Economics as if Women were Agents
--Fabienne Peter
These days, economics seems to be in demand. Not just among the
"usual suspects" - national ministries, central banks,
international development agencies, and the likes - but, increasingly,
among feminist "rioters" in activist and academic circles
concerned with women's empowerment and the transformation of gender
relations. In the past two decades or so, there has been much
emphasis on the cultural dimensions of processes of social construction
of gender and its meanings. These efforts continue, with good
reasons, but awareness spreads that the material dimensions of
gender relations need to be taken into account and better understood.
Nancy Fraser has expressed this perhaps most forcefully, by demanding
that the politics of redistribution should matter in addition
to the politics of recognition. In this spirit, there is a renewed
call for economic analyses that shed light on the relationship
between gender differences in the command over resources and the
workings of the economy.
So far so good. The question immediately arises, however, what
kind of economic analysis is called for and what should be the
informational basis of this analysis. The mainstream of the discipline
largely caters to the "usual suspects", for better or
for worse. It does not have much on the menu for those hungry
to understand the gender economy. I gladly admit that mainstream
economics today is more value pluralistic than it used to be.
Monetary income, GDP, and efficiency still dominate, but spaces
are being carved out to analyze the complexities of social interactions
and the multifaceted nature of poverty and social inequality.
In the context of development economics, the World Bank, under
President James Wolfensohn and its former chief-economist Joseph
Stiglitz, has finally abandoned its exclusive focus on economic
growth and GDP-per-capita. Of course, the Bank's most widely used
poverty measure - the 1-Dollar-per-day-measure - is still defined
in purely monetary terms, with highly problematic consequences.
But in its World Development Reports, it at least documents developments
in health, education, living conditions, political participation,
women's empowerment, etc. In that respect, the Bank has followed
the lead of the Human Development Reports produced by the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
As a Lines editorial (Averages and Outrages, May 2003)has argued,
the statistical reporting of achievements in the different dimensions
of human development serves some valuable purposes. As it has
also noted, however, such an approach alone will not do. It argues,
first, that distributional questions are insufficiently studied.
Different social groups will experience deprivations qualitatively
and quantitatively differently. Secondly, it asks how the relevant
dimensions get identified. Who decides what "human development"
means? How can the tension between "top down" reporting
be reconciled with assessments "from below"? How to
make sure that the needs of different social groups are registered?
The latter point, it seems to me, is the more fundamental one,
as distributive issues cannot be settled independently of the
"what" that is to be distributed. It is not just the
satisfaction of needs that causes trouble, but, prior to that,
the questions of how needs are defined and interpreted and by
whom.
Concerns related to women's empowerment are, of course, tightly
linked to this issue, as many women belong to social groups that
have notoriously been silenced. Feminist economists have traditionally
been concerned with biases in economic analysis that contribute
to - and even reinforce - the silencing of women. Work done by
feminist economists thus provides a starting-point, even though
it remains relatively marginalized in academic economics as well
as politically. A main focus of feminist economics is the household,
understood as the primary site of the construction and reproduction
of gender relations. The gender division of work and the gendered
nature of public policies are analyzed from this angle. Increasingly,
feminist economists also study the impact of macroeconomic processes
- globalization or policies in the context of structural adjustment
programs - on women and on the construction and reproduction of
gender relations. I cannot summarize this rich literature here.
Instead, I want to focus on the dilemma that the Lines editorial
has raised. It plays out within feminist economics too, and I
do not think that it has been resolved. As a result, the relation
between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition
remains unclear.
Much of economic analysis proceeds on the basis of individual
choices and their underlying preferences. Social phenomena are
typically explained as the result of individual choices, and the
underlying preferences are treated as given. Feminist economists
have pointed out how explanations based on given individual preferences
may not capture the situation many women find themselves in. Such
explanations understand individuals as "unencumbered selves"
and disregard the effects of the social environment on individual
preferences. They neglect the specific makeup of care work. They
also downplay the role of gendered social and moral norms on individual
behavior. As a result, the patriarchal and often oppressive gender
division of labor is either viewed as "natural" or as
a result of voluntary individual choices (or both). In addition,
the preferences framework seems inadequate not only at the level
of explanation, but also at the level of evaluation - of the consequences
of social, economic, and political arrangements. Actual choices
and overt preferences may simply be a result of one's circumstances.
They may be influenced by gendered social and moral norms - for
example norms that demand that women put more weight on the interests
of their family than on their own. In that case, they are a poor
reflection of what a person's interests are and say little about
that person's well-being. Basing analysis, not on individual preferences,
but on objective needs - health, education, access to labor markets,
etc. - may then seem like a good alternative. Much of feminist
economics seems to be drawn to it. But are these really the two
only alternatives?
Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen has made an important
distinction that helps to identify a "third way". He
distinguishes between people's well-being and their agency and
argues that the latter has received less attention than the first
- with the consequence that people are treated as "patients"
and not as "agents". He defines agency as the ability
to set and pursue one's own goals and interests. Agency thus relates
to self-determination - individual or collective. As such, it
includes the self-determination of what the pursuit of well-being
is all about. This emphasis on agency echoes well with the agenda
of contemporary women's movements, which typically highlight the
active role of women's agency in bringing about social change.
It would be silly to deny that women's agency - their ability
to have their concerns be heard and to express their assessment
of desirable changes - is often severely restricted. But limited
effective agency does not imply impaired capacity of judgment
and absence of agency altogether. It seems equally inadequate
to presume that women have no agency at all. Economist Bina Agarwal
has rightly questioned this move. She argues that women's overt
compliance with social circumstances does not necessarily mean
they have accepted the legitimacy of gender inequality. What may,
in terms of manifest behavior, seem like submission, may hide
more subtle strategies of resistance. Limited though these strategies
may be, given these women's situation, they can nevertheless form
grounds for policy change. She thus urges us to "place much
less emphasis … on women's incorrect perceptions of their self-interest,
and much more on the external constraints to their acting overtly
in their self-interest" (Agarwal 1997: 25). Too much emphasis
on the manifest restrictedness of women's agency in economic analysis
and evaluation will continue to treat women as "patients".
In so doing, it will contribute to the perpetuation of gender
inequalities.
On the interpretation of agency, there is quite some controversy
in contemporary gender theory. Does emancipatory politics require
the conception of an individual agent capable of self-reflection,
self-determination, and autonomy and or is agency merely a result
of the cultural (including gender) constitution of the subject?
Nancy Fraser - rightly, in my opinion - rejects such a dichotomy
as false. She points out that acknowledging the situatedness of
agents need not imply robbing people of their autonomy. In any
case, the controversy relates primarily to the interpretation
of the constitution of persons and their agency, a topic I cannot
address here. The role of agency - individual or collective -
in bringing about social change is not disputed. The challenge
for economic analysis and evaluation of policy alternatives is
thus to abandon the "women-as-patients" perspective
and to register and take seriously the interpretations and evaluations
of "women-as-agents".
References
Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One's Own. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Agarwal, Bina. 1997. "'Bargaining' and Gender Relations:
Within and Beyond the Household." Feminist Economics 3 (1):
1 - 51.
Benería, Lourdes. 2003. Gender, Development, and Globalization.
New York and London: Routledge.
Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser
(eds.) 1995. Feminist Contentions. New York: Routledge.
Ferber, Marianne and Julie A. Nelson. 2003. Feminist Economics
Today. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Ferber, Marianne and Julie A. Nelson. 1993. Beyond Economic Man.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Folbre, Nancy. 2001. The Invisible Heart. New York: New Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. "Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests
as Political Conflicts in Welfare-State Societies." Ethics
99(2): 291 - 313.
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus. New York and London:
Routledge.
Kabeer, Naila. 1994. Reversed Realities. New York: Verso.
Reddy, Sanjay and Thomas Pogge. 2003. "How not to Count the
Poor." www.socialanalysis.org.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf.
Word Bank. Multiple Years. World Development Report. Washington
D.C.: The World Bank.
United Nations Development Programme. Multiple Years. Human Development
Report. New York: UNDP.
______________________________________________
Fabienne Peter teaches Economics at the University
of Basel, Switzerland and is a Fellow at Max Weber Kolleg of the
University of Erfurt, Germany (fabienne.peter@unibas.ch).
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