I first began studying economics because I wanted to answer big questions. I wanted to understand the sources of prosperity and poverty ‒ including the economic decline and destitution which surrounded me when I was growing up. Having lived through my first experience of boom and bust in the late 1980s and early 1990s during a recession that hit my parents’ small business particularly hard, I also wanted to discover whether instability was inevitable, or whether, having seen the human toll, there was anything more that policy makers could do about it. When studying for my A-levels between the ages of 16 and 18, I devoured the works of the classical economists on the bus back and forth to Oldham Sixth Form College. I remember exactly where I was on that bus the first time I opened my library copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. I was hooked. It led me on to an economics degree at the University of Cambridge. Before long, however, I realized that what I was being taught in lectures wasn't quite what I had been expecting. Where were the big debates? Where was the intermingling of society, politics, history and philosophy of the kind needed to truly understand economic outcomes? I spent most of my time applying maths to simplistic models of decidedly un-human behaviour ‒ and increasingly so with every year.
At this time, in the late 1990s, feminism was not, however, at a high point. After all, we had all been brought up ‒ thanks to the Spice Girls and their ‘girl power’‒ to assume that we women had the same potential as the boys we studied alongside. However, as the years went by, and as shown throughout this book, I increasingly came to realize that to answer all of those big questions, it was necessary to think about both sex and gender ‒ about both the biological and socially constructed differences between men and women. The more I began to confront the inequalities between men and women, the more I realized that feminism had passed economics by. It was as if the women's movement had never happened.
So why has economics failed to embrace feminism, and how, going forward, does it need to change if it is to become more open to feminist concerns? Well, let me present a humble manifesto for change, containing four simple and very achievable demands.
1 Re-centre economics on content rather than on approach. Economics might make more progress if, as is the case with almost every other academic subject, it was defined less by an approach ‒ one that involves applying the assumptions of a rational, maximizing and self-interested economic agent to situations of scarcity ‒ and more by its actual content. If this were the case, then the vast human activity that takes place outside the market, and yet is nevertheless essential to the economy, along with the broader connections between the public and private spheres, would in turn become an essential part of economics, rather than being either ignored or left for non-economists to consider. As things stand, they remain nowhere to be seen in the common core of material included in an economics degree.
2 Increasing interdisciplinarity. One cannot understand the workings of an economy ‒ including what makes it poor or prosperous ‒ without also knowing something about history, about society, about philosophy, and being cognizant not just of class but also of gender and race. This means that economics needs to become much more open and interdisciplinary, as the student-led groups Post-Crash Economics and Rethinking Economics have called for. Economics needs to stop seeing itself as ‘the king of the social sciences’. It needs to refrain from its historic academic imperialism, from seeking to bring its insights to bear on every subject, without listening to and learning from what those other subjects have to offer in return. One study of bibliometrics data found that the top articles in politics and sociology reference economists between five and eight times more than the other way around.10 Economists’ interactions with other academic disciplines need to be two-way; not one way. But that will only happen once economists come to respect other disciplines.
Rather than appearing dull and dry, as a branch of applied mathematics, economics could be much more exciting than it is at present, bringing together all of the many aspects of human life in order to think big thoughts about poverty and prosperity. Markets, the state and society are fundamentally linked. If we are to understand the multitude of connections between them, we need to see them in the round, rather than to separate them out and treat them as three different spheres of study, with concrete walls dividing them. Breaking down these walls would help us to appreciate, as I have tried to emphasize throughout, that the market is not an independent entity. The rules by which markets operate, and the agents within them, are the product of the state and society. Markets can be ‘made’, and they can also be made to work better for those involved. In the process of doing so, however, economists cannot escape difficult ethical and philosophical questions or social assumptions and taboos. Those include the notion that the sciences are superior to the arts, that the brain is superior to the body, that care is women's work, and that sex and women's bodies are sinful. The latter holds the key to tackling so many practices that curtail women's freedom, from restrictions on women's work and mobility that aim to preserve their sexual honour through to FGM, restricted birth control and clothing that is intended to disincentivize sex.
3 Economists, including feminist ones like myself, need to spend more time listening and less time talking, not just to policy makers and businesses, but also to those on the periphery of what we think of as ‘formal’ economic activity ‒ immigrant labour, welfare claimants, workers in sweatshops overseas and sex workers. By listening, we can learn; we can learn things that can help us develop a much better understanding of poverty and prosperity, and what policy changes are needed to improve the lives of those who are, sadly, all too regularly ignored. And, in the vein of ‘feminist standpoint epistemology’ (of women speaking up), it can also help us to challenge the social order.11
Sometimes even small changes can make a big difference. Take the simple administrative mechanics of the welfare state, not something that economists would normally consider but which can affect poverty just as much as the size of benefits themselves. Whose account benefits are paid into ‒ the main income earner or the caregiver ‒ can, for example, have powerful effects on the lives of women.12 How long it takes to receive benefits after making an application also has big effects on how ‘risky’ it is for an unemployed person to seek and accept work, work which increasingly comes without a long-term contract, or for an abused woman to leave her partner. When it comes to taxation, whether taxes are paid at the level of the household or by individuals can also make a big difference to women's lives. Where women are secondary as opposed to primary income earners, but taxation takes place at the household level, the effective marginal tax rate they pay is higher, as their partner's higher earnings take them beyond the lower tax threshold. This may help to equate incomes between families, but it acts to widen the gender gap within families.13
4 Economics needs to admit that it displays an aggressive form of masculinity ‒ and so does economic policy. Macho biases are, as we saw in part IV, interwoven throughout the whole fabric that is economics, a fabric that is all too often assumed to be ‘gender neutral’.14 These macho biases deeply affect everything from what economists choose to measure and study to the assumptions they make when modelling the economy and the methods they most value. As we have seen in the course of the book, the most popular measure of all ‒ GDP ‒ ignores both the vital contribution made by care to the economy and the sustainability of the growth process. Taking these things on board isn't simply a matter of tinkering at the seams. Calculations suggest that unpaid work alone amounts to some 20‒50 per cent of GDP,15 and that, once we adjust for well-being and sustainability, the performance of the economy in the last few decades looks nowhere near as impressive. Economic change can bring a dark as well as a positive side and, unless we force ourselves to capture the former as well as the latter, we risk not only reducing rather than enhancing our standard of living but depleting the economic foundations on which future prosperity will be built. Rather than taking for granted existing economic measures,
economists need to spend more time reflecting on how we choose to measure the economy.
When it comes to assumptions, economists have prized the autonomous independent agent, ignoring or downplaying the human connections between individuals, meaning that difficult questions ‒ of great relevance to the economy ‒ have been sidestepped. How, for example, should we deal with the situation of dependency that we all face at different stages of life? By failing to address the reality of dependence, we have been left with an escalating ‘crisis of care’ including not only the ‘problem’ of elderly and child care but health problems associated with juggling too many balls, fertility rates that have fallen below replacement levels in many western countries, and low pay for those working in the care sector. Many of today's economic problems ‒ and its environmental ones ‒ are rooted in a failure to deal with dependency.
In the words of Jane Humphries, ‘Feminist economics requires the central character be changed from the autonomous, isolated agent who needs no social contacts to a socially and materially situated human being.’16 By assuming away the connections involved in human life, economics has ignored many of the real-life economic challenges that face us all every day.
According to Paula England, economists have not only neglected dependency but have also placed ‘the independent self’ on a pedestal.17 Caregivers are cast as detractors from economic activity and are regularly presented as a potential pool that can be tapped in an effort to push up GDP, ignoring the fact that they are already contributing to the economy.18 Although the feminist project has often been interpreted as one in which women achieve the same degree of independence as men, a world in which we are all independent is impossible. Achieving gender equality should not be about ‘making women like men’, as if what is considered masculine is somehow better, but about both men and women meeting in the middle. As Nancy Fraser argues, that means we all need to contribute to care, not just women and not just mothers.19 Without it, there will be no future generation. There will be no future economy.
The world of work can no longer continue to operate on the assumption that we all have someone at home to press our suits, do the dishes and look after the kids whilst we stay at our desk and work late. According to Fraser, it is not single mums who deserve to be cast as free riders, but the men who have for decades shirked their caring responsibilities, piling them onto their partners whilst they themselves relish the public glory and power that paid work brings. The same applies to the companies whose profits have been built on all of those same invisible behind-the-scenes women ‒ the women who have given birth to the workforce and who have spent years turning out their partners clean, tidy and well fed every day. Policy needs to recognize the current conflicts between the workplace and the home, and the deeply ingrained gendered assumptions about work and care. Policy ‒ including that of austerity ‒ also needs to be aware of its own gendered consequences. As Diane Elson has argued, the domestic sector cannot be assumed to be a ‘bottomless well’ that can automatically pick up the slack when governments decide to cut back on spending. Unless it receives inputs from other sectors to match the outputs that it provides, care resources are depleted ‒ and so too is the base for all other activity.20
By continuing along its current path, economics has succeeded in one way at least: in making itself much less relevant to people's lives than it truly deserves to be. If taken seriously, this four-point manifesto would give economics a renewed power, the power to become a more flexible, more human and more useful discipline. By feeding through to policy, it would not only improve the lives of women the world over, it would also serve to bring about more equitable and sustainable economic outcomes for us all.
Robert Solow, Nobel prizewinner for his work on the causes of prosperity, allegedly said that ‘everything reminds Milton [Friedman, a fellow Nobel prizewinner] of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.’21 This is precisely why economics is failing. What economics needs is not the X-Factor. It is the ‘Sex Factor’.
I fell in love with economics as a 16-year-old girl growing up in a deprived part of deindustrializing Manchester in the 1990s. I am still in love with it today, despite nearly falling out of love with it at university. Economics is my life ‒ and always will be. I just wish that it loved me ‒ as a feminist ‒ back in the same way.
Perhaps one day it will be unnecessary for me to appear naked at the Royal Economic Society conference in an effort to draw attention to the elephant in the room: economics has a serious sex problem ‒ a problem about which economists remain in denial, and which has restricted economic growth, increased inequality and damaged the planet. It has hurt us all.
Until economics faces up to its problem with sex, I will just have to keep on making the point in every way I know how ‒ with and without words.
Notes
1 Wang (2016); Rodgers (2018); UNFPA (2017).
2 Ahmed (2018).
3 Agarwal (1992).
4 Xue (2016).
5 Eswaran (2014), pp. 365‒8.
6 Jha et al. (2011).
7 Paul (2016); Eswaran (2014), pp. 234‒6.
8 Jensen and Oster (2009).
9 Rai (2013).
10 Fourcade, Ollion and Algan (2015).
11 Harding (1986); Humphries (1995), p. xiii.
12 Howard (2018).
13 Bateman (2016e).
14 Nelson (1992).
15 OECD (2011), ch. 1.
16 Humphries (1995), p. xvi.
17 England (1989).
18 See, for example, Woetzel et al. (2015).
19 Fraser (2013b).
20 Elson (1998); Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2011).
21 Edlund (2006): 622.
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