Why we need a feminist economy: ‘Economic growth is a means to an end’

Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and human rights are under threat worldwide. In a world where conservative movements are – often successfully – countering the progress that feminists have made, with less and less funding and means, it is important to shed light on those working at the forefront of the feminist movements, trying to secure an equal and just world for all. Lilith Magazine teamed up with Hivos to create a series of interviews connecting international feminists who share thoughts on current times, their work, the challenges they are facing, and how they are trying to push back. In the next few months, you can read our interviews on Lilith Magazine, join us for live conversations throughout the country, and listen to our podcasts.

“When we wake up, we’re not just thinking: I need to earn more money, I need more material gain. You wake up, spend time with your partner or child, or enjoy a walk. Over time, we’ve forgotten that economic growth is a means to an end. Now financial gain has become a goal in itself. When you reduce economics to just the domain of things you can commodify and sell, you reduce humans to this neoliberal image of humanity,” states Najah Aouaki, a Dutch economist and urban strategist in conversation with Jayati Ghosh, a renowned Indian economist. They dive into the inequality of our current economic system, the failure of funding feminist and women’s labor, and the exciting possibility of a feminist economy.

The concept of a ‘feminist economy’ is largely attributed to New Zealand activist, politician, and principal founder of feminist economics Marilyn Waring. Her book If Women Counted, first published in 1988, is seen as the founding document of feminist economics. Feminist economics emphasizes often-overlooked topics such as care work, domestic violence, and improving economic theories by integrating gender effects. This includes examining the relationships between the paid and unpaid sectors of the economy.

Jayati Ghosh is a renowned economist from India who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for 35 years. She is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Ghosh is concerned with how economic systems impact real people, especially those who often get overlooked – like women, workers, and the poor. Ghosh dives into these kinds of puzzles, asking big questions about fairness, justice, and how to create a system that benefits everyone, not just the privileged few. In her opinion, you cannot understand the economy without looking at gender relations.
Ghosh has written books on COVID-19 and the Indian Economy, women in the informal economy, and crisis management in economics, in addition to her work for international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). She is a member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economics and Social Affairs, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health For All, and the Club of Rome.

Najah Aouaki is an economist and urban strategist dedicated to creating inclusive cities through innovative strategies that challenge traditional economic models. She focuses on community wealth building and urban development, especially for marginalized groups and communities of color. Aouaki is known for her work in Amsterdam, where she develops projects to promote economic inclusivity, such as in the Venserpolder district, ensuring that local communities benefit from urban changes rather than being excluded by gentrification. Her approach treats cities like living ecosystems, emphasizing the importance of social and cultural capital in shaping urban growth. Through her organization, Aouaki Concepts, she works on various community-driven initiatives, like the exhibition ‘Speculate or Die Tryin’, which explores alternatives to gentrification by centering local residents within economic development.

Let’s start with the basics. What is the feminist economy?

Ghosh: “Basically, it's a way of looking at the economy that recognizes that there are differences in how men, women, boys, girls, etc. interact with and are affected by economic processes. And this is a little different from the standard ways in which we are taught to think about the economy. In the mainstream, you are told about those who produce and those who consume. In more radical Marxian traditions, you are told about the differences in classes between the workers, the capitalists, the employers, and so on. Within the feminist economy, you’re saying that the way gender is constructed in societies affects the economy.”

Aouaki: “Economics is about how we distribute scarce resources to meet human needs, and those needs aren’t just material. Who gets how much, of what? But we’re not just consumers or producers. Humans are complex beings. We are social, emotional, and spiritual beings searching for meaning. And we are connected to our environment, whether it’s the natural environment or the social environment. And within that context, we try to improve our well-being. And I say ‘well-being’ because it’s not just about wealth. For me, a feminist economy is about democratizing the economy and taking back the agency to form a system that works for us as human beings.”

Aouaki, what does your feminist economic vision entail?

Aouaki: “When we wake up, we’re not just thinking: I need to earn more money, I need more material gain. You wake up and spend time with your partner or child, or enjoy a walk. These are all things that give people fulfillment. Over time, we’ve forgotten that economic growth is a means to an end. Now financial gain has become a goal in itself. The same has happened with economics as a whole. When you reduce economics to just the domain of things you can commodify and sell, you reduce humans to this neoliberal image of humanity: this rational, pragmatic, competitive being whose primary purpose is to gain material goods. This limits the economic domain. It excludes care work for example, while paid work is not possible without this care work of others.”

This care work is one example of gender disparity in economics. Over 16 billion hours are devoted to unpaid domestic and care work around the world every day. Unpaid domestic and care work would equal a substantial portion of global GDP (if given the same monetary value as other work). Girls and women perform a little over 76% of this unpaid labor. Why?

Ghosh: “There is a lot of work done in any economy that is not marketed or sold. The people who do this work, don’t get compensated for it. It is predominantly done by women and girls because, traditionally, it's been associated with the fact that women have babies. I mean, bottom line, right? It's because [cishet, ed.] women get pregnant, have a baby, and then are looking after the baby, for at least two to three years. And so, because you're doing that, you may as well do all the other stuff that has to be done within the house. However, there is no inherent reason why women must do all the activities that constitute unpaid labor. And yet we find across economies and societies, women dominate in care work. It can include caring for younger and older people, or those with disabilities, along with the regular work of looking after perfectly healthy people who have to be clothed and fed, keeping the house clean, and provisioning of necessary items.”

The Global Gender Gap Report measures how much progress has been made in closing the gap between men and women in economic participation (among other areas). But it does not take unpaid labor into account. How does unpaid labor impact economies?

Ghosh: “Unpaid labor enables these economies to survive and thrive. It’s unpaid labor that enables households in rural India to access fuel, because a lot of this is still wood collected by women. But there’s an international aspect: consider my friend, who's a professor in Rome, who can fly around the world doing work for the European Union because she has a Filipina woman looking after her kids at home. And that Filipina woman has her family in metro Manila being looked after by someone from the island of Mindanao, whom she hires for wages. And that woman from Mindanao has children who are being looked after by her sister, as unpaid work. There's a whole value chain of care work that we don't recognize, where we're resting on the unpaid or poorly paid work of women, and it's just excluded from economic policy discussion. Once you start looking at the structure of society from this perspective, it's very hard to see anything in the same way you did before. So, it changes the way we look at economies, and we become less willing to accept a lot of the – forgive my words – crap that we have been fed.”

How did your personal experiences influence your understanding of gender and class?

Ghosh: “I grew up in a nuclear family with two girls. And our parents brought us up pretty much like boys. We didn't really have a sense that we were different. We grew up in an upper-class, upper-caste bubble. The first real important economic differentiator that I was aware of was class, for sure. I didn't realize gender was a factor until I was in college and in higher studies. It was a kind of niggling thing inside me that: how come things are the way things are? Then you start looking around and being a little bit more critical. My mother was a homemaker. And you realize that, wait a minute… She's a very bright woman. She has an MA. She reads a lot. But she's the one doing all the homemaking stuff and has never had a career. You start looking at all of that and saying: oh, well, maybe it wasn't all completely wonderful and egalitarian in the way that you grew up to think.”

Aouaki: “During my first economics class in university, I realized there are a lot of assumptions being made that are the base of economic models. We look at the outcome and say: these are the hard facts, while forgetting that these are based on assumptions about how people respond to situations. And these assumptions are a reflection of the reality of economists themselves, who often are or were white middle-aged men with higher education. As soon as you tweak those assumptions, you get completely different outcomes. For example, I have a different outlook on things because I come from a different background than most people who create these models. I’m a woman. I’m a migrant. This isn’t my reality or the reality of people around me. This isn’t my norm. This realization evolved into: wait a minute, maybe these assumptions aren’t the norm. Maybe my reality lies closer to the truth of the majority of the people than these economists realize.”

Professor Ghosh, one of your earlier research for the UN Development Programme looked at how work was organized and who was doing what kind of work in Asia in the late 1980s. There was a dramatic increase in women’s workforce participation. You noticed this had to do with the enormous wage gaps. Young women were being used as a cheap labour force with little demand, because they didn’t see themselves as the primary wage earners. They didn’t ask for benefits or pensions, and left before they would become a ‘liability’. What was it about particular research that showed you the importance of gender in economics?

Ghosh: “I think what these studies on garment industry workers in Southeast Asia brought home to me is that there are two significant things that economists have been missing out on. One was about how economic processes impact men and women differently. And that's largely because of unpaid labor, which permeates a whole lot of other aspects. But it's also for other, though related, reasons: women own fewer assets and they have less control over their mobility.

Two is that it has become very clear how economies use this gender differentiation. I feel we don't put enough emphasis on this. I fervently believe that capitalist accumulation in particular relies on these gender differences. You know, when economists claim: ‘Oh, it's all the market.’ No. No, it hugely depends on these social differences which enable different kinds of labor markets. You can pay much less for the activities where women predominate.”

So you’re saying policymakers and governments are not just aware of inequality but use it to their advantage?

Ghosh: “Yes. And not just governments, but even the international financial institutions are aware of it. When you reduce funding for healthcare, there will be fewer nurses in the hospital, and fewer people in the whole healthcare sector, which means people need to leave the hospital earlier on, etcetera. You know that households will step up and fill the gap, and that basically means women in these households will fill the gap. So, you are relying on this to cushion the impact of your austerity measures or other policies like privatization. You know, the downswing is cushioned by increased unpaid labor. I don't call these gender-blind policies. I think they are gender-exploitative policies.”

Aouaki: “I also think there has been this tendency in economics to want to ‘keep things simple’. Whenever I would start about these assumptions made at the beginning of economic models or theories, people would tell me to ‘stop being difficult’. I was told to accept things the way they were, ’cause otherwise it would be far too complex. And I understand where they were coming from, adding all these different perspectives, experiences and opinions does make things complex. But it is complex. The moment you leave out this complexity, you are selling people short, especially those on the fringe of society. If we only take into account the work that can be commodified and consider all this other labor as ‘leisure time’, we’re missing a large part of the bigger picture. In the Netherlands, attention to the growing issue of inequality has only recently gained traction. Awareness and knowledge about class differences are still in their infancy among politicians and policymakers. Inequality is being approached through poverty reduction policies, rather than tackling the fundamental changes needed to address its root causes. Within this context, there is little focus on the inequality between women and men.

Professor Ghosh, you’ve highlighted the significance of unpaid labor by women in sustaining economies. What would you advise governments or institutions to tackle this?

“I think in terms of care work in particular, by now, feminists have pretty much developed a framework which is the five R’s. You first Recognize it. And the best way to recognize it is to do surveys about the use of time: how much time are you spending on all your activities, including cooking, cleaning, taking care of small children, etcetera? And we make it part of the statistical system. [LINK: https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/unpaid-work/measuring-unpaid-domestic-and-care-work/] Then the second is to Reduce. There’s a lot of unpaid work that really should not have to be done. For example, in India, women are walking miles to collect and carry firewood or water, which would not occur if they had access to piped fuel or water. The third is to Redistribute the unpaid work. And that’s a big one. You have to redistribute between households, the public provision, the private or cooperative provision, and within households. Again, remember that there’s no biological reason for women to do most of the housework. The fourth is to Reward those who are doing the paid care work. Because what happens now is that because so much of this is unpaid work, the ones who do it as jobs, get low pay. So it’s like a continuum. We do not reward care workers or domestic workers enough. A lot of care work is actually skilled work, even though we don’t treat it that way. Looking after very young children, it’s a skilled job. Looking after the old is a skilled job. And finally, the fifth is to Represent, to give a voice to all care workers. And I mean all. That is to say, the well-paid and low-paid workers, voluntary workers and unpaid workers in their homes.”

As an economist and urban strategist you did a lot of different projects in cities like Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Can you give an example of how democratizing economics looks like?

Aouaki: “I did a project in Venserpolder [Amsterdam-Zuidoost, ed.] that started with an investigation into the needs of the local residents. Together with the University of Amsterdam, we created a Well-Being Dashboard that showed the neighborhood was missing a few essential basic living conditions, such as access to healthy food and other essential products. A growing part of the population is impoverished and relies on the Food Bank. The neighborhood desperately needed a supermarket since the last one was closed due to the number of robberies. We call these food deserts: areas with limited access to plentiful, affordable, or nutritious food. Where do you go for aspirin? Or cucumbers? The research showed that a large part of the residents in this neighborhood have low-wage jobs and a relatively long commute. Households have to combine paid work with care work at home and, in addition, travel a long way to find healthy, good food. This is something to take into account as policymakers, but it will not show up in the regular economic calculations. So, together with local organizations and residents, we want to develop a plan for a cooperative supermarket in the Venserpolder, take it a step further, and explore the possibilities for urban agriculture at the courtyards of the apartment buildings. This urban agriculture could then supply the cooperative supermarket. The point is that we need to look outside of the existing economic frames if we want to do something about poverty in the neighborhood and outside of it.”

And what do you think is needed to bring this democratization of the economy one step further?

Aouaki: “What it is about for me, is that people actually gain more ownership, as we showed in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. I often say that when you anchor a project locally it is so much stronger because it has these roots and therefore is so much more intelligent. Let's reframe this as the norm, instead of talking about trickle-down policies and other economic theories that we know by now don’t work, at least not for a growing part of the population. We can do better. We are smarter than this. We have to build more intelligent systems. This project shows that people can reclaim economic agency and say: ‘We’re going to do things differently.’ Instead of accepting this imposed system that doesn’t work for them. The economy doesn’t revolve around millionaires and billionaires, it revolves around people. There is a reason equity funds are investing in basic commodities: real estate, water, food, etcetera. That’s what makes the world go round: things that normal people spend their money on from day to day. There lies power in that. People should be aware of that power, and use it.”

This series of interviews about feminism in today’s polarized world and inspiring examples of grassroots activism is made possible by Hivos’ Walking the Talk program

Interview, HivosAnne DirksOctober 8, 2024Hivos, Feminism, Politiek