--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.[1]
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.[2]
But in its World Development Reports,
it at least documents developments in health, education, living conditions,
political participation, women’s empowerment, etc. [3]
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.[4]
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.[5]
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.[6] 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).
[1] Fraser (1997).
[2] For a critique of this measure and its uses,
see Reddy and Pogge (2003).
[3] A casual comparison between the two World Development Reports on poverty –
1993 and 2002 – illustrates the shift in conceptual frameworks used.
[4] Here I draw again from Nancy Fraser. She
writes: “Usually the politics of needs is understood to concern the
distribution of satisfaction. In my approach, by contrast, the focus is the politics of need interpretation. … The
reason for focusing on discourses and interpretation is to bring into view the
contextual and contested character of needs claims” (Fraser 1989: 292).
[5] See, for example, Lourdes Benería’s latest
book Gender, Development, and
Globalization: Economics as if People Mattered (Benería 2003), Bina
Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own
(Agarwal 1994), Naila Kabeer’s Reversed
Realities: Gender Hiearchies in Development Thought (1994), Nancy Folbre’s The Invisible Heart (Folbre 2001), and Feminist Economics Today, the sequel to Beyond Economic Man (both edited by Marianne Ferber and Julie
Nelson, 1993 and 2003).
[6] See the debate between Seyla Benhabib and
Judith Butler and comments by Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser in Benhabib,
Butler, Cornell, and Fraser (1995).