From Gender as Exogenous to Gender as Endogenous in the New Economics

Abstract

This chapter argues that gender is endogenous to the economic process. It demonstrates a twoway relationship between the economy and gender relations, and emphasizes the macro level. It demonstrates that inequality in gender relations can have a negative effect on economic policy and economic outcomes. This integrated understanding of gender in economics, developed in feminist economics, is not possible in neoclassical economics because that treats gender, like any social structure, as exogenous, often as a given constraint on individual choices, or at most as a sex-disaggregated impact variable. Heterodox economics, in particular when applying a contextual view of the economy as embedded in social, cultural, and political structures, allows for an endogenous analysis of gender. This chapter shows, with examples from empirical research, how this may be done in a systematic way, by linking feminist economic insights with various key heterodox concepts. JEL Classification: B50, B54, E02, O11 on social phenomena to exogenous variables. One such important force is gender, which influences the economy and is at the same time influenced by it, in a two-way process.In this chapter, I would like to show that in heterodox economics, particularly feminist economics, but also strands of structuralist economics, social economics and institutional economics, gender has increasingly been recognized as endogenous to the economic process. This implies that not only there are economic impacts that are often differentunequalfor men and women, but also that existing gender relations have an impact on the economy, either positive or negative, and on economic outcomes. And, that these two directions of the relationships between the economy and gender mutually influence each other, directly as well indirectly through feedback effects. In neoclassical economics, gender is at most included as simply sexdisaggregated labour market variables, mostly limited to the labour supply variable. Differences in labour supply and its elasticity are then attributed to exogenous variables such as the availability of childcare or culture. The analysis of gender differences in the labour market, hence, is then reduced to the behavioral question why women behave differently in the labour market than men, without understanding how gender affects the economic process and is being influenced by dynamic efficiencies, unpaid work, asymmetric institutions, risk-strategies of households, path-dependence of institutions that generally benefit males over females. At the micro level, there exists already a substantial body of literature on such two-way relationships between the economy and gender, in particular in labour economics and household analysis. At the macro level, however, the literature on this two-way relationship between gender and the economy is still at an early stage of development. But what does emerge from this literature is that for a full understanding of the macro economy, gender can no longer be ignored. In the present chapter, I will point ...

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