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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...

The COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated employment prospects, particularly of women, and exposed the longstanding neglect of care systems and poor employment conditions of care workers. Most recovery programs propose to stimulate employment by focusing on investment in construction, ignoring gender equality issues. This paper argues for public investment in high-quality care services and better conditions for care workers to build a more gender-equal caring economy. Using input–output analysis, across selected European Union countries and the United States, the study shows a care-led recovery has superior employment outcomes to investment in construction, even when wages and hours are matched. In particular, matching employment and wages in care to the high levels of Scandinavian countries would raise employment rates by more than 5 percentage points and halve most gender employment gaps, while the net cost of investment in construction that achieved as much would generally be at least twice as high.

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 chapter engages with three important themes of the larger report: the meaning of progress, its uneven nature, and obstacles to future progress. It also considers a number of political and economic alternatives aimed to overcome these obstacles, emphasizing the need for diverse strategies, open-minded experimentation, and scientific assessment. While it may be impossible to ever reach agreement, the effort to calibrate different interpretations of progress remains an important exercise for political deliberation about how to make the world a better place. The very hope of moving forward implies some agreement on a destination. All of us must take responsibility for the future. Our discussion emphasizes the complexity and multidimensionality of the interpretive debate, but also calls attention to its ideological character. Social actors-individuals, groups, and even academic disciplines-tend to define progress in ways that serve their own interests. In a way, distributional conflict undermines our very efforts to better understand and mediate such conflict. The uneven character of progress is manifest in many different domains. Increases in the global reach of formally democratic institutions have been accompanied by growing concerns about their stability, efficacy, and consistency with democratic ideals.

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 book brings together the research of leading feminist economists in the area of gender and austerity economics. By conducting a rigorous gender-impact analysis at national and pan-European levels, not only do the chapters of the book offer thorough evidence for the detrimental gender-impact of austerity policies across Europe, but they also provide readers with concrete suggestions of alternative policies that national governments and the European Union should adopt. The focus is on the creation of gender-equitable economic policies for Europe, where expansionary fiscal policies and investment in physical infrastructure are accompanied by investment in social infrastructure and the care economy. A combination of country case studies and cross-country empirical analysis reveals the scope and channels through which women and men have been impacted by austerity policies in Europe and goes on to offer readers the opportunity to assess the feasibility and implications of a feminist alternative to continued austerity. This book is invaluable to social science students and researchers as well as policy-makers searching not just for a Plan B to continued austerity policies but for a Plan F – a feminist economic strategy to stimulate sustainable economic recovery.

The use of markets and market mechanisms to deliver care services is growing in both liberal and social democratic welfare states. This article examines debates and policies concerning the marketisation of eldercare and childcare in Sweden, England and Australia. It shows how market discourses and practices intersect with, reinforce or challenge traditions and existing policies and examines whether care markets deliver user empowerment and greater efficiency. Markets for eldercare and childcare have developed in uneven and context specific ways with varying consequences. Both politics and policy history help to shape market outcomes.

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.

About the book: Top feminist theorists and scholars examine the latest developments in gender politics and policy around the world. Gendering Politics and Policy: Recent Developments in Europe, Latin America, and the United States discusses in depth how women and women’s perspectives are changing politics and policy in both the United States and around the world. This compelling resource surveys a range of issues and methodologies to bring the most recent gender issues, politics, and policies into clear focus. Top feminist scholars and theorists from several disciplines explore the latest in gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting, citizenship, social capital, and the gender gap in various cultures and countries. Gendering Politics and Policy provides case studies of different policy areas, techniques, and political practice as it highlights issues important for women and women’s issues around the world. The book’s three main sections include detailed looks at politics and gender issues in the United States, policies of concern for women in Latin America and Europe, and women’s agendas in the United Nations. This book is extremely useful as a teaching tool for students by surveying a wide range of vital issues and methodologies of gender development, women and politics, women and public policy, and women in international politics. The text is extensively referenced and includes several tables and figures to clearly present data and ideas.

The acute dilemmas facing lone mothers in raising their children and earning a living form a common theme across the articles in this special issue of Feminist Economics on Lone Mothers. Like other parents, lone mothers face difficult decisions in allocating their time to caregiving and income generation, but in their families there is only one adult to do both. Further, that one adult is a woman, who will generally earn less than a man, compounding the difficulties. Lone mothers must rely on a range of support mechanisms (fathers, other family members, employers, and government policy) to manage; they can therefore rarely be economically independent. Policies that are ideologically reluctant to support unmarried mothers in their caregiving may divide unmarried mothers from other lone mothers, and lone mothers from other poor parents. Nevertheless, most lone mothers find creative strategies to manage that are as varied as lone mothers themselves.

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...

This chapter examines the implications of the concepts of togetherness and financial autonomy for gender equality, drawing on findings from both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative research explored the two concepts in individual interviews with men and women in low- to moderate- income couples. The quantitative research used the British Household Panel Survey to analyse the factors affecting the differing assessments of their household income by men and women in couples across the range of incomes. The findings support the argument that an honest recognition of interdependence (or togetherness) is essential when analysing women’s financial autonomy.

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.

Collecting signatures for the petition against the Corrie Bill in parliament has been a very instructive and encouraging process. Popular support for 'A Woman's Right to Choose' is clearly enormous. Nearly all women and many men are prepared to sign the petition and often express their horror most colourfully at the very idea that anyone but the woman concerned should have any part in the decision. Suggestions as to what might be done to Corrie's genitals have not been infrequent. Even anti-abortionists have signed on the grounds that while they themselves would never have an abortion they do not see why they should prevent others coming to their own decisions.