Economics from different perspectives

Feminist economics looks at the economy from the point of view of women's lives as much as men's lives, and it differs from mainstream economics, which tends to take men's lives as the norm: if it looks at gender differences, it looks at women in the ways they are different from men. Feminist economics sort of reverses that and says both sorts of lives are equally valid ways of looking at the economy. In doing so, it’s saying that gender is a structural part of economics, that gender differences are part of the way our economy runs. Therefore, in exploring any economic issue, we have to look at where gender differences arise.

How might men and women react differently? How are they differently positioned in the economy? What, for example, does that mean for economic policy? Economic policy may arrive at the wrong results, different from what was intended, if it ignores those differences; if it just thinks about what the effect on people living a typical man's life might be; if it doesn't think about what the effect of that policy is on women or people living the sorts of lives that women lead.

Mainstream economics

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Mainstream economics would tend to see workers as starting at a certain age, perhaps quite young, having had some training, working until retirement, accumulating income and some savings during that period and then living off those savings until they die. Women's lives tend to be much more complicated. First of all, a lot of the income they receive, they may not receive directly from their own work; they may be part of households in which somebody else is in employment. As far as their own employment, some may work a bit, they have a job until they're 25, they take some time off for children, then they go back part time. Then they might have to take some time off again looking after older people, and they will end up with a much smaller pension insofar as the pension is accumulated through employment. At various points in that life course, they will be quite dependent on the state, either for benefits or for services. So, it’s a much more complicated picture than the rather simplistic one that economics tends to have based very much on a typical man's life. Now, of course, it doesn't really apply to most men either, but it's an even worse characterisation of a typical woman's life.

Having an economics that ignores the reality of gender difference is detrimental to both men and women because it comes out with answers that are not correct. For example, policy could be very badly targeted and therefore very much more expensive if it assumes that everybody is going to react to it as their idea of a typical man. So that's one reason it's detrimental to everyone. The other reason is that some of the things that women tend to care about more than men do are very important to everyone.

Women, through the choices they make, have shown that they tend to be more interested in how people are cared for than men do. If we built an economy simply around men's concerns, say, for a good income and to be able to accumulate savings, we wouldn't have much care going on in the economy. Even if men ignored that, in practice it would impact them just as much as women. Everybody needs to be cared for at various points in their lives. It's just that women tend to be more conscious of that, and feminist economics is more conscious of that than mainstream economics.

Badly targeted policies

An example of a badly targeted policy is pensions policy. So many countries, particularly in Western Europe, are now moving away from a system in which the state provides for older people after retirement, instead expecting people to make their own savings. Now, if you are employed full time all your life, you've got the opportunity to make sufficient savings to keep yourself in old age.

If you're only employed sporadically because you take time out to care for other people, you may not have the chance to build up good savings. Throughout Europe, you find that women's pensions are considerably lower than men's pensions. Women's wages are also lower than men's wages, but not to the same extent as their pensions because their pensions depend on a lifetime of accumulated earnings.

Should all care work be paid?

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It's not really just a question of whether we should pay for all care work, because you actually need a different sort of economics to cope with something like care. Mainstream economics for a long time just ignored the existence of care, but now, because care has become an important policy issue in many of the richer countries of the world, mainstream economics is beginning to look at care – but it looks at it as though it's just a commodity like any other. Actually, care has some characteristics that really make it quite different from other commodities. In particular, it involves relationships that – unlike if you make something, produce it in a factory and it gets sold to somebody else – don’t exist between the people who made the thing and the consumer who consumes it. However, that's not true of care.

Good care depends on relationships

There's an important relationship between a provider of care and the recipient of care, and that has a number of economic consequences. Two of the most important are, first of all, that it's very hard to raise productivity in care. The general notion of progress in the economy is that we get to produce everything with less and less labour. If you produce care with less and less labour, you're actually just producing poor-quality care. You're producing worse care because care is the time that people spend on it. Therefore, while you can improve productivity in care in the sense of providing better care in the same amount of time, to try and cut the amount of time that goes into care is really a false economy. It's coming out with something that's just less good. So that's one way that care involving a relationship makes a big difference to how we see it in the economy.

The other important aspect is that it's very hard to judge the quality of care in advance without being involved in it, because it involves a relationship that actually has to be felt by the people involved. So, using the market to purchase care involves making lots of leaps into the unknown. Most economic theory is based on the idea that consumers can make really good and well-informed choices about what they are purchasing.

Market limitations for care services

If you purchase care services, you very often do it in an emergency, to start with. It is difficult to move then. For example, if you move people from one care home to another, there's quite a high death rate in terms of the number of people who don't survive such a move if they're in a vulnerable state. Continuity of care really matters. Therefore, the market isn't a very suitable way of delivering it. One of the principles of using the market to deliver good quality output is that consumers have to be able to exit the market easily. If they don't like one provider, well, they don't use them. They find another one that they like better. That's very difficult to do in care, because if you're stuck in a relationship with one care provider, even if things aren't going so well, there's an awful lot to lose in moving to another one. Therefore, the market really isn't a very good way to deliver care. Mainstream economics is really based around the old idea from Adam Smith that even if people are only looking to their own self-interest, the market will provide good quality. That's a good way of ensuring good quality and the best prices. That doesn't really work for care.

Care in pandemic times

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I think we can see what's happened in the pandemic as a result of a lack of investment in the care infrastructure of our economy. First of all, we saw that in care homes, there were incredibly high rates of infection. That is largely a result of them being seen as part of the private sector, just something to be run through the market. We also saw a huge inequality growing in the amount of time that was spent between women and men on looking after people who the system was no longer looking after, particularly children. If you think about homeschooling, there's a lot of research that shows that women spent a great deal more time on home schooling than men did. As a result, far more women actually lost their jobs at this stage through their domestic responsibilities than men did. Above all, for everybody, we would have been in a better state if our whole social infrastructure, including our health service, had been better prepared. We knew that pandemics were a possibility, but investment in health was seen as a welfare measure, a concession to the people, rather than what it really was, which was an investment in the economy itself.

Discover more about

feminist economics

Himmelweit, S. (2002). Making Visible the Hidden Economy: The Case for Gender-Impact Analysis of Economic Policy. Feminist Economics, 8(1), 49–70.

Himmelweit, S. (1999). Caring Labor. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 561(1), 27–38.

Feminist economics and the true cost of gender bias