 I'm Jayatig Hosh, I'm an economist and I've been very concerned with issues of how gender affects the economy. The ways in which we define gender relations affects production, consumption, distribution, how states deal with us and how we as citizens should be responding to state policies. You absolutely cannot understand the economy without understanding gender and there are many ways in which things that otherwise appear inexplicable become perfectly understandable once you realise the different roles played by men and women. And once you realise what society expects women to do in the form of unpaid labour makes such a huge difference to the ways in which economies are currently organised. And how do we change economic policy to make it less oppressive in ways that we don't even realise? Gender differences play a role which is not physiologically determined, not biologically determined, but are socially determined in ways that often disadvantage women. Economists have got lots of things wrong about many things including gender. But when you think about how the lack of understanding of specific roles played by women in the economy have governed mainstream economics for hundreds of years now, one of the most obvious is in the very notion of rational economic man. It's the idea that every individual is out to maximise his utility in ways that advance material incomes and utility is derived from more of these material incomes is what then drives practically all the basic microeconomic models. This ignores the huge role that is played by the care economy and by women largely responsible for care across the world who do not necessarily operate according to this criteria. And if you try and explain care, you cannot explain it with the notions of rational economic behaviour because it is not necessarily rational. And it's not even true to say that women derive utility from looking after others because only some of it is because they derive utility. A lot of it has to do with the way societies allocate these responsibilities. So in terms of standard microeconomics, the very methodological basis is undermined once you recognise the existence of unpaid care work. You really have to see how this particular gender construction of societies affects all economic processes, microeconomics, macroeconomics, growth theory, international trade, migration. So many things are affected by the difference of work allocation that societies create. You know, markets basically reflect the society that they are constructed in. This cannot be this ideal type, which is often presented in the textbooks, but very much reflect the existing power imbalances in society and therefore, if they are not regulated adequately, they will amplify them, accentuate them and create further divisions. How much is influenced by the fact that women are the ones responsible for doing care activities? How much is determined by the fact that women in general tend to have less access to different markets or have fewer assets or less incomes available to them? It's important to have more and more people aware of these issues because if we don't raise our voice about these things, we're never going to be able to change either economics or economic policy.