Concept

Feminist economics

Overview

Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in 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 is oriented toward the social ecology of money.

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 by an exclusive attention to masculine-associated topics and a one-sided favoring of masculine-associated assumptions and methods. While economics traditionally focused on markets and masculine-associated ideas of autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for a fuller exploration of economic life, including such "culturally feminine" topics such as family economics, and examining the importance of connections, concreteness, and emotion in explaining economic phenomena.

Many scholars including Ester Boserup, Marianne Ferber, Drucilla K. Barker, Julie A. Nelson, Marilyn Waring, Nancy Folbre, Diane Elson, Barbara Bergmann and Ailsa McKay have contributed to feminist economics. Waring's 1988 book If Women Counted is often regarded as the "founding document" of the discipline. By the 1990s feminist economics had become sufficiently recognised as an established subfield within economics to generate book and article publication opportunities for its practitioners.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Yet those who know the habits of the continent of Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money getting, even in the operations which have money getting for their direct object. The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the diversities of individual and national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
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In a parliamentary debate on Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 and 1845, Gladstone remarked that not even love has made so many fools of men as the pondering over the nature of money. He spoke of Britons to Britons.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
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We need only express and interpret this fact, instead of fancying ourselves bound to explain it away. It is an interest not less genuine and significant in economic experience than elsewhere (Sec.Sec. 6, 7). Its importance lies in the fact that it obliges us to regard what is called economic choice not as a balancing of utilities, marginal or otherwise, but as a process of "constructive comparison." The new…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
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Philosophers who discussed Feminist economics

Feminism

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Labor theory of value

Place in the tradition

Part of Ecological economics.

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