Feminist Economics

After the countless amount of ideas, statements and reasoning I was exposed to at the People & Planet Conference on Economics today (the "Lefties Conference", that I refered to previously), I decided to make an extended series. Every day for the coming weeks or so, I'll be posting something that originated at this conference and address the flawed reasoning and/or incorrect premises used in reaching their conclusions.

First up, in honour of the day, I'll dedicate my first blog post to Feminism. Now, I'm not a particularly big fan of feminism, depending obviously of what you choose to fill that concept with. This position I've addressed elsewhere. However, at the Conference I was introduced to the field of "Feminist Economics", and as this blog overwhealmingly focus a lot of its attention of economics, obviously I was curious.

The way I understand Feminist Economics, it includes the regular presuppositions given by marxian approach to class remade and re-organised for Sex or Gender; structure, exploitation, traits inherent to those groups that determine their actions etc. Wendy McElroy has done extensive works in that particular area. Anyways, we touched upon 3 specific areas that came up during the session.

1) Domestic work done by women is excluded from measures of the Economy.
2) Women are forced to choose between Career and Family.
3) Stats and the Wage Gap


1) Domestic Work
The argument here is that domestic work (care ex or relatives of children, household cleaning, cooking) is unpaid, doesn't involve a measurable transaction and is not included in the GDP, thus in the economy as a whole. Feminist Economics try to distinguish itself from 'Traditional Economics' by including such unpaid work into their models and measurements of the economy.

2) Career or Family?
Such an ancient question, constantly been part of the feminist movement. How is a woman to choose? Does she even have to? Can she have both? The discussion here is that there's a social pressure for women to focus on family, a structure implicitly telling women they're bad mothers if they spend too much effort/time on their careers. Because men doesn't face these questions, all things equal, women will be disadvantaged by such anticipations.

3) Stats and the "wage gap"
We had three sets of statistics presented to us. Taking them at face value, they were "Women hold 70% of jobs paying the minimum wage"; "30 000 women are sacked each year because they are pregnant"; "Average Domestic work for women are 3x the domestic work of men".

Also included the discussion about the wage gap, that is men making more money than women, within the same occupation.

Addressing these issues resolve mainly around two things; Refutal of the "Wage Gap" and the notion of Choice. In the first two areas, choice is a dominant factor, largely ignored. Let me give you a hypothetical. Let's say the entire economic society went 'equal' overnight; supply and demand randomly created an equal pay for everyone (women included) and sectorial work identital between men and women. No wage gap, no involuntary part-time work, no penalty for choosing family etc. Now then let's also say there's a change in attitude towards leisure in the case of some women whilst the pattern of leisure/work for men is held constant; these women now prefer staying home, planting flowers in the garden, watch tv, involve themselves in community work and whatnot to a larger extent than before. They substitute some work for leisure and are therefor better off (First, they had a certain ratio between work and leisure that they were happy with; now the change in preference altered that ratio, resulting in a higher rate of leisure, and they recieve more personal benefits from this - otherwise they would stay in the same ratio as before, like the other women did). 

How would we see this? We would see that 1) the wages of men would outstrip women (if women work less and pay is perfectly equal, their aggregate wage is reduced), 2) men would work more than women, 3) women would be overrepresented in part-time jobs. Not too different from the story Feminists tell us today.

My point here is that domestic work is a choice; relationships, assumed here to be male-female, are determined by their reciprocal relations. Simply, in living together, men and women decide who is taking up what task, who is doing what. If that choice comes out with 5 vs 15 hours work respectively, what does it matter? Two people voluntarily choose to distribute domestic work in a certain pattern. No more, no less. Domistic work is, by its nature, unpaid, because it is what you do in your home. The fact that women happen to do more of such work than men means very little, especially for the entire economy. Irrelevant.

Second point: Wage gap. All kinds of numbers are generally presented to support this idea; women make 15% less than men, £5000 less in a year; higher in private sector (19%) than public (13%) etc, etc. What does this mean? How is this measured? The simplest of comparisons are made through dividing all income by women by the amount of women to the same ratio for men. Clearly inaccurate, because that would compare the pay of a female working minimum wage at tesco with a handsomely payed lawyer. Most studies then controll for other factors, most obviously what profession you're in. But even then, same questions arise; differences in productivity, experiences, in certain education etc. Some studies controll for more factors than others, but very few of them are conclusive in the sense that they add such tiny things as choices or personal adequacy.

Truth to be told, when more factors are accounted for (education, experience, career choice or even negotiation skills) the gap narrows into virtually nothing. There is no wage gap, there's only choices. More extensive reading here.

Bottom Line: if there is no wage gap due to sex, and the domestic issue is largely determined by choices, the fundamenta for "Feminist Economics" is largely pulled away.

___________________________

P.S: There was also a discussion about particular male characteristics that women allegedly had to embrace in order to become successful career-wise (ie, the idea that 'female traits' such as emotion or care is less usefull in business and career than are 'male traits' like logic or self-discipline and whatnot). A widely-used UK example is Margaret Thatcher, who, allegedly, wasn't female enough.
That's a perfect example to what I mean with "Epistemology" in my story of Feminism: how can we know that? How is such knowledge obtained? How is even 'male traits' to be defined?

Also, the idea of "Sacked because of Pregnant" faces the same issue; how do we know? Because such an action is illegal in the UK, it's not simply to gather statistics of "reason for redundancy". Furthermore, Wendy McElroy has a great outline of why exactly discrimination is justified.