What is Feminist Economics?

As defined by Women’s Budget Group, feminist economics promotes economic equality between women and men. The activities, behaviour and decisions of men and women have a major impact on our economy. But mainstream economics tends to be based on men’s lives and recognises only work that is done for money. A feminist economics perspective recognises the paid and unpaid work for both men and women.

“This is a man’s world 

This is a man’s world 

But it would be nothing 

Nothing without a woman or a girl”

Now although James Brown is not an economist, this song really does encapsulate what it means to be a woman in modern-day society. That the world would not be the same without women, and economically this is something that is majorly overlooked in the composition of a society. 

Gross domestic Product (GDP) as an economic indicator is usually taken to analyse and measure the monetary value of goods and services produced by a country in a given year. It tends to measure the overall size of an economy and thus its growth rate when considering prior year-on-year changes. However, the key fundamental here is that GDP measures all paid goods and services in a year and fails to acknowledge the unpaid domestic and care work (non monetary economy), for which is predominantly undertaken by women. 

Shockingly, the non monetary economy accounts for around ‘40-50% of the work done in any industrialised economy is unpaid work (care-taking, educational roles, volunteer activities, self-employment’ and in my opinion, the most unrecognised being household tasks, such as cleaning, looking after children, cooking (and the list goes on), these activities are just simply not accounted for. 

The UN has recognised that the unequal distribution of unpaid work between women and men is substantially linked to the sex-segregated labour market and the prevailing sex discrimination. In a the paper ‘Unpaid Work and Policy-Making’ they undertake a study into how much unpaid work is done and by whom, two tendencies were well established: 

1. On average, unpaid working time amounts to a comparable number of hours a week to the number of hours in paid employment.
2. The burden of unpaid work and paid work respectively are distributed unequally between men and women. As a result ‘men receive the lion’s share of income and recognition for their economic contribution- while most of women’s work remains unpaid, unrecognised and undervalued’. 

From the back of studies such as these, feminist economics has unfolded, arguing that modern economics is centred around the idea of an ‘economic man’, for which describes the weighting

towards organising society and the general foundations of an economy around the experience of a man, by a man. Meaning the experiences of women in the architecture of our society are largely ignored. 

Did you know that a woman experiences her hormonal cycle in around 28 days, whereas a man’s cycle is over in 24 hours? Meaning that when we feel low for (lets say) 4 days before our period, that is basically the equivalent of an hour for a man …. Can we let that sink in for a moment… their testosterone levels are the highest in the morning and lowest in the night, which essentially is exactly constructed around the standard 9-5 workday. Whereas, as you can imagine, women are not so perfectly compatible with the way society is constructed, when the world has been designed by men, for men. 

Feminist economists also tend to focus on the gender pay gap problem, and thus the macroeconomic policies that should be designed to consider a more inclusive environment that considers the fundamentals of gender when implemented. They also highlight the institutional framework, whereby societal roles of families and expectations of women, should be socially negotiated rather than as a direct result of the market allocations. In this way again considering how policies should be implemented so that economically women are considered in their design. 

Feminist economics, however, is not just economics for women but rather it is equality for all and really all economists should be feminist economists. I for one am excited to see where feminist economics goes both academically and in reality, particularly in the reduction of socially constructed characteristics of the economy.  

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