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Research grant funding influences the organisation of academic work and academic careers. We problematise general approaches to gender bias in research grant funding and argue that it fails to incl...

This paper discusses new methods of combined macro-micro analysis of labor demand and supply to investigate the gender impacts of public policy. In particular it examines how studies have used input-output analysis together with more or less sophisticated methods of allocating people to jobs to model the impact of public investment in care on the gender employment gap and other inequality measures. It presents some results of a cross-country comparison of investment in the care and construction industries, suggesting methodological refinements to take account of the labor supply effects of such investment policies in order to enable a more detailed analysis of who gets the jobs generated and under what conditions of employment to achieve a more accurate assessment of a policy's full impact on employment inequalities. We argue that such a microsimulation of who is likely to get any newly created jobs should be able to take account of the (child)care "tax" paid by those with caring responsibilities on time spent in employment (as well as the formal tax and benefit system).

This paper examines how contributions to household resources, indicated by employment status, influence satisfaction with household income (SWHI) for members of male/female couples. We take changes in SWHI, which may differ within couples, to indicate changes in perceived benefits from their common household income, benefits that can go beyond individual consumption. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 2,396 couples from 1996 to 2007, three gender effects are identified. First, men predominate in making the type of contribution that most positively influences SWHI, namely full-time employment. Second, the effect of contributions depends on the gender of the contributor, with men’s employment being more influential than women’s. Third, within couples, making the more influential contribution, as men tend to do, leads to relatively greater SWHI. We conclude that gender asymmetry in contributions made to household resources is one way in which gender inequalities invade and inhabit households.

Over the last thirty years, economic models have been developed that recognize that potentially conflicting interests may shape household decisions and the sharing of resources within families. This paper provides an overview of how decision-making within households has been modeled within economics, presents the main benefits and limitations of those models and critically assesses their usefulness to those from other disciplines interested in within-household distribution. Our main focus is on the theory, empirical application and results of the currently dominant collective models, but we also look at developments that led up to them and some subsequent extensions and alternative approaches. Given the weight policy-makers and others put on economic and quantitative evidence, it is incumbent on researchers of all disciplines to understand on what such evidence is based, that is, the achievements and limitations of the models used to produce it and the assumptions that lie behind them.

This paper examines three distinguishing features of caring: that it involves the development of a relationship, that caring responsibilities and needs are unequally distributed and that social norms influence the allocation of care and caring responsibilities, to draw out their implications for analysing caring and its movement between unpaid and paid economies. Rising opportunity costs of caring are found to produce pressures experienced in different ways across different sectors of the economy. These, coupled with inequalities in care responsibilities and labour market opportunities, influence the movement of care between paid and unpaid economies. This analysis is then used to examine the likely evolution of caring norms and practices and how policy might intervene to avoid an uncaring future.

This paper makes the case for analyzing the gender impact of economic policy, based on the existence of an unpaid as well as a paid economy and on structural differences between men's and women's positions across the two economies. Economic policy is targeted on the paid economy. However, unintended impacts on the unpaid care economy may limit how effective any policy can be. Gender-impact assessment will not only make the effects of economic policies on gender inequalities transparent; it will also enable policy makers to achieve all their goals more effectively, whether or not these goals relate explicitly to gender. The introduction in the UK of a new Working Families' Tax Credit (WFTC), designed to make employment pay and help reduce child poverty, provides an example of how gender-impact assessment could have been used to improve an initial policy design. The paper also suggests criteria for evaluating economic policy, so that its full gender impact and its effects on both paid and caring economies c...

This paper questions the dichotomy of work/nonwork. It examines the way in which the category of work was expanded by feminists and economists to include much domestic activity, and considers some of the consequences of this expansion. It argues that the discovery of unpaid “work” involved an uncritical application and validation of a concept of work abstracted from a model of commodity producing wage labor in manufacturing. However, this concept excludes much of what is distinctive about domestic activities, such as their caring and self-fulfilling aspects. Inequality between households has become a conduit for the construction of needs in a form in which “work,” and in particular work for money, is needed to satisfy them. Some consequences of this tendency are examined together with the policy concerns which would need to be addressed in order to mitigate its deleterious effects. The development of a feminist economics which transcends the polarization of life into “work” and “nonwork” is argued to be v...

The issue of taxes has always been a highly politicized one in the UK, and never more so than in 2009 as the UK government discusses how to rebalance its budget after rescuing its banking sector with its economy suffering its most severe financial crisis since the 1930s. Debates about taxes, however have tended to focus mainly on the overall level of taxation and government expenditure and on distributional effects between households. With the exception of the work of the Women's Budget Group, a think tank that regularly comments on the gender implications of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s annual budgets, little attention has been paid to the gender aspects of the taxation system. In particular, there has been little debate about what effects any proposals for tax rises to pay for a 2008 stimulus package or for bailing out the banking sector are likely to have on men and women. This chapter seeks to address this gap by analysing some gender aspects of the UK personal income tax system and its expenditure taxes. Taxes have both distributional and behavioural impacts and both of these impacts can be gendered. In this chapter we consider their impact on both inter- and intra-household inequalities, as well as whether taxes reinforce or challenge existing gender roles.

This chapter considers ways in which policies on care may help or hinder progress on tacking gender inequalities.