Kvinnopolitiskt engagemang i könsneutral vetenskap - Karin Kocks könsteoretiska analys under 1930-talet

Abstract

In this artide, the Swedish economist Karin Kock's work "Kvinnoarbetet i Sverige" (Womens Work in Sweden) from 1938, is analysed as a "feminist empiricist" strategy of knowledge. Karin Kock earned a Ph.D. in economics from Stockholm University in 1929. After that, she built a successful career, first as a teacher and researcher at Stockholm University, låter as a government official and minister. She was the only woman economist active in Sweden before the 1970's. Kock was an organised feminist from the middle of the 1920'son. Married women's right to work was a controversial political issue in Sweden in the inter-war years, and Women's Work in Sweden was written as a part of a government investigation into that question. Kock based her theoretical work on women's wages and their situation on the labour märket on a large scale empirical investigation, which showed that the labour märket in Sweden was characterised by horizontal and vertical segregation, as it was in the other industrialised countries. Kock then utilised the difference between women's and men's wages as starting point for an analysis of the factors that influenced the supply and demand for women's labour, thereby combining neoclassical labour märket theory with institutionalist analysis. Women s Work in Sweden was the only work where Kock used her feminist commitment as a basis for formulating a scientific problem. The broad economic and social approach she developed in this work in the end of 1930's came to be the mainstream approach among feminist economists during the 1980's and 90's.