Introduction

The household is often regarded as a “black box”, given that it is difficult to investigate the internal material aspects of family life. As stated by Burgoyne et al. (2006: 619), the reason for this is because “so much economic behaviour takes place (literally) behind closed doors”. Traditionally, the family is viewed as a “glued-together” unit whose interests are melded as one (Sen 1997). At least two assumptions underlie this view. First, all household members are assumed to benefit equally, or at least proportionally to their needs, from household resources. Second, incomes are pooled “all in one pot” (Sung & Bennett 2007) for distribution, with no differentiation, and with the mechanisms of control, or decision making, remaining unexamined. These assumptions are applied in particular to co-resident family members or the “family household” (Haddad, Hoddinott & Alderman 1997; UN Women 2019). A related area concerns how money is managed in this domestic space; it is often regarded as an essentially neutral – and endlessly fungible – means of exchange both within and outside the household.

An alternative body of thought, mainly from within feminist economics, has interrogated each of these assumptions and found them wanting on a number of points. First, despite acknowledging that people often derive various benefits from living together, it is argued that, because of the unequal positions of individuals in households, some sharing of resources is often necessary; however, this may not be equal (Himmelweit et al. 2013). Second, some allocation method intervenes between the receipt of household resources and their consumption, which needs to be scrutinized rather than assumed. Finally, in relation to the nature of money, it is argued that, rather than being neutral, money has a “social meaning” in varying contexts. For example, Robeyns (2003: 65) has argued that, “even if household income were shared completely, it is problematic to assume that it does not matter in a well-being assessment whether a person has earned this money herself, or obtained it from her partner”. Money is thus a social and ideological, as well as an economic, medium of exchange and forms an integral part of the “emotional economy” of family life (de Goede 2005; Goode 2010; Zelizer 2002).

Introduction

For the past decade or so, following the 2008 global economic recession, concerns with wealth and income inequality have become a mainstream issue in many policy-making arenas. According to the latest World Inequality Report (Chancel et al. 2021), income and wealth inequalities within countries have increased to the point that global contemporary inequalities are at similar levels to where they were at the peak of Western imperialism. Thomas Piketty's focus on wealth, and in particular the top 1 per cent of income earners, has ensured that talk about the 1 per cent is entrenched in public debate (Piketty 2014). The necessity of tackling inequality has been made even more urgent because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it has unleashed, throwing into sharp relief not only income or wealth inequality but, crucially, also gender, race and class inequalities. The intensification of several inequalities throughout the era of neoliberalism threatens to roll back many hard-won gains towards social and economic justice and has given rise to a renewal of social protest and other forms of civic engagement.

Prior to the most recent global crises many scholars had long traced social movements and highlighted the social, political and economic injustices created by persistent structural inequalities of income and wealth, gender, race and class. Feminists have struggled to foreground gender inequalities in economics and in political economy, and have often taken issue with mainstream thinkers who have traditionally considered the economy neutral and void of conflict, and with Marxist thinkers, who saw it as being structured on the lines of class conflict alone (see Folbre 1986 for a critique). For many feminists, gender inequality cannot be seen in isolation from mainstream economic issues. Marxist feminist traditions have long studied the interplay of gender and class; Black feminisms have centred the critical importance of race with Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class, first published over 40 years ago (Davis 1981), which is emblematic of this. Current feminist scholarship and activism draw on these lines of engagement and extend them into the context of globalized and financialized capitalism.

Introduction

Labour market inequalities present themselves in various forms, and stratification in the labour market happens by gender, race, class and sexual orientation, inter alia. Despite these divergences, men and women generally still tend to find themselves in different positions within the labour market. Women tend to be employed in lower-quality jobs, they earn less than men and they are under-represented in positions of power. How they decide to engage with the labour market has been widely studied, although the debates related to these differences have often been discussed within the narrowly defined notions of work used in the traditional economics literature and textbooks that first introduce these concepts (Feiner & Roberts 1990).

Feminist political economists take a broader view of work, including the unwaged or unpaid care work that is predominantly performed by women, and view the labour market as a gendered institution that is characterized by unequal power relations and structures of constraint. They additionally highlight the important role unpaid care work plays in the reproduction of the productive economy, which is underpinned by a continuous labour supply, and uses it as a tool for understanding women’s, marginalized and racial minority groups’ subordinate positioning in the labour market. Discussing the labour market from a feminist perspective, this chapter is structured as follows: section 7.2 discusses work on a continuum, challenging the dualistic tendencies used to describe work in the economy. Section 7.3 discusses topics widely studied within mainstream texts, human capital development and the gender wage gap. However, this section approaches these topics from a feminist political economy approach and highlights the shortcomings in how these topics have been thought and written about in traditional texts. Section 7.4 discusses segmentation in the labour market, juxtaposing feminist approaches with established ways of thinking about segmentation. Section 7.5 introduces time use inequality as a key source of disparity in paid labour, while section 7.6 takes a feminist approach to interventions that are typically employed to address inequalities in the paid labour market. Section 7.7 looks at changes that are inevitable in the labour market and the implications these changes are having and are likely to have for women and other minorities in the future, while section 7.8 discusses gender inequalities in the labour market in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Introduction

The household is a key site for the reproduction of gender inequalities as well as of capitalism on a global scale. What happens in the household is made invisible and depoliticized, but feminists have continuously placed the spotlight on households – studying both the inner workings and their embeddedness in the wider economy and society, not least in the contemporary globalized and financialized world.

This chapter looks at what the household is and why it is relevant in feminist economics and feminist political economy (section 5.2). It starts with a review of the conceptualization of the household in mainstream economics – Gary Becker's new household economics (NHE) (section 5.3) – and then discusses the feminist critique of NHE (5.4). Such critique led to a shift in economic theory, from unitary to collective household models, which saw some improvements while continuing to suffer from significant limitations (section 5.5). The chapter considers feminist political economy perspectives on the household, touching upon key debates from the 1970s to today's financialization (5.6), and section 5.7 sketches the foundational dimensions of a feminist conceptualization of the household.

Definitions of the household and relevance in economics and political economy

The household is normally defined as a physical place – the home or housekeeping unit – where one or more people live, share resources and make decisions on a range of issues bearing economic and social relevance.

The definition of the household provided by the UN report Families in a Changing World (UN Women 2019) places the emphasis on the act of sharing resources and the importance of familial and marital relations in the vast majority of households across the world.

3.1 Introduction

Social reproduction is a core, cross-cutting conceptual and methodological approach in feminist thinking, one that anchors the feminist agenda of challenging the status quo and reversing structures that perpetuate oppression and exploitation. What is social reproduction? The notion of social reproduction has multiple meanings and is part and parcel of several foundational debates in feminist scholarship. In the broadest terms, social reproduction is “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” as well as “a set of structured practices”, as vividly put by Cindi Katz (2001b: 711), that are needed for the reproduction of both life and capitalist relations. In other words, it encompasses all the work, unpaid and paid, and the socio-cultural practices, institutions and sectors that are essential for the regeneration of our lives and society. The ebb and flow of social reproduction interpretations map key trajectories in feminist thinking, not only in political economy but also in sociology, geography, economics and other social sciences. The roots of the concept in Marxist-feminist approaches explain why debates on social reproduction initiated in the 1970s were then sidelined in later decades but are now experiencing renewed interest among feminists. Such conceptual roots also explain why the social reproduction literature remains fundamentally concerned with correcting and enriching our understanding of capitalism. In essence, social reproduction is about reclaiming a feminist reading of capitalism.

In this chapter the meanings of social reproduction are explored (section 3.2), and the key debates are discussed by linking early and more recent perspectives, as well as Global North and Global South views. Section 3.3 addresses the debates on value generation, from the domestic labour debate of the 1970s to contemporary social reproduction theory (SRT) and its critics. Section 3.4 analyses the tendency of capitalism to squeeze and devalue social reproduction through processes of privatization and the generation of chronic crises of social reproduction. Section 3.5 discusses how social reproduction approaches can be deployed to understand work, non-work and labour processes. Section 3.6 provides an analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic as a crisis of social reproduction.

Introduction

Care, broadly defined, encompasses all the activities and relations needed for the existence and the well-being of societies. It includes all paid and unpaid activities to meet people's needs and to reproduce the workforce for the labour market. Care systems include healthcare, education, domestic work and social care. In shifting from the current narrow economic model, care should also entail environmental and climate concerns and engaging in social relations based on reciprocity, cooperation and mutuality (ActionAid International 2022a). Care is thus crucial to the functioning of economic and social life. Despite this, care work has long been undervalued and underpaid and often made invisible.

Before moving forward, a note on the relation between “care” and “social reproduction” is warranted. The broad definition of care provided above presents striking similarities with many conceptualizations of social reproduction. Indeed, the similarities reflect overlapping concerns, in the literatures on care and social reproduction, with forms of work and practices that are foundational to the functioning of the economy but that are most often neglected in mainstream political economy (or economics, more generally). However, there are also important differences, and care might be seen as a subset of social reproduction, in that it is mostly concerned with activities that are relational in nature, with carer and cared for fairly easy to recognize. However, in narrowing down the attention to relational activities, the care literature also broadens the scope of analysis of care work by highlighting its emotional and ethical dimensions, in ways that remain more marginal in the social reproduction literature. Importantly, care and social reproduction speak to different debates; most notably, the care literature is primarily focused on gender equality and has a strong policy concern, while social reproduction is also concerned with gender equality but has a broader structural agenda.

The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically exposed and underlined the centrality of care, not only in terms of increased caring for those who had the virus within the domestic household but also for those in hospitals and nursing homes, as a result of government lockdown measures that required people to stay at home, following the mass closure of non-essential workplaces, schools and childcare settings. Families are the main site of care: familial relations comprise the place where most people are nurtured and cared for.

Introduction

Measuring economic and social progress is a complicated methodological task, not least because of the theoretical and normative questions it raises in relation to what constitutes “progress”, “well-being” or a “good life”. Although criticisms of gross domestic product as a measure of socio-economic progress are nearly as old as the concept itself, it nonetheless has remained the dominant benchmark of general prosperity. Indeed, so pervasive is the use of GDP that its growth is the prime economic objective of almost all governments. However, more than serving as a (mostly flawed) indicator of economic activity, GDP growth has become the key indicator of economic development and progress, despite its failure to capture non-economic aspects of quality of life. Such aspects include glossing over inequalities in the distribution of resources and opportunities, neglecting the value of uncompensated economic activities, such as caregiving, and ignoring environmental damage and the depletion of natural resources. The implications of using GDP growth as a shorthand measure of national well-being are thus very significant, both in relation to entailing misguided policy decisions and, conceptually, in terms of conflating economic growth with welfare improvements. These shortcomings have become even more striking in a world of rapidly evolving technologies, rising income inequalities and urgent environmental pressures. To this end, a number of alternative measures of nationallevel progress have been developed that address some of the flaws of GDP – particularly the depletion of social capital and natural resources that undermines the quality of life for future generations (Costanza et al. 2009). Although these measures have their own limitations, they typically highlight large differences between average measures of economic performance and social conditions and how these can change over time. Further, they demonstrate the degree of overlap in the economic and social dimensions regarded as most relevant to assess social progress and quality of life.

This chapter begins by examining GDP and other measures of economic growth, within the System of National Accounts (SNA), drawing some comparisons between them. It delineates the limitations of GDP, both on its own terms as a measure of economic activity and its inadequacy as a measure of societal welfare. It also highlights the specific gender limitations of GDP (section 11.3), especially in terms of how unpaid work – mainly undertaken by women – has been made invisible within national accounting systems and the subsequent damage this causes.

This book provides an extremely valuable resource to all those interested in a joined-up analysis of key issues in feminist political economy. It is a very useful as well as a very timely book that lays out the basic contours of a feminist political economy from a global perspective. A political economy approach, as the authors explain, is concerned with how the structures of power in global, national and local contexts shape the operation and outcomes of economic forces. The book combines feminist concerns with gender and its intersection with other forms of inequality with this political economy approach. The authors examine how the intersectional nature of inequalities is an essential frame for understanding the different manifestations of power as they operate through the domains of production and reproduction across the world, reconstituting, modifying or transforming the institutions of states, markets and households. The book sets out a macro-level analysis of how the global division of labour between men and women, between paid and unpaid work and between households and markets emerged through the interplay of global forces, initially as an aspect of the colonial world order and then, in contemporary times, through the workings of the neocolonial order that took its place.

The timeliness of the book lies in the global scope of the analysis. As the authors argue, the need for a global perspective does not lie simply in the increasing visibility of unequal global interconnections as economies open up (or are opened up) to global competition but also in uncovering the roots of these unequal interconnections in an earlier era of primitive accumulation, when the capitalist expansion of the West proceeded through the expropriation of land and the extraction of resources and labour in territories inhabited by those constructed as “uncivilized, unproductive and, in essence, inferior to the colonizers”. A feminist approach to questions of political economy is cognizant of the long history of exploitation that produced the intersectional inequalities of today: class inequalities, yes, but also their intersection with the subordinations associated with gender, caste, ethnicity, race and national identity.

The book also addresses the interconnected relationships between labour markets and households, and hence between paid work that is recognized and counted and the shadow economy of unpaid work.

This book represents the encounter of three feminist scholars committed to a powercentred understanding of the economy. We are from different generations and countries but we all work in the fields of political economy and economics in critical and interdisciplinary ways. Our own journeys, intellectual interests and differences, as well as dilemmas, are reflected in this book, which has a primary aim to systematize the rich, complex and variegated knowledge in feminist political economy around a selection of key topics so as to provide an overview of the foundational insights and debates in this area of enquiry.

The book has been a long time in the making. Although this was partly a result of other work and life commitments, it was also because the book itself, which had appeared a quite straightforward proposition, turned out to be a more complex endeavour, marked by several periods of reflection and introspection on our own understanding of feminist political economy.

Our initial idea was to draw on our teaching practice and write up some of the classes we have taught working from our slides, resources and relevant literature in courses such as the “Feminist Political Economy & Development” summer school at SOAS University of London, the “Feminist Political Economy: Concepts and Tools to Analyse Intersecting Inequalities” at the Central European University, the “Feminist Economics” summer school organized by the Institute for Economic Justice in Johannesburg, the “Social Thought and Political Economy Program” at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst or the “Political Economy of Inequality” module on the Equality Studies MSc at University College Dublin. Yet, in the process of writing, new questions emerged that caused a revision of the structure of the book as well as the topics to select, the most relevant starting point and how best to link the various areas, let alone the bigger issue of defining the burgeoning field of feminist political economy and identifying its boundaries. It is, therefore, the result of our extended process of writing and evolving interpretations and engagements with feminist political economy. So, for example, the chapter on the global division of labour, which was meant to frame the following one on labour market inequalities, turned out to be the chapter we felt was best suited to frame the whole book.

Introduction

Economic crises have become a recurring and almost normal part of the contemporary economic landscape. During such difficult times, governments and international financial institutions are often well positioned to steer economies and their various moving parts through the crisis. However, the tools used to avert the worst outcomes of economic crises have often prioritized vulnerabilities that are visible, while leaving less visible parts unaccounted for in recovery strategies. The household, for instance, has traditionally been an ignored and invisibilized economic institution. Its systemic exclusion has perpetuated the invisibility of women and other marginalized groups who are primarily responsible for the social and economic survival of the household. Ironically, during economic crises the household becomes an even more critical part of the economic ecosystem.

This chapter highlights how the systemic exclusion of certain groups serves to exacerbate their economic vulnerability during economic crises. The chapter starts with an overview of the most relevant financial and economic crises in recent decades, followed by a discussion of the male bias that often characterizes economic recovery packages (section 10.3). This is followed by various theoretical explanations for how women behave in an economic crisis in relation to their economic activity, followed by how households tend to rearrange activities during a crisis. How crises serve to change or entrench gender relations is discussed in section 10.6, while section 10.7 provides a model to describe the interconnected nature of contemporary economies and how this creates vulnerabilities specifically for women in Global South nations. The last section focuses on the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic crisis that emerged from the health crisis.

Definitions of an economic crisis

The term “crisis” implies a deviation from some degree of normality. Crises range from wars, financial market crashes and health crises to natural disasters. Often crises have important economic impacts on the communities that are affected by them. Consequently, they tend to result in some form of reorganization in the way resources are obtained, distributed and accumulated. A historical analysis of resource distribution and accumulation often provides important clues as to how communities, individuals and countries fare during and in the aftermath of a crisis, and some even result in a change (even if small) in prevailing gender norms.

Introduction

The role of the state in relation to resource sharing and ownership is a key concern of political economy. Despite this, many studies on the economy and economic policy have failed to incorporate the political implications of certain economic policy interventions, and nor have they questioned the way in which the state itself is instrumental in maintaining class hierarchies and implicated in the reproduction of unequal relations in society. Further to this are the often ignored constraints that market action can pose on the state to exercise its power or the tendency of the state to support and maintain exclusionary market practices. It is in the debate on the welfare state that the role of ideology, the contradictory nature of the state and the role it is meant to play undermine the assumption of an economy and society comprised of self-interested rational decision makers.

Dominant approaches to the welfare state have often veered between liberal and socialist perspectives, although feminist theorists have also introduced gendered critiques of the welfare state and the ways in which it maintains gender inequalities rather than transform them (Blackburn 1995; Park, Han & Song 2002). In fact, feminist critiques of the welfare state often highlight the gender-blind analyses of early welfare state theorists (Christopher 2004; Lewis 1997). Those who take the liberal view believe that the rights of individuals should be protected, that policies that promote free markets (meaning reduced state intervention) should be implemented and that, when welfare benefits are provided, these should be minimal and conditional. The socialist view, on the other hand, favours generous government provision of social services and the regulation of the market, and state ownership of important infrastructure is encouraged. This is a generally egalitarian view that favours redistribution while the well-being of the collective is prioritized. Feminist critiques highlight that these opposing debates often miss the important role that unpaid work plays in supporting welfare systems, that women are often excluded in the formulation of policies and that ideological intentions are often difficult to determine given the political and economic constraints that policy makers may face at a given time in their tenure – whether it be a short bout of power in an advanced democracy or a longer stay under an authoritarian regime (Kasza 2002; Lewis 1997; Park, Han & Song 2002).

Introduction

The feminization of poverty thesis states that women are disproportionately affected by poverty. Despite having been originally formulated in the United States, the feminization of poverty thesis became a core dimension of the integration of gender into development policy in the Global South. Addressing women's poverty was identified as a critical area of intervention by the Beijing Platform for Action, launched in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women. Since then the belief that poverty is feminized informed the gender mainstreaming agenda, with a specific focus on how poverty alleviation programmes could/should serve women. In this way, it allowed development actors to target women (or, more often, women-headed households) to pursue the twin goal of poverty alleviation and gender equality. As women-headed households became protagonists in development scholarship and policy, important feminist debates unpacked this category and questioned its nature. Much as the deserving female-headed household captured the imagination of scholars and policy makers, the feminization of poverty narrative suffers from several conceptual and methodological limitations and promotes a simplistic understanding of the interconnections of poverty and gender. A critical engagement with the feminization of poverty thesis entails a reflection on how poverty is measured and, importantly, how poverty and gender are interconnected; in particular, important questions are raised on the structure versus agency debate that is cross-cutting in feminist thinking.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the meaning of feminization of poverty (section 9.2), it then engages with a brief debate on measurements of poverty (section 9.3) and articulates the limitations of the feminization of poverty narrative (9.4). Finally, it considers different feminist perspectives on the links between poverty and gender (section 9.5).

What is the feminization of poverty?

The feminization of poverty thesis states that women are disproportionately affected by poverty. Why would this be the case? Women face disadvantages in several domains, which can result in the increased likelihood of their falling into poverty. Women have more limited access to productive resources such as land, credit and education; they are employed in lower-paid and more insecure jobs; they carry the burden of reproductive work; and they face greater constraints to socio-economic mobility because of cultural, legal and labour market barriers.

The global or international division of labour refers to the transnational organization of production and how labour is mobilized and distributed across space, often crossing the boundaries of the nation state. During capitalism the global division of labour underwent important transformations, driven by capital's need for cheap labour and resources under the evolving conditions created by technological advancement. From the time of sixteenth-century colonialism, the European expansion into other parts of the world set the foundations for an organization of production and trade that saw the colonies become exporters of primary inputs, through the appropriation of land and the use of enslaved labour. The transfer of surplus from the colonized to the colonizing countries made it possible for the latter to embark on a process of industrialization that created a growing economic divergence between the industrializing countries in the West and the rest of the world. In the post colonial time, countries in the Global South have experienced economic growth and, in a few cases, industrialization, but this was not sufficient – for the vast majority of them – to catch up with the first industrializers. As production was increasingly organized into global supply chains, different stages of the productive process were relocated where the production costs were cheaper: in the Global South. This phase of neoliberal globalization constituted another key turning point in the global division of labour, when jobs in the export-oriented labour-intensive manufacturing and agriculture were created in the Global South and blue-collar jobs were lost in the deindustrializing Global North. Feminist analyses of the global division of labour at different historical times offer at least two central insights. First, the global division of labour entails not only production but also reproduction – from the early colonial time in the Americas and the Caribbean, where the control of reproduction was a crucial dimension of labour extraction, to the era of neoliberalism, marked by the rise of global care chains. Second, the transnational organization of production and reproduction is gendered, in that women take up specific types of employment that tend to be lower-paid and less secure. Not only that, there are also important dynamics of racialization that place women of colour and migrants in specific positions of disadvantage in the global division of labour.

Cities are a sprawling mass of things: buildings, pipes, wires, pavements, parking lots, machines, roads, tunnels, bridges. This landscape of things is often what we focus on when we think “city”. But alongside these bits and pieces of city life there is a dense web of living entities, both human and non-human, that make cities. It is the relations between these elements and how they come together that define city life. In our next step on our journey to save the city, I focus on what I call the players: the people who will put our strategies from the last chapter into practice, and make the emergency moves I outline in the next chapter. These players operate through dense and interconnected relations with others. How each player sees and shapes itself, how they relate to others, and how they use, mobilize and change our landscape of things, ultimately will determine our success. These players form our breakaway coalition, acting as first responders that will tackle our triple emergencies. It is a lot to ask. It means taking risks, feeling uncomfortable and standing up to powerful interests. There is a huge responsibility to change direction and take rapid, urgent and decisive action. But this is what is needed if we are to save the city.

I have intentionally developed a broad list of players. I want readers of this book to find their persona in this change game. But more importantly, it is crucial to understand that a broad range of actors make and remake cities. Given the complexity of urban life it is often quite difficult to identify who actually does what, who is in charge and who can actually make things happen. This is both a strength and a weakness. There is no single office or seat of power that can determine the future of cities. Cities are certainly powerful, in the sense that they are full of power, and we need to work hard to uncover who has this power, where it resides, how it is applied, and importantly how its focus can be disrupted and shared as we act in the emergency context in which we find ourselves.

We have to think about power in a relational way (Anderson 2017). Power does not just emanate from a single source.