 Little more a little more in the future I don't think I can say it's good to be back so as again I'm in to see so many of the rising generation of scholars who are gonna take forward the important issues about inequality and exploitation and development in the years to come. So I'm going to talk about what I've called economic inequality and gender inequality gyda'r dwyliadau lleol iawn, a byddwn yn ymddych chi'n gweithio, rydyn ni'n gwybod ei hunain a'r ddechrau yn ymddychol. Mae'n eitio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r hwn a'r dweud o'r ffordd. Aeth o'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Llyfrgell gwahanol iawn o'i dwyliadau lleol iawn rwy'n gweithio'n gweld o'r maes ymdwyllt ac oedden nhw. A wneud ysty count i eich myfyrdd amhaeo am hyn o bunod, yr ydych chi'n gystafell yno? Mae wneud wych yn ei tynnu maen nhw ofyn pan ddechrau â'i gwirio mewn gwirio mewn gwirio mewn gwirio mewn gwirio a gwirio ac ydych chi'n gwirio gynydd gysylltu gwyllwll â'i gwirio mewn gwirio, Felly, mae'n gweithio eich ishwt ar gyfer y maen nhw i'r economaeth a'r economaeth hefyd. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud. Mae fyddwn amynch Llyfrin Gweithio Eich ishwt ar gyfer y maen nhw rhaid i ddweud o'r hyn i ddweud o cyfnodau a cyfnodau cyfnodau, o gwybod i dyna o'r OECD yn ei ffimol iawn i dda lleolag froedd o rrésun gyfo'r cyfnodau a bron o casio iawn i ddweud o cyfnodau cyfnodau. Mae'n rhaid i'r rherod o'r analysau empyrolyddiol byddai'n hytradewgol o'r economaeth, oedd yw'r rhaid i'r ysgrifetio o gendro i'r analysau rhaid, oedd ei wneud i'r analysau o'r economaeth yn ymddangos. O'r analysau yma'r rhaid i'r analysau rhaid i'r analysau o'r economaeth yn ymddangos, a fyddai'n golygiadau ar hyn yn cael ei chwylliannol, a'r analysau i'r analysau ar y gwybodaeth i'r analysau chi'n gwybodaeth, ychydigwyd. Fydan o'r ydych chi, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r rydyn ni'n gwneud o'r ymddydd i'r cyfnod hynny, ond y gallwn wedi'u gofyn ar gyffredinol y dyfodol yn ymweld gyda'u cynnigoloddau yn ymwyaf, ac yn ymweld y gweithio'r ymddydd yn ymddydd ymweld y fwyaf, a'r oedden nhw'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. What are the implications for public action, economic inequality? The mainstream economies focus on the interhousehold distribution of income and wealth and an example of a recent publication that I'll be referring to is by economists at the OECD, in it tog am why less inequality benefits all but heterodox economists have always been yn y ddwg ddwybr o gwybodaeth yng Nghymru wedi bod yn ffwyrdd ac yn ddweud. Dyma'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gwybodaeth yng nghymru. Ac mae'r cyfrifloedau yn cyfrifyngau ar y gyrraedd. Y Gwlad Fawr ILO yn 2013 yn ymdifigol o'ch gwybodaeth sy'n eich gwlad ar y gyrwm hefydol sy'n ei gallu gweithio'r gwybodaeth. Mae'r gwybodaeth yn ddwybr o gwybodaeth. Mae'r ddwybr o gwybodaeth yn ymdillogol yn ddwybr o'r gwybodaeth gennymwys y dynid gennwys o'r parwyd o uned. Y chem, yw meddwl, yw wneud, a'r ysgrifennu yma i gael gafodd. Yn ymgymell yw, y dyfodol yw'r hynod o'r hyn mae uned yw unedau, ymgymell yw wedi gwynigol fel gyfleddio eto y gwasanaeth. Rhaid i dechrau eich cyflet supportive ar y dyfodol,tyno eu ddorion eich cyfletwch i gened i gyd i ddodol. a unigwal efo'. Mae'r gwneud o gael wedi oedd o'r unigwal efo'r ffordd o'r hollod iawn i ddarparu, ar y cyfnod. Rhaid i'n hefyd yn ymddangos i gyngloedd efo'r unigwal efo'r economiaid, rhai o hollod economiaid yn ymddangos y dweud y gondodus o'r enghremoedd y ddygaen, gynhyrchu, sechareddiau, oes yn ymddangos i'r gondosis o'r gondosis yn morbyddwr yn yw rhagosteb o'r genantol o'r cyllidiau a phodol ac mae'n mynd i'w gwaeth eich gweithio'r gweithio llynedol yn ymddangos gynllun o'r llynedol yma, ac mae'n hynny'n gwneud y dyfodol cyfnod yn ymwneud am ymgwneud, mae'n ddyn nhw'n ei wneud o'r ddweud o ddau o gweithio'r llyffanau i ddau mwy o'r gweithiau. Mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r gweithio'r llyffanau o'r ddweud o'r gweithio'r llyffanau i ddweud, The UN Women Report progress of the world's women has a lot of interesting discussion of that. The human development report, as you'll know, regularly focuses on gender gaps in capabilities. The kind of work that I have done particularly looks as well at economies as gendered structures and argues that gender isn't just a characteristic of individuals, it's a characteristic of economies. Just like economies are class structures, just like economies are racialized structures, economies are gendered structures and gender is a characteristic of institutions and economic processes. Sorry, I'm doing this the wrong way around. I will start off, let me just list the empirical analysis that I'm going to refer to in my talk. I'm going to refer to these two mainstream reports, the OECD, in it together where chapter four has an interesting, although flawed, look at a particular way of looking at the intersection between economic inequality and gender inequality. And I'm going to look at an IMF staff discussion note called catalyst change empowering women and tackling income inequality, which has a different and litical approach than the OECD one and covers a lot more countries, not just OECD countries. I'm also going to refer to two papers by heterodox economists, very pioneering paper by Cade Finnoff and Arjan Diadev on feminization and the labour share of national income, which was issued as a working paper of the international working group on gender macroeconomics and international economics. Sadly I found that the website that this was on is no longer operative so it's a bit obscure to actually find it. And then a work in progress by Alexander Grishanski and Islaminaran at Greenwich and I'm very grateful to them for sharing with me some of their preliminary results which I'll say something about. First let me just make sure we all have the picture about gender inequality in the labour market in OECD countries. Legenda gaps in full time employment and wages have been falling on average in the last 20 years. The employment gap narrowed in all OECD countries over that period so that by 2013 it was 16% on average. But there's a wider gap in working hours because women are more likely to work part time than men. And if you look at the gender wage gap among full time employees on average it fell four percentage points between 2013 but women still earn on average 15% less than men. And occupational segregation has persisted so men and women are concentrated in different occupations and there's both horizontal occupational segregation and vertical. Occupational segregation. It's easier to talk about the OECD countries because there's more readily available data on the OECD countries and I'm aware that most of the OECD countries are high income countries and they're in Europe and North America, Japan of course and South Korea are in the OECD as is Mexico. So we've often got that difficult trade off between wanting to do more comprehensive analysis and thinking where have we got data easily available. And in fact the studies I'll be referring to the two by the heterodox economists are OECD countries. The one by the OECD is OECD countries and it's the one by the World Bank which has a much wider range of countries but with a much more problematic indicator I think that they use of gender inequality. But I think we would find a somewhat similar pattern in many other countries which are not in the OECD of these gender gaps that I've referred to having fallen over the last 30 years or so, 20, 30 years. Although that fall has come to a halt now in many countries but at the same time rises in inequality as measured by things like the genicoefficient, the measure of the distribution of income between households or as measured by the shares of labour and capital in national income. And the OECD study asked what impact these falling gender gaps in the labour market had on the inter-household distribution of income as measured by the genicoefficient. So I wanted to look at the intersection if you like between the gender inequality and the class inequality but taking the distribution between households as measured by the genicoefficient as one indicator of the distribution between classes. Now, with the rise in women's employment rates, women's contribution to household income has risen on average so the average household now a bigger share of the income comes from women's employment than it did 30 years ago. And the proportion of households with the women in paid work has risen on average both for full-time and part-time work. The proportion of households with a woman in higher paying managerial, technical and professional jobs has risen on average as well. So what impact these things had on the distribution of income between households as measured by the genicoefficient. What the OECD study said was say let's assume everything else stayed the same and let's compare the genicoefficient with these increases in women's contribution to household income with what the genicoefficient would have been had there not been these increases in women's contribution to household income. And they find that the increased employment of women did serve to reduce the inter-household inequality below what it was otherwise have been. It didn't outweigh the other factors that are driving for greater inequality but it meant the inequality was less than it otherwise would have been by about two genie points. But not all of these reductions in gender gaps serve to reduce inter-household inequality. One aspect of it actually served to increase inequality between households I wonder if you can guess which one. So if we take the overall result it was if the proportion of households with a woman in paid work had stayed as it was in the mid 1980s the average genicoefficient would have risen by an additional 0.8 points. It would have risen from 28.2 to 31.6 but with this increase in women's participation and contribution to household income it rose to 30.8. But that overall impact hides two contrasting impacts from a class perspective. So the overall impact of the reduction of the gender gaps in the labour market is to reduce the inequality between household income below what it would otherwise have been. But that's not true. We get the opposite impact from the rise in the proportion of households with women employed in high paying jobs. So there's been a rise in the proportion of households with women in high paying jobs. Those women tend to be in the same households as men with high paying jobs and so that tends to push the income inequality higher. But that has been counteracted by the fact that there are a lot of women who are not in high paying jobs who have also entered the labour market and they tend to be in households where the men are also not in high paying jobs. But that extra money that they brought into the householders meant that overall the income distribution is less unequal than it otherwise would have been. So I think that's an interesting study because before 18 this study I was quite concerned. Are we going to find that actually more women in employment has increased the inequality in income distribution between households and that would have been the case if the major impact had come from more women in high paying jobs. But in some ways I was a bit relieved to find out that that impact was outweighed by the fact that lots of women in lower paying jobs but that makes a big difference to their household income. The method that they've used as you can see is a rather static and mechanical method is to say let's just hold one thing constant, let's assume nothing else moved, let's see what the impact would be if there hadn't been this reduction in gender gaps what would have been the genie coefficient. So it doesn't consider the determinants of inter-housel distribution and the gender gaps in the labour market and ask whether they might be linked. It doesn't explore what might be the cause or factors driving what's happening to gender inequality in the labour market and what's happening to inequality in the distribution between households. Well you look at that data and one hypothesis might be that the entry of more women in the labour market reduced male wages below what they would otherwise be particularly at lower skilled levels. And there is a long tradition on the left actually of being of a worry about more women moving into the labour market lowering men's wages. And in the history of the trade union movement there have been moments when trade unions were not totally keen on having more women in the labour market because they thought it was going to reduce men's wages. Actually if you look at once where women have moved into the labour market you see on the whole it's not been into the same kind of jobs that men have been doing. Not the same occupations as men. Cold mining goes, heavy industry goes and there are new jobs in the service sector that women move into, care industries. There aren't very many men employed in the care industry or as cashiers in supermarkets. And I also think that the rising female employment rates is far from exogenous. It's not suddenly feminism got a grip on the minds of all these women and they also said we must have jobs, paid jobs even if our mothers didn't. Rather there was a push for women to go into the labour market because their male partners were losing their employment. To maintain the wages needed for the social reproduction of a household you needed two earners rather than one. So there was a push of women into the labour market, this added workers effect and at the same time capital was moving in what it produced in the OECD countries out of sectors that employed a lot of men and into sectors that employed a lot of women. And the sectors that employed a lot of men it was offshoring. So I think there's a more complicated story going on in terms of what's the intersection between the class and the gender dynamics. A further limitation of this OECD study is it pays no attention to unpaid work. It doesn't consider how reductions in gender gaps in the labour market might be associated with an extension of the total working day if we look at not only paid work but unpaid work including for those not of working age such as grandparents and I speak now as a grandparent who does unpaid childcare and older children looking after younger children. Of course unpaid work may ford you if you have more money coming into a household because people can afford to buy some labour saving technology. There might also be improved public provision of care services, development of for profit care services and employment of paid domestic workers often migrant women. But all of those strategies for reducing the amount of unpaid work that needs to be done are much more likely to be available to better off women than to lower income women. And it's the public services that's particularly critical for lower income women but of course it's spending on the public services that have been particularly under pressure since financial crisis. So the positive impact of labour market participation of women on inter-household income inequality may be at the cost of overwork for low income women and increasing their time poverty and their work intensity. So I would argue to really get a full picture of the both the class and the gender dimensions of economic inequality you need to look at the unpaid work as well as the paid work. Now the IMS staff discussion notice the only one that looks at it looks at 140 countries so it has a lot of developing countries in there and it measures gender inequality by the human development reports gender inequality index which was created by the human development report in 2010 but the IMF has done a new estimation using the data that needed to construct this indicator going back to 1990 so it's quite a long time period now for 140 countries. But I think there's a bit of a problem in using this particular indicator of gender inequality it doesn't have income in it. It's the gap between male and female labour market participation, the gap between secondary and higher education rates for men and women, female shares in Parliament, maternal mortality and adolescent fertility rates all of which are important for getting a picture about gender inequality but not income and not income because of data limitations. You cannot get good data on the gender wage gap for 140 countries going back to 1990 and this gender inequality index has been declining in the majority of countries. So what do they do? They're kind of an analytical framework is a regression equation that seeks to quote explain income inequality as measured by the genicoefficient by a number of variables one of which is the gender inequality index. They also look at the shares of the top, the bottom and the middle income groups not just the genicoefficient which I think is useful because it's much more intuitively clear to people what the shares of the top and the bottom and the middle income groups are than the genicoefficient. On the other variables they look at are very standard variables when people are trying to quote explain income inequality, technological progress, trade openness, financial openness in deepening, change labour market institutions and labour business, government spending etc etc. And when they did their regression analysis they found that gender inequality is found to be significantly, statistically significantly related to inter household inequality. So just to give you one or two of the findings they said they found that if the gender inequality index falls from its highest level in the sample which was Yemen at 0.7 to the median level which is Peru at 0.4 then the genicoefficient falls by 3.4 percentage points which is similar to the difference in the genicoefficient between Mali and Switzerland. If the gender inequality index rises from the median to the highest level then the share of the top 10% increases by 5.8 percentage points similar to the difference between Norway and Greece. And they also looked at the impact of different components of the gender inequality index and they found for high income countries the main impact is from the gender gap in labour force participation and in emerging low income countries that's important but also gaps in education and health are important. Some limitations, it's not nearly as clear in this study what the transmission mechanism is between the indicator of gender inequality that they're using and the inter household income inequality as measured by the genicoefficient or the share of the top 10%. There's a kind of a lot of implicit links between this gender inequality index and what might be happening to income between households whereas a much tighter transmission mechanism between gender inequality in the labour market and the inequality between households in the OECD study. There's also, as with any regression analysis, the problem of direction of causality and excluded variables, maybe there are other sets of factors that help explain both the degree of gender inequality and the degree of inequality between households and their incomes. So I'm inclined to argue that we need to take into account the possible joint determination of both the gender inequality and the class inequality by a process of capital accumulation which leads to weakening of restrictions, legal restrictions for instance on women entering the labour market. But at the same time it weakens protections for workers so yeah, now some of the barriers to getting into the labour market go but when you get there you find that also the protections that workers enjoy, the rights they enjoy in the labour market have been weakened. And the central dynamic of this process is one that is one of educating more women, drawing more women into paid employment but exerting downward pressure on the returns to paid employment for both men and women. So for instance we can in some countries where there's data you can show you can have a narrowing of say the gender wage gap because men's wages fall and women's wages fall too but they don't fall quite as much as men's wages. So you've got a kind of equalising down rather than an equalising up. One of the kinds of conclusions that the IMF economists draw. Well, reducing gender inequality by levelling the economic playing field between men and women could also go a long way to reducing overall inequality of the income distribution. If we get cynical we may say yes you see having more women in the labour market is not only going to be good for growth, it's going to be good for economic equality as well. But just like the OECD study they do not pay any attention to the possibility of an increase in the total working day for women and the work intensity of low and middle income women. And they call for investment to free up women's time for work outside the house in a series of services and forms of social protection that we probably all agree with. But what they don't consider is whether IMF policies that constrain fiscal space are going to make this impossible. So on the one hand we've got people who've actually done this piece of research saying countries should be investing in all these good things that will reduce gender inequality. On the other hand we've got the economists who negotiate the loans and the conditions for the loans doing some ways that constrain the fiscal space that governments have. So that levelling of the economic playing field isn't just down to what individual governments want to do, it's down to what kind of fiscal space are they allowed by organisations like the IMF. Let me now turn to what a couple of heterodox studies have to say about gender inequality and economic inequality. And these are studies that look at the functional distribution of income. So the one by Finno Fyndadeff examined the relationship between female share of the labour force and the share of labour in national income for OECD countries at quite a long time period. And in this time period the female share of the labour force has been rising while the labour share of national income has been falling. So they included the female share of the labour force as an explanatory variable alongside a lot of other things that are listed up there, which are all kinds of things people put in their regression equations when they're trying to understand what's driving this decrease in the labour share of income. Their innovation was to add for the first time female share of the labour force into this kind of analysis. What they found, what their regression results showed them, was that a larger female share of the labour force is significantly negatively linked with the labour share of national income. They tried different specifications of their equations but they found that a 1% rise in the female share of the labour force was associated with a 0.2% to 0.6% decline in labour share of national income. So this is saying all good things don't go together. We might be having that as gender inequality in terms of share of the labour force reduces class inequality in terms of labour share of national income goes up. One underlying mechanism for that could be the substitution of female female workers because female workers are cheaper and less organised. But again because of the persistence of occupational segregation you do not see many cases of direct substitution. And again I would be, and indeed Finoff and Diolch have also noted that a more complex explanatory framework would refer to the erosion of stable employment, the expansion of flexible specialisation, the increase in male unemployment in many OECD countries and increased female participation in the labour forces as concurrent and linked processes. So it may not be that women entering to the labour market is acting to reduce men's wages, it may be that pressures that have reduced men's employment and men's wages have pushed women into the labour market in order to try and maintain family incomes. So Finoff and Diolch, if I'm careful to state there isn't an inherent and irreducible conflict between greater female participation in paid work and positive outcomes for workers and they conclude that eliminating discrimination against women can as they put it serve to strengthen labour as well as women. But I'd argue if we simply look at discrimination in the labour market, eliminating that in a narrow sense won't be enough. You need to address the way that the process of social reproduction is organised and articulated with the process of production. There's need to be restructured in various ways so that both men and women can easily combine getting a living and taking care of family, neighbour and friends. So it's not a reduction of discrimination against women in a narrow sense that's needed but that's not going to be enough. You've got to have policies that will address unpaid work that will reduce the amount of unpaid work that has to be done through investment in public services and will redistribute the remaining unpaid work so it's more equally distributed between men and women and for that, the kind of leave as you have for that is things in the social security system like paid parental leave for fathers as well as mothers. I've just got a piece coming out about that in an American labour studies journal called New Labour Forum. Research is currently underway at Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre by Alexander Gershensky and Ursula Menoran and they very kindly shared that with me. They're looking at 15 OECD countries and they're looking at the determinants of wage shared by industry so their innovation is to disaggregate the economies into different industrial sectors and to look at the capital and labour share by sector not just by the share of national income and also disaggregating by low, medium and high skilled workers. That's important because we actually know there's huge inequality in wage income. It's not just inequality between capital income and labour income, there's huge inequalities among workers, people who get paid a wage and salary. Their measure of the wage share is the ratio of labour compensation to value added and they find that it decreased in 70% of the sectors in these 15 countries. They exclude the public sector, they exclude mining and agriculture but they include manufacturing utilities and services. So the wage share is going down across the majority of sectors and they're looking again, they're setting up an equation, a regression analysis to see what factors might be explaining this. Another innovation is to add the female employment share in the sector to look among the potential explanatory variables as well as union density, the extent to which people work in the sector belong to a trade union, different measures of globalisation and different measures of technological change. And another important innovation is they measure female employment as share of hours worked by women to total hours worked in the sector. So that allows for the fact that a lot of women are working part-time. You just take female share of the labour force and you don't adjust it, you're actually over estimating the extent to which women are employed in production in the sector. They're findings a little bit different to the earlier study, the pioneering study I referred to. Overall they find there's a very small statistically significant negative association of female share of employment and labour share value added by sector. But this is driven by the female share of low-skilled employment. So if you disaggregate then the shares of the low-skilled, the medium and the high-skilled workers, the estimations for medium-skilled and high-skill employment, the labour shares of medium and high-skill workers didn't find a statistically significant relationship with the share of women in the hours worked in medium-skill and high-skill employment. What's driving this negative association is the experience of low-skilled workers. And a possible explanation for this is that there's a great agenda differences in the pay of low-skilled workers and medium and high-skilled workers. So it's this low-skilled, it's in low-skilled work where we've got that association of the reduction of gender inequality with an increase in class inequality. And that is to be like, is because it's easier to exploit low-skilled women than it is to exploit low-skilled men. It's easier to exploit both of them than it is the higher-skilled workers, but the low-skilled women it would seem at a particular disadvantage. So in terms of the policy implications, they point to Grishansky and the Narrow Call for a Strengthening of the Bargaining Power of Labour, as many do, but not only by improvements in union rights and in minimum wages, minimum wages are very, very important for gender equality as well as class equality, but also for increasing the social wage via public goods and social security. And I think this bringing in the idea of the social wage is really important and implicit in this reference to the social wage is a recognition that the articulation of capital accumulation and social reproduction is mediated by the state that can take action to reduce and redistribute unpaid work or fail to take action and to reduce the role of the wage in social reproduction. So more of the resources that you need for social reproduction come through a non-wage form. And this implies that the dynamic of bargaining and rights that we're interested in isn't just between capital and labour in the workplace, it's between capital and labour in a way that brings in the arena of the state as well and the kinds of public services and social protection, as well as the physical circuits as well as the circuits of production and of distribution. Anyway, I'm very grateful to them for sharing those early results with me and I'm in an ongoing discussion with them as they refine their work. I have five minutes. So let me end by just saying a couple of things about what is the best selling book on inequality, class inequality ever. And this of course focuses, if you like, on the share of capital in national income rather than the share of labour in national income. No econometric analysis, lots of charts and stories, and I think this goes some way to explaining why this has been a bestseller. Lessons there for the rest of us, I think. So I just want to pick out the part of Piketty's analysis where he said what's driving this increase in the share of capital. He doesn't try and set up some regression equation. He says, I'm going to look at this in terms of two things, the rate of return and what he calls capital, which in itself is problematic, and the rate of growth of output. And it's kind of, you never to be the case, it's just an accounting identity that if the rate of return of capital is greater than the rate of growth of output, then the share of capital in output or income will increase. So what really matters is what's driving R and what's driving G. And Piketty tends to argue that, I mean he just scurr other plucks in my view out of the air, the idea that R tends to persist on average at between 4% and 5%, except when there's an exogenous shock like war or revolution. And G depends on productivity and population increases, both of which are treated as exogenous, and both of which are now falling. I was particularly struck when he said decreased growth, especially demographic growth, is thus responsible for capital's comeback. That struck a dagger to my heart because actually some of the things that underlie demographic growth have been very, very critical for improving the well-being of women and reducing gender inequality. If you don't have spent all your life having lots of children and taking care of them, that's one of the things that's really underpinned the improvement in the well-being of a lot of women around the world. I don't like the idea that demographic, the end, decreased demographic growth is responsible for capital's comeback. There must be more to it than that. Well, a lot of heterodox critics and Piketty have challenged these exogeneity assumptions he makes about R and about G. And feminists, I just point to the ones that feminist economists have particularly made. First, the critique of the assumption that fertility in the labour supply are exogenous. The argument to be, no they're not, they're endogenous. Fertility decisions are not simply private individual choices determined by cultural factors. They depend on gendered institutions, like women's access to public services. And Diane Pones has pointed out that it's the European countries with better publicly provided childcare services and less requirement for unpaid work which have got higher fertility. Those fertility decisions are endogenous to what's happening to the social wage. Similarly, Diolch i Gosiaw, I know it's a familiar frequent visitor to us. So, as pointed out, the capitalism has always generated a supply of labour to adjust to demand, including through changing the labour force participation of women. So we shouldn't see these quote demographic changes as exogenous changes, I think, but endogenous changes. Similarly, the rate of return on capital, we shouldn't see as some exogenous, exogenously determined thing every now and then. There's a shock that reduces it, but then it bounces back up. Underpinning the rate of return on capital, our yes process of production, which a surplus has extracted, which heterodox economists emphasise. Though Piketty does not, but also processes of social reproduction in which the costs of social reproduction externalise to non value spheres of households and states. And this task of turning the historically and socially determined wage into the means for reproduction of this and future generations is one of the falls primarily, not exclusively, but primarily to women. Well, the more you can externalise these costs of social reproduction, the higher other things being equal can be the rate of return on capital. But other things are not equal because households are not equipped to supply the kinds of education and health services and risk mitigation needed to produce the kinds of labour that industrialised production requires. Which is why we see the growth of the social wage, which is why we see the growth of public investment and public services and social protection systems. So I think there's an ongoing tension between externalising the costs of social reproduction as a way of increasing the rate of return on capital. And needing a kind of investment in public services to produce the particular kinds of labour force that a more industrialised, more technologically complex economy needs. This underlies the determination of R as well. There's an ongoing tension there. That ongoing tension creates a space that means that social reproduction, no less than production, is a bargained process and is a site of struggle. So I think feminist analysis would suggest if we're thinking about the relation between R and G, it's shaped by the outcome not only of struggles on wages and conditions of paid work, but also on conditions of social reproduction. In particular that's critical for thinking about how the fiscal circuits and the issue of the taxation or lack of taxation of capital. So let me end by saying that what I've been trying to argue is that economic inequality and gender inequality are intrinsically intertwined and we can't fully understand economic inequality without taking into account the gendered character of economists. We must guard against reductions into household income inequality being achieved at the cost of increasing the total working day and intensity of work of many women. So I don't want to see added to the burden of women work more and we'll have faster economic growth adding to that work more and we'll have less inequality between households without thinking about is it just more and more work for women or what do we have to do to reduce the amount of unpaid work. And finally that reversing increases in economic inequality between capital and labour requires policies and struggles that reshape both the process of production and of social reproduction both paid labour. Are the wider political or discursive limitations of this way of thinking? I think you can hear me as of asking the question about what it is that we want to know about the relationship between gender equality and the wider economic inequality. My second reflection relates very much to where you end up in terms of the importance of taking seriously the role and the place of social reproduction and the work of care and the unpaid work of caring relations. And you talk, I'm not sure if it was on the slides that you went through but slides that I read, you talk about the need to recognise, redistribute and reduce that unpaid work of care and social reproduction. And certainly in the wonderful article you wrote for feminist reviews, special issue on the politics of austerity, that was a very important part of your overall argument. So I would like to hear more about what that might look like and what that entails. I'll just say my very last point in the work that I've been doing most recently in looking at social policy across a wide range of social policies to do with social society. Social security, with migration, with benefit systems and family policy during the period, in the context of austerity, reproduction, the work of reproduction comes time and time and again in policy documentation and in policy discourses as of the thing that can't be born. That is just too expensive, too much of a burden on the state and becomes an argument for why we need the austere state. So I think that argument that you're making that the social reproductive needs to be revalued is tremendously important in the current context and I'm just going to stop there. Thank you. Respond, should we go to some questions? I'll just say thank you, I think those are really good points. On challenging the privileges of some, reducing inequality means challenging the privileges of some, I agree, but I think we also got the issue of challenging the privileges of some in ways that might help us build coalition. So I think this is particularly important when we're looking at the intersection of gender inequality with class and race inequality. So can we find a way of challenging the privileges of the white men, which I know is a big issue for you here and so on, but in ways that help us build necessary coalitions that we're going to need to build that will stretch across different kinds of inequalities. So I agree with you, but that's why I think that's why I wanted to look at the heterodox economists who are trying to bring in as a variable in their analysis, a quantitative analysis of what might explain the declining share of labour, because that poses quite starkly the issue of what about, can we, is it possible to have class alliances that take into account other kinds of inequalities when all kinds of inequalities might not be diminishing at the same time. Some might be going up, some might be going down. Okay, let's go to questions. I'm going to take three at a time, Ali. Thanks for the question, not my question. I guess my question relates to our policies on the data. We can't imagine where you left it, especially if we're trying to address the articulation of the action and social interactions. All the studies, the heterodox studies, you mentioned a point more of strengthening the fighting power of labour, the classic production, and the targeted interventions. Once we try to imagine the measures that are to reach out for social reproduction, what is it that we talk about? And for instance, with all the debates we have on the incremental movement, which actually was one of the early, I mean, different arbitrariness, one of the feminist demands in the 70s with religious for household campaign, I wonder if there's something to be paid there to cut back to the attention. Thank you for that. I thought the presentation was fascinating. The different parts of the presentation were equally fascinating, absolutely beautiful. In the first part of your discussion, it seemed to me that the focus was on the impact of women's entry into the labour market or the inequality between males and females as an exercise as a whole. It seemed to me that literature was located at slightly different planes. The mainstream talked about the dynamics of capitalism in general. The heterodoxy talked about the dynamics of neoliberalism and recent changes in the structure of the economy in recent decades. Now, the first question is, does this represent adequately these debates? But also, is it possible to draw a parallel between those debates with the problem of immigration? In the past, on the communism and now, is there a similar impact on the inequality? But also, if you can go back and look at the dynamics of capitalism in general, how about the withdrawal of children from the labour market and what is the impact of that on social equality? It's pulled cross-sectional and time series. Good questions. Basic income, which I would say is actually rather different from wages for housework. I think basic income is a really interesting discussion going on about basic income. Basic income is a way of, as a kind of social protection, social security system that might help deal with some of the extreme inequalities. That's fine so long as the focus on basic income is not seen as an alternative to improvements in the labour market. So you need to be both. You need to be working both on improvements in social security through what the state redistributes as well as the direct improvement in bargaining rights and things like minimum wages. So it's not either basic income or minimum wages you're going to need, definitely need both. Although then the challenges, basic income to be meaningful is going to require a lot of tax revenue. And what you were saying in there about the challenges with austerity policies and the challenges of raising tax revenue is something which is, I think that, I see that as the basic problem really in trying to make, have a meaningful basic income, which means has to be a high enough level to replace a lot of the fragmented and punitive elements of welfare states that we have at the moment is can we raise enough taxes to do that. That's a huge challenge. And for that we need to definitely have these kind of broad coalitions of forces because it's a big difficult challenge which cannot be solved by women, cannot be solved by trade unions, cannot be solved by black and ethnic minority people on their own. I think that's one of the reasons why we have to have some coalitions. I'm sorry. But really fascinating to the issue of immigration. And two issues. One of course getting the data is more difficult but you could certainly, other people may be no more about whether there have been any studies that have looked at labour share of income and used as one of the explanatory variables, the share of labour force that are migrants. I could imagine if the data is available one could do that and one might probably find yes as the share of migrants goes up, has gone up, the share in some countries, the share of labour has gone down. But just as with the share of women going up and the share of labour going down, you have to be very careful not to say one causes the other. Similarly with the share of migrant labour going up and the share of labour going down you have to look at the complex forces that are propelling people to migrate. And that are like looking on both the supply side and the demand side of this. But I think that's an interesting issue. So maybe this is a good PhD topic for somebody. And the withdrawal of children from the labour market, I think that was interesting. That was a big, as a result really of massive mobilisations where it happened to mean that if you like less time of the working classes was mobilised for capitalist production is part of the struggle about not only the length of the working day but how much time. Of households was devoted to capitalist production. And I have no idea what that might have done in terms of the inequalities. It went along of course with a lot of other changes that might outweigh the impact of loss of household income. Because technologies changed so that other members of the household might earn more money. Male breadwinners got to earn more money maybe when that happened. Of course the OECD and the IMF studies are not framed in terms of any of the kind of critique of neoliberalism that the heterodox studies would be concerned with. But they are covering similar time periods and they are taking into account similar factors like increase in financial mobility and trade openness. Just the way they frame the issues is different. The question that you raised about the OECD and the IMF studies about convincing politicians to try and reduce gender inequality. I think this is a second string to the both. There have been a huge number of studies on economic growth and gender inequality and how if you want your economy to grow faster you should reduce gender inequality. Well as we all know politicians don't always pay attention to the evidence of the experts. So there is a limit to what you are going to get from that. So I think this is a second string to the both. People are starting to get a bit more worried about inequality. Mainstream politicians, CEOs of big companies are starting to get a bit worried about inequality. Systems stabilisation is obviously one of the concerns they have and quite rightly I think from their point of view. And I think it's in that framework. It's the OECD is already starting to do work on inequality which it didn't do before and then within that. Well maybe we should look at gender inequality as well. We should see not only what's happened to gender inequality alongside what's happened to inequality between households but maybe we should try and have to look and see how they intersect. That's what the interesting thing was and it's not that I have a quarrel with their policy advice on yes should invest more in childcare and things like that. Yeah they should. But the problem is that the other kinds of advice that the IMF and the OECD gives us institutions is still along the uniberal line and it's not going to make it possible for governments to follow the advice on what public services they should invest in in order to reduce gender inequality. I do think that these are issues of historical struggle because we have we saw a period where some kinds there was quite a lot of reduction of inequality at a time when actually growth was high and a lot of unconscious of being decolonised and and a struggle for their independence. So if we think of the kind of 50s and 60s and 70s there was a time when the forms of capitalism we had then seemed to be it seemed to be quite compatible with the process of capital accumulation to have reductions of some kinds of inequality. So I don't think it's kind of something you can read off from some kind of logic of capital accumulation but I think it's important to look for the contradictions in the process which mean there's a chance of some kind of struggle for rights and for inequality getting some kind of toehold getting some kind of traction because the system of capitalist accumulation itself is a contradictory system. So I tried to give one example on the one hand it will reduce its cost by externalising the cost of social reproduction but on the other hand that kind of externalisation is not successful in producing the kinds of labour force that a more technologically complex industrialised economy needs. And so you have a space there in which working class and national liberation forces and so forth were and women's organisations were able to through their different struggles to sometimes separately sometimes together get investment get some investment in public services get some investment in social protection systems. Now in many countries those things are under attack again and perhaps here in Europe because they're particularly under attack here we definitely have that in the forefront of our minds. Go to Uruguay and maybe anybody here from Uruguay things might look a little bit different they're not being the same kind of downward pressure on over the last 10 years and there's rather been an expansion of rights and of services and of equality. So I think it is contingent on the nature of particular struggles and I think it is important to think about both recognising the specificity of different kinds of inequality and different kinds of oppression but also trying to build coalitions across those intersections because what we're up against is very powerful and I think we're all looking around for seeing where can we find those possibilities, where can we find those possibilities. So I find for instance in the movement on tax justice international movement on tax justice quite an interesting example of coalition building of a kind which I think is very important. The lady here. Interesting questions. On grandparents I haven't done any academic research on this I just know the personal experience as a grandparent but of course the inequalities across age groups is also an important axis of inequality to have a look at. And there is in all countries a lot of unpaid work in families is done by grandparents especially grandmothers. And it's important to recognise that and it's important to think for instance in countries where they're going to raise the retirement age so people go to work longer in paid work in order to get their pension. What does that mean in terms of unpaid childcare that grandparents have been providing? There's quite, there's an organisation in the UK certainly of grandparents that looks at these kinds of issues in some detail and there may be in some other countries as well. But sometimes it's just taken for granted this is what grandparents do but you can see in countries, anybody in China, countries like China with a huge demographic changes where at the moment there's a problem in looking after the grandparents when they get really frail and elderly but this next generation down there aren't going to be that many grandparents either so those demographic changes across the age ranges are important to look at. I agree with you that actually what capitalism is interested in is its rate of return. Sometimes faster economic growth is a way to improving that rate of return sometimes it's not. It's more I think that analysis that focus in economic analysis on what will improve the rate of growth is something that's been actually directed more to politicians than to capitalists per se on the grounds that if you increase the size of the pie you can satisfy more of your voters. And I think now you can see there's a bit of a worry about maybe inequality has gone too far on the part of some capitalist companies so maybe that's why we all drink our champagne and eat our caviar at Davos and we listen to Winnie Byonema from Oxfam who gives us the latest data on international inequality. We say this is terrible, we don't want riots in the streets but you're saying we should pay more taxes. So I think there's some interesting tensions there at the moment in terms of has inequality become too extreme the 1% and is this undermining therefore the conditions for the social reproduction of profitability. Maybe, maybe not but I think there's some spaces there that we can work in and in terms of the current conjunction the particular circumstances we face now with rhetoric from the right about women's rights and minority rights and so forth being that's just the talk of the global elite. I don't know the working class has two sexes and several genders in several races and I think we really have to resist that. So a nice article recently, I think maybe it's in the Guardian called populist correctness. What we have to resist is populist correctness which says all of the concerns about inequality and rights is just liberal metropolitan elites. No it isn't, there are people out there at the grassroots struggling about all of these rights and we really have to resist the claiming that low income people are not interested in inequality and rights. They are, they are. I mean there's huge, you look in the US now, the resistance, anybody here from the US? Resistance, yeah, the resistance against the Trump administration from lots and lots of low income people organised in community groups, organised in trade unions but also organised in women's groups, African Americans, Hispanic Americans. But you're right there's a rhetoric that we really have to resist about these concerns about rights and inequalities. There's just you, it's just you privileged students in so has who are talking about these kinds of things. We are people, aren't interested in these. I think we really have to resist them. You have time for one final round of questions? Steve? I think it's really important that there's investment in vocational skills and in engineering in all countries but as part of that, as part of that investment there has to be a training of engineers about their interface with people. Because engineers think about we're building something. We're building, well people are bound to come and use it. They don't think about the interface enough with people and the design of the facilities with people. I talked in Morocco, they made pressure from women's organisations and with some sympathetic officials. They wanted to get the government to think about all its public expenditure in terms of what was its gender equality implications. The people in education and health could see that much more quickly and in infrastructure building dominated by the engineers. But we don't deal with people, we deal with building roads and water pipes and so forth. To get them to think about, yes, but if this is going to improve productivity or improve people's well-being, you've got to think about how are people using this and is it best designed to meet the needs of people? Maybe different people have different needs in the way that they use roads or water systems and maybe you should take that into account. I do think there's a challenge there. I think the gender issues in engineering go beyond we should have more women engineers. We should have more women engineers, but we should go beyond that. We should be thinking about how do we train engineers in ways that they can interact more and think more about the people that whatever their designing building is meant to serve and then they would be better engineers. Any final questions? Okay, so I'm going to thank Diane firstly for her wonderful contribution and also our discussant Irene, so can we give them both a round of applause?