“A text is like medicine,” the art critic Pauline Kael complained in the mid-1990s. “[I]t’s a book you don’t want to read that is supposed to be good for you.” Footnote 1 Begrudgingly, she made an exception for texts in more technical fields, such as economics, where material can be reduced and codified, where tastes can be assumed, where standards of excellence and significance can be enforced by institutional authority.
Mukesh Eswaran’s Why Gender Matters in Economics is an oddity. Designed for a course on Women in the Economy, the text artfully demonstrates how economic thinking adds value to debates about sex and gender and how considerations of women have forced a reconsideration of the “science” of economics. In light of recent student-led demands for more diversity in the teaching of economics, it stands as a considerable achievement. Had the text offered a more playful alternative to the prosaic thought exercises and discussion questions that end the chapters, even the cranky Kael might have drunk the medicine and found it good for her.
The text promises a “comprehensive view of the economic lives of women” (ix). Building on the contributions of a long list of pioneering women economists—Esther Boserup, Joyce P. Jacobsen, Francine D. Blau, Nancy Folbre, Claudia Goldin, Marianne Ferber, and Anne E. Winkler, among others—it extends the analytical, topical, and geographical reach of women’s economic activities beyond labor markets to “sites of struggle” that produce different outcomes for women and men and occasionally different gendered behaviors in rich and poor economies. Gender and sex are not conceptually unpacked. The text follows common practice among economists in treating them as interrelated and contextually determined. The goal is to show how different economic outcomes matter to an understanding of women’s roles and to account for the differences.
The building blocks of empirical and theoretical scaffolding emerge from Eswaran’s impressively wide-ranging interdisciplinary synthesis of the literature, which keeps economic chauvinism at bay. Economic explanations compete for interpretive space with those of psychology, evolutionary biology, feminist economics, Marxism, and post-modernism. The value of the various approaches depends on how effectively they explain the differences in gendered behavior and outcomes that emerge in different situations at different sites. Eswaran places more value than I do on the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology and biology when trying to understand why men are more likely than women to engage in risk-taking and entrepreneurship, and why women are more disposed than men to save money (155, 143). I am concerned that his caveats about not using such arguments to justify the status quo might well go unnoticed. There are clearly more insights to be drawn from business, economic, and women’s history, especially when discussing the constraints and changes in social mores and customs. Moreover, given that most academic journals prove far more willing to publish articles about gender differences than similarities, I wonder about possible bias in the selection of sources.
Eswaran is optimistic that students with only a basic knowledge of economics can master the material. I am not so sure. Four modules are used to organize information. The first module introduces students to “fundamental matters,” which are defined as the “core mechanisms—economic, psychological, and social factors—that determine gender differences in behavior” (3). The language alone signals something different about an economist’s habit of thought. The OED traces the roots of “mechanism” to “contrivance, a machine-like structure of action linked to nature” (1756). Focusing on how and why an effect is produced tilts economics more toward the sciences. The tilt is no reason for more humanistically inclined students to disregard economics. The beauty of Eswaran’s “tilt” is that it manages to convey how a consideration of causal mechanisms can actually open rather than close debates about gender difference. As historians well understand, creative sense-making sometimes demands that old habits of thought be broken.
The title of a chapter in the first module asks a common-sense question: “Do Women and Men Behave Differently in Economic Situations?” The evidence and arguments about whether women are more altruistic, risk averse, and non-competitive sets a lively stage for learning about observer bias and the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary, feminist, and postmodern views of gender difference. In my own experience, micro-level analyses prove popular with students precisely because they focus on behaviors of individuals, groups, and institutions that students care about and have some familiarity with. Negotiating for grades or parental money means that most students already intuitively understand the power of bargaining models. Eswaran enlists Marxism to discuss the origins and consequences of patriarchy, a theme that runs through the text and illuminates other situations of exploitation.
A second module positions gender in markets. Eswaran presents evidence about differences in access to credit, about wage discrimination, and the advantages and disadvantages of globalization. He explains the logic underlying models of taste and statistical discrimination and the efficiency wage theory of discrimination. The links between asset ownership, the level of wealth, and entrepreneurship are clarified. If women are denied access to credit, they cannot borrow, and if they cannot borrow, they have a much harder time becoming entrepreneurs. How wealth is distributed makes a difference. This is especially true in developing economies, where wealth is based on land ownership and is primarily in the control of men who shape the laws of inheritance in their own interests. Whether or not discrimination can be found and measured, Eswaran concludes that women are disadvantaged by greater family responsibilities and a lack of collateral. The Heckscher–Ohlin trade model helps to illuminate an intriguing paradox about the different gendered outcomes for trade liberalization in rich and poor countries. Skills matter. To the extent that women are more unskilled than men, increased trade benefits women more than men. Poorer countries with a larger unskilled labor force, therefore, should experience a decline in the gender wage gap while the opposite should occur in skill-abundant rich economies. The gendered effects of foreign direct investment are found to be more favorable for women in developing economies than in the developed world, since women in poorer economies tend to work in lower-paying domestic sectors and thereby benefit from the relatively higher wages offered by multinationals. Darker lessons about globalization emerge from India, where investments in human capital worsened the plight of female victims and increased the profitability of male-run trafficking business. As for the evidence about and the explanations for a possible gender gap in opinions about trade liberalization, Eswaran punts, recommending more research.
A third module traverses the hotly contested terrain of marriage and fertility. A discussion of how and why men derive more benefits both from the institution of marriage and from divorce is as sobering as it is eye-opening. Tough-to-discuss issues like monogamy, spousal violence, divorce, contraception, and abortion are dealt with sensitively and even-handedly. To help students learn how women can be both propagators and victims of fertility decline, Eswaran discusses marital interactions and choices, employing the concept of present value to compare and add the benefits and costs that accrue at different points in time.
In the fourth and final module, Eswaran negotiates a political turn that involves policy recommendations to empower women. Saving policy for last is strategic and effective. Without understanding the reasons why different economic outcomes have disadvantaged women more than men, the politics of suffrage, and the political consequences of the right to vote make little sense. As Eswaran notes, “unless a person has the right to vote she or he is not really acknowledged to be a person” (305). Evidence from previous chapters show a strong link between women’s autonomy and economic independence. The final chapters ask why women were denied the vote for so long, why they received it when they did, and how the right to vote mattered to women’s well-being and to the shaping of government policies. The median voter theory is pulled from the toolkit of political scientists to implicate self-interested men in the passage of suffrage. Women’s voting preferences and attitudes about political parties are compared with those of men. Women are shown to have stronger preferences for public goods and favor more government spending; their political views appear to lean more to the left than the right. They even self-report as being happier than men.
The text’s collective findings and explanatory offerings underscore the significance of the policy recommendations that close the discussion. Eswaran values the capabilities approach developed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and refined by Martha Nussbaum. If women are to become who they want to be, they need the means to achieve their capabilities: better access to education, credit, and health care; greater political representation; and reforms of property and inheritance laws. These are not novel proposals, but in Eswaran’s hands they emerge organically from his evidentiary and theoretical materials.
“Gender” not only matters in economics. It matters to the study of economics. Gendered inequalities cannot be explained away. There have been and continue to be measurably noticeable gaps in performance, wages, entrepreneurship, politics, and, yes, even in those self-reported claims of happiness. Some gaps have narrowed and some have widened. As Eswaran cautions, the process of economic development does not automatically solve the problems of gender inequalities. In light of the enormity of the world’s problems, women may simply be no less unhappy than men.
Eswaran does not have definitive answers. Part of the appeal of his text is his appreciation of the limit of economic models, his focus on the dynamics of human interaction and reaction, his unwillingness to segregate the study of women and men, and his sensitivity to context.
Context matters, more so for women than for men, as economic experiments with contemporary subjects have demonstrated. However, context also matters to the professions and to an understanding of professionalizing processes. Economics continues to lag behind most fields in the number of female full professors. Only the physical sciences fare worse. Why has it taken so long for a comprehensive economics text about women to appear? Why has Eswaran accomplished what other economists have not? If the personal is political, as women’s rights advocates maintain, might not the professional be personal and political? Eswaran is a development economist and the father of two daughters. Evidence has shown that people’s political voting preferences depend in part on the sex composition of children in their families and that parents with daughters tend to affiliate with left-wing parties. As Eswaran himself suggests, “This may be an avenue through which men begin to appreciate and adopt feminist views” (332).
Hooray to that.
