Economics

For a long time, economists for the most part considered issues of sex and gender to be irrelevant to their discipline. Economics was considered to be centrally concerned with markets, a realm from which women had historically been largely excluded. Male activity was treated as universal human economic behavior, whereas women's activities in homes and families were considered "noneconomic." This division of realms, it was long assumed, was dictated by the nature of biological sex differences. Beginning in the 1970s, some economists began to question this assumption, looking at the roles played by gender beliefs—social beliefs culturally constructed on top of a perception of biological sex differences—in creating observed outcomes, particularly regarding the division of home and market labor. By the 1990s, a second layer of critique had evolved, focusing on how the definition, models, and methods of the discipline itself bear a strong imprint of masculinist gender bias. The field of studies of sex and gender in economics has continued to develop and diversify, although it remains marginalized within the academic mainstream.

ECONOMICS OF LABOR MARKETS

The role of sex and gender in economics must be considered in relation to the core models of the discipline, as traditionally envisioned. In the neoclassical model of economics that dominates Anglo-American teaching and research, an individual is assumed to make rational decisions about participating in markets. When considering participating in a labor market, an individual is assumed to determine the number of hours he (as the theory was formulated) wants to work by making trade-offs between hours of labor and leisure. Labor is assumed to yield income but no direct utility (satisfaction), whereas leisure yields utility but no income. The individual chooses what sort of occupation to enter based on his preferences, abilities, and the amount of investment in human capital (education and training) that an occupation requires. The wage received while working is assumed to be determined by market conditions of supply and demand and to reflect the amount that his last increment of work contributes to the value of production (the marginal product of labor).

Some of the earliest work on sex and gender in economics took this model and extended or modified it to encompass what were perceived as uniquely women's issues. In 1962 the economist Jacob Mincer proposed that married women face three, rather than two, options for the use of their time: labor, leisure, and work in the home. A substantial and highly statistically sophisticated literature subsequently developed on the topic of women's labor force participation. Mincer and Solomon Polachek in 1974 proposed that women tended to be employed in different occupations than men because of choices made concerning investment in human capital. Assuming women would be out of the labor force for some periods because of child rearing, it made sense, they argued, that women would choose occupations that had lower education and training requirements. Men, meanwhile, would choose to make deeper investments in order to gain the benefits over a more protracted span of years.

By the early 1970s a number of studies of the gap between average male and average female wages had been accomplished. At that time, female, year-round, full-time workers in the United States earned approximately 60 percent of men's wages, on average, leaving a raw wage gap of approximately 40 percentage points or 40 cents on the dollar. Using survey data on large numbers of male and female workers, empirical studies sought to explain the source of wage gaps in the United States and other countries by breaking them down into components. Using statistical methods, portions of the gap were explained by differences in choice of occupation, and additional portions were attributed to differences in average levels of education, experience, unionization, or other observable worker characteristics that might lead to differences in productivity and earnings. Generally, about half of the gender wage gap remained unexplained by variations in these observable characteristics.

A number of the economists conjectured that this unexplained gap could be attributed to characteristics that affect productivity but are not observable in survey data. Women might have preferences, they suggested, that lead to lower levels of ambition, energy, or dedication to their jobs. The idea that there could be a significant problem of sex discrimination was generally dismissed because it goes against core assumptions of neoclassical theory, which posits that wages are based on marginal productivity, not on social factors such as gender. In addition, it was argued that in a competitive market economy, discriminators would not be able to stay in business. That is, a firm that failed to make its hiring decisions based on productivity factors alone would make lower-than-normal profits, and lose out to its competitors. This argument was, in turn, based on a theory of discrimination advanced by the economist Gary S. Becker during the 1960s that portrayed discrimination as simply an individual preference (a taste for discrimination).

In the 1970s and 1980s the feminist economists Barbara R. Bergmann, Marianne A. Ferber, Francine D. Blau, Heidi Hartmann, and others challenged the notions of sex and gender implicit in many mainstream economists' studies. While the economics literature assumed that women "naturally" preferred to stay at home or be maids, teachers, or nurses, social change was quickly calling this assumption into question. With the advent of the women's movement and antidiscrimination laws in a number of countries, many women were by that time "voting with their feet" and moving into the paid labor force in unprecedented numbers, as well as breaking into formerly male-dominated professions such as business and law. Feminist scholars challenged the orthodox view that labor market outcomes were a matter of biologically given sex differences in preferences and abilities. The term occupational segregation was introduced to refer to the socially constructed division between "men's jobs" and "women's jobs," and wage studies were reexamined.

Using corroborating evidence of discrimination from ethnographies, court cases, and studies of individual occupations or employers, feminist scholars argued that the unexplained gap largely reflected discrimination. The persistence of beliefs such as that "men need higher wages because they have families to support," or that women are less able, or should not be in positions to direct men, came through strongly in such alternative forms of data (Bergmann 1989). In addition, feminist scholars called into question the idea that women freely choose their occupations, educational levels and tracks, seniority, and union status in a world in which sex stereotyping and male-dominated power structures are endemic. Occupational segregation and discrimination by educational institutions, employers, and unions could cause women's observable characteristics to differ from men's, these scholars argued, even when women's innate abilities were the same. They thus called into question the view that discrimination is an individual preference, pointing instead to its existence as a deep and widespread social and institutional phenomenon. These scholars also initiated new studies, such as those by the economist Andrea H. Beller and the sociologist Paula England, both published in 1982, that showed that Mincer and Polachek's human capital theory could not explain women's distribution across occupations.

Economic research into gendered labor market outcomes continues, both along traditional and more feminist lines. Some economists have sought to assess the effectiveness of anti-discrimination law (particularly, in the United States, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), affirmative action policies (put into law for U.S. federal contractors by Executive Order 11246 of 1965), and comparable worth policies (also called pay equity, mandating "equal pay for work of equal value," and enacted by some localities). Studies over time tend to show a narrowing of the wage gap in the United States from about 40 cents on the dollar in 1970 to about 28 cents by 1990, and about 25 cents in the early 2000s (Blau, Ferber, and Winkler 2006). International studies of wage gaps show the importance of a nation's overall wage structure in influencing the gender gap, with countries with centralized wage bargaining and relatively low overall inequality generally having smaller gender wage gaps (Blau and Kahn 2003).

Many studies have looked at how marital status and the presence of children affect earnings, often finding that being married and having children increases, on average, the wages of men, holding factors such as education and experience on constant, while decreasing the earnings of women. Interpretations continue to vary as to how much such effects can be attributed to choice (i.e., to women having a biologically based preference for focusing on children at the expense of their paid work); how much is due to employer prejudices regarding the abilities, interests, and responsibilities of mothers versus fathers; and how much reflects a lack of attention by men and support from society at large for the work of child care (i.e., to power-based gender roles assigning the responsibility to individual women, regardless of their talents and interests).

The issue of gender within the labor market for economists has also been the subject of study. The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), formed within the American Economic Association in 1971, is charged with monitoring the advancement of women within the profession and acting to increase that advancement. CSWEP annual reports indicate that women comprised less than 5 percent of economics faculty in the United States in 1972, but by 2004 comprised 27 percent of assistant professors and 21 percent of associate professors. Less than 9 percent of full professors, however, were female in 2004. A 2004 study by the economists Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn found that women's lack of representation in the higher echelons of academic economics cannot be explained by pipeline issues (that is, by a lack of women in lower ranks ready to move up into higher ranks), and is more marked in economics than in a number of related disciplines. The progress of women economists has been studied in other countries as well (Jacobsen 2006).

ECONOMICS OF HOUSEHOLDS

In core neoclassical economic theory, households are treated as though they are individuals, who supply labor and buy products according to a unitary set of preferences. It was not until the 1970s that mainstream economists started to treat the internal workings of households as something of potential interest. The so-called new home economics pioneered by the economists Becker, Mincer, and Theodore W. Schultz brought standard theories of individual utility-maximization to bear on issues of marriage, divorce, and fertility. In Becker's theory of (heterosexual) marriage, for example, traditional gender roles are explained as the outcome of mutually beneficial comparative advantage. Women, being relatively more efficient in home production, rationally specialize in nonmarket work, while men, according to this theory, rationally specialize in market work. The relative efficiencies were explained as being either due to biological sex differences or women having lower market earnings. Becker also advanced the theory that a household's unitary set of preferences could be taken to be that of the household altruist, the one individual in the household who cares about everyone's welfare (and—it was assumed but not made clear—also had control over the household income).

Critical economists, including Ferber, Jane Humphries, Alice H. Amsden, and others, soon raised objections to these theories that, by the nature of their assumptions, served to justify the status quo. They pointed out the circular reasoning in the argument that women specialize in home production because they make less on the market, and make less on the market because they specialize in home production. They noted that unitary and altruist models of households glossed over issues of divergent interests and power differentials within families, which could in turn be influenced by factors outside families such as cultural norms and public policy.

"Bargaining" models of household behavior, advanced by the economists Marilyn E. Manser, Murray Brown, and Marjorie McElroy in the early 1980s, improved on unitary models by positing households consisting of two people, each with their own preferences, who must divide the benefit from a marriage. Should they divorce, each of their utilities would be reduced to threat point levels. These models mathematically formalized the idea that the spouse with better opportunities outside of marriage (because of, for example, higher earnings or favorable divorce policies) may wield more power over intrahousehold decision-making. Some feminist economists, while accepting the value of looking at marriages as situations of cooperative conflict (as described by the economist Amartya Sen), found formal modeling to be too restrictive and urged a broader examination of the determinants of power and decision-making within families (Agarwal 1997). Bargaining models, for example, are limited to consideration of two parties, meaning that full consideration of the interests and influence of non-spousal parties (such as children or other household members) is precluded.

Empirical work on household spending behavior has overwhelmingly tended to disprove the unitary model. In the unitary model, it should make no difference who in the family has wealth or brings in income, because spending is always carried out according to "household" preferences. A now extensive literature on intrahousehold allocation in several countries has shown that, in general, spending varies depending on the share of income or wealth contributed by the mother in a family with children, as compared to the father. A number of studies have found that expenditures on children's items, such as children's food and clothing, are higher when the mother controls a larger share of household spending.

Another debate in economics concerns whether housekeeping and child-care work in the home, traditionally done by women, is productive and a crucial part of the economy. Traditionally, the value of this work has been omitted in calculations of gross domestic product (GDP). In 1988 the economist Marilyn Waring pointed out how the omission of women's traditional work from the United Nations "system of national accounts" can bias policymaking. While still not officially part of accounts, beginning in the 1990s some countries started to develop satellite accounts that seek to measure the value of such work, based in part on data from national surveys of how people use their time. Other economists have looked at how measures of economic growth might be biased by the omission of household production, or how the treatment of unpaid labor as unproductive has affected tax policy.

A substantial literature on the economics of fertility has also developed. Some of this literature emphasizes that increasing women's education, earnings, and power within the household in poor countries has been found to bring down birthrates. The effects of coercive population policies on women's human rights may also be discussed. In other economics discussions of population issues, however, the fact that women are involved may be hardly mentioned.

FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF THE DISCIPLINE

In the early 1990s feminist economists began publishing more thoroughgoing critiques of the mainstream discipline, pointing out that the failures in labor market and household theories were not just isolated instances but rather signs of deep-seated masculinist bias in the discipline. Formal choice-theoretic modeling; a central image of rational, autonomous, and self-interested economic man; and a narrow focus on mathematical and econometric methods were (and still are) hallmarks of mainstream economics. Feminists argued that these are a Procrustean bed when it comes to analyzing phenomena fraught with issues of tradition, connection to others, and relations of power and domination. Feminists began to raise questions about the mainstream definition of economics, its central models, and the high regard given to a particular set of methodological tools.

Essays on this theme were brought together in a 1993 volume, Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by Ferber and Julie A. Nelson. In this volume it was suggested that economics be defined by a concern with the provisioning of life in all spheres in which this occurs, rather than only in markets. Investigations were made into how a particular set of professional values, emphasizing culturally masculine-associated factors such as autonomy, separation, and abstraction, had come to take precedence over culturally feminine-associated factors such as interdependence, connection, and concreteness. The contributors argued that rather than taking the former as a sign of "rigor" in the discipline, the truncation of methods created by masculinist bias has weakened the discipline's ability to explain real-world phenomena. Questions were raised about mainstream economics not because it is too objective, but because it is not objective enough.

While many feminist economists continue to make use of traditional mainstream tools, on the whole the field of feminist economics has come to be characterized by inclusion of a broader range of concepts and methods. These encompass theories of human behavior that include a balance between individuality and relationship, autonomy and dependence, and reason and emotion, and the use of additional methods including historical studies, case studies, interviews, and other qualitative data. Feminist economists tend to find that such serious efforts to create and promote more adequate forms of economic practice lead to new insights across the board, whether or not the topic being studied is explicitly gender-related.

With the publication of a number of books and articles, and gatherings at early conferences, feminist economics coalesced into an organized field in the early 1990s. The International Association for Feminist Economics was formed in 1992, and its journal, Feminist Economics, commenced publication a few years later. An encyclopedia of feminist economics, edited by Janice Peterson and Margaret Lewis, was published in 1999, and a review of developments during the first ten years of feminist economics was published in 2003 and edited by Ferber and Nelson.

ADDITIONAL AREAS OF RESEARCH

In addition to work on labor markets, households, and the philosophy and methodology of economics, economists have addressed issues of sex and gender in a number of other areas, from both traditional and feminist perspectives.

Work on public policy issues affecting women's economic status has been extensive, not only on matters of labor market discrimination but also on issues such as access to credit or pensions, welfare and poverty, childcare availability, family leaves, health care, and taxation. Beginning in the 1990s, a number of countries developed "gender budgets" that analyze government budgets for their gender impacts.

Scholars of the history of economic thought have researched the lives and writings of early women economists and examined how male economists treated issues of sex and gender in historical texts. In the process, they have brought renewed appreciation (at least among feminists) to the economic writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Margaret G. Reid (1896–1991), and others. The historical writings of male economists on questions regarding women show, with only a few notable exceptions, a pronounced tendency to substitute cultural biases for analysis (Pujol 1992). Gendered analysis has been applied not only to the history of neoclassical economics but also to the history of Marxist, institutionalist, and other schools of economics.

While the economic history of various countries and regions traditionally focused on men's activities, feminist scholars have investigated the roles played by women. Women's historical roles as household workers, as agricultural or industrial workers, as colonists or subjects of colonization, and as activists in combating discrimination or changing public policies have been investigated.

The economic status of girls and women in the global South has increasingly become a topic of economic study. The economist (and Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen played a crucial role in increasing attention paid to this area with his 1990 report on the missing women of China, India, and other countries. In these parts of the world, the number of adult women is substantially below the number that would be expected from a normal ratio of births. Inferior access to food and health care (and, increasingly, the use of sex-selective abortion) has caused millions of women to go "missing." Feminist scholars such as Diane Elson (1995) and Lourdes Benería (2003) have also investigated the gender impact of international policies related to trade, investment, and credit, carried out by individual nations and multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Shifts in the trading patterns for goods produced by women versus by men, for example, or macroeconomic policies that lead to cuts in support to health, education, or child care, can differentially affect men and women.

In many fields in which empirical data can be disaggregated by sex, literatures have grown up examining sex differences in male and female economic behavior. These include studies, for example, of whether women or men are more cooperative in experimental game situations (laboratory studies in which economists study choice behavior), or whether sex makes a difference in the willingness to take risks in investment decisions. In some of these studies, attempts are made to adequately explain and explore any differences found, whereas in others the analysis remains at a superficial level.

The intersections of sex and gender with issues of race, class, caste, sexual preference and gender identity have also been researched. The economist M. V. Lee Badgett (2001) and others, for example, have studied labor market discrimination and household structures among gays and lesbians. The economist Deirdre McCloskey (1999) has written about her transsexual transition.

Sexuality has also entered economics discussions under the topics of commercial sex, rape, and sexual harassment. A few labor market studies have focused on the working conditions and pay of sex workers. Some economists, and many in the area of law and economics, have studied the use of rape and sexual harassment to intimidate women in the workforce. In 1992 Richard A. Posner, a neoclassical economist, libertarian, and leading figure in the law and economics movement, published a controversial book titled Sex and Reason, in which he addressed topics including prostitution, abortion, and rape. Critics claim that his arguments (such as his characterization of female infanticide as simply a rational method of family planning) tend to epitomize a blindly economistic view of the world.

Beginning in the 1990s, feminist economists including Nancy Folbre (1994) and Susan Himmelweit (1999) initiated research on the topic of caring labor. Work such as nursing or child care, which is done for pay, but also often out of a sense of concern for or emotional closeness with the person receiving the service, transgresses the usual boundaries between concepts of love and work. Empirical studies about the conditions of such work, as well as studies of the sorts of belief systems that often make such work ill-paid or disrespected, have taken place within economics as well as in related fields such as sociology and political theory. Communication among scholars on this issue often breaks down around the question of whether economies are inherently cold and impersonal, or whether this belief is itself a social construction (Nelson 2006).

THE STATE OF THE FIELD

Among economists who associate themselves most closely with the mainstream, sex and gender research remains mostly a matter of applying conventional, individualistic, and highly formalized forms of theoretical analysis to this subject matter, or simply disaggregating empirical research by sex categories. Whether such research sheds useful light on sex and gender issues in economic life, or instead says more about the biases of its creators, may be debated. Meanwhile, economists and other scholars who are less loyal to the methodological strictures of mainstream economics have sought to investigate more deeply how sex and gender shape, and are shaped by, the economic activities that provide for the sustaining and flourishing of life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agarwal, Bina. 1997. "'Bargaining' and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household." Feminist Economics 3(1): 1-51.

Badgett, M. V. Lee. 2001. Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beller, Andrea H. 1982. "Occupational Segregation by Sex: Determinants and Changes." Journal of Human Resources 17(3): 371-392.

Benería, Lourdes. 2003. Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered. New York: Routledge.

Bergmann, Barbara R. 1989. "Does the Market for Women's Labor Need Fixing?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 3(1): 43-60.

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. 2003. "Understanding International Differences in the Gender Pay Gap." Journal of Labor Economics 21(1): 106-144.

Blau, Francine D.; Marianne A. Ferber; and Anne E. Winkler. 2006. The Economics of Women, Men, and Work. 5th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Elson, Diane, ed. 1995. Male Bias in the Development Process. 2nd edition. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

England, Paula. 1982. "The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation." Journal of Human Resources 17(3): 358-370.

Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. 1993. Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. 2003. Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. London: Routledge.

Ginther, Donna K., and Shulamit Kahn. 2004. "Women in Economics: Moving Up or Falling Off the Academic Career Ladder?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 18(3): 193-214.

Himmelweit, Susan. 1999. "Caring Labor." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561: 27-38.

Jacobsen, Joyce, ed. 2006. "Explorations: The Status of Women in Economics." Feminist Economics 12(3): 427-474.

McCloskey, Deirdre. 1999. Crossing: A Memoir. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nelson, Julie A. 2006. "Can We Talk? Feminist Economists in Dialogue with Social Theorists." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31(4): 1052-1074.

Peterson, Janice, and Margaret Lewis, eds. 1999. The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Posner, Richard A. 1992. Sex and Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pujol, Michèle A. 1992. Feminism and Anti-feminism in Early Economic Thought. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

Sen, Amartya. 1990. "More than 100 Million Women Are Missing." New York Review of Books 37(20): 61-66.

Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

                                          Julie A. Nelson