Feminist_economics_Palgrave.doc

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 authors original manuscript and has not been reviewed or edited. The definitive published version of thisextract may be found in the complete New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics in print and online, forthcoming.Feminist EconomicsJulie A. NelsonGlobal Development and Environment InstituteTufts Universityjulie.nelson@tufts.eduFebruary 2005AbstractFeminist 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 EconomicsFeminist 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 e。