 You cannot understand the economy without looking at gender relations. Why does the issue of the economy get affected by gender relations? It's something that people normally see as outside the economy. It's a social relationship. It's not something that is supposed to be affecting significant things like international trade or macroeconomic policy or any of these other major economic processes that we're concerned with. There's a very, very important reason for focusing on a gender perspective for understanding the economy. We are always looking at distributive inequality. That's what economists do. We are looking at who gets how much of what, comparing households and families. We look at it comparing classes of people, capitalists and workers. We look at it comparing different social groups, tribes or ethnic groups or minorities or different races or castes in a country like India. Gender is an inequality within that. It cross-cuts all of these things. And that's fundamental and it's very significant because it then changes how even within these groups and categories, there are ways in which it plays out. But the other difference about gender is that it's not just about distributive inequality, it's also about relational inequality. Now, what's that? That is really the power a person has over another. It's an inequality of the relationship in which one person in the relationship or one category has greater power than another. And that matters because that affects the way in which not just distribution, but lots of other decisions play out. And this relational inequality is something economists very rarely look at. But gender is fundamentally a relational inequality and it has a very, very strong economic impact. It's like, let's say that a huge part of female wiring is tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care. One of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don't make as much money. It's biological, right? It's women, bare children and men don't. And that's a fundamental difference and there's no getting away from that one. But this biological difference has then been used in societies to create what is called the gender construction of society or the gender division of labor. One of the things about social reproduction, if you want to call it that, all care activities, the whole bundle of things which involves looking after the young, especially, but also the old, the sick, the differently abled, those who cannot look after themselves in different ways. Societies have to create some situation in which care activities are performed, whatever else happens. It's something that creates a kind of tension between what you could call individual welfare and group welfare because the care of others is not the care of yourself. It is, in a sense, something which is against your own welfare if you're going to spend time caring for others. So this gender construction has been extremely useful in resolving that tension. Care activities have to be performed and biology only covers really pregnancy and childbirth. That's the real thing that women can do which men cannot. But we find that this gender construction whereby women do the entire burden of care. This is something that's brought out very well in a recent book by Nancy Folbre. It's called The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. She says this is not something that is because of private property or capitalism or anything like that. It has existed through time, through very, very different systems. So in a fundamental sense, patriarchal systems are really about controlling women's labor power. This is quite different from the argument that was made by people like Friedrich Engels who argued that it's really private property colluding with the state which has created these very strong gender differentials. Yes, private property played a role. But even before, even in periods of communal property, we find that there was this strong division of labor in which women were effectively consigned to homes and looking after others. And that's because society needs these things to be done. And it's very easy if you can effectively make it the responsibility of one group without getting into all kinds of questions about why that group should be performing it. But the other thing that Nancy mentions and which is a very important point is that there's a peculiar nature of care work which makes women vulnerable to their own exploitation. Because care is a very emotional thing if society decides that they're not going to look after the people who are in old people's homes. It's most unlikely that adults will say, I'm not going to bother about my aged mother because the nursing home is no longer willing to accept her. I will leave her out on the street. It's not going to happen. That woman will be taken into a home and looked after by the children, usually women. The fact that women are unlikely to withdraw, basic care services, even when they're not provided by others, is a huge loss in bargaining power. They're much more likely to be oppressed and exploited and in fact collude in their own exploitation. This is not just something that is true of capitalism per se, but it's also true of other welfare states that have tried or used the labor of women in particular ways or existing socialism of the 20th century. And in fact, I asked Nancy about that. How has this played out in contemporary capitalism and in welfare states as well? One of the characteristics of care provision is that to be successful, it really requires some concern for the well-being of another person. And that concern for the well-being of another person limits your ability to threaten, departure, to threaten to leave, to say, if I don't get more reward for this, I'm out of here. So I think that's a process I like to describe as being a prisoner of love. That's a phrase from an old rock and roll song. And if you think about it, it's a theme and a lot of songs about people feeling kind of trapped by their own commitment to other people. And I'm just emphasizing that goes beyond romantic relationships to what happens if you become a parent, what happens if you start caring for somebody who needs care and you become attached to them. The way in which that affects bargaining power helps explain I think why caregivers are always going to be a little bit of a disadvantage. So it's kind of an argument against having any one group specialize in providing care. If everybody does it, then that risk is more equally shared. What are the implications of this fundamental distribution of unpaid care work across all societies, across social categories, through history? Once women are responsible for this care, even when they do get paid employment, they're still seen as fundamentally responsible for ensuring the care of their family members. They can delegate to others. They can outsource. But they are the ones who have to be managing that process. And they are the ones who would have to perform it if they cannot afford or find others to do it, which in turn means that you get a double burden of paid and unpaid care, which I will talk about later, because of the fact that you're doing this unpaid work at home. You have to do this care work. You're much more likely to be confined to your homes. So there's less mobility, less ability to go out and interact and do various other social activities. You certainly are less likely to be able to access paid employment on the same terms. So you have less access to money incomes, which in turn means you have less decision-making power. And that in turn, because money incomes also give you social and economic status. It means you have less social and economic status as well. It's also reinforced by patriarchal norms, sociocultural norms that are embedded in people's consciousness. Sometimes they're also very strongly enforced by legal codes and regulations. There are all kinds of restrictions in different societies of women owning property, of women being allowed to do specific jobs, whether they're allowed to work outside the home, whether they need permission to travel, usually from a male member of the household or the head of the household, how much control they have over their own children. All kinds of legal codes and regulations exist which reduce the power of women. It's often implicit in some societies, it's explicit. Even in developed societies and developed countries, you find there's a very strong acceptance of the significance of this role that women play. The Irish Constitution, for example, the state recognizes the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society and as a moral institution, possessing inalienable and imprescribable rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law. Everything else is dependent on this fundamental significance of the family. Second, it says, the state therefore guarantees to protect the family in its constitution and authority as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the nation and the state. In particular, the state recognizes that by her life within the home, notice within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. So they know exactly the role that is played by women. The state shall therefore endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home. The state pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of marriage on which the family is founded and to protect it against attack. So here is an open and explicit recognition of the role that women play. And of course, it's couched in a way which appears to be protective of women because it's saying that they're going to prevent a woman from having to seek outside employment. But you can see how easily this can be turned the other way, saying, well, you know, you have no business seeking outside employment because your purpose is to fulfill this role of assisting the state in guarding the social order by doing all this unpaid work within the household. Here we have this distinction. We have this division of labor. How does it matter for the economy? Well, actually it's absolutely critical in how economies function. There are huge implications of the gender division of labor on labor markets and on work, on the accumulation strategies of contemporary capitalism. We cannot even understand how economies have behaved even in the COVID era, even the pandemic without recognizing the specific role played by gender. Let's consider just even microeconomic behavior. Mainstream economics typically views all economic activity as being performed by agents who are either consumers or producers, okay? And so these are supposedly rational entities. There's a reason why it was called rational economic man, okay, but these are these rational entities who are behaving in a way which is consistent with what is called possessive individualism. That is to say you want to possess more and more, you want to consume more and more, and you want to do so as an individual, okay? You will maximize your utility, which will be derived solely from either material gain or leisure. In that world of the rational economic man, care activities would not be possible because they are not adding to your individual welfare in that same way. Once you recognize particularly gender, as I said, it's cross-cutting across all of the other differences, it undermines this analysis completely. The standard principles on which economic rationality is supposed to occur completely change because in fact you would never get the whole phenomenon of care economies being this huge substratum on which the so-called material economy is built. You would not get that phenomenon at all, but all of this basically points to a broader conclusion. You cannot understand capitalism or any contemporary economy without looking at that gender perspective, without seeing how gender differences determine how that economy is growing, not growing, the kinds of labor markets it has, the kinds of accumulation strategies that have been chosen, and even the future prospects of that economy. In the last week or so, how many of you have transported members of your household or their goods without payment? How many of you have done a bit of cleaning, a bit of vacuuming, a bit of sweeping, a bit of tidying up the kitchen? Yeah? How about going shopping for members of the household, preparing food, cleaning up afterwards, laundry, ironing? Well, as far as economics is concerned, you were at leisure. Let's delve a little bit more deeply into this issue of unpaid work. There are many implications of the fact that the work that men do is largely paid, the work that women do is largely unpaid. Something like 70% of the unpaid time, labor time, is accounted for by women. It varies a little bit in some slightly more gender-aware societies, more developed advanced economies, you find that it's lower, maybe sometimes even as low as 60%. In other societies, you find it's as high as 90%. Wherever you find women are performing the greater part of the unpaid work, and wherever more and more women are mostly involved only in unpaid work, you find the status of women is low, you find that the other productive economic activity they do is often unrecognized, certainly not remunerated, but not even socially seen as contributing in any productive way. It's so common for investigators doing these surveys, household surveys, to be told, oh, my wife is just at home, she doesn't do anything. It's a very common response of the male head of household that my wife is at home, doesn't do anything. So this devaluing of the unpaid work in turn means that when women do enter the paid workforce, they are paid less, because you can get the work for free. So clearly when they enter the workforce, they don't deserve to be paid as much as men. How do we have all of these women going to law school, all of these women going to business school? It's practically 50-50 in those arenas, and then you look a few years later, you see very few female CEOs, very few women controlling capital really being the decision makers. What's happening? Is it bias? Is it sexism? There are two reasons for these fairly significant gender wage gaps that are found across the world. First, of course, women have lower, what are called reservation wages. That is, they're willing to work for less. But secondly, because society knows that they do a lot of free work within their homes. So when they do get paid, they don't really deserve to be paid as much. You find wherever there's a higher proportion of women who are doing unpaid work, gender wage gaps on average are higher across countries. But also it means that women then get clustered into certain occupations, child care, various other care activities, nursing and so on. Activities which all end up being low paying. And that wage penalty extends even to the men who work in those. So a male kindergarten teacher also gets low paid. A male frontline health worker is also low paid and so on. Now this is definitely true of private employers. Private employers always use this difference. But it's also true of public employment. There are countries like India which don't even call a lot of frontline health workers employees. They call them volunteers because then they don't have to pay the minimum wage. And they hire them on terrible terms with no job security, no social security and terrible wages because of the fact that they can. You find this in many other developing countries even in South Africa and a bunch of other places. You have ancillary workers and workers who are not treated as proper workers simply because they happen to be women. There's another implication of unpaid work. And it's something which again is not really recognized in a lot of the economics discussion. And that is time poverty. So what is time poverty? It's kind of obvious, right? It's when you don't have enough time. There's one definition or one way of looking at time poverty which somehow assumes that it's more among very, very highly paid executives and professionals who are very busy and who have very, very long working hours per week and so on. So there's a perception often that time poverty increases with the complexity skill and how driven certain workers are, professional workers in particular. But actually we know, and this is very evident from time use service as well, that is the poor who are time poor. That is the income poor are also the ones who have less time. And why is that? That's because they cannot afford to outsource a lot of the unpaid labor that the rich can afford to outsource or the better off can afford to outsource. So when you're very poor, you end up not only having to perhaps work for your living in very difficult, straightened circumstances and with low wages, but you also have to come back and do all of these unpaid goods and services for your household. And this adds to the material poverty of the household. So it's not just that the time poverty is a bad thing for the people who are time poor. It definitely reduces the quality of your own life, the woman's life, the health of the woman and so on. But it also reduces the quality of the goods and services that households get from unpaid work. Supposing there are two families, both of whom are poor, both of whom get very, very low incomes, okay? Let's say 1,000 units of whatever currency there is. In one family, there's a man and a woman who with their children and the man is the one who goes out and works and earns this 1,000 units. But the woman is at home cooking, cleaning, looking after the children, doing all of the other activities. In the other household, which also has an income of only 1,000 units, but both the man and the woman are working for 500 units each, okay? So they both go out to work. They're getting even lower wages, but they both spend a lot of time out working. Maybe they also spend time commuting. And then they come home, but they still have to do the cooking, cleaning, looking after kids and all that. Even when the income poverty is the same across these two households, the one where there is greater time poverty, especially of the woman, the one who's responsible for doing all of this, is actually going to be worse off. That family is going to have a lower quality of goods and services. Let me give you an example from India. My friend, the journalist P. Sainath, he did an analysis of some women in a rural district of Gondya in Maharashtra about 10 years ago. He just followed them around for several weeks. These are very poor households, and there's very little economic activity there. They get up at four o'clock in the morning, and then they cook for the rest of the household for the day. They clean and sweep and do whatever has to be done. And at six o'clock, they start walking to the railway station. It's a five-kilometer walk. And they get on this train. It's a journey of more than an hour and a half. They go to this neighboring district where they find work in these agricultural harvesting and things like that. So they work all day. They come back on the train and get home by 11 o'clock at night, when they barely have enough time to just eat a little bit and then go to sleep to start the whole process again at four o'clock the next morning. One of the women told Sainath that she hadn't spoken to her seven-year-old son for seven months, or six months, because every time she was at home, he was asleep. So clearly, the quality of services that child is getting are not that good. But you can see that the burden of that time poverty, it's of course being felt by the women, but it's felt even more or as much by the family, which has also denied a certain quality of those unpaid goods and services. Why is this important? Because there's lots of discussion now about multidimensional poverty. So people look at poverty, not just in terms of income, but how it affects your health, your education, your food access, your housing, your sanitation, and all of these other things. But they don't really look at time. They don't add time poverty as a fundamental dimension of the poverty, which actually adds to your material poverty in a significant way. I think that's important because if you recognized time poverty, you would also be thinking of doing things to reduce it and to address time poverty as a major economic problem. This absence of seeing this fundamental requirement of unpaid work leads to so many misconceptions of how people live and also how economies manage. What are the implications? Well, one, of course, is that clearly unpaid labor is a huge subsidy to the recognized economy and the formal sector. So you have these estimates of productivity, for example, which are based on GDP per worker. Now, of course, there's a lot of issues with all of these things. We know that GDP itself, the gross domestic product, is a problematic concept. We know that there are all kinds of things that leaves out, all kinds of things it brings in, which we may or may not value as societies. But now we even know that the denominator is a problem. The worker part, we are not really counting all the workers because we're not counting all of the women who are doing the unpaid work or sometimes men who are doing all this unpaid work as well. So when you get increases in productivity, that is GDP per worker, and you say, what a great economy and so on, it could be for all the wrong reasons. It could be because there's an increase in unpaid work, as has happened in India over the last 20 years. Then of course, there's a huge role that unpaid work has played in the accumulation process. In the 20th century, for example, in Europe and in the US, why was there this massive increase in industrialization because lots of women entered the workforce as well? Why were they able to enter the workforce because there was a big expansion in public services which enabled them to reduce the unpaid work within the home and to be available for the paid work? Capitalist industrialization in the advanced economies relied on that expansion. And so that big golden age period in these economies depended on the phenomenon of greater public provision of services that were previously provided within households. The opposite also happens when there are downswings, when there's a fiscal constraint. A lot of that public spending on social services is one of the first things to be cut whenever there's a downswing or whenever there's an attempt at fiscal austerity. You can reduce the care services. You can reduce childcare services. You can even reduce healthcare services and all of those things. Why? Because families will end up taking up that burden. It's not going to remain undone. So it's a cushion. It can actually be utilized by governments. But there are other implications. For example, even in terms of long-term demographic change, have you wondered why fertility rates are falling in so many advanced economies? Japan, Italy, Sweden, you know, why is it that they're less and less children? It's really that when women have the freedom and autonomy to make their own choices about the number of children they will bear, and when it's become very costly, it is in fact a real cost for women to have to bear children because they end up doing all the unpaid work. They are the ones who have less access to outside income, all of these things. They will tend to have less children. And therefore, you're getting demographic declines in advanced economies because of this unfair distribution of these burdens of unpaid work, which more and more women are saying they're not willing to actually deal with. And of course, all of this boils down to the other fundamental point I've made, that, you know, power imbalances are absolutely crucial to understanding economic processes. In the next lecture, I'm going to take up the whole issue of how this affects paid work. And we're going to look specifically at the role that women's paid work has played in economies over the past century or more.