Feminism and Economics

American Economic Association Feminism and Economics Author(s): Julie A. Nelson Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 131-148 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2138170 Accessed: 14/11/2010 11:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aea. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. American Economic Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic Perspectives. http://www.jstor.org Journal of Economic Perspectives- Volume 9 Number 2-Spring 1995-Pages 131-148 Feminism and Economics Julie A. Nelson A n article in The Chronicle of Higher Education of June 30, 1993, reported, "Two decades after it began redefining debates" in many other disci- plines, "feminist thinking seems suddenly to have arrived in economics." Many economists, of course, did not happen to be in the station when this train arrived, belated as it might be. Many who might have heard rumor of its coming have not yet learned just what arguments are involved or what it promises for the refinement of the profession. The purpose of this essay is to provide a low-cost way of gaining some familiarity.1 Most people associate feminism with a political program, which of course it includes. While there are now many varieties of feminism, they all share a concern with remedying the disadvantages historically born by women. Such a concern has been manifested within the discipline of economics in the form of efforts to encourage the advancement of women within the profession (for example, by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profes- sion) and sometimes by the application of economic analysis for feminist ends. Less familiar to many economists, however, are the implications for economics of recent feminist theorizing about sexism and science. Feminist scholars have documented how beliefs about gender-that is, beliefs about the characteristics and social roles of men and women-have been important on an intellectual as 'While isolated feminist challenges to neoclassical theories date back at least to the 1970s (for example, Bell, 1974), this article focuses on the "second revolution" (Coughlin, 1993) that has taken place in just the last few years. This stronger current is exemplified by publications such as Ferber and Nelson (1993), recent sessions on feminist economics at the meetings of the American Economic Association (Bartlett and Feiner, 1992; Shackelford, 1992; Strassmann, 1994; Strober, 1994), and the organization in 1992 of the International Association for Feminist Economics. * Julie A. Nelson is Associate Professor of Economics, University of California at Davis, Davis, California. Her e-mail address is janelson@ucdavis.edu. 132 Journal of Economic Perspectives well as social plane. Recent feminist theory leads to questioning of many basic assumptions and values that undergird current economic practice. Feminist theory raises questions about the adequacy of economic practice not because economics is in general too objective, but because it is not objective enough. Various value-laden and partial-and, in particular, masculine- gendered-perspectives on subject, model, method, and pedagogy have heretofore been mistakenly perceived as value free and impartial in economics, as in other scientific disciplines. Traditionally, male activities have taken center stage as subject matter, while models and methods have reflected a historically and psychologically masculine pattern of valuing autonomy and detachment over dependence and connection. The alternative suggested here is not, however, a "feminine" economics in which masculine biases are replaced by feminine ones, nor a "female" eco- nomics in which economics by or about women is done differently than economics by or about men. The alternative described in this article is an improvement of all of economics, whether done by female or male practitioners. Gender and Disciplinary Values If one believes that the current definitions and methods of economics come from outside of human communities-perhaps mandated by divine interven- tion, or descending via a Friedmanesque helicopter drop-then of course the idea that such standards could be gender-biased will seem nonsensical. But if we allow that economic practice is human practice, developed and refined within human communities, then the possibility must be admitted that human limitations, interests, and perceptual biases will have effects on the culture of economics. The feminist analysis of economics that will be discussed here starts from the premise that economics, like any science, is socially constructed. Social constructionism should not be mistaken for a claim that "anything goes" or that there are no standards of truth or reliability. It simply recognizes that such standards are determined from within a particular scientific community, not from without. How, then, might gender influence economics? While women were histori- cally excluded from the economics community, some caution is recommended in moving from the observation of women's exclusion to conclusions about the mechanisms by which gender biases take root. It is necessary to clarify here that feminist scholars make a subtle but important distinction between sex and gender. Sex, as the term is generally used in feminist scholarship, refers to biological differences between males and females. Gender, on the other hand, refers to the associations, stereotypes, and social patterns that a culture con- structs on the basis of actual or perceived differences between men and women. Women's lesser average brain weight than men, for example, is a biological characteristic. The nineteenth-century interpretation of this fact as implying Julie A. Nelson 133 that women are therefore less rational is an example of a social belief, that is, a construction of gender (Bleier, 1986). Most feminist scholars see masculine bias in science as primarily an issue of gender, not of sex. The entrance of more women into scientific disciplines is seen as contributing to the transformation of the disciplines, not because women "bring something different" to the fields by virtue of femaleness, but rather because the illumination of gender biases at the level of the social structure of science makes gender biases at other levels more visible as well.2 To say that "contemporary economics is masculine," then, is to say that it reflects social beliefs about masculinity, not that it reflects the maleness of its traditional practitioners (Keller, 1986). To say that a less masculine-biased economics would be more adequate is to say that social beliefs about economics must change and that economics would be enriched by a diversity of practition- ers, not that economics must be practiced by eunuchs or neuters. The analysis of links between modern western social beliefs about gender and about science was the accomplishment of groundbreaking work by feminist scholars starting in the 1980s (Bordo, 1987; Harding, 1986; Keller, 1985; Merchant, 1980). Objectivity, separation, logical consistency, individual accom- plishment, mathematics, abstraction, lack of emotion, and science itself have long been culturally associated with rigor, hardness-and masculinity. At the same time, subjectivity, connection, "intuitive" understanding,> cooperation, qualitative analysis, concreteness, emotion, and nature have often been associ- ated with weakness, softness-and femininity. Such associations were some- times explicit in the language used by the early scientists to define their endeavor. Henry Oldenburg, an early Secretary of the British Royal Society, stated that the intent of the Society was to "raise a masculine Philosophy ... whereby the Mind of Man may be ennobled with the knowledge of Solid Truths" (Keller, 1985, p. 52). Simple recognition that the characteristics most highly valued in economics have a particularly masculine gender association does not, however, suggest a unique response for scholars concerned with the quality of economic practice. One response might be to endorse this association so that we can go on doing as we have always done. If this is masculine economics, so be it. The only alternative to masculine economics, our usual way of thinking about gender tells us, would be emasculated, impotent economics. Another response might be to turn the tables and seek to replace hard, objective, active, androcentric economics with soft, subjective, passive 2This is not to ignore the current scholarly (and popular) debates about the degree to which males and females may "think differently" due to genetic or hormonal conditions, only to note that it is not the central issue here. Carol Gilligan's (1982) work, for example, is often quoted in these discussions as having uncovered male/ female psychological differences. A more careful reading of her work, however, and of studies which have followed, indicates considerable overlap between men and women in the dimensions studied. What is important to the point here, and what has been shown in a number of studies, is the way in which people in U.S. and European cultures tend to mentally associate certain characteristics with masculinity or femininity. For a review of these literatures, see Jane Mansbridge (1993), especially notes 32 and 53. 134 Journal of Economic Perspectives gynocentric economics. One might focus on cooperation, for example, instead of competition and eschew all quantitative methods in favor of qualitative ones. While this might be appealing to those who consider modern economics to be responsible for all the ills in the world, such a response merely trades one set of biases for another. A third response, particularly associated with the intellectual currents of postmodernism, might be to "deconstruct" the dualisms on which modern definitions of economics depend. In deconstructionist theory, all human pro- jects are simply texts or discourses to which techniques of literacy criticism can be applied. In this view, neither the distinction science/ nonscience nor mascu- line/ feminine reflects any nonlinguistic underlying reality. This approach, however, yields little guidance about how to judge the quality of scientific practice.3 A fourth approach is adopted in this article. It does not require endorsing one side or the other of the masculine/ feminine dualism, nor forgoing evalua- tion. The key to this approach lies in an unlinking of our judgments about value-that is, about what is meritorious or less meritorious in economic practice-from our perceptions of gender. The notion that masculine economics is "good" economics depends on a general cultural association of masculinity with superiority and femininity with inferiority, or, in other words, a mental linking of value (superior/ inferior) and gender (masculine/ feminine) dualisms. Any reader who might question the asymmetry of this linking, preferring, perhaps, to think of gender differ- ences in terms of a more benign complementarity, should ponder some of the more obvious manifestations of asymmetry in the social domain. Rough "tomboy" girls are socially acceptable and even'praised, but woe to the gentle- natured boy who is labeled a "sissy"; a woman may wear pants, but a man may not wear a skirt. The sexist association of femininity with lesser worth implicit in such judgments, it should be noted, is not a matter of isolated personal beliefs but rather a matter of cultural and even cognitive habit. Research on human cognition suggests that dualisms such as superior/ inferior and masculine/ feminine play an essential role in structuring our understanding (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Nelson, forthcoming, ch. 1). Human cognition is not limited to such simple two-way associations, however. Consider the different interpretations we can make if we think of gender and value, instead of as marking out the same space, as operating in orthogonal dimen- sions. Then we can think of there being both valuable and harmful aspects to qualities culturally associated with masculinity, as well as both valuable and harmful aspects to traits associated with femininity (Nelson, 1992). Consider, for example, the idea that a "hard" economics is clearly prefer- able to a "soft" economics. This judgment relies on an association of hardness 3While some feminist economists take a thoroughly postmodernist position, and a few even expound a gynocentric view, this essay focuses on those lines of feminist theorizing about economics that seem to have the most adherents, and that, to mainstream economists, should provide the most convincing case for reform. Feminism and Economics 135 with valuable, masculine-associated strength, and softness with inferior, feminine-associated weakness. However, hardness may also mean rigidity, just as softness may also imply flexibility. A pursuit of masculine hardness that spurns all association with femininity (and hence with flexibility) can lead to rigidity, just as surely as a pursuit of feminine softness (without corresponding strength) leads to weakness. There is no benefit to "specialization" on the side of one gender: neither rigidity nor weakness, the two extremes of hardness and softness, is desirable. There is benefit, however, from exploiting complementar- ity. Strength tempered with flexibility would yield a balanced and resilient economics. This is just one abstract example of how new thinking about gender could change how we think about discipline; many more concrete examples follow. Four Aspects of Economics Applying the feminist scholarship on science to economics suggests that the criteria by which we judge "good economics" have been biased, and that the use of less-biased criteria of evaluation would lead to a more adequate practice. Consider the biases that arise in four different aspects of economics: model, methods, topics, and pedagogy. While critiques and new directions concerning the subject matter of economics and teaching may be familiar to some economists, the more subtle areas of model and method will be discussed first since these have implications for the broadest range of economic practice. Economic Models At the center of mainstream economic modeling is the character of the rational, autonomous, self-interested agent, successfully making optimizing choices subject to exogenously imposed constraints. In adopting this concep- tion of human nature, economists have carried out the suggestion of Thomas Hobbes (as cited in Benhabib, 1987), who wrote, "Let us consider men ... as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other." Economic man springs up fully formed, with preferences fully developed, and is fully active and self-contained (England, 1993). As in our Robinson Crusoe stories, he has no childhood or old age, no dependence on anyone, and no responsibility for anyone but himself. The environment has no effect on him, but rather is merely the passive material over which his rationality has play. Economic man interacts in society without being influenced by society: his mode of interaction is through an ideal market in which prices form the only, and only necessary, form of communication. This is not to say that all practicing economists believe that humans are no more than homo economicus (though there are a few true believers), but only that this model of human behavior is perceived as being the most useful and most rigorously objective starting point for economic analysis. Consider, however, 136 Journal of Economic Perspectives the gendered biases implicit in taking the "mushroom man" as representative of what is important about human beings. Humans do not simply spring out of the earth. Humans are born of women, nurtured and cared for as dependent children and when aged or ill, socialized into family and community groups, and are perpetually dependent on nourishment and a home to sustain life. These aspects of human life, whose neglect is often justified by the argument that they are unimportant, or intellectually uninteresting, or merely natural, are, not just coincidentally, the areas of life thought of as "women's work." One must be careful here, again, to draw a distinction between analysis at the level of sex (biological distinction) and analysis at the level of gender (social beliefs). An interpretation that some might draw from the above contrast might be that next to homo economicus to describe men's autonomous, self-interested behavior, we need a femina economica to describe women's connected, other- oriented behavior. Such an endorsement of separate spheres for men and women is, however, quite opposed to a feminist analysis that sees the gender distinctions as socially constructed rather than biologically determined. Homo economicus may not be a good description of women, but neither is he a good description of men. Both the autonomous, rational, detached, masculine pro- jection and the dependent, emotional, connected, feminine one are equally mythical and distorting. Men's traditional facade of autonomy has alyiays been propped up by the background work of mothers and wives; to believe that women are passive requires turning a blind eye to the activity of women's lives. What is needed is a conception of behavior that does not confuse gender with judgments about value, nor confuse gender with sex. What is needed is a conception of human behavior that can encompass both autonomy and depen- dence, individuation and relation, reason and emotion, as they are manifested in economic agents of either sex. Feminists need not reinvent the wheel while looking for ways of building more satisfactory models. One example of a richer model of human behavior that is probably familiar to many economists is George Akerlof and Janet Yellen's (1988) theory of efficiency wages as based on fairness. In their model, agents are not hyperrational, isolated monads, but rather human beings capa- ble of "emotions such as 'concern for fairness'" or jealousy (p. 45) and very concerned with their sphere of personal connections. As they point out, the idea that workers' concern with fairness affects their job performance is in fact borne out by empirical studies done by psychologists guided by equity theory and sociologists guided by social exchange theory. In suggesting that wages may be influenced by fairness considerations, rather than purely by market forces, such a model contributes toward explaining the persistence of non- market-clearing wa