Article Title : Feminist economics Subject : Feminist economics Feminist economics is the critical study of economics including its methodology, epistemology, history and empirical research, attempting to overcome androcentric (male and patriarchal) biases. It focuses on topics of particular relevance to women, such ascare work or occupational segregation (exclusion of women and minorities from certain fields); deficiencies of economic models, such as disregarding intra-household bargaining; new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics ultimately seeks to produce a more gender inclusive economics. Feminist economists call attention to the social constructions of traditional economics, questioning the extent to which it is positive and objective, and showing how its models and methods are biased towards masculine preferences. Since economics is traditionally focused on topics said to be culturally masculine such as autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for the inclusion of more feminine topics such as family economics, connections, concreteness, and emotion, and show the problems caused by exclusion of those topics. Inclusion of such topics has helped create policies that have reduced gender, racial, and ethnic discrimination and inequity, satisfying normative goals central to all economics. Many scholars including Ester Boserup, Marianne Ferber, Julie A. Nelson, Marilyn Waring, Nancy Folbre and Ailsa McKay have contributed to feminist economics. By the 1990s it had become recognised as an established field within economics. Origin and history Early on, feminist ethicists, economists, political scientists, and systems scientists argued that womens traditional work (e.g. child-raising, caring for sick elders) and occupations (e.g. nursing, teaching) are systematically undervalued with respect to that of men. For example, Jane Jacobs thesis of the Guardian Ethic and its contrast to the Trader Ethic sought to explain the undervaluing of guardianship activity, including the child-protecting, nurturing, and healing tasks that were traditionally assigned to women. In 1970, Ester Boserup published Womans Role in Economic Development and provided the first systematic examination of the gendered effects of agricultural transformation, industrialization and other structural changes. This evidence illuminated the negative outcomes that these changes had for women. This work, among others, laid the basis for the broad claim that women and men weather the storm of macroeconomic shocks, neoliberal policies, and the forces of globalization in different ways.[4] Moreover, measures such as employment equity were implemented in developed nations in the 1970s to 1990s, but these were not entirely successful in removing wage gaps even in nations with strong equity traditions. In 1988, Marilyn Waring published If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, a groundbreaking and systematic critique of the system of national accounts, the international standard of measuring economic growth, and the ways in which womens unpaid work as well as the value of Nature have been excluded from what counts as productive in the economy. According to Julie A. Nelson, Marilyn Warings work woke people up. She showed exactly how the unpaid work traditionally done by women has been made invisible within national accounting systems, and the damage this causes. Her book [...] encouraged and influenced a wide range of work on ways, both numerical and otherwise, of valuing, preserving, and rewarding the work of care that sustains our lives. By pointing to a similar neglect of the natural environment, she also issued a wake-up call to issues of ecological sustainability that have only grown more pressing over time. In recent decades, the field of feminist economics has broadened and widened to encompass these topics and more. While detailed feminist critiques of traditional economics appeared in the 1970s and 80s, such as those of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1972, feminist economics rapidly developed with the initiation of networks to support the careers of women in economics such as the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and in 1994, with the founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and the journal Feminist Economics. As in other disciplines, the initial emphasis of feminist economists was to critique the established theory, methodology, and policy approaches. The critique began in microeconomics of the household and labor markets and spread to macroeconomics and international trade, ultimately extending to all areas of traditional economic analysis. Feminist economists pushed for and produced gender aware theory and analysis, broadened the focus on economics and sought pluralism of methodology and research methods. Feminist economics shares many of its perspectives with ecological economics and the more applied field of green economy, including the focus on sustainability, nature, justice and care values.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:38:41 +0000
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