This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Feminist economics is often summarized, reasonably enough, as economics about women. Its methodological core is narrower and more radical than that summary suggests: an argument that the categories mainstream economics uses to separate 'the economy' from 'the household' were never gender-neutral in the first place. National accounting was built in the mid-twentieth century around market transactions precisely because they were the transactions easiest to observe and price, and unpaid domestic and care work, then and now performed disproportionately by women, was defined out of the production boundary as a matter of measurement convenience rather than economic logic.
That definitional choice has consequences the field traces in detail. A country whose care work shifts from unpaid family labor to paid market labor, without any change in how much care is actually provided, will register as an increase in GDP; a country where a health crisis forces relatives to leave paid jobs to provide unpaid care will register as a decrease, in both cases measuring something close to the opposite of underlying wellbeing. Household bargaining models built on the assumption of a single rational household decision-maker, feminist economists argued, obscure real conflicts of interest and unequal power between household members that shape who works, who cares, and who controls income.
The field's policy proposals, paid family leave, public childcare investment, satellite accounts that price unpaid labor without folding it directly into GDP, follow from treating care as economic infrastructure on the same footing as roads or the electrical grid: something an economy depends on and can underinvest in, not a private matter that happens to sit outside the discipline's proper subject.