[Jump to interview with: Drucilla Barker | Ellie Perkins | Cecilia Conrad ]
Interview with Drucilla Barker
Conducted by: Aminah Sulayman
March 12, 2003
Biography:
Drucilla Barker is currently a Professor of Economics and Women
Studies at Hollins University. With a joint professorship, her teaching and
research interests are interdisciplinary, focusing on gender and the economy,
women and globalization, feminist theory, philosophy, and economic methodology.
She is a post-modern feminist economic philosopher. Ms. Barker is a founding
member of the International Association for Feminist Economics as well as
an editorial board member of Feminist Economics, just a few of her many involvements.
She has also contributed extensively to reference works in feminism and economics.
Her most recent work is an anthology co-edited with Edith Kuiper titled, Toward
a Feminist Philosophy of Economics. She is currently writing a book with Susan
Feiner titled, Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Economy.
Interview questions and answers:
What, in your opinion is feminist economics? What does feminist
economics mean to you?
(laughs) That is a really broad question. Well…I don’t
like to say what feminist economics is in that sense. I much prefer to think
about what are some approaches that characterize feminist economics and define
it by those approaches. Gender analysis is central to all these approaches.
In other words, a recognition of the social construction of gender, and its
intersections with ethnicity, class, nationality, sexual identity and so forth.
So feminist approaches examine the ways in which the organization of the economy,
especially the gender division of labor, reflects, reproduces and transforms
these social hierarchies. Feminist approaches do not privilege the market,
but rather examine other ways that societies provide for their material well-being.
Thus they recognize that economies are not populated by disembodied actors,
but rather by historically situated subjects.
What do you do in your work? What do you specialize in?
My specialty is methodology and epistemology. I ask questions
about the boundaries of the economic, the cultural, the political. How do
those boundaries sometimes aid us in our examination of the world and other
times hold us back. I am also interested in articulating methodologies that
avoid the pitfalls of positivism but do not collapse into relativism. And
the other thing that my research methodology does is look at how feminist
economists and other social scientists can avoid being co-opted by institutions
like the World Bank and the United Nations. I think that’s very important
to be able to participate in these institutions without losing one’s
critical or radical edge.
What are the questions feminist economics is asking? Is there
a main question that feminist economics is asking? What are they searching
for? What is their drive?
I think that question is too broad and abstract for me to answer.
I do not think we can distill feminist economics down into a “main question,”
but rather we should look at the varieties of questions that feminist economists
are working on. What sort of interventions will allow women to participate
in the economy on the same terms as men? What strategies will encourage both
women and men to take responsibility for caring labor? strategies that will
work towards alleviating inequalities in income, wealth, privilege. How can
inequalities in income, wealth and privilege be overcome, both locally and
globally? A more specific question that I find especially compelling has to
do with the relationship between privileged women in the industrial countries
and poor women in the developing ones. Relatively affluent women are able
to combine fulfilling careers and motherhood by hiring poor women to care
for their young children. Women from Philippines, from Latin America, and
from the former Soviet block countries of Eastern Europe leave their own children
to come to care for the children of others.
What does it mean to you to be a feminist economist?
It means that I am finally able to practice my profession with
integrity and ethics. That is, in a way that is consistent with my own ideals
and the way I live my life. I’m a feminist economist because I am a feminist.
Do you feel as if it has a political role? And if so, what
would that political role be?
Well, I feel all economics has a political role. I feel all
knowledge production has a political role. I do not believe in that positivist
split between knowledge and politics. So yes, I believe it has a political
role.
How would you define feminism?
You know, I’ve been giving some thought into that in different
contexts. I think feminism is best defined by it practices. Practicing feminism
in your scholarship or in your daily life is a commitment to looking at women
human beings, rather than as “other.” Feminism is one of the world’s
great liberation movements and if it is to fulfill its promise, feminists
should resist all forms of oppression. As your professor Julie Matthaei famously
put it, feminists should be anti-sexist and anti-racist.
How would you suggest more women get involved in the feminist
economic movement?
I suggest that women get involved in the feminist economic movement by going to graduate school in economics and choosing their graduate programs very very carefully! I’d also like to see more feminists who are in graduate school in related disciplines, such as anthropology, political science, and sociology, become more involved in economics. Feminist economics needs to become a trans-disciplinary approach, a feminist political economy rather than just economics. This could be done by collaboration with feminist scholars in other disciplines, both in the social sciences and in the humanities.
Conducted by: Vida Chavez-Garcia
Interested in social change and activism, Ellie Perkins participated in the Anti-apartheid movement in college. Upon graduating from Princeton University with a degree in Public and International Affairs, Ellie decided to advance her academic credentials in order to be more effective and credible as an activist. She enrolled in the University of Toronto, Canada and focused her studies on the economic changes brought about by foreign direct investment in the industrial and agricultural sectors of the global South. Currently, Ellie Perkins is a mother of three and a professor in the Environmental Studies Department at York University in Toronto.
What, in your opinion, is feminist economics?
Feminist economics in an attempt by a group of people, who consider
themselves feminist, to revision what economies are and, therefore, what economics
needs to be in order to create a society that functions better from a feminist
point of view.
So not necessarily a society that includes women more that
it already does, but a society that functions in a way that if friendlier
to the female experience?
Well…yeah…but not just that. It seems to me that if
you are a feminist that, of course, you are interested in what women’s
experiences are like in the world but also you are interested in transforming
that world so that it is not just women but also men, children, the elderly,
and everybody who can do what they need to do and get satisfaction in a way
that stresses relationships.
The thing about neoclassical economics is that is divides us
all, in so many ways. For me, feminist economics is an economics of relations,
not an economics of individuation that is based on the reality that people
exist as social beings in connection to each other in families, in the global
community, in extended families, and that is a source of satisfaction for
people. It is not what they have, it is who they are involved with and what
those relationships are like. I’m not talking about family relationship,
partner relationship, or parent/ child relationship. If you, as an individual,
are situated in a context of intergenerational and friends and… we don’t
even have words for this…if your basic needs, the food, the clothing,
the shelter, the recreation that you do are all in the context of caring,
friendly relationships with people of diverse kinds, it seems to me that you
are healthier, you feel more fulfilled as a human being if you aren’t
just surrounded by people of the same age and position in life. And this is
why people seek out churches, because a church is a place where you see little
kids and older people. It is one of the most acceptable ways in our society
of having intergenerational relationships. We have to look really hard, in
our society now, to get that kind of satisfaction, to put ourselves in social
contexts where we feel unified. And I think that’s weird. When you look
back to medieval times, or some kind of idealic past, that probably wasn’t
all that idealic, there is this vision that a lot of people shared about the
idea of living in a place where you are known. You go into a store or a bank
and you see your neighbors, you recognize their faces. They know you. And
if you weren’t to come they would worry. And people ask how you are and
they keep track of fact that your mother is sick and your bother broke his
leg. That is economics.
But where do efficiency and competition fit in to that? I’m
thinking of the arguments that my fairly conservative economics professors
throw out there when I’m talking about the same things that you are talking
about. They say, “Yes…but is that enough?Does it get the job done?
Does that make society and markets function?”
There are two ways to respond to that. One, people work better
and are far more productive when they feel satisfied as individuals, when
that are able to realized themselves, when they are able to act on creativity.
You can put someone in front of a machine in a factory and stand over them
with a whip and force them to produce more and more. That might work in a
limited way to increase productivity. But we live in a really complex society
now, in a society where risks are increasing everyday due to the technological
complexity that modern industrial processes have generated. People need to
be able to think and figure out what to do in an unknown situation. And that
kind of productivity, the kind that allows an overall system to continue to
function and that demands that each worker, or each person in the system,
be able to jump in and do what needs to be done. You must be able to do teamwork
to figure out how to maximize the overall situation. This ability is based
on relationships.
So what about competitiveness and productivity? The kind of
complex economies of the industrial society that we live in now demand a different
kind of productivity that cannot be measured just in terms of competition.
If someone is talking about competition they are already assuming a lot of
stuff that I don’t believe in. They are assuming that the money that
you pay to a worker is a real measure of that workers value, that dollars
attach in a one to one ratio with value and the fact neoclassical economics
is more and more ludicrous is an indication that society in general doesn’t
acknowledge that feature anymore.
Another way to respond to the question about competitiveness
and productivity, since it is very nice to talk about social relationships
but what about cheap prices, is to say that there are ecological restraints
on what happens in the economy. You cannot continue to produce or increase
the rate of inputs through an industrial economy because you will hit these
constraints, whether it is clean air, or energy, or trees to chop down. We,
in our lifetime, are going to see these constraints really start to bind.
And I know that technological optimists say, “We’ll have developed
a different production function when one thing becomes a constraint, we will
develop something different that isn’t in limited supply.” But there
are structural reasons why that won’t be able to continue. More and more
both the economics and ecological literature are starting to raise alarms
bell about the technological optimist approach. I just read an article about
how neoclassical economics says that when something becomes limited in supply,
its price will rise and therefore there will be incentives to push away from
that good because technology will step and say now that now that the price
is increasing we will switch to something else. But this article looks at
cobweb type pricing where the price won’t necessarily rise, even when
the absolute supply of the good is becoming more and more limited. In fact,
the price will stay stable or will go down. Even economist neoclassical economists
are questioning the assumption that technology can get us out of resource
constraints.
I would like to know what your definition of ecofeminism
is and what feminist economics looks like in an ecofeminist context.
I don’t think that women are closer to nature in the same
way that essentialism implies but I also think that essentialism is a word
that is thrown around a lot mostly when someone is trying to undermine someone
else. It seems to me that the society that we live in drives women to defend
the environment. In the global North you can see that women are environmental
activists. You go to any local or community based environmental group, chances
are the leaders and main movers and shakers are women. Now why is that? You
can say that it is because some of them are women who have chosen not to spend
eight or ten hours of their day working for money in order that they can be
activists and do community based work. I don’t think it is right to say
that they are housewives so they have time to go to meetings. It is that they
have chosen to do that instead of earn money. And if you look at the global
South, because farming, and getting water, fodder, and fuel are gendered occupations,
women are more concerned about what is happening to the environment and feel
a greater need to protect the environment. I think that ecofeminism is about
the relationships, the special relationships that women have with nature because
of the way that society is structured.
What are the questions that feminist economics is asking?
I think that many feminists are concerning themselves with these
issues of women and work and labor markers, issues that have to do with women
in the economy. But I think that that there are also many feminist economists
that are trying to rethink economic theory and go beyond critiquing neoclassical
theory and put together an alternative approach for maybe even a new vocabulary
that we can use to think about some of the traditional issues such as the
meaning of value, productivity, and human satisfaction. The whole idea of
production distribution and consumption has been expanded by ecological economists.
You produce, distribute, consume a good and then either it gets recycled around
into different productions or something else happens to it. All of this takes
place within a limited ecological reality. You have to consider the economy
as not an open but a closed system. There is a parallel way in which the feminist
economists are starting to think about the social context in which the economy
is situated. You cannot continue to exploit women and the underclass, there
is a limit to how you can treat people and still have the same continuum.
So I see a lot of parallels between the environmental and feminist critique
of neoclassical economics and their alternatives to the consumer culture that
enhance and build on the new ideas that are coming out of both fields.
Given the issues that feminist economists are bringing up
and given that you are an activist at heart, what do you think, as a feminist
economist, is the political role of feminist economics?
The people in the International Association for Feminist Economics who are
working to make economics itself more women-friendly profession and people
like Barbara Bergmann and other women economist, who where trained thirty,
forty years ago, have spent their lives trying to improve the economic position
of women. And their work has real policy implications. There has been really
progressive policy change as the result of the work of these people and shouldn’t
stop, it needs to continue. And the theoretical work of people like Nancy
Folbre and Julie Nelson, to consider what a lot of the more theoretical and
fundamental questions are about what an economy is and what kinds of economics
are useful. The purpose of economics is to help with policy prescriptions
and to have some kind of theoretical basis for what governments do. If you
have a theory that blinds you to a whole set of processes that are going on,
it becomes useless.
Conducted by: Christina Wang
March 6, 2003
Brief biographical information:
Ms. Conrad is an anti-racist African-American labor economist.
She grew up in Dallas, TX, where she attended Roosevelt High School. For her
undergraduate years, she chose to study at Wellesley College. Ms. Conrad obtained
both her masters and doctorate at Stanford University. After teaching at Duke
University initially, she relocated to New York, New York with her significant
other for ten years. Ms. Conrad currently teaches at Pomona College in Claremont,
California.
Interview questions and answers/summary:
What, in your opinion, is feminist economics? What does feminist economics
mean to you?
Ms. Conrad sees feminist economics as “its contribution
to economics” as it “thinks differently about economics.” “The
first thing is that it’s open to other disciplines, and learning things
from other disciplines. It focuses a lot more on power and interactive relationships,
as opposed to just power defined as market power.” Ms. Conrad stresses
how feminist economics analyzes “household and intra-household household
relationships, who has actual control of allocation of relationships, and
how they behave.” Feminist economics “asks questions beyond the
traditional Becker model” which features a “dictator father”
that supposedly knows or has the “best interests of the family at heart.”
“Connected to that is that feminist economics is playing
a critical role in care work, the human to human relationship.” An example
is a current question or dillemma: “We don’t as economists fully
understand why people engage in care work when their human capital might allow
them to earn more somewhere else, and we don’t understand why they’re
underpaid. It might have to do with the nature of care work as a social exchange.”
Referring to both paid and unpaid care workers, Ms. Conrad says, “There
are ways in which you might not be able to bargain.” “The very fact
that there is an interpretation of some agreement or some exchange as being
economic will change a relationship,” whether that relationship maybe
between a household and the nanny they hire or a husband and wife. Ms. Conrad
cites an example of a friend of hers who “let the nanny go because they
were moving” and was unhappy because “the nanny didn’t keep
in touch with the child.”
What does it mean to be a feminist economist?
Being a feminist economist, specifically an anti-racist African-American
feminist labor economist, means for Ms. Conrad, “I have frequently been
involved with people who do work on race.” With these people, Ms. Conrad
stresses that both “race and gender are inter-linked.” With a laugh,
she says, “There are these people that exist called black women. There
are some questions to be asked about how they (race and gender) are inter-linked.”
Ms. Conrad focuses outside of market reactions in her work. Currently, she
has “an ongoing project” that she picks up off and on when she has
time, namely “teenage childbearing in the African-American community.”
She is trying to understand “the marriage issue” and sees the large
decrease in marriage rates as a genuine “failure to reach a bargain between
a couple.” Ms. Conrad is determined to continue to analyze this problem:
“I have a neoclassical heart. There exists a bargain, and what is it?
It needs to be struck. To some extent, it’s true that male blacks don’t
have as many jobs, but if you think of comparative advantage, marriage would
still be advantageous. If the women have jobs, why isn’t there an exchange
that takes place?” On the other hand, Ms. Conrad says “That’s
one part of it, but when I’m with feminist economists, I put on the race
cap, and say that we cannot put aside the concerns of race.” Ms. Conrad
shares the general concerns of feminist economics. “There is interest
in feminist economics as a topic. Economics cannot be a-historical, outside
of race and gender.”
What are the questions feminist economics is asking?
“Some of the questions feminist economics is asking deals
with time-allocation and non-market activities. How do you do it? How do you
go about measuring time use? What are the different meanings of time use?
There is more attention focused on the ‘family wage gap.’ Even as
the gender wage gap is decreasing, there is a persistent gap for women who
have children.”
There is also “more interest in public policy.” Feminist economics
is “not as theoretical or philosophical” as it used to be in its
methodology and the questions it is asking. Now, feminist economics is asking
things like, “What should feminist economics say about welfare reform?”
There are also different types of feminist economist critiques that focus
on “the history of how the economy evolved.”
Does feminist economics have a political role?
Feminist economics has an “important role because economics
[itself] has an important role, and part of what we do is public policy.”
How would you define feminism?
“First of all, it’s an appreciation that there is
something socially constructed called gender, and it influences our positions
in society. This includes, for economists, our economic status.”
How would you define economics?
Interestingly, Ms. Conrad would “stick with the textbook
definition, the study of the scarce allocation of resources.” She sees
it in terms of efficiency, but also equity and distribution. She mentions
that “we often forget that early economists would have said the same
thing” and she remembers a famous early economist who was quoted as saying
that the most important economic study was the “distribution of wealth.”
How does the work you do fit in with labor economics?
As a term, Ms. Conrad thinks “labor economics” is
the “best fit” possible, “but not good.” She deals with
applied microeconomics, public finance, how voters vote, and how the economy
is based. “That’s not really labor. I’ve done work on the labor
status of minority women and affirmative action, but not on the labor market
[itself].” Ms. Conrad has also studied “UC (University of California)
higher education” and has done work looking at a systematic analysis
to see how much it costs and make estimates for regulatory practices and policies.
As someone whose “main field in graduate school” concerned industrial
organization,” Ms. Conrad focuses more on regulatory economics.
What is some of the work you have done on affirmative action,
and did anything about your findings particularly surprise you?
After hearing of estimates that affirmative action results in costs that are “four percent of GDP,” Ms. Conrad deconstructed that estimate, reconfiguring for a worst case scenario that would be only half a percentage GDP, which included any possible downturn in the economy. “I was trying to show that there was an increase resulting from diversity. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t see that in my results.” Diversity did not show an adverse effect either. “In standard economic analysis, discrimination is inefficient. There are case studies of particular initiatives that increasing diversity increases productivity.” The “four percent” was supposed “lost productivity” because “companies were no longer able to use tests to screen workers.” The estimates used “the cost of regulation based on a study done at Washington University in St. Louis, which had included the EPA in the study.”