International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
ECONOMICS
This essay offers a feminist critique of economics, which has been and remains a men’s field. This is true in part because it is still dominated by men. The proportion of PhDs awarded to women rose from 5 per cent in 1949–50 to only 29 per cent in 2000–1 (US Department of Education 2002: Table 255). It is also true, however, because most members of the profession see economics as a onedimensional story of sustained progress guided only by self-evident facts and logic. There have, of course, been many critics, male as well as female, of this ‘masculinist’ view, but feminist economists stand out because they offer a fundamental and comprehensive critique of this unrealistic approach. Their concerns go beyond the objections raised by ‘feminist empiricists’ who focus on inequities facing women and try to break down remaining barriers against women in the economics profession but do not challenge the conventional economic paradigm.
Contrary to the widespread perception that feminist economists are critical of the mainstream of the profession because it is too objective, most feminists find fault with the discipline as currently practised because it is not objective enough. Like the mythical Pro-crustes, who mutilated people to make them fit his bed, most economists ignore the complexities of the real world and pretend that reality conforms to their elegant but onedimensional models. An early volume that brought together a number of path-breaking essays that demonstrate this point is Marianne A.Ferber and Julie A.Nelson’s (1993) Beyond Economic Man, followed ten years later by Ferber and Nelson (2003) Feminist Economics Today. The papers in these volumes offer incisive critiques of crucial aspects of the dominant neoclassical school they consider unrealistic or misguided. A number of these are summarised below.
Rebecca Blank’s (1993:134) explanation of why she has considerable sympathy for the feminist approach, although she finds ‘the economic model of choice-based behavior an extremely powerful and useful analytic tool’ sets the stage for an explanation of the fundamental difference between feminist and conventional economics. As she so aptly puts it, ‘Too often during a seminar or a conversation with a colleague, I’ve suddenly realised with surprise, “He really believes all this stuff about individuals constantly making fully informed and rational choices accounting for all expected lifetime costs and benefits’” (p. 133).
Julie A.Nelson (1993) raised the most basic question of whether economics is the study of choice, as most economists would have it, or of ‘provisioning’, as Adam Smith, ‘the father of economics’, proposed. Nelson makes a strong case that, in order to be useful, economics needs to be concerned with the creation and distribution of the necessities and conveniences of life, rather than merely with ‘the mathematical theory of individual choice’ (p. 34). Unlike standard economics, provisioning does not focus exclusively on market production, the traditional domain of men, but also on housework, the traditional domain of women, which facilitates consumption. Both are essential for sustaining human life.
Another crucial issue raised by Paula England (1993) and Julie A.Nelson (2003) is whether the ‘separative’ models of the individual and of the firm are realistic. England, focusing on the individual, notes that three of the most basic assumptions underlying traditional economic theory are that interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible, tastes are exogenous and unchanging, and an individual’s utility is independent of the utility of others. She, however, points out that these assumptions flow from an unrealistic model of human nature that assumes individuals are wholly autonomous, impervious to social influences and so devoid of sufficient emotional connections as to make empathy with others impossible.
Nelson extends England’s analysis to business organisations which are variously regarded by most economists as fully bounded entities only interested in maximising profits but also, inconsistently, as being entirely at the mercy of inexorable market forces beyond their control. Neither of these views can explain such events as one lone securities trader bringing down Barings Bank, which in turn set off the Asian financial crisis of 1995, or the 2002 crash of Enron, one of the ostensibly most successful giant US corporations. Nelson’s explanation is that these entities involve real people who form social as well as economic relationships and have only a passing resemblance to the corporation of the theorists.
Paula England and Nancy Folbre (2003) turn their attention to the much-neglected issue of care work and the fact that women have long been disadvantaged because it has been their responsibility. Even today, when women’s labour force participation in economically advanced countries ranges from almost 65 per cent (in Japan) to about 75 per cent (in the Scandinavian countries), the care of children, the elderly and the infirm continues to be largely their responsibility. Further, they do by far most of the paid work that now replaces some of the services family members used to perform. Thus, while less than 20 per cent of architects, clergy, dentists and engineers are women, more than 90 per cent of registered nurses and preschool as well as elementary school teachers are fenale. It is also the case that mothers who are employed earn considerably less than other women, and workers in predominantly female occupations earn considerably less than other workers with comparable qualifications.
Neoclassical economists argue that this is because homemakers, and particularly mothers, expend more energy on household work than people without ‘family responsibilities’ and hence do not perform as well in their paid job, but no one has even attempted to provide proof of such a connection. Similarly, these economists claim that male-dominated occupations are more highly rewarded because they are more demanding, more stressful or more dangerous. Alternatively, they claim it is because they make more valuable contributions. But does anyone really believe that plumbers or construction workers are under more strain or at greater risk than nurses, who are responsible for human lives and are exposed to health risks every day they spend on the job? And do investment brokers or advertising executives make greater contributions than grade school and kindergarten teachers who help our children to become successful and responsible adults?
Women’s greater commitment to family is also frequently used to explain their slow progress in climbing the ladder within organisations. According to a report by Catalyst on Fortune 500 companies, in 1999 only 12 per cent of all corporate officers and 5 per cent of top-level executives were women; and women held just 3 per cent of top-earner spots comprised of the five highest-paid executives in the company. Similarly, women comprise almost 60 per cent of instructors but fewer than 20 per cent of full professors at academic institutions; and the situation is worse at the prestigious research universities.
Myra H.Strober (2003) addresses another important issue when she expresses serious reservations about the emphasis most economists place on the role of training students in skills that increase their value in the workplace and tend to ignore the importance of education that can help young people to achieve their human potential and to be responsible members of society. This is in stark contrast to some economists who go so far as to argue that it is irrational for people to take the time to vote when they are not likely to reap any direct, concrete rewards.
Finally, unlike the authors discussed so far, Nancy Folbre (1993) focuses on the different views of feminists and socialists. She emphasises that like Friedrich Engels most of them considered their brand of socialism, which was concerned with the exploitation of the industrial proletariat, ‘scientific’, but branded those who were concerned with gender inequality as ‘utopian’. Yet Folbre argues persuasively that such socialists as August Bebel, Robert Owen and William Thompson were no less scientific for being sympathetic to feminism. They criticised competitive individualism, called for social cooperation and invoked the categories of right and wrong. Foreshadowing criticisms by modern feminists of Gary Becker, who assumes that a family necessarily has a ‘head’ (presumably the man) who is entirely benevolent, Thompson and Bebel also disparaged the assumption that men are self-interested in their dealings with other men but altruistic in their dealings with women. Further, while Folbre does not mention the debate between Clara Zetkin who recurrently urged the USSR during its early days to provide the services they had promised women to make lives easier, and Vla-dimir I.Lenin, who continued to respond that they would do so as soon as more urgent needs were taken care of, this dispute provides additional evidence that from the revolution till the fall of the Soviet Empire women’s issues were never taken seriously by ‘mainstream socialists’, just as has been true of most classical and neoclassical economists, from Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall to Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson. The scant attention paid to women and women’s issues in introductory economics texts, discussed by Ferber and Nelson (2003), provides evidence that this continues to be the case.
Feminist economists also raise questions about many tenets of neoclassical economics not specifically mentioned above, from the almost universally accepted premise that more is better than less (is it really better to have more cars on the road?), the implicit assumption that externalities tend to be relatively minor (is pollution inconsequential as compared to the production of goods people often buy because they are heavily advertised?) and the contention that a dollar’s worth of different goods always has equal value (does a $100,000 addition to a $1,000,000 mansion provide as much satisfaction to its tenants as a $100,000 house to a previously homeless family?).
Similarly, feminists challenge other implicit assumptions of laissez-faire economics. Among these is the notion that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. This is obviously not true as long as people are born with different capabilities and raised in environments not equally conducive to achieving their full potential. Hence, feminists question the basic tenet that distribution according to contribution, which can lead to great wealth for some and dire poverty for others, is fair. Finally, they are critical of the failure of producers to bear the cost of exhausting natural resources and polluting the environment. These concerns lead feminists and other dissidents to the heretical conclusion that a smaller output more equally distributed, within and among nations, would most likely improve overall wellbeing.
In sum, this essay emphasises the contrast between what may be broadly characterised as ‘masculinist’ and feminist economics. However, as already noted, not all men subscribe to the former, nor do all women subscribe to the latter. In other words, the difference is not categorical, and certainly not merely determined by biology. Rather, women who have been acculturated to be caring and concerned about the welfare of others, especially children and the helpless, tend to have different priorities than men who are expected to be tough and ambitious. Thus, mainstream economists, male and female, emphasise maximising income, while feminist economists, again both male and female, stress the importance of distributive justice and are more concerned with quality of life rather than merely quantity of output.
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