
only to presumably innate differences between men and women in tastes and abilities,
often expressed in different choices about human capital formation. Or circular reasoning
was used: Women’s lesser market earnings were used to explain their specialization in
household work, and women’s household responsibilities were used to justify their lesser
market earnings. While these works recognized women’s existence, they were not
feminist in that they served to rationalize rather than explore and question women’s
assignment to second-class status and financial dependency.
A key distinction feminist economists make is between sex, understood as the
biological difference between the sexes, and gender, the social beliefs that society
constructs on the basis of sex. While traditional economists saw household and labor
market outcomes as reflecting only sex differences, feminist economists raised the
question of how much these outcomes might, instead, reflect misleading stereotypes and
rigid social constraints. Some works called into question, for example, the ideas that
specialization in household work would be an optimizing choice for a woman (given
rising divorce rates), or that it would necessarily yield higher household wellbeing than
other, more egalitarian, arrangements (Ferber and Birnbaum, 1977; note: all references
given in this article are examples from larger literatures). Others emphasized the role of
discrimination in limiting women’s labor market opportunities (Bergmann, 1974) or the
interplay of household and workplace power relations (Hartmann, 1976).
In actuality, as the equal rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s loosened many
of the legal restrictions and social norms that had artificially narrowed women’s
educational and job choices in a number of countries, women moved increasingly into the
labor market and into formerly all-male occupations. Surveys of women’s economic
history, economic status, and progress towards gaining economic equality have since
been made for many countries and regions, along with surveys of policies related to
gender equity. Recognition of the importance of social beliefs and structures of power in
creating gendered economic outcomes has remained a hallmark of feminist economics.
The critique of mainstream economics
While feminists’ dissatisfaction with mainstream economic scholarship was
originally rooted in its neglect and distortion of women’s experiences, by the late 1980s
feminists were also raising a more thoroughgoing critique. Many feminist economists
were finding that traditional formal choice-theoretic modeling and a narrow focus on
mathematical and econometric methods were a Procrustean bed when it came to
analyzing phenomena fraught with connection to others, tradition, and relations of
domination. Feminists began to raise questions about the mainstream definition of
economics, its central image of “economic man,” and the exclusive use of a particular set
of methodological tools.
Essays on this theme were brought together in a 1993 volume, Beyond Economic
Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Ferber and Nelson, 1993). In this volume, it was
suggested that economics be defined by a concern with the provisioning of life in all
spheres where this occurs, rather than only in markets. Investigations were made into
how a particular set of professional values, emphasizing culturally masculine-associated
factors such as autonomy, separation, and abstraction had come to take precedence over
culturally feminine-associated factors such as interdependence, connection, and
concreteness. The contributors argued that rather than taking the former as a sign of
“rigor” in the discipline, the truncation of methods created by masculinist bias has
weakened the discipline’s ability to explain real-world phenomena. Questions were raised
about mainstream economics not because it is too objective, but because it is not
objective enough.
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A conference held in Amsterdam in 1993 further developed this theme, and
contributed innovative discussions on economic methodology (Kuiper and Sap, 1995).
While many feminist economists continue to make use of traditional mainstream tools, on
the whole the field has come to be characterized by inclusion of a broader range of
concepts and methods. Theories of human behavior that include a balance between
individuality and relationship, autonomy and dependence, and reason and emotion are
being developed (Ferber and Nelson, 1993, 2003). The use of historical studies, case
studies, interviews and other qualitative data, as well as greater attention to issues such as
data quality and replication in quantitative work, are being explored (Bergmann, 1989;
Nelson, 1995). Feminist economists tend to find that such serious efforts to create and
promote more adequate forms of economic practice lead to new insights across the board,
whether or not the topic being studied is explicitly gender-related.
The formation of a field
With publication of a number of books and articles, and gatherings at early
conferences, feminist economics coalesced into an organized field in the early 1990s.
The International Association for Feminist Economics was formed in 1992 and its
journal, Feminist Economics, commenced publication a few years later (Strassmann,
1995). The field was first described in a journal of the American Economic Association
in 1995 (Nelson, 1995), an encyclopedia of feminist economics was published in 1999
(Peterson and Lewis, 1999), and a review of developments during the first 10 years of
feminist economics was published in 2003 (Ferber and Nelson, 2003).
International and wide-ranging in scope, feminist economics now includes work
on a number of subjects, including topics in microeconomics, macroeconomics, history,
philosophy, and other areas.
Labor, households, and care
True to its roots, feminist economics continues to develop analyses of gender
roles in labor markets and households. Studies of women’s paid labor supply, labor
market discrimination, and the origins of occupational segregation have been numerous.
Some feminists make use of mainstream theories and/or econometric models to examine
the wage gap between men and women and its possible explanations. Other feminist
economists raise questions about the ability of such tools, used alone, to shed light on the
underlying causes of inequality and encourage increased investigation into the social,
political and institutional structures of gender and labor markets (Bergmann, 1989;
Rubery, 1998; Figart, Mutari and Power, 2002).
Studies of unpaid work within households have sought to obtain quantitative
measures of this labor and to increase the attention paid to unpaid work in the design of
policies (Waring, 1988; Ironmonger, 1996). The issue of valuing this work remains
controversial among feminists. Some feminists endorse the use of replacement cost or
3
opportunity cost methods of assigning dollar values to unpaid household labor. Others
argue that these methods lead to understatement because the wages used in such
imputations have been held artificially low by discrimination. Still others believe that this
issue serves to draw attention away from women’s lack of access to real money and
power.
Issues of intra-household distribution and decision-making have been investigated
by many feminist economists. The dramatic effect of skewed intra-household
distribution by sex in countries such as China, India and Pakistan has been brought to
public attention (Sen, 1990). Bargaining models (McElroy and Horney, 1981) have been
developed as one way of bringing women’s agency within households to the fore.
Questions of marriage, divorce, fertility and the well-being of children have been
investigated from feminist perspectives. A number of feminist economists go beyond
choice-theory-based bargaining models to examine legal, social, and psychological issues
related to intra-household decision-making and well-being (Sen, 1984; Agarwal, 1997;
Wheelock, Oughton and Baines, 2003).
Much of women’s traditional work in sex-segregated occupations (such as nursing
and child care) and within households and can be described as “caring work.” Caring
work presents a challenge to mainstream economics since the traditional image of
“economic man” is of an autonomous, self-interested individual who neither requires care
nor has any inclination to provide it. The conceptual and empirical study of work with
dependency, emotional and/or other-regarding components has recently become a
frequent endeavor of feminist economists (Folbre, 1994; Himmelweit, 1999; Folbre and
Nelson, 2000; Bettio and Plantenga, 2004).
Feminist economists have developed critiques of theories and policies that assume
that economic agents are unencumbered prime age workers, delving into the economic
problems of elderly women, parents of young children, and lone mothers who are faced
with simultaneous responsibilities for income generation and family care (MacDonald,
1998; Albelda, Himmelweit, and Humphries, 2004).
Development, macroeconomics, and national budgets
Feminist economists have also made innovations in the analysis of national and
global economies. Studies of the effects of including unpaid production in GDP
(Wagman and Folbre, 1996) and the analysis of government budgets according to their
effects on gender equity (Budlender et al., 2002) have become well-developed fields.
Feminist economists have challenged the definition of economic development in
terms of industrialization and GDP growth, turning attention instead to issues of growth
in human well-being and capabilities (Elson, 1991; Benería, 2003; Agarwal, Humphries,
and Robeyns, 2003). Many have studied the changes in women’s status that have come
about during transitions from socialism and during other forms of macroeconomic
restructuring (Aslanbeigui, Pressman and Summerfield, 1994).
4
The effects of macroeconomic policies of structural adjustment and the
liberalization of global trade and finance have been looked at from a feminist point of
view (Çagatay, Elson and Grown, 1995; Grown, Elson and Çagatay, 2000). For example,
programs that prescribe macroeconomic belt-tightening through cutbacks in health care
often have their most immediate impact on women, as women are expected take on,
unpaid, the work of providing services no longer provided by governments. Men and
women may also be affected differently, depending on the degree to which they work in
subsistence or traded sectors. Women’s employment in subcontracting firms has also
received considerable attention (Kabeer, 2000; Balakrishnan, 2002).
History, philosophy, and teaching
As well as investigating the history of women’s economic activities (Humphries,
1990), and the history of economic thought in regards to women (Folbre, 1991; Pujol,
1992), feminist economists have looked at the history of women and feminists within the
economics discipline itself (Dimand, Dimand, and Forget, 1995). The most recent
national studies indicate that women are still underrepresented in the top ranks of
academic economics (Booth, Burton and Mumford 2000), receiving tenure less
frequently than men even when controlling for factors such as publications and family
(Ginther and Kahn, 2004). Sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and inhospitable
environments are among the barriers yet to be overcome in some departments and
universities (Ginther and Kahn, 2004).
Feminist economists have also engaged in philosophical discussion concerning
the epistemological and methodological foundations of economics in dialog with
postmodernist, postcolonialist, critical realist and other perspectives (Barker and Kuiper
2003). Feminists have also explored comparisons of aims and methods with various
heterodox schools of economics including institutionalist economics (Waller and
Jennings, 1990), social economics (Emami, 1993), radical economics (Matthaei, 1996)
and Post Keynesian economics (Danby, 2004).
Regarding the teaching of economics, feminist economists have investigated how
the content of economics courses can be made less biased concerning women (Feiner,
2004), how courses can be enriched by feminist reevaluation of theories and methods,
and how pedagogy can be adapted to better reach students with diverse backgrounds and
learning styles (Shackelford 1992; Aerni and McGoldrick, 1999).
Feminism and other concerns
Feminist economists have also analyzed how such factors as race and caste
(Brewer, Conrad and King, 2002) and sexual preference (Badgett, 2001), in interaction
with gender, affect economic outcomes.
Finally, feminist economists’ skepticism about the adequacy of the image of
“economic man” has stimulated new thinking in areas other than gender relations. The
5
analysis of relations of power and of care, first generated by study of women’s work and
family relations, has been extended to the subject of interpersonal relations among people
economy-wide (Nelson, 2005). Feminist explorations into ecological economics examine
how natural processes, like women, have been treated as invisible and freely exploitable
in traditional economic thought (Perkins, 1997).
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