Feministiska ekonomer och feministisk ekonomi - exemplet nationalekonomi

Abstract

Economics is one of the most women and gender resistant disciplines of all. Some Economists who are critical of mainstream economic theory and method have, however, started to apply a gender perspective to economic models. One important feminist critique of macroeconomic theory and policy has been that they do not take into consideration unpaid care work (including domestic work) and paid work in the informal sector. Feminist economists have therefore started to present an alternative view of economic reality that includes work of this kind. Making unpaid care work and paid informal work visible offers a more comprehensive picture of the economy and women's place in it. It also makes it possible to analyse different sectors of the economy and the connections between them. When consideration is given only to the monetary economy, men are seen as more economically active than women, while resources are redistributed from men to women through social security systems and women are subsidised more than men by public services such as childcare and care for the elderly. If however unpaid care work is also included in the analysis, women appear to be as economically active as men, and since they have as long or longer working days, resources might rather be seen as being redistributed from women to men and women's unpaid care work as subsidising men's paid work. Economic theories and models, which integrate paid and unpaid work, are needed especially since the time available for care work, paid and unpaid now seems to be decreasing as a consequence of women's increasing participation on labour märket, savings in the public sector as well as of the fact that services are continuously becoming more expensive in relation to goods since these cannot be replaced by technological advances. At the same time the demand for care work expands because the proportion of elderly is increasing and because children seem to need an ever increasing investment of human and social capital to be able to cope on the labour märket.