Nancy Folbre: Women's Work and the Limits of Capitalism | The New School

Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) | http://www.newschool.edu/scepa

SCEPA's 2010 Annual Robert L. Heilbroner Memorial Lecture Presents:
Women's Work and the Limits of Capitalism: A Feminist Analysis of the Current Crisis

Nancy Folbre, economist and contributor to the New York Times "Economix" Blog, will join The New School to present SCEPA's annual Robert Heilbroner Memorial Lecture on the Future of Capitalism.

Folbre is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, winner of a MacArthur"genius" grant, and associate editor of the journal Feminist Economics. Her work focuses onthe interface between feminist theory and political economy, with a particular interest in caring labor and other forms of non-market work.

Women now represent almost half of all workers on non-agricultural payrolls, concentrated in paid care industries such as health, education, and social services. Even full-time women wage earners devote significant amounts of time to unpaid care work in their households and communities.

Women's specialization in both paid and unpaid care stabilizes and subsidizes the market economy even as it reproduces gender inequality. Recent efforts to measure and assign a value to care work suggest that economists have fundamentally misinterpreted trends in both the level and the distribution of economic well-being, overstating economic growth and understating trends toward increased inequality.

A feminist analysis of care work has important implications for understanding both conservative attacks on the "nanny state" and the global unemployment crisis. The growing need for public provision of care services outside the home, combined with the difficulty of outsourcing these services to low-wage countries, means that "women's jobs" are growing in relative importance within the U.S. economy.

Women and men have much to gain from public investments that could increase both the quantity and the quality of these jobs.

MILANO THE NEW SCHOOL FOR MANAGEMENT AND URBAN POLICY | http://www.newschool.edu/milano

* Location: Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor. Monday, December 13, 2010, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

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• The New School
• SCEPA
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• New School
• Nancy Folbre
• Capitalism
• Women's Rights
• Robert Heilbroner
• Feminist Economics
• Women's Work
• Labor