Womenomics - Women în Economics

REFERENCE

Introduction

Today’s world is changing at a startling pace. Political and economic transformation seem to be occuring everywhere – as countries convert from command to demand economies, dictatorships move toward democracy, and monarchies build new civil institutions. These changes have created economic opportunities for women who want to own and operate businesses. Today, women in advanced market economies own more than 25% of all businesses and women-owned businesses in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America are growing rapidly.

In some regions of the world, transformation to a market economy threatens to sharpen gender inequality. Some of these changes are simply the legacy of a gender imbalance that existed prior to political and economic reforms. Other changes reflect a return to traditional norms and values that relegated women to a secondary status. As countries become more democratic, gender inequalities lessen; thus, offering a more productive atmosphere for both sexes.

Chapter 1: Feminist Economics

Feminist economics broadly refers to a developing branch of economics that applies feminist lenses to economics. Research under this heading is often interdisciplinary or heterodox. It encompasses debates about the relationship between feminism and economics on many levels: from applying mainstream economic methods to under-researched "women's" areas, to questioning how mainstream economics values the reproductive sector, to examinations of economic epistemology and methodology.

One prominent issue that feminist economists investigate is how the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does not adequately measure unpaid labor predominantly performed by women, such as housework, childcare, and eldercare.[ Since a large part of women's work is rendered invisible, they argue that policies meant to boost the GDP can, in many instances, actually worsen the impoverishment of women, even if the intention is to increase prosperity. For example, opening up a state-owned forest in the Himalayas to commercial logging may increase India's GDP, but women who collect fuel from the forest to cook with may face substantially more hardships.

While attention to women’s economic role and economic differences by gender started in the 1960s and there were important feminist critiques of received economic theories in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist economics took off in earnest with the founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in 1990 and the journal Feminist Economics in 1994. 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 labour markets and spread to macroeconomics and international trade, leaving no field in economics untouched. 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 is gradually becoming a widely recognized and reputed area of inquiry. In 1997, IAFFE gained Non-Governmental Organization status in the United Nations. That same year, the journal Feminist Economics was awarded the Council of Editors and Learned Journals (CELJ) Award as Best New Journal. The organization boasts approximately 600 members in 43 countries. Although its founding members were mostly based in the US, a majority of IAFFE's current members are based outside of the US. The 2005 ISI Social Science Citation Index ranked the journal Feminist Economics 20th out of 175 among economics journals and 2nd out of 27 among Women's Studies journals. Feminist economists have also challenged and exposed the rhetorical approach of mainstream economics. They have made critiques of many basic assumptions of mainstream economics, including the Homo economicus model. They have been instrumental in creating alternative models, such as the Capability Approach and incorporating gender into the analysis of economic data.

Feminist economists argue that traditional analysis of economic systems often fails to take into account the value of the unpaid work being performed by men and women in a domestic setting. Feminist economists have argued that unpaid work is just as valuable as paid work and that measures of economic success should take unpaid work into account when evaluating economic systems. In addition, feminist economists have also drawn attention to issues of power and inequality within families and households.

Many feminist economists argue that economic success cannot only be measured in terms of goods, but must also be measured by human well-being. To evaluate economic well-being, one cannot only look at distribution of wealth or income, but one must also look at individual entitlements and needs. Amartya Sen, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and other feminist economists have been at the forefront of developing alternatives to the GDP, such as the Human Development Index.

Human agency is an approach that looks not only at the individual but also the system that constrains an individual's options, or the systems and process behind them. Often many systems have been established over a long period of time and are disproportionately hard for various groups of people to access or take advantage of. A human agency methodology attempts to look at where the power in a system lies and who has unequal access to it. In addition, in contrast to "rational actor" models of economics, feminists have drawn attention to the problems of those who lack agency, such as children, the sick, and the frail elderly, and the way in which responsibilities for their care can serve to compromise the agency of their caregivers.

This is a methodology that looks at systems not from the point of view of neutral observer, but from a specific moral position and viewpoint. One can add, however, that this does not mean that feminist economics is "more subjective" than other types of economics. Rather, by recognizing that all views of the world arise from viewpoints, it sheds light on masculinist biases. Too many theories, while claiming to present universal principles, actually present a masculinist viewpoint in the guise of a "view from nowhere.”