Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century has burst upon the sky of economics, like a huge round of fire crackers. It has sold 2 million copies and has been translated into several languages. The book has focused on economic inequality—its source and its impact. Piketty’s main thrust is to reveal that the wealthy, he calls it the one percent, will continue to accumulate wealth. He reveals the dynamics of such a process, and then concentrates on the tax system as a possible source to reduce this phenomenon. It is of course a startling revelation, especially the argument on the process.
However, the various dimensions of economic inequality including how it perpetuates poverty, creates violence, inhibits GDP growth, has been pointed out and highlighted in many reports1 and in the most sophisticated terms especially by gender specialists.2 Peeling the onion of inequality with the knife of gender reveals far more on how it happens and what to do about it than Piketty’s work.
The problem with feminist economic research, however is that it did not provide an alternative theoretical framework, to the usual dichotomy of capitalist and socialist. The research unveiled many errors in data and reasoning, but it could not build a core argumentation.
However the argument in this essay is to suggest that feminist scholarship by revealing gendered difference in describing phenomena, can actually lead to reassembling if not reconstructing economic reasoning. It also questions many of the theories of knowledge creation.3
Helen Longino, an American philosopher of science and feminist, has this to say: ‘The problems of knowledge are central to feminist theorizing, which has sought to destabilize androcentric, mainstream thinking in the humanities and in the social and natural sciences.’4
Professor Naila Kabeer, a Professor of Gender and International Development at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics, in a recent March 8, 2016 article in Economy, supports this argument: ‘Economists are saying gender equality brings economic growth. Feminist economists are digging deeper, asking under what circumstances and whether growth brings gender equality….’
‘Feminist economists play a key role in rethinking the way we do economics. They’re building an economics discipline that’s better able to reflect the various contexts in which men and women participate in the global economy and the often unequal terms on which they do so. They stress that power is a factor in economic life and want an approach that takes account of how our behavior shapes, and is shaped by, relations of power that operate in everyday life and at the societal level.’
Inroads have been made which clearly reveal the value of gendered analysis of phenomena, of data, of policy, of programme, of institutions.5 Gendered analysis undermined every aspect of what could be called ‘existent knowledge’. Such undermining includes measures, the fact base, the construction of development indices, the descriptive categories, the language; the composition of laws, international conventions, and institutions from local to global arena. Therefore, it was not only that women were making themselves visible in both statistics and in choices, but they were actually reconstructing, recasting and undermining the very elements of the mainstream development discourse.
Research by feminists even in the domain of academia, usually drew from the well of struggle and action and hence had the additional value of ‘speaking’ from reality. Further, as feminist philosophy’s core goal is justice, it goes beyond economic equality.
Given below are two illustrations to show the way feminist research and action has reconstructed theory.
One of the earliest entries into the sphere of gendering space came with the entry into the survey methodology in collecting statistics on employment. This then led to further revelations. I call this Counting Correctly. There is a vast literature in the field6 but I will give one example, dating to the 1970s which is now streaming and impacting both knowledge and practice.
Surveys conducted every five years by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) in India present data on employment at the national level. These surveys include every household in India. According to the NSSO survey of 1976–77, ‘male participation’ in Rajasthan was around 89%– 90% and for West Bengal it was in the range of 81%–93% while the ‘female participation’ in Rajasthan was around 15% and in West Bengal is from 8%7 .
This data seemed at odds with what was visible, for example that women were busy carrying and digging and bending their backs in the streets and fields of India. Sometimes in certain areas there were more women working in the fields and factories and forests than men.
To challenge this Female Workforce Participation Rate (FWPR), this number, the Institute of Social Studies Trust conducted a field study, where the time spent on different activities by everyone, starting with children above the age of five, was collected from a sample of households stratified according to economic class. This calculation of Women Participation Rate (WPR) by collating their activities revealed their ‘real participation rate’ and their economic value. It also drew attention to the faultlines in the investigative methodology.
The probe8 revealed that the methodology by which the workers were counted was such that it excluded the counting of certain types of work by women. Further in responding to the schedule, the questionnaire from which the data was collected, the self perception of women led to their exclusion.
It further challenged the view that men were the ‘primary bread winners’ and women were ‘supplementary bread winners’—the word ‘supplementary bread winners is used across the board for women. It was found that among the really landless i.e., the deeply landless households where there was no land, not even ‘homestead land’, it was seen that more women were engaged in economic activity than men. This led to challenging the view that the male was the main bread winner.
Finance and support to households usually took note of the man’s occupation, and not the woman’s. For example, he may be a cart puller, but she may be a weaver. So credit programmes designed for the poorest households were shown that there was need to include her also for credit.9
This and other studies led to a widespread interest in examining and changing the data base, the understanding of phenomena. The concept of missing women by Sen and the development of gender specific indices by the UN, the change in the perception of the household surveys format by the UN Stat office e.g., the breaking open of the household into its individuals, looking at intra-household inequalities—all these issues became a major subject of research and advocacy, apart from influencing policy.
The Oppression of Vocabulary: If we look at what the body of feminist literature is revealing, it basically wants to stand most of the existing vocabulary of classification on its head. Feminist scholars have made dramatic and sometimes angry inroads into the vocabulary used to describe phenomena, apart from the very basis, the facts from which theories of knowledge are drawn.
To illustrate: In India forest produce is defined in two categories, major forest produce and minor forest produce. Major forest produce is timber and minor is leaves and twigs and berries and roots and gums that you pick up from the trees. It is now well established that the volume and value of minor forest products, not only in India, but in the rest of the Third World, are greater than the volume and value of what is called major forest produce.10 Minor forest produce is not only an activity in which the majority of the masses engage in but it also produces products which are used by the masses. Further, its attack on trees is less vicious than that of major forest produce. Yet the words minor and major are being used and thereby the attention by the state to this product and the workers in it is invisible. Incidentally women are the major ‘workers’ in the collection of these items, as can be seen in the occupational classification. It comes under free collection of forest produce, and as such has not been given a value either to the workers or to the product.
‘Formal-informal’, ‘organized/unorganized’ are names given to economic spaces and forms of work and they are misnomers if seen from Africa or Asia. Small business, the producers and vendors who predominate the private sector, often are the backbone of the trade in certain countries like Ghana, the Caribbean and Indian States like Manipur, but are marginalized as ‘petty vendors’.11 But this is the manufacturing and trading sector of the South, not the big business that gets centre-stage in accounting and attention.
Further the unorganized sector is extremely organized in different ways. Most of these forms are exploitative and unless named and understood correctly, will continue to be exploited. Around 95 per cent of India’s GDP is coming from the informal economy and 80 to 90 per cent of jobs, even though at the worst level, are coming from the informal economy. So, the major areas of production and trade as operated by the poor and the masses, are called informal and yet it is the central mode of production and trade and from the employment point of view.
Hence it can be seen that gendered analysis of phenomena, whether data collection, or programme design or even vocabularies, is not only revelatory in terms of revealing the reality, but can also improve the effective translation of policy into programme. Feminist economists however would go further and argue that their work challenges the very basic arguments in economics.
Taking note of this valuable area of knowledge construction could enhance the efficacy of policy and programme, apart from drawing attention to the intellectual skills of women.
Devaki Jain* is founder director of Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) and one of the founding members of the Indian Association of Women Studies.
Neha Choudhary is an MPhil scholar in Women and Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi.
References:
* Assisted by Neha Choudhary.
1 Inequality Matters: Report of the World Social Situation 2013 -Humanity Divided: Confronting Inequality in Developing Countries, UNDP Bureau for Development Policy, New York 2013 -UNCTAD Report, in 2010 -International Labour Organization’s contribution 2014.
2 Jain, D. (2014) ‘Exploring Economic Inequality from Piketty: Through Arvind Adiga to Gandhi’, Lecture delivered at Azim Premji University.
3 Devaki Jain Women’s Participation in the History of Ideas and Reconstructing Knowledge, Lecture delivered at National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, 2014.
4 Helen E. Longino, ‘Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Problems of Knowledge’, Signs 19, No. 1 (Autumn 1993) 201–212.
5 Jain, D. and Elson, D. (Eds.) (2012) Harvesting Feminist Knowledge for Public Policy: Rebuilding Progress, Sage Publications: New Delhi.
6 Jain, D. and Banerjee, N. (1985) Tyranny of the Household: Investigative Essays on Women’s Work, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd.: New Delhi. -Chandrasekhar, CP and Ghosh, J. (2014) Growth, Employment Patterns and Inequality in Asia: A Case Study of India, ILO Asia-Pacific Working Paper Series. -Majumdar, I. and Neetha N. (2011) Gender Dimensions: Employment Trends in India 1993–94 to 2009–10, Occassional Paper No. 6, CWDS.
7 Jain, D. (2007) The Value of Time Use Studies in Gendering Policy and Programme, Presented at the International Seminar on Mainstreaming Time Use Survey in the National Statistical System in India, 24–25, May 2007.
8 Jain, D. (1996) Valuing Work Time as a Measure in Economic and Political Weekly, 31(46): p. 46–57.
9 Krishnaswamy, K.S. and Rajagopal, S. (1985) Women in Employment: A Micro Study in Karnataka in Jain, D. and Banerjee, N. (Eds.) (1985) Tyranny of the Household: Investigative Essays on Women’s Work, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi. The article is based on the Institute Of Social Studies Trust Bangalore Report, Integrating Women’s Interests into State Five-Year Plan: Submitted to the Ministry of Social Welfare, Government of India in September 1984.
10 Khare, Arvind, 1987, Small Scale Forest Enterprises in India with Special Reference to Roles of Women—National Review Paper, ISST, New Delhi.
11 Sengupta, A. (2007) Report on the Conditions of Work and Promotions of Livelihood in the Unorganized Sector, Dolphin Printo Graphics.