Within mainstream economics, gender issues are often associated with microeconomic questions relating to how economic output, income, and employment in a market setting can be divided along gender lines, using neoclassical methodology of supply and demand and marginal analysis to explain phenomena such as wage inequality and occupational segregation. Feminist economists commonly reject this methodology in favor of a social construction of economics using models of social reproduction, in which a vast nonmarket sector serves as a critical complement and, indeed, forms the essential foundation for the existence and creation of the overall social product in which market output is a subset that is “embedded,” in the Polanyian sense, within the broader social sphere. For this reason, one cannot speak of gender matters relating, for example, to the allocation of time within the market/nonmarket spheres or to sexual discrimination in isolation with the use of a methodologically flawed individualistic perspective. The gender dimension in the broad sense described by feminist economists is essential to an understanding of the viability of the entire social system, and gender-based macroeconomic variables can shed light on overall economic performance pertaining to the size, composition, and distribution of the economic surplus emerging within the market sphere.
In the first subsection of this issue of the International Journal of Political Economy (IJPE) dedicated to gender matters, we have invited a group of four feminist economists to analyze aspects of the macroeconomics of gender within a nonmainstream perspective and to discuss how the gender dimension is so critical to promoting socially responsible macroeconomic policy, especially in this age of austerity. This special project originates from an invitation by the 2015 president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), Alicia Girón, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), to organize a special session at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference in Berlin, Germany. Without Alicia’s important suggestion, some of the papers that have been regrouped for this issue would not have been written, and for this reason I am especially grateful to her. Special thanks must also go to Eugenia Correa, also from UNAM, who truly went out of her way to support this project and whose commitment was indispensable to its final outcome. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge the special support offered by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in making that special Berlin IAFFE session possible and, especially, for special encouragement from Thomas Ferguson and Orsola Costantini, the latter also of INET and now an associate editor of IJPE, who had formally participated in the IAFFE session.