DisCO DNA 3: Feminist Economics

Economics, like many areas of life, has tended to be dominated by male priorities and privileges, occluding many areas of economic activity falling outside patriarchal interest. Described as a "...social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services" the very definition of mainstream economics instantly raises concern: What about everything falling outside the limited scope of goods and services? What's the other story?

Feminist Economics is an approach to economics that factors in all of the unseen labor (traditionally associated with women) needed in order to support economic activity (traditionally associated with men). Feminist economics focuses on caring for the well-being of the individuals that make up an economic system, valuing and recognising that carework is equally important as “productive”, income-generating economic activity.

Overview

Feminist Economics questions the gendered aspects of work, what we value and the types of economic activities we favor. It challenges heteronormativity in the field of economics, both through an established body of work and tactics and as an approach to organizing our lives and capacities.

Whereas mainstream economics only recognises work valued by markets, Feminist Economics substantially extends the scope of what we want to value by placing human and planetary wellbeing at the center of our economic priorities and tracking systems. What produces wellbeing? "Goods and services" is an inadequate answer, subjecting wellbeing to the limitations of monetary exchange which, in the current economy, prioritizes for profit, extractive and often environmentally damaging and unnecessary products and activities.

Arguably, what truly produces wellbeing is care: whether it's our children, elderly or environments, care is fundamental to human existence. Yet care work is either invisibilized and left out of economics analysis or relegated to low salaried work.

Feminist Economics seeks to correct these imbalances by critically analyzing the gendered assumptions underlying mainstream economies while promoting economic equality regardless of gender. Beyond production and distribution, it places great importance on cooperation and care, valuing unpaid and reproductive work while acknowledging that the full complexity of our lives and interaction can't always be grasped by qualitative metrics.

Capitalism excels at isolating holistic processes into discrete parts in order to exert dominance. Think of artificial binaries like "producer/consumer" or "policymaker/citizen". This is reflected in its truncation of the productive and reproductive spheres. Feminist economics offers a more grounded perspective that factors all these interdependencies — paid and unpaid work, caring for families or close ones and earning a living. This approach is much more compatible with the ideals of the commons, cooperativism and ultimately DisCO.

Just as we feel that Feminism should be intersectional, ecological and, ultimately anti-capitalist, Feminist Economics can't exist in isolation of ecological and decolonial concerns. Applying intersectionality to Feminist Economics allows us to understand how the interconnected nature of systems of oppression, whether based on gender, class, race, ability or sexuality, also plays into our economics. Likewise, the inclusion of ecofeminist economic approaches integrates an ecological perspective and expands the notion of interconnectedness and care to the non-human world. 

Feminist economics as we know it today arose around the 1970s with the publication of key texts such as Betsy Warrior's Housework: Slavery or a Labor of Love and The Source of Leisure Time or Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development. Prior to these texts, earlier luminaries such as Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beuvoir and Beatrice Potter Webb explored the intersections of gender, class and capitalist exploitation in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The publication of Marilyn Wairing's If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics is considered a groundbreaking moment in the development of the discipline by shedding light on how traditional methods of accounting and productivity standards exclude both women's unpaid work and nature from the equation. Since then the discipline has expanded from houseworld microeconomics and their relation to the labour market to macroeconomics, international trade and all other areas of economic analysis. 

The 90s saw the founding of academic network focused on Feminist economics, such as Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). Since then the scope of Feminist economics has broadened into areas such as Gender Budgeting, globalization and trade policies and, as mentioned before, intersectionality and diversity. Crucially for the DisCO DNA, there is a strong feminist component in the Social and Solidarity Economy. The worlds of the Commons, P2P, mainstream cooperativism and distributed technology are often ignorant of it, or simply don't see it as a core factor in the design of economic alternatives.

Resources

In order to understand quickly why Feminist Economics is so revolutionary and challenges the capitalist mindset, we encourage you to start by checking out Naila Kabeer’s article, Why we need feminist economists, The Problem of Value for ‘Women’s Work’, as well as the Women’s Budget Group’s excellent resources and infographics. Then you’ll be ready for longer walks at the Feminist Economics site.

For further exciting explorations through the intersections of Feminist Economics and Technology, we suggest you check GenderIT.org’s articles, especially Why We Need ‘Feminist Digital Economics’ and Marilyn Waring’s noteworthy and groundbreaking book Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, as well as the rest of her extensive production in this field.

But if you want a personal recommendation that we hold dear, then go for the Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance zine, published by Amateur Cities and the Institute of Network Cultures and featuring the contributions of some of our long-time collaborators such as Ruth Catlow, Ailie Rutherford, Inte Gloerich and Denise Thwaites:

MoneyLab#7 Session 4 BEYOND THE “BLOKECHAIN from Institute of Network Cultures on Vimeo.

Examples

In progress. Please check back soon for updates.

Image Credits

• Lead Image by Susan H. Baker