… is the economics profession a functionary and tool of patriarchy – or is patriarchy a functionary and tool of economics? – Marilyn Waring
Economically, the rupture of 2020 showed us two things: that our lives depend on care work, especially the unpaid care work still mostly done by women; and that another way is possible.
It’s timely that Covid-19 has brought women’s traditional realm, the household, into clear and blinding view – because economics, the intellectual discipline that most shapes policy and funding decisions around the world, has its root in the ancient Greek word for household management. And if any discipline is in need of an influx of expert household managers to transform its ossified thinking and reimagine it for this new millennium, it’s economics.
In its current state, mainstream economics is failing to address the many critical issues of our times, including gendered and racial violence, climate change, inequality, poverty, hunger, species extinction, ecosystem destruction, land theft and the privatisation of water. As Ross Gittins, economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote in 2020: “leading thinkers among the world’s economists are still grappling with the embarrassing question of why their profession’s advice over many decades seems to have made our lives worse rather than better.”
As the past year has demonstrated, women excel in household management. Yet it was thanks to a series of deliberate decisions made during the 19th century that women’s critical labours were designated “unproductive” and simply wiped from view. Key to these erasures was Alfred Marshall, the revered father of neoclassical economics, who advocated strict limits on women’s choices lest they behave selfishly. Women’s reproductive labour had already been excluded from the realm of economics by Adam Smith and others, but Marshall mapped this onto a new distinction between market and non-market work.
It was bad enough that the 1881 census of England and Wales had explicitly placed wives and other women engaged in domestic duties in the “Unoccupied Class”; but subsequently, following Marshall’s advice, the “Unoccupied Class” was struck from the census categories altogether. Why? Because if this main female occupation had been included in the reckoning, “the proportion of occupied women would resemble that of men”. In his influential work Principles of Economics, published in 1890, Marshall wrote that employing women was “a great gain in so far as it tends to develop their faculties; but an injury in so far as it tempts them to neglect their duty of building up a true home, and of investing their efforts in the personal capital of their children’s characters and abilities”.
Read More: What really counts? How the patriarchy of economics finally tore me apart |