 The absence of a gender perspective is only one of the many things that is wrong with mainstream economics at the moment. It's been wrong on financial markets. It's been wrong on the impact of government spending. It's been wrong on how much you can afford to increase monetary easing without creating inflation. It's terribly wrong in its ability to address climate issues. It is fatal in terms of its attitude to intellectual property rights which today as we speak are leading to loss of lives. We cannot control a pandemic because of that. There are many ways in which it has been absolutely wrong and it's kind of interesting that society still tolerates us economists when we've made so many major errors in ways that really matter for people and societies. One of the reasons why this is happening is because unfortunately too much of it is in the service of power. Certainly class and corporate power but also patriarchal power. Too much of it tends to confirm and reaffirm existing power imbalances and add to them and justify them in ways that ultimately for humanity are counterproductive. The fact that most of these companies are run by white men, white rich men means that they are out of touch with what the majority of the world is because the majority of this planet are not a bunch of rich white guys. They're people of other colors. They're the majority. Women are the majority and the poor and working poor make up the majority of this planet. Especially when we're teaching economics we do not give enough attention to the assumptions that underlie the models that a particular model generates these outcomes because we have made the following assumptions. These assumptions if they're not valid this model will not hold or it will hold in a different way or it will have a different impact. If we did that so many different policies which are routinely advised to different governments would fall by the wayside. For example the standard policies about how you have to base your external trade on what is your current comparative advantage based on whether you have more capital, more labor, more land. All of this depends crucially on assumptions of perfect competition, constant returns to scale, full employment. We know that none of those assumptions holds. We know that these models will collapse if you remove those assumptions. Why are we still using these theories to advocate for particular policies? This is related to the power imbalance that I talked about because within the discipline there's a real marginalization of alternative approaches. There's a real attempt to decry, disparage other insights, other traditions. Everything is sought to be compressed into a particular stylized template that has to provide true knowledge. And this is all because economics is pretending to be a science, a natural science kind of thing when it's not. It is at best a social science. But because we're so focused on somehow being a science and often very esoteric techniques, it can lead us to rather trivial pursuits. It can lead us to things which only make sense within that little bubble of a particular set of assumptions. But we're not necessarily getting closer to understanding and appreciating and explaining an economic reality. And one of the aspects of that is the complete lack of a sense of history or a willingness to learn from and absorb the insights of other disciplines. Many other social scientists find economists arrogant and there's no doubt about it. There's a lot of arrogance certainly in terms of approach to other disciplines, but there's also the arrogance of economic policy. The belief that you can do economic and social engineering based on models which you have not bothered to ensure are exactly relevant for that particular economy or society. And there's even arrogance in empirical research. Increasingly we have phenomena like randomized control trials, RCTs that really treat people as lab rats. And it's been argued that there's a strong sort of neocolonial element to that. It's really people in developing countries or poor people in the rich countries who get the benefit of these RCTs because you can do it to people there. Chile is by all odds the best success story in Latin America today. The real miracle is not that those economic arrangements work so well because that's what Adam Smith said. The real miracle is that a military hunter was willing to let them do it. See, as I said to begin with, the principles of the military is from the top down. The principle of a market is from the bottom up. Now it's a real miracle that a military group was willing to let a bottom up approach take over. And as you know, as I say, I did make a trip to Chile and I made talks in Chile. In fact, I did meet with Mr. Pinochet but I was never advised by him. I never got a penny from the Chilean government, never an advisor to him. But I will say that that process led to a situation in which you were able to get an election which ended the military hunter and you now have a democratic government. You cannot cite any similar example from the world of entirely socialist states. So I was not an advisor to Pinochet, I was not an advisor to the Chilean government, I am more than willing to share in the credit for the extraordinary task job that our students did down there. So there is a real problem in the ways in which we are doing both our research and our policy advice. And these are aggravated by the fact that we don't like to admit that we're wrong. There's a lot of dishonesty about our past and current mistakes. A lot of pretending we never said that or hoping others will forget that we said certain things. Increasingly there has been discussion about the sort of machismo, the gender discrimination within the discipline and there's a lot of discussion about that. I'm not going to spend too much time about it but I think it's important because we have to think of how we fix it. And fixing it therefore necessarily requires much more diversity of people of different gender, of race, of class background, of ethnicity. We really have to move away from the sort of dominant hierarchies that exist and push for much greater recognition of economists with very, very diverse backgrounds. And that's a good reason for this. If your lived experience is different you will be much more able to bring a different angle to a particular discussion. You will be much more able to question particular assumptions. You will be much more able to understand whether it's relevant in different contexts. And therefore you will actually force a collective to move in a more complex, nuanced, richer, more informative direction ultimately. But it's not just diversity of background. What you really must have is a much greater recognition and respect for diversity of approaches. It's extraordinary how much this discipline is dominated by the North Atlantic. All the top economists apparently are from here. All the top economic departments are only located on both sides of the North Atlantic. All the important prizes in economics are granted to those who are resident in both sides of the North Atlantic. All the journals publish articles dominantly by people in the North Atlantic. This is not just implausible because it basically suggests that both intelligence and analysis are not randomly distributed but all concentrated and focused in this one geographical region. But it's also foolish because we're losing out on a lot. There is enormous insight, there's enormous interest in a lot of the work done by scholars in the developing South who are resident in the developing South. Sometimes it's a language barrier, a lot of it could be in Spanish or in some other languages. But even when there isn't a language barrier, there's an inherent tendency to dismiss anything that is not produced in the North Atlantic. Which is very unfortunate because we are really missing out in terms of good science, if you like. Ultimately what does this all boil down to? It means that we should also be willing to speak truth to power. All of this makes a gender perspective essential. It really has to imbricate all of our understanding and analysis in which a gender understanding will change how we're looking at these economic phenomena. And we really have to recognize this. So how do we actually now fix policy making and make it more gender aware? There are some things we should avoid because it's become the flavor of the month. Everybody realizes that they have to be gender sensitive and bring women into it and all of that. So there's a lot of symbolism, there's a lot of tokenism. We really have to avoid that. We do not get away with just doing minor gestures that don't improve the actual condition of women while the broader macroeconomic package, the fiscal package, the distributive package works against them. Consider whether they're actually going to benefit women workers. Consider whether they're going to harm women in self-employment. Consider how they would actually gain from a particular strategy and the way it's implemented before announcing that because its intent is good, therefore I'm going to go on with it. A lot of the focus of feminist economic policy has to be therefore oriented to the fundamental contradictions that I have been talking about in terms of paid and unpaid labor. So we have to liberate both work and free time. That is to say we have to recognize and enable the right to work for women but we also have to recognize the issues of time poverty, the right to relational time in addition to private leisure. There's a wonderful term that was used in a five year plan for Ecuador that one of the goals is to increase relational time which means the time that is used for being an active participant of society, group or family. That's a wonderful idea. It's recognizing that there are other aspects to life for both men and women but especially because women are so short of that. The first principle therefore in terms of let's say macroeconomic policy what your overall strategy may do for the condition of men and women and do no harm, which means what? Avoid imposing fiscal austerity measures in general and do not make them pro-cyclical. Don't make things get worse in a downswing. Ensure that they are counter-cyclical and particularly that the kinds of spending that directly affect women as workers, as unpaid workers within homes that those are not the things that you are going to cut which means that you should not require fiscal measures that either explicitly or implicitly reduce spending on basic public provision of essential services and public wage bills. This is happening as we speak and it's happening not just done by individual governments but it's done by the international financial institutions, by the IMF which is declaring at another level that it doesn't believe in doing all this which has a whole section supposedly looking at gender issues and yet is doing this in terms of its actual program and conditionality requirements in developing countries. Similarly, we should avoid pro-cyclical monetary policies and rigid regulations. We know that women are the first sufferers and these end up worsening their position. They also make micro-finance institutions less able to even provide the limited amount of consumption smoothing that they do provide. The price of essential commodities is a very important aspect of this real provisioning that reflects what women have to do. So it's important to ensure that the prices of essential commodities don't increase especially because of regressive taxation measures and taxes on intermediates. That's a very important part of many strategies that say well you have to raise the money, the best way to raise the money is not by putting more taxes on the wealthy or on large corporates but by imposing a regressive value-added tax. That's really counterproductive and we should really shift away from that particular approach. Once you have a gender perspective on policy you will be looking at all of these processes differently and you would, for example, focus on changing the structure of taxation towards a more progressive taxation. For example, equitable taxation of multinationals. Finally, that's on the agenda. Taxes on extreme wealth, we have seen obscene increases in extreme wealth even during the pandemic. It's a time to actually ensure that some of that gets paid back to society. Taxes on financial transactions because we know a lot of finance is not really working for the real economy. It's in its own little speculative bubble and enriching some people without playing the role it should play. So tax financial transactions and prevent that ridiculous speculative expansion that continues. I mean the basic aim is universal and affordable access to good quality public services. But of course we need to do that through significant public expansion. Much more investment, much more spending on these critical areas. And when you're doing that you have to make sure that the women who are in these programs receive proper wages, they are seen as proper employees, that their working conditions are good, that they are receiving all the legal and social protection to which they are entitled. Many governments across the world are not doing this. But even in developed countries there's so much outsourcing that governments can say well you know we've washed our hands of it, we've hired this company, they are going to do it and we don't know what conditions they are imposing on their workers. So we really have to ensure much better conditions and working conditions and wages to women in all of this public employment. I haven't talked about food so far, but it's a very important aspect in developing countries especially. Food and nutrition, without universal access it's well known that within families women and girls suffer more. And now that we know that there are major livelihood losses, family incomes are going down for the majority of the population in much of the world, this is actually coinciding with rising prices of food in many economies. Even countries that had stopped worrying about it, stopped thinking about it have to refocus on sustainable food policies and systems which also provide sustainable and affordable access to good food. In banking regulation you really have to look at internal debt relief, including for people especially women who have taken loans from private money lenders and cannot repay and are in a position to lose whatever little assets they possess and be wiped out. Look at the way asset markets are constructed. I told you in many countries there are laws preventing women from either inheriting or even getting other access to assets like land. Remove those legal impediments, generate much more favorable conditions for women to have equal access to asset markets and of course enable women themselves to mobilize, to associate, to unionize, to get together and demand better conditions. Obviously labor market regulation is a good thing, especially minimum wage because we know so many women are at that bottom. They are automatic beneficiaries of increases in minimum wages. You know there's a lot of talk today about a Green New Deal in some countries, the UK and the US and of a global Green New Deal which is definitely important. It's something that we have to think about because the pandemic has been a big crisis and it is really relatively minor compared to these serious existential threats that are going to come from climate change and which are already coming in many parts of the world. We already have climate refugees. We already have major natural disasters that are unexpected and have very, very serious consequences and we're having more and more of them as we speak. I would argue that being green is not good enough. Of course it has to be green. You have to recognize and respect and preserve the environment and address all the climate challenges. I think when we're looking at the greening, we are ignoring or underplaying the huge problems of water access. Desertification is one of the most significant environmental problems in many parts of the developing world. The issues around water, we are underplaying but they are going to come and get us very, very quickly and so we really have to make it a green and blue deal. And everything I've said so far also suggests that it has to be a purple deal. Purple, why purple has been seen as the color of the care economy? Many feminist economists have identified the purple requirements for an economy which means that it must reward paid care work through increased public spending creating the baseline for all decent work in care activities. It has to recognize unpaid labor which is performed within households. It has to reduce that unpaid labor as much as possible. Reduce the drudgery, for example, walking long hours to collect water or fuel and we have to represent care workers. We have to give them a voice. We have to make sure that care workers of all kinds, paid, unpaid, underpaid, all have a voice in determining the public policies that will affect them. This is a very, very major element, not just in gender equality but I would argue for the very viability of our societies and economies. We have seen that a neglect of care actually can create complete lack of resilience in an economy. Economies have collapsed because our care systems and our healthcare in particular has not been able to meet the challenge. And finally, of course, it also has to be read. It has to address and reduce inequalities. I don't need to tell you how much inequalities have grown over the past two decades, how even before the pandemic they were at unacceptable levels and they've actually worsened during the pandemic. This is inequalities in assets, in income, in access to food, access to education, access to healthcare, access to other essential public services, inequalities in employment opportunities. There's so many massively exploding inequalities across the world and we have to address them across all these different dimensions. But of course, another very large inequality is the North-South inequality which unfortunately still persists. The unequal distribution of vaccines is just one of the more recent indications of how unequal our world remains. But what is very clear is that all of these efforts to have a multicolored new deal require an appropriate international architecture, which is why this new deal has to be global. There are many ways this can be done. There have to be rethinking of many of the ways in which we have organised trade, the ways in which we currently allow and enable finance to work for itself rather than for society as a whole. The ways in which intellectual property rights have gone out of control and are simply generating rents for large companies and enabling them to evade taxes rather than contribute to genuine invention and innovation. There are many, many things that we can change in our international architecture which require cooperation. It's probably going to sound like it's impossible to achieve because it's too ambitious. But you know, hey, humanity has done this before. In periods of extreme crisis it has actually got together, created the United Nations, created international financial organisations that were supposed to provide a stable framework for trade and investment. It has stepped back from the brink. So if we have to step back from the current brink, we have to have that same level of ambition. But it has to be an ambition that brings in this very, very crucial gender perspective because without that we're not going to achieve even survival of the species.