Feminist Economics

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A country's gross domestic product counts a restaurant meal, a paid babysitter and a nursing-home stay as economic production. It does not count the equivalent unpaid work, a parent's meal cooked at home, a grandmother's childcare, a daughter's care for an aging parent, even though the labor and the value produced are functionally the same. Nancy Folbre's research, most fully set out in her 1994 book Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint, made the argument that this omission is not a neutral accounting convenience but a structural feature of how economics has defined its own subject matter, one that happens to make the overwhelmingly female labor of care invisible to the discipline that studies production.

Folbre's account goes further than pointing out an omission. She argues that unpaid care work functions as a kind of tax, paid disproportionately by women, that subsidizes market production by raising the next generation of workers at private rather than social cost, and that markets, left alone, will systematically undervalue and under-provide care because its benefits are diffuse and long-term while its costs fall immediately on the person providing it.

The 1992 founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics gave this line of research an organized field and its own journal, Feminist Economics, rather than leaving it scattered across labor economics, family economics and sociology. Folbre's own later work, as director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute, has pushed statistical agencies toward satellite accounts that estimate the monetary value of unpaid care, an attempt to make visible in the numbers what the theory had already shown was invisible only by choice of definition.

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.