Feminist Economists - Major Areas of Inquiry - Care Economy

Care Economy

Feminist economists join the UN and others in acknowledging care work, as a kind of work which includes all tasks involving caregiving, as central to economic development and human well-being. Feminist economists study both paid and unpaid care work. They argue that traditional analysis of economics often ignores the value of household unpaid work. Feminist economists have argued that unpaid domestic work is as valuable as paid work, so measures of economic success should include unpaid work. They have shown that women are disproportionately responsible for performing such care work.

Feminist economists have also highlighted power and inequality issues within families and households. For example, Randy Albelda shows that responsibility for care work influences the time poverty experienced by single mothers in the United States. Similarly, Sarah Gammage examines the effects of unpaid care work performed by women in Guatemala. The work of the Equality Studies Department at University College Dublin such as that of Sara Cantillon has focused on inequalities of domestic arrangements within even affluent households.

While much care work is performed in the home, it may also be done for pay. As such, feminist economics examine its implications, including the increasing involvement of women in paid care work, the potential for exploitation, and effects on the lives of care workers.

Systemic study of the ways women's work is measured, or not measured at all, have been undertaken by Marilyn Waring (see If Women Counted) and others in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies began to justify different means of determining value — some of which influenced the theory of social capital and individual capital, that emerged in the late 1990s and, along with ecological economics, influenced modern human development theory. (See also the entry on Gender and Social Capital.)