Diffusion and Dilution: The Power and Perils of Integrating Feminist Perspectives Into Household Economics

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, feminist economists have been at the forefront of work on household and intrahousehold economics. To a significant degree, their work has entered mainstream economics. This is surely a success story, both in the impact on academia and the broader implications for policy. This essay suggests that feminist economists should pause to reflect on the potential perils that accompany these successes. What gets lost when intrahousehold issues are folded into mainstream economic analyses? What is still missing in this literature? What still needs to be on the agenda for feminist economists working on issues around households? The essay highlights five potential perils: the focus on individuals, the narrow definition of households, the tendency for questions to be driven by available data and metrics, the possibility of collecting more data than scholars can use, and the need to include social norms and structural constraints.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Feminist economists have advanced the frontiers of household economics.

• Innovations in data collection help us understand women’s asset ownership and decision making.

• Women’s voices are increasingly captured in data collection.

• Mainstream approaches continue to focus on individuals and to define households narrowly.

• Much mainstream research still struggles to include social norms and structural constraints.

KEYWORDS:

• Household economics
• intrahousehold
• women’s voices
• sex-disaggregated data

JEL Codes:

• B54
• D10

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The comments and suggestions from those attending the IAFFE Presidential Address at the ASSA meeting in January 2020 were very helpful. And thank you to the many friends and colleagues who have been with me on this journey of including feminist ideals in the economics of the household.

Notes

1 See http://weai.ifpri.info/ for information on the various WEAI measures.

2 Gender Asset Gap Project. https://sites.google.com/view/genderassetgap/home.

3 See Naila Kabeer (2020) for a critique of these approaches.

4 See Bina Agarwal (1995). Also see Agarwal (2003) and Cecile Jackson (2003) for two different perspectives on this issue.

5 See Aletheia Donald et al. (2020) for a review of this literature.

6 https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/lsms/initiatives/lsms-ISA.

7 See M. V. Lee Badgett (2010) as an example of economic analysis with limited quantitative data.

8 The International Labour Organization describes decent work as follows: Decent work sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives. It involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/decent-work/lang--en/index.htm.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cheryl R. Doss

Cheryl R. Doss is a development economist who works on issues of intrahousehold dynamics, the gender asset and wealth gaps, methods for collecting sex-disaggregated data for gender analysis, and agriculture and rural development, with a primary focus on Africa. She joined the Oxford Department of International Development following seventeen years at Yale University. She has an extensive publication record in the fields of economics, international development, and agricultural economics. She has also served in advisory and consulting capacities for the International Food Policy Research Institute, UN Women, UN Statistics, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, FAO, and the World Bank, among others.