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In their 2019 Emissions Gap Report, the U.N. states that transitioning to a zero-carbon economy by 2050 will cost between $1.6-$3.8 trillion annually. While this is an enormous amount of money, to put it into context, $16.7 trillion was spent globally by May 2021 on COVID-19 measures. It is also worth noting that should global temperatures warm by 2degC, then the cost to the global economy is estimated at between $10-$20 trillion a year, a fivefold increase. The cost of action will rise each year governments drag their feet. It will never be cheaper than $1.6-$3.8 trillion.

Now we have seen what it will cost, the big question should be where this funding comes from? One source of funding could come from military budgets which total approximately $2 trillion a year and contribute around 6% of global CO2 emissions. As military budgets are sold to citizens as a defense strategy, their use to defend us from runaway climate chaos is clearly warranted. A further source of funding, and one that is equally justified, is a global wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires. Why is this justified? Well, research is clear that emissions are closely correlated with wealth, and as we live in a world where we are taught to be responsible for our actions, it seems fair that the more you have contributed to the problem, the more you should pay to solve it. Research by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute found that the richest 10% (over $38,000) were responsible for 49% of emissions, the richest 5% contributed 37% of emissions while the wealthiest 1% (over $109,000) created around 15%. The poorest 50% of humanity contributed almost nothing. This should be enough evidence to refute the often-cited words that "population is the problem". If the top half of earners lived like the bottom 50% then global emissions would be just 14% of their current total and could be balanced through natural carbon sequestration.

Though most people naturally dislike inequality, it’s often argued that raising taxes on the rich will do more harm than good by damaging incentives and investment, thereby slowing economic growth and ultimately hurting us all. “Given five fat sheep and ninety-five thin, how [to] induce the ninety-five to resign to the five the richest pasture and shadiest corners?” the famous British philosopher R.H. Tawney once asked. He continued: “By convincing them, obviously, that, if they do not, they will die of rot, be eaten by wolves, and be deprived in the meantime of such pasture as they have. Nor, indeed, hitherto has it been difficult to convince them, for there is nothing which frightens thin sheep like the fear of being thinner.” But is it really true that high taxes — even very high ones — are detrimental to societal well-being? The last few years have witnessed an explosion of new evidence from economists, sociologists, political scientists and ecologists that suggests they’re not. Exaggerated concerns It’s accurate that high taxes on the wealthy bring real risks. But in general, the downsides are highly overblown. For instance, a common worry is that rich people will respond to high taxes by working less. But there’s essentially zero empirical support for this claim. In fact, there is now close to consensus among researchers that while the rich do frequently try to avoid taxes, they don’t do so by working less. The most serious potential cost of high taxes is the reduction of private investment. This is definitely possible. But the key point to keep in mind is that such a reduction is only half the picture. It’s wrong to think of taxes as simply reducing investment, because states do not simply collect taxes — they also spend them. Therefore it’s more accurate to regard taxes not as reducing investment but as rearranging it — from the private sector to the public. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends entirely on the details. In many cases, levying high taxes on the rich will mean money is no longer invested in foreign stock markets or spent on unproductive things like private jets and multiple mansions, but is rather spent on productivity-enhancing entities like schools, hospitals, roads, public research grants and so on. Indeed, critical research shows that, all things considered, high inequality actually tends to reduce an economy’s overall growth rate. The most sensible and cautious conclusion is that high taxes — very high taxes, in particular — could somewhat reduce economic growth, but these costs are likely to be only mild or moderate. What about the other side of the ledger? What are the social and economic benefits from high taxes and reduced inequality?

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the advanced research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — recently launched a program to develop new innovations for tackling threats and advances inherent within the rapidly changing biointelligence and biosecurity landscapes.

The Biointelligence and Biosecurity for the Intelligence Community (B24IC) program represents the Intelligence Community’s (IC) latest investment in research that pushes the boundaries of our biointelligence and biosecurity understanding and technologies. The resulting innovations could have far-reaching impacts, with the potential to develop new ways to collect, detect, analyze, and prevent traditional biothreats, while addressing possibilities and dangers associated with biotechnology. To address these challenges, the IC seeks to advance research across multiple biology sub-disciplines.

Economist Paul Collier once wrote that “war is development in reverse.” That conflict inevitably produces poverty and hunger is a theory that has been tested—and proven true—in every major clash across human history. It is believed, for example, that more people died of starvation and starvation-related disease than from combat during the Second World War.

But it is also true that hunger and food insecurity can lead to instability. There is a vicious feedback loop between conflict and hunger currently at play in dozens of countries around the world. War drives hunger and hunger drives war.

During this year’s International Food Aid and Development Conference (IFADC), food security featured prominently as both a major concern and a primary program focus for current and future USDA projects. Each year the IFADC brings together USDA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, private sector companies and voluntary organizations who collaborate throughout the year to provide America’s food aid and assistance to the world’s neediest people. This week I joined USDA and USAID leaders in Kansas City to address this important subject.

You may not be aware, but the United States is the largest provider of food assistance in the world. Over the past 10 years, we have supplied about one-half of total international food assistance, and in 2009 alone United States programs reached over 70 million people worldwide.

A recent research brief from Oxfam International, Profiting from Pain, uncovers the massive wealth inequalities that contribute to global food insecurity. While prices of food, energy, and other basic items rose from 2019 to 2022, the brief finds companies including Cargill and Walmart earned more than they have over the last 23 years. Oxfam reports that there are now 2,668 billionaires in the world–that is 573 more billionaires compared to 2019. At the same time, between 2019 and 2022, a quarter of a million people around the world experienced poverty and food insecurity. Irit Tamir, Director of Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department, tells Food Tank, “if governments were able to tax the wealthiest, there would be more money available to invest in poverty-busting public services like education, health, and social care.” Tamir says that taxing industries on excess profits can help redistribute wealth to vulnerable communities. She explains that industries charging more for basic items, including food, throughout the pandemic, should be taxed accordingly. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, food price inflation, compounded by supply chain and labor shortages, has added to an already unstable food system. The brief finds that corporate tax breaks have increased profits for the wealthiest companies in the food, energy, pharmaceutical, and technology sectors. In the food and agriculture sector for instance, billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by US$382 billion between 2020 and 2022. According to the brief, together with just three other companies, the Cargill family dominates 70 percent of the global agriculture market. In 2021, Cargill made US$5 billion in net income, its largest profit ever. The company’s profits are expected to increase further in 2022. Archer-Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and (Louis)-Dreyfus have consolidated power over years through their roles in biofuels investment, large-scale land acquisitions, and financialization of agriculture commodity markets, Tamir explains. This consolidated power makes supply chains more vulnerable to price shocks, climate change, and conflict, and concentrates “greater power in fewer people.” Additionally, the food and technology industries avoid taxes which perpetuate this corporate consolidation of power. Tamir mentions that companies including Amazon “park their intellectual property in tax havens.” This tax loophole is bad for everyone because, “it deprives governments of much needed revenue for public services or food aid when a crisis hits, like the one we’re seeing now in the horn [of Africa],” Tamir tells Food Tank, referring to the worsening drought, causing a hunger crisis that will impact 20 million people by United Nations estimates. Tamir hopes to see the United States Congress introduce tax reform outlined in the Build Back Better proposal that can help close corporate tax avoidance loopholes and prevent tax haven abuse. Oxfam also urges governments to create immediate and permanent billionaire tax policies to support the most vulnerable members of society. Argentina, for example, has introduced a one-time wealth tax on its wealthiest citizens as part of the country’s COVID-19 recovery plan. In the past, other countries, such as Thailand, have introduced progressive taxes to promote social welfare for their most vulnerable communities. Since 2001, Thailand’s Universal Coverage Scheme provides free healthcare to a population of 65 million people by taxing its wealthiest members, and, Tamir mentions, “the system was implemented when Thailand had the same per capita income as the U.S. did in 1930.” “Costa Rica is another example that has universal public services,” Tamir tells Food Tank, referring to the country’s free education and public healthcare programs. “Nepal, Sri Lanka, these are countries that are not wealthy countries and yet have been able to provide universal public services through taxation.”

In recent months, reporting by ProPublica confirmed that some of the wealthiest billionaires in the United States are paying virtually no income tax on the incredible gains in their fortunes.1 Worse, a massive loophole in the tax code allows these billionaires and other wealthy Americans to escape income tax on their gains for their entire lifetimes—even as regular Americans pay income tax on every paycheck.

To pay for the transformative investments in his Build Back Better agenda, President Joe Biden has proposed tax reforms to close a capital gains loophole favoring the wealthiest Americans. This change is the most important way that Biden’s plan combats the tax code’s preferential treatment of income from wealth over income from work.

Economists have frequently argued that a negative income tax would be an improvement on the motley of programs that have been used to redistribute income.13 In the U.S., an NIT received support from a wide spectrum of economists, was given serious consideration by high ranking members of the Johnson administration, and came very close to being enacted in the form of Nixon's Family Assistance Plan. But it seems that the NIT has fallen out of favor with both politicos and economists. One explanation for its present status could be its work disincentive; FAP drew a great deal of criticism and invective for guaranteeing an income to the “"indolent and malingering.'' Our analysis shows that under majority rule, the work disincentive from negative income taxation could be an impediment to its adoption.

When government spending is high, it is possible that the electorate would support a proportional income tax over a tax that provides for cash transfers to low income households. A simple computational model indicated that with per capita government spending at 20% of average household income, roughly the current level of U.S. government spending, a majority of households may prefer a proportional tax to a linear income tax that provides for income transfers.14

What Can Feminist Political Ecology Bring to Degrowth?” of “Contours of Political Feminist Ecology”, Gender, Development and Social Change Special Series, (2023), Palgrave Macmillan)

Degrowth is both an academic and activist framework, which seeks alternatives to current patterns of economic and socio-ecological destruction and calls for movement towards a fair and liveable future for all. Degrowth proposes a scaling down of certain sectors and aspects of the economy (such as advertising, the military industrial complex, planned obsolescence of products, and the fossil fuel industry) and supports other kinds of economies and policies (such as shorter working weeks, a care income, economies of renewables, and strong public education and healthcare systems). Degrowth transformations are envisioned as taking place in equitable and democratic ways by strategically addressing privileges so as to avoid abrupt changes that will negatively impact the most vulnerable groups and exacerbate injustice (Chertkovskaya et al., 2019; D’Alisa et al., 2014; Liegey et al., 2020; Paulson et al., 2020). Through interdisciplinary analysis, including with and through social movements and grassroots initiatives, degrowth aims to debunk the idea that continuous economic growth is necessary for modern life and civilisation, and that tweaked versions of “green growth” are capable of addressing the interrelated crises of ecological destruction, social injustice, and climate change. As Schneider and Pope (2020) eloquently summarise “degrowth is not a passive critique but an active project of hope”. However, the central issue of unequal power and privilege is often left unquestioned in degrowth propositions, especially in terms of who needs to or can afford to “degrow”, whose claims and demands are represented in the degrowth movement, and how subaltern, racialised, and gendered communities at the global and local levels would be impacted by degrowth initiatives, policies, and approaches (Smith et al., 2021). While these tensions and questions are common in many articulations of alternatives (Argüelles et al., 2017), we feel it is important to interrogate power relationships in emerging imaginaries of radical socio-ecological change like degrowth. In this chapter, we outline ways in which feminist political ecology (FPE) perspectives can contribute to degrowth analysis and political strategy. We aim to strengthen the radical potential of degrowth by problematising and pushing forward the questions of who is recognised in, or can be part of, degrowth communities of practice and thought. An emerging realm of FPE scholarship focuses on power analyses in degrowth (Paulson, 2017), with particular attention to coloniality (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019), race (Abazeri, 2022; Gilmore, 2013), class and labour (Barca, 2019), and gender (FaDA, 2020; Saave-Harnack et al., 2019). Neera Singh (2019), for example, stresses the need for deeper mutual learning between environmental justice movements of the global South and degrowth, in order to discover common ontological grounds for “other ways of being”. She argues that an examination of on-the-ground practices and epistemologies of local communities can help “reconceptualize work and care in a post-production, post-growth world” (Singh, 2019, p. 139). In a similar vein, Padini Nirmal and Dianne Rocheleau (2019) propose a feminist and decolonial perspective on degrowth that is “materially and ecologically rooted and culturally expanded” through practices of “re-rooting and re-commoning” (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019, p. 470), what they refer to as “regrowth”— practices of regeneration and collective flourishing that counter the destructive legacies and paradigms of colonialist expansion and capitalist forms of growth. Feminist economists have been among the first to criticise GDP growth from the point of view of class, gender, and colonial inequalities (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019; Wichterich, 2014). As scholars and activists from the “Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance” (FaDA) have highlighted, rather than understanding degrowth as just about shrinking the economy, degrowth should be focused on transforming core institutions that govern production and reproduction, inspired by and grounded in feminist traditions (Saave-Harnack et al., 2019). Part of this vision and challenge is to re-situate and re-value care at the centre of socio-ecological processes and systems: to treat care as a core common for a liveable future. But what is meant by the term and concept of care? And what kind of caring practices and communities can support a radical social transformation? FPE seeks to answer these questions in diverse ways. FPE is a convening space of research and ideas where scholars theorise different forms of power and access to resources. FPE understands people as embodied and emotional beings with “complex and shifting relationships to the natural world, embedded in place and shaped by interactions of gender, race, class, caste, culture, age (and so on)”, moving towards environmental and social justice (Resurrección, 2017, p. 74). In FPE, the concept of care is theorised in various ways. In their edited volume, for example, Wendy Harcourt and Christine Bauhardt (2018), delineate some main threads of thought around care as the gendered work of social reproduction: care as a form of commoning; care as looking after and providing for human and nonhuman others; and care as interspecies reciprocity and more-than-human relations. FPE thus highlights the central role of socio-ecological production and reproduction and the labour of care as the foundation of planetary well-being by asking more specifically: in what ways can economies be transformed in terms of provisioning and care while degrowing in a socially just manner? What can we learn, in this regard, from communities who are fighting every day for environmental and social justice, or simply for their own well-being and survival on earth? This learning might well go beyond social reproduction and the care of human families and communities to include the work of “earthcare” (Merchant, 1989) and environmental struggles in the defence of and care for more-than-human others (Barca, 2020b; Fragnito & Tola, 2021). What would this expanded understanding of care, beyond but including social reproduction, mean for a new politics of care commoning? As Chizu Sato and Jozelin Soto Alarcón point out, “community is, by definition, constituted through commoning. It is the process and site of being produced through sharing a property, a practice, or a knowledge” (2019, p. 38). Building on these different understandings of care, we ask: what are caring communities in a post-capitalist, post-growth future and what are the main challenges ahead?

Yet even accepting gender-responsiveness – or more radically still, the transformation of gender relations – as the goal, many questions remain with regard to how such concepts are mobilized in practice, what facets of gender (in)equality are prioritized, and what theories of change are deployed. In the spirit of evidence-based policymaking, we suggest that better systems design should begin with an overview of the research landscape in order to clarify which ‘system focused’ questions, topics and (political) approaches have received relatively more robust treatment and which areas merit further elaboration. While there has been much-needed recent work to synthesize knowledge on social protection systems generally (Loewe and Schüring, 2021), to our knowledge, no such endeavour has been undertaken from a gender perspective. This article addresses this gap in the literature around gender and social protection systems through a phased scoping review of academic and grey (policy) publications. The review aimed to answer the following questions: (1) What evidence exists on gender and social protection systems? and (2) What does the existing evidence base tell us about gender and social protection systems? In addition to a scholarly contribution, this article seeks to provide policymakers, practitioners, donors and advocates with a practical map of what is already known and what has yet to be discovered and developed. The article begins by outlining our study design. Section ‘Study design’ describes the composition of the evidence base, including characteristics such as share of research that is academic or policy-oriented, type of research outputs and geographical focus. In section ‘Results’ we discuss the content of the evidence base in terms of conceptual frameworks utilized and components of social protection systems under inquiry (e.g. administration, financing, etc.). We conclude with a discussion of the results and implications for future research and practice.

A paramount but under-studied institutional issue is the financing of social protection systems from a gender perspective. In a reflection on lessons learned in the Caribbean, Iyahen (2017) notes that economic stagnation and high debt burdens undercut opportunities for much-needed investments in gender-responsive social protection systems, and that under such constraints, knowledge sharing spaces that bring together gender equality advocates with high-level policy decision-makers are critical. Another study looking at 28 OECD countries found that women did not benefit at the same rate as men from stimulus packages following the 2008–2009 financial crisis due to sectoral segregation; moreover, cuts to social protection deepened women’s unpaid care burden, making them less able to take advantage of employment opportunities where these existed (Kushi and McManus, 2019). A call was issued for studies exploring how to finance gender-responsive social protection systems in the context of increasing labour informality, tax avoidance and capital flight (Bastagli and Hunt, 2020). Few studies explicitly addressed the issue of coordination of national social protection systems with other policy areas. One of these was the Rubery (2015) article on social protection and labour policy discussed above. Another identified a need for coordination between social protection systems and infrastructure – principally access to water – in order to address the gendered impacts of climate change (Mushunje and Sewpaul, 2018). Women interviewed reported that as men migrated out of rural communities, women were faced with managing crops; while they had diversified their income streams where possible, they identified a need for social assistance and consistent irrigation to prevent food insecurity during periods of drought.

To adopt a feminist perspective is, first and foremost, to bring perception of legal and social arrangements to bear upon a largely gender-neutral understanding of them.31 The object is to highlight the assumptions embedded in such arrangements, assumptions rendered invisible by, among other things, the allegedly 'objective of traditional academia. Feminism thus presupposes that gender32 has a much greater structural and/or discursive significance than is commonly assumed, a significance which is ideologically but not practically diminished by its relative invisibility. In this sense, feminism purports to offer a better understanding of the social world by addressing aspects which have hitherto been ignored or misrepresented,33 while, at the same time, countering the ideological effects to which such misperceptions give rise. The application of feminist perspectives to law has been characterized by a focus not just on law as a reform mechanism, or even as (part of) a system of capitalist and/or patriarchal oppression, but also as a body of knowledge which can be explored, dissected, and subjected to close critical scrutiny.34 Feminist legal scholarship sets out to show how gender is both ignored and enshrined in legal theory and practice by highlighting the ways in which it is replicated and constructed in legal discourse. One approach involves analysis of how women are disadvantaged by rules formally complying with the rule of law. The gist of such work is to demonstrate how 'gender-neutral' laws can impact upon men and women differentially.35 Another closely related approach considers the extent to which legal concepts are gendered not just in their application, but also in their meaning and scope. The liberal legal idea of the 'individual rights-bearer', for example, has been said to rest on an implicit notion of the physically separate ('autonomous') person,36 thus rendering it ill-equipped to resolve the legal and moral dilemmas thrown up by pregnancy. Similarly, the rooting of concepts of property and contract in public discourse, commercial practices, and the historical commodification of women's bodies has, it is argued, made them poor mechanisms for conceptualizing and regulating intimate relations or facilitating egalitarian social change.37 Yet another feminist approach examines the myriad ways in which law constructs gender by invoking images of 'woman' - the 'good' battered wife,38 the 'bad' mother,39 the deserving and undeserving homemaker,40 the 'real' rape victim.41 These images serve to coerce women, both by penalizing them for corresponding or failing to correspond to the image invoked by law and by beguiling or 'con[ning]' them into believing that 'certain identities are natural and inevitable'.42 Thus, in feminist legal theory, the legal subject is posited, not as the abstract, ungendered creature of the traditional legal imagination but as an ideological construct, endowed with attributes that vary according to context, and compel particular (gendered) perceptions of the social world.43 The feminist unpacking of the largely hidden gendered content of law has operated in tandem with its strategic deployment to advance women's interests. An understanding of law as irretrievably 'male', while often attributed to feminism, is not a position generally cohering with the theoretical or practical orientation of feminists working in law.44 The recognition that law is gendered in ways which produce or contribute to inequality has resulted not in its eschewal but, rather, in careful, painstaking, and highly contextualized assessments of the strategic implications of legal engagement.45 The object has been to harness law's instrumental and discursive power to particular feminist goals - improving the rights of pregnant workers, securing better financial provision for women in divorce, protecting them (and their children) from physical and sexual abuse - while, at the same time, exploring how law's (mis)representations46 contribute to the perpetuation of women's disadvantaged status. Of course, it remains possible and, indeed, increasingly, common, to bring a gender perspective to bear upon law without any concomitant concern with advancing women's interests. The concern may be to improve the legal and social position of gays or transsexuals47 or, even, heterosexual men,48 or there may be no (articulated) political concern driving the engagement beyond that of 'excavating' law's gendered content. In this latter context, the growing theoretical emphasis on the performative dimension of law as a 'gendering practice' is illustrative of a shift in feminist focus away from a direct concern with women's disadvantage towards a broader engagement with law's discursive significance. From such a perspective, the stock of characters (male and female) depicted by law are not simply 'fictions' who fail to comply with the 'reality' of men and women's lives; they are, rather, constitutive of that reality, part of the process of gender identity formation.49 Within such a theoretical framework, law is relocated as one of a range of practices through which gender is acquired, a process of which gender and gender differences are an effect. The object of feminist legal theory is reconceived in terms of analysing law's role in gendering subjectivity50 and, although the concern of the analyst may well be women's disadvantage, it does not have to be ... or, does it?

We will now present this reading in its various dimensions, together with feminist calls for action in several domains. This action should allow progress to be made in the transformation of the neoclassical model in the short term with measures to fulfill present needs and desires. It should also open a path to develop new logics and dynamics that would promote other kinds of life that are both possible and good. Feminist economics argues that traditional economic thought has historically ignored gender issues by disregarding or underestimating women’s lives and work. Mainstream economics also places humans outside and above nature, seeing it as a “free” resource that can be exploited without restrictions (Mellor 1997). This biased vision hampers conventional economics from addressing rigorously the factors that have taken humanity from preindustrial times to the current state of ecological overshoot, which is caused by unsustainable patterns of extraction, consumption, and discharge of effluents. Such processes as global warming, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion are evidence of this overshoot, to which only partial and insufficient answers are being given. In the neoliberal model of indiscriminate trade openness, commodification of all natural resources, destruction of peasantry and indigenous cultures, and cancellation of food security and food self-sufficiency policies, all solutions are designed from an eco-efficiency perspective in which short-term interests still prevail in green and competitive economies (Carpintero 2013). By contrast, the transitions proposed by ecological and feminist economics show respect for the natural cycles of the ecosystems and concern for the general well-being of fairer and more democratic societies (Perkins and Kuiper 2005). The goal of an eco-feminist transition is a system of resource production, consumption, and redistribution that operates within ecological and climatic boundaries, and a change in people’s imagery, value systems, and symbologies that develop sustainable life patterns by taking into account real ecological conditions. FE gives rise to debates and analyses on various topics, such as: the characteristics of the present economy that have caused the crisis; the difficulties and contradictions inherent in the transition process; the possibilities for collaborative consumption; the myth of technological salvation; the importance of territorial planning and of the individual’s insertion into the community; and the necessary change in people’s subjectivities (Bauhardt 2014). FE has identified various types of bias in neoliberal economic politics and their corresponding impacts on women: • The deflationary bias. When market activity is kept below its potential, the first ones to be expelled from it are women, who are then consigned to unpaid work. • The privatizing bias. When the private sector is promoted over the public sector, the amount of unpaid or ill-paid care work increases. • The breadwinner bias. Neoliberal policies reinforce the traditional distribution of roles of male breadwinner and female caregiver. • The risk bias.The individualization of risk affects women in a particularly negative way by reducing social support in case of accidents or misfortune. • The credit bias. Financialization, by exacerbating the asymmetry between debtors and creditors, has a markedly negative impact on women. • The knowledge bias. When economic interests determine the forms of knowledge taught in universities, neoliberal policies are legitimized. (Elson 2002; Young, Bakker, and Elson 2011; Gálvez and Torres 2009) The structural adjustment measures of the 1980s in Latin America, Africa, and Asia and the austerity policies implemented after the last great economic crisis in Europe are clear manifestations of those biases (Benería, Berik, and Floro 2016). On paper, the basic objective of austerity measures is the correction of macroeconomic imbalances to lower inflation and reduce budget deficits and current account imbalances. In practice, however, neoliberal measures increase poverty rates and lead to increasing income inequality, low growth of real salaries, escalating family indebtedness, and intensification of unpaid work (Elson 2002). These aspects reveal connivance between patriarchal and capitalist structures; this is why they have a major gender impact.

For decades, feminist economists have challenged the ways in which traditional economic theories and assumptions forego any consideration of social provisioning, child and elder care, birth and other forms of feminized and gendered activities vital to the very ways we understand worth, utility, and productivity as they relate to the formation, organization, replication, and maintenance of our economies (Ferber & Nelson, 2009; Phillips & Taylor, 1980; Waring & Steinem, 1988; Woolley, 1993). Separately, but in a related fashion, feminist sociological analysis has demonstrated that the ways we theorize organizations and enact organizational life are gendered (Acker, 1990, 2006), demonstrating how the allocation of value to particular organizational processes and outcomes are gendered practices that favor men and the masculine. Joan Acker's prescient observation in 1973, as shared in the starting quote to this article, is a question around the way dominant perspectives arriving from mainstream economics and sociology still do not account for gender as an organizing principle of the economy and society—gender is relegated as an additional and different domain, beyond the interest of the largely male academic population. The pandemic has not only exposed the limitations of our traditional theories of the economy and society but also highlighted the various ways gendered labor in the form of domestic work, childbirth/care, and eldercare are the very foundations of economies and societies globally. The organization of these forms of labor has suffered an exogenous shock, to use economic nomenclature, laying bare the very ways in which work is dependent on gendered labor that is generally unremunerated and/or low‐paid and low‐status. These gendered activities around social provisioning, work, and labor literally create and anchor the economies and societies that we deem essential to our humanity. Yet in many ways, the understanding of gender as central to any notion of value, productivity and time remains squarely limited to the domain of feminist perspectives. This is the case even in scholarship that espouses critical philosophical traditions as their primary lens for understanding the social, economic, and political—and in fact, some of this scholarship engages in critical sexism in subsuming theorizing arriving from feminist traditions as outside of “mainstream” critical philosophies while centering on a disembodied approach. Meanwhile, feminist political theorists and activists have argued convincingly that the existence of women's reproductive work has been ignored. Silvia Federici's critique of capitalism illustrates that critical assessments of contemporary political economy have been overwhelmingly blind to “the significance of women's unpaid reproductive work in the process of capitalism” (Federici, 2013, np.). To recognize women's contribution to the economy historically, Federici shows how the function of the wage in capitalism created divisions between the working class and between men and women. In the 1970s, women's rights activists recognized women's unpaid labor as a source of exploitation. For the Wages for Housework movement (see, Federici, 1975), housework was a specific branch of capitalist production, that continued to render the sexual division of labor invisible. The revolt of women against housework in the 1960s exposed that the “value of labor is proven and created by its refusal” (Federici, 2013). The movement initiated by Leopoldina Fortunati, Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici refuted the model of reproduction, and from the mid‐1970s, women's private struggles were made visible, at least to those who were willing to pay attention. Of note, in the United States, the Welfare Mothers Movement worked to recognize the economic value of women's reproductive work and declared welfare a women's right. Historical divisions on the grounds of sex, class, and race remain and have been illuminated during the pandemic. Today, we see the continued omission of women's unpaid reproductive work and women's roles in the post‐Covid‐19 economic recovery. In Australia, the conservative government's 2020 budget faced significant criticism for prioritizing male‐dominated industry investment and failing to plan for women's return to work through paid childcare. In effect, the policy is based on the premise that recovery will be achieved by making sure men have jobs. This exemplifies how governments and capitalist institutions continue to ignore that the production of life is almost exclusively done by women, and that this is a taken for granted dimension of economic activity. As Federici surmises, “women continue to reproduce their families regardless of the value the marketplace places on their lives, valorizing their existence, reproducing them for their own sake, even when the capitalists declare their uselessness as labor‐power” (2013: np.). While the 20th century saw women's participation in the paid labor force increasingly significantly in many nations, the Covid‐19 pandemic witnessed a significant shift which pushed women back into the home as they lost their jobs. Capitalist organization of work and the relations of production during the pandemic have heightened the precarity of the paid employment of many women. As the world adapts to “COVID normal” workforce restructuring has become commonplace as a response, and the ways in which it affects women and the effects on the family require close monitoring. Moreover, the pandemic once again exposed the lack of attention that has been given to women's invisible and unpaid labor and the inequalities between women and men's labor‐power. In public discourse, almost no attention has been given to women's paid and unpaid labor perhaps because governments and institutions continue to be willfully blind to gender, or because they consider that it is in their best interest to continue to exploit women. And even in instances where women's withdrawal from paid/productive work in the economy to tend to the domestic sphere is acknowledged, little is being done to reorganize extant structures that have contributed to the ongoing inequalities in the formal and informal domains of work. Action is required to assert the gendered character of productive work and its contribution and value to the state and to society more generally. Redressing the “umbilical connection between the devaluation of reproductive work and the devaluation of women's social position” (Federici, 2013) is critical. There are five factors that we believe are worth drawing special attention to. First, the ways in which colonial capitalism manifests in economies requires close analysis to recognize systems of disadvantage that affect women's labor differently. Acknowledging the exploitation of women historically enables analysts to cost and recover the economic value of women's labor. Decolonial feminism exposes the impact of the crisis on individuals, health systems, and economies in the Global South highlight preexisting inequalities. As Al‐Ali (2020) discusses that specific risks and vulnerabilities are associated with intersectional preexisting inequalities in the Global South especially the wider challenges faced by LGBTQ populations, ethnic minorities, domestic workers, migrants, and sex workers. Considering transnational feminist solidarities, Al‐Ali highlights how against the background of gendered intersectional challenges, feminist initiatives, and mobilizations to deal with the crisis in specific local contexts as well as nationally, regionally, and transnationally are required. Al‐Ali alerts us to the need to attend to the pandemic‐induced “crisis of social reproduction.” Specifically, this draws attention to the effects on women as the main caregivers as well as addressing various forms of gender‐based violence, mounting poverty and limited access to resources and health services, which have become particularly devastating in marginalized and vulnerable communities in the Global South.

Feminist development and political economy literature currently finds itself in a peculiar position, where the high visibility of gender equality issues in global governance is tempered by the recognition of problematic associations between liberal feminism and neoliberal economic policies. As a result, significant debate has emerged in the field about the extent to which feminism has been forcibly coopted, seduced by, or consciously aligned with neoliberalism and the impact of prominent liberal feminist discourses which stress the instrumental value of gender equality for extant economic policies. This debate has revolved around a few key themes: the difference between rhetorical and substantive engagement with feminist aims, the peril of collaboration with mainstream governmental and financial institutions, and the future directions for feminist action. Overriding this debate is one central question: to what extent can these new, technocratic discourses of gender equality be identified as feminist? Do they represent feminism corrupted or simply fragmented? Ultimately, the question of ‘what is really feminist’ is an elusive and unproductive one because it can only be answered with reference to an arbitrary and subjective set of boundaries. Moreover, this kind of litmus test is anathema to the plural and inclusive nature of feminism. I have argued above that accounts of feminism’s co-optation by neoliberalism are flawed, in part because they misrecognize the efforts of feminists to work within institutions and develop politically resonant narratives that align feminist aims with the institutional priorities, and because in doing so they erase the diversity of feminist voices. The successes of liberal feminists to articulate a politically appealing account of gender equality as economic growth represents an ambiguous achievement, however, for the ways in which narratives of ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ legitimize harmful neoliberal economic policies, empower corporate actors in the governance process, compound the invisibility of social reproduction, and close off space for resistance by anti-capitalist feminists. Using Peck and Tickell’s roll-back and roll-out neoliberalisms as a framing device, I have suggested that new ‘Smart Economics’ gender equality initiatives are manifestations of roll-out neoliberalism which cannot be adequately explained through co-optation accounts, but which require direct engagement with the power of femocrats and corporations in the development process.

WHAT DOES EXTINCTIOPOLITICS DO? In the previous section, I refrained from critically analysing extinctiopolitics. However, even from a cursory overview of the field of existential risk studies, serious limitations are apparent. Building on the critical accounts of the field published in recent years, several key points should be highlighted. Normatively speaking, the total utilitarianism advanced by Bostrom and Ord appears to prioritise the survival of the human species over the wellbeing of actually existing people (The Dangerous Ideas; Democratising Risk). Karin Kuhlemann, adapting Parfit's example above, instructively contrasts two possible scenarios: one in which 'a global catastrophe causes ninety-nine per cent of the human population to slowly starve to death' and the second in which 'the human lineage gently dwindles into extinction without any suffering (e.g. because individuals lose interest in procreation)'. (33) On the logic of existential risk studies, the former scenario is preferable because, despite causing a huge amount of suffering to living people, it safeguards the future of the species. The utilitarian logic of extinctiopolitics sidelines the suffering of actual people and, worse, could be used to justify inflicting suffering in the name of protecting the future of humanity (Calamity Theory, p24, p52). (34) If it is the case that space colonisation is one of the best strategies for protecting the future of the species, any exploitation and oppression associated with initiatives like Musk's SpaceX are legitimate; they are a small price to be paid for reducing existential risk. The empirical account of the threats facing humanity can also be questioned. In particular, as discussed further below, since there is only a small possibility that climate change will totally eliminate humanity, it is deprioritised by philosophers associated with existential risk (see The Dangerous Ideas). Furthermore, while there is a particular focus on the risks posed by technology, such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, there is very little attention to the social and political structures that shape these technologies and how they are used. (35) Systematic discussions of capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and so on are entirely absent in the writings of Bostrom and Ord. Moreover, the field obscures the differential effects of catastrophes; the combined and uneven consequences of extinction across space and time are flattened. For instance, there is no acknowledgement that, for many Indigenous peoples, the end of the world is not something for the future but, instead, an event that has already happened (I return to this point in the final section). Finally, it is unclear whether the solutions posited by existential risk studies are adequate. Bostrom and Ord, against Gunther Anders' pessimistic claim in the face of nuclear disaster that 'the possibility of our self-extinction cannot end--except through the end itself', assert that humanity will eventually escape the age of existential risk. (36) In the utopian world imagined, preventing extinction is no longer a priority; existential risk will have been conquered. However, as others stress, the utopian ambitions of the field may increase rather than reduce existential risk. (37) For example, the advanced technologies required for space colonisation could be easily refunctioned for destructive ends and trigger what Daniel Deudney calls an 'astrocide', or 'the extinction of humanity caused directly or indirectly by largescale human space expansion' (Dark Skies, p362). Moreover, just as the social causes of catastrophe are obscured, the social relations of the future utopia are vaguely described; it appears that the future world of liberation will leave the structures of the present untouched. Indeed, the positive content of the transhumanist utopia imagined by Bostrom reflects and reinforces social inequalities. As Claire Colebrook notes, the lionisation of cognitive activity as the sine qua non of the future world is 'bound up with the "man" of Western reason', a figure that is strongly associated with many forms of oppression and violence (especially in relation to race, disability, gender and sexuality) (Lives Worth Living, p167). In the light of the dubious normative consequences, skewed empirical account of the threats to humanity and flawed vision of the liberated future, it is difficult to affirm extinctiopolitics. However, these criticisms do not examine why extinctiopolitics has emerged in the current conjuncture. What is the relationship between, on the one hand, thinking the future in terms of threats to human extinction and, on the other, the social struggles, political crises and cultural anxieties of the last two decades? What is it about existential risk studies that resonates with philosophers at prestigious universities and billionaires in the tech industry? As David Sepkoski argues more generally, there is a close association between, on the one hand, discourses of extinction and, on the other, the social and political context in which they are elaborated. (38) For instance, the theory that the dinosaurs were annihilated by an asteroid that triggered huge climatic changes, which was first proposed in the 1980s, can be understood in terms of broader Cold War anxieties about the threat of a nuclear winter. The past end of the dinosaurs and the future end of humanity were bound together by widespread fascination with 'sudden, cataclysmic events capable of obliterating life in the flash of an atomic blast or an asteroid impact' (Catastrophic Thinking, p298). Given this, are there similar resonances at play in the popularity of existential risk studies in the contemporary moment? It should first be stressed that this is a subversive question to pose to extinctiopolitics. For existential risk studies, we need to abstract ourselves from the immediate concerns of the contemporary moment. The object of extinctiopolitics is the long-term trajectory of humanity; it traces the entire history of the species from its origins to its multiplanetary and transhumanist future. From this perspective, the political and social concerns of the present moment, especially those that are deemed non-existential in their stakes, are insignificant. For instance, Leigh encourages us to place ourselves in the grand arc of human history: 'Suppose humanity's potential time on the planet was shrunk down to a single eighty-year life span. In that event, we would now be a newborn baby--just nine days old' (What's the Worst, p10). Indeed, scholars associated with existential risk studies voice frustration with politicians for their short-term perspective; they respond to today's headlines rather than the long-term interests of the species. Ord recounts that: 'When I have raised the topic of existential risk with senior politicians and civil servants, I have encountered a common reaction: genuine deep concern paired with a feeling that addressing the greatest risks facing humanity was "above my pay grade"' (The Precipice, p35). Similarly, William MacAskill, another proponent of existential risk studies, recalls the response when he talked about future pandemics at a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, in 2017: 'Everyone laughed, and the host of the dinner, Sir Tom Hunter, joked that I was "freaking everyone oot"'. (39) However, the disavowals of presentism amongst the proponents of existential risk studies should not be taken at face value. There are resonances between extinctiopolitics and the conjuncture in which it emerged; it is entangled with a set of concerns that are specific to the moment of the 2000s and 2010s. Extinctiopolitics chimes with the broader feeling of crisis and catastrophe that has emerged since the turn of the millennium. It is perhaps no accident that 2002 witnessed the publication of Bostrom's foundational paper on existential risk and the establishment of Musk's aerospace company SpaceX. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, as Phillip E. Wegner notes, marked the decisive end of the long 1990s in the American context. (40) Like the extinction risks highlighted by Bostrom, the event of 9/11 inaugurated a new understanding of the future in which it is defined not by endless peace and prosperity but instead decisive caesuras and disastrous failures. Furthermore, the catastrophic consciousness fostered by existential risk studies has found succour in a range of events in the decades that have followed 9/11, including the global financial crisis of 2007/08, the rise of authoritarian populist governments across Europe and North America in the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, extinctiopolitics has a particular affinity with the apocalyptic mood that surrounds the current climate crisis, something captured by Greta Thunberg's declaration that the world is on fire and Extinction Rebellion's claim that we are living in a climate emergency. (41) The 'Anthropocene is the Apocalypse', its arrival marking the end of the relative stability of the Holocene era and a beginning of a new world of radical ruptures and unprecedented events. (42) In this context, images of human extinction become convincing. In the face of the revenge of Gaia, what hope is there for humanity? The power of extinctiopolitics partly derives from its elaboration of the catastrophic consciousness of the current conjuncture; it takes up anxieties about destruction and brings them to their conclusion with the vision of an Earth absent of humanity. Here, it is instructive to contrast existential risk studies to the new optimists, a group of writers including Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling and Johan Norberg, who claim that history is a story of unending progress. (43) By virtue of the free market and Enlightenment philosophy, people are richer and healthier than at any other point in history. Moreover, the new optimists see no reason why this should not continue into the future; however severe the problem, capitalism will find a solution. It is easy to see why this idea might appeal to those committed to the current social order and, like existential risk studies, it has been promoted by billionaires such as Bill Gates. (44) However, given the crises of the contemporary moment, it is unsurprising that even billionaires have found the sunny optimism of Pinker, Rosling and Norberg insufficient; something more is required than the declaration that everything will work out for the best in the end. In contrast to existential risk studies, which foregrounds the dangers and threats to the human species, the declaration that the twenty-first century will bring unending progress rings hollow, masking over rather than responding to the catastrophic consciousness inaugurated by the financial crisis, the pandemic and climate change. Scholars associated with existential risk studies both affirm and critique the new optimist account of history. For extinctiopolitics, the future will be better than the past; if the species succeeds in not extinguishing itself, then it is almost inevitable that utopia will be established. Ord, explicitly invoking the new optimists, states that 'at the largest scales of human history ... the trends toward progress are clear' (The Precipice, p18). At the same time, extinctiopolitics cannot entirely accept the image of the future painted by the new optimists, with Emile P Torres making it clear that it offers, at best, a partial account: '... this cluster of encouraging trends is only half of the diachronic picture of humanity, so to speak. The human condition is indeed better overall today than in the past, but the contemporary world also contains far more risk potential than any previous moment in anthropological history' (Facing Disaster, p6, emphasis in original). (45) Extinctiopolitics, in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's terms, posits a dialectic of enlightenment; the forces that appear to guarantee the advancement of humanity react back on themselves to deliver intensified forms of destruction. (46) A phenomenon like climate change is thus, in principle, entirely explicable on the logic of existential risk. The huge increase in carbon emissions over the past few centuries is simultaneously a symptom of human control over nature and produces uncontrollable forces that threaten the current social order. Yet, extinctiopolitics, despite evoking the catastrophic tendencies of the contemporary moment with its talk of annihilation, does not directly address them. The speculative account of future human annihilation is an analogy for the problems of the present. Existential risk is marked by the social and ecological tensions of capitalist society but it does not offer a determinate conceptual account of them. This is especially evident in the place of climate change in discourses of existential risk. On the one hand, the ecocidal movement of contemporary capitalism is too big to entirely ignore, with accounts of existential risk habitually devoting some attention to environmental issues (see Existential Risk, p9; The Precipice, pp53-58; What's the Worst, pp36-54; What We Owe, pp134-140). On the other hand, as Torres stresses in their critical account, climate change is consistently devalued as an existential risk (The Dangerous Ideas). For instance, Ord suggests that global warming is an 'immense human tragedy' but, given that it is unlikely to cause the annihilation of the species (even on the gloomiest predictions), it does not 'pose a direct existential risk to humanity' (The Precipice, p56). MacAskill concurs with this assessment, noting that 'climate change does not drastically increase the risk of civilisational collapse' (What We Owe, p136). Like the nuclear war that kills ninety-nine per cent of the population, a recovery from climate change, even if it takes thousands of years, is possible. Tallinn, one of the billionaire funders of the field, makes a similar argument: 'Climate change is not going to be an existential risk unless there's a runaway scenario'. (47) In fact, Tallinn, channelling Donald Rumsfeld, states that a more important risk is 'unknown unknowns', or 'things that we can't perhaps think about right now' (quoted in 3 Existential Risks). On the typological approach of extinctiopolitics, climate change is relegated to a second-order risk; it is like, but not quite, an existential challenge. To borrow a notion from Sigmund Freud, extinctiopolitics cultivates a form of screen memory. This concept refers to a phenomenon whereby 'the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event' is 'associatively displaced' by another image, the latter repressing and masking the former. (48) The substitution of one image by another has a mollifying function, protecting the subject from the full force of a destructive event. The presence of certain images of catastrophe can exclude and displace other threatening and troublesome processes. For instance, Michelle Bratu Hansen, reflecting on the place of the Holocaust in American society, suggests that the genocide of the Jews 'could be read as a kind of screen allegory behind/through which the nation is struggling to find a proper mode of memorialising traumata closer to home', whether this be the enslavement of African Americans, the genocide of Indigenous peoples or recent imperialist wars. (49) Similar processes are at work in extinctiopolitics. Unlike the new optimists, who largely dismiss the dangers of the present, the anxiety associated with ecocide is acknowledged through the analogy of human extinction; the latter summons a sense of the unfolding catastrophes of the present. However, extinctiopolitics, which focuses on the history of the species across hundreds of thousands of years, soothes the angst associated with contemporary threats by displacing them into the long-term history of humanity. The traumatic feelings associated with climate change are immanent in the understanding of existential risk but, at the same time, they are camouflaged by reference to speculative disasters in the future. (50) Extinctiopolitics, in Fredric Jameson's terms, involves 'transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies', such that they are 'subsequently "managed" or repressed'. (51) Tallinn's unknown unknowns, a destructive event of immense scale that cannot yet be described, contains the ecological catastrophe but also deflects the gaze away from it. Existential risk studies is defined by a tension. On the one hand, with Walter Benjamin, it acknowledges that there is something destructive at the heart of the contemporary world: 'The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe'. (52) On the other hand, extinctiopolitics obscures the stakes of this unfolding catastrophe; it depoliticises disaster, pacifying the anxieties produced by financial, political and climatic crises. (53) The tension at the heart of existential risk studies is symptomatic of a real contradiction for billionaires in capitalist society: between the desire for the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and an awareness of its destructive consequences for nature (both human and non-human). Extinctiopolitics is a means by which to respond to the disruptions and dangers associated with the spread of capitalism across the globe but in such a way that the social and political relations of the current moment are untouched and unquestioned. Extinctiopolitics, to quote Jameson again, invents 'imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions'. (54) The desire to escape from the bounds of the Earth is one such solution; it stages and resolves a genuine tension. To return to Adorno and Horkheimer's terms, it suggests that it is possible to accelerate away from the dialectic of enlightenment, leaving behind the contradictions of the present social order through new technological developments. The dream of a multi-planetary humanity is thus a technofix; it stimulates a feeling for the tragic arc of history and renders invisible the social forces underlying the movement toward catastrophe. Utopian accounts of a spacefaring humanity are a masquerade, mimicking the shape of a radical response to a serious crisis while being devoid of the social and political content required to address it. A possible concern can be raised here. Reading existential risk studies in terms of the Freudian notion of the screen image might imply that the dangers highlighted can be dismissed as mere fantasies. However, recent events suggest the value of the warnings advanced by Bostrom and Ord. For instance, MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (2022), another addition to the growing corpus of texts concerned with existential risk, states: 'Russia's invasion of Ukraine reminds us that war can all too quickly return to regions that have enjoyed peace for decades, and that initially more limited disputes can push the world's largest nuclear powers dangerously close to the brink of a direct confrontation' (What We Owe, p113). If, prior to the war in Ukraine, nuclear conflict seemed like a distant possibility, it is now a much more pressing concern. However, even if existential risk studies is right to identify nuclear conflict as a major danger to humanity, this does not change the underlying logic of the field. Nuclear war remains subject to the high bar of human extinction. As long as the current conflict does not annihilate humanity as a whole, it is a second-order risk. Extinctiopolitics, in a familiar pattern, evokes the disastrous consequences of the war for the people of Ukraine and its deleterious effects elsewhere, especially in terms of fuel and food prices, while also masking over these tensions by focusing on human extinction and placing the war in the long arc of human history. The conflict is thus abstracted from social and political context, with questions of inter-imperial rivalry, shifts in the global economy and revivification of nationalist forces side-lined in favour of a focus on the capacities of atomic technology itself.

“Violence” is both an act and an abstraction defined and determined by those with power, especially in societies built and structured around stable, organized patterns of violence, such as we see with patriarchy, imperialism, militarism, and policing. Violence is shaped and perpetuated by existing ideologies and social structures and its measure is a product of social processes that do not always constitute some objective, universal reality. How we come to understand, respond to, and think about violence is intimately tied to patriarchy, which is a system that has come to dominate global civilization, even though this was not a naturally occurring inevitability. In a piece on intersectionality and violence, Collins (1998) rightly observed that, “despite its ubiquitous nature, analyses of violence provide partial understanding of it” (p. 918), noting that this is attributable to their singular frameworks, such as gender-only or race-only approaches. These approaches often erase the experiences of certain groups, such as Black women in the United States, when race-only approaches emphasize institutionalized, state violence such as lynching, and genderonly approaches emphasize interpersonal violence and sexual violence, often in the private realm, and often focusing on White women. Violence not only enhances various social hierarchies such as nationality, race/ethnicity, social class, ability status, and sexuality, but also enhances intersections among social hierarchies (Collins, 1998). The purpose of this article was to propose a cohesive structural framework that addresses the nexuses between patriarchy, gender, and violence. The next step in comprehensive theorizing on violence, from our point of view, is for scholars to ask two questions: What commonalities can we identify across various hierarchy-facilitated and hierarchy-enhanced forms of violence in different cultures and across time? And what cultural specificities arise in different manifestations of race, gender, social class, and so forth and their intersections with relation to violence in particular contexts? The first attempts to highlight universal purposes and causes of violence across the span of human experience. The second emphasizes how hierarchies are socially produced and are neither static nor uniform nor inevitable and centers the lens away from ahistoricism. That said, the proposed theoretical framework in this article represents a step toward more comprehensive theorizing and terminology on gender systems and violence. Identifying commonalities in the patriarchal causes and consequences of violence helps keep these structural realities at the forefront of academic and public consciousness

Research in the social sciences on violence that is not identified as “gendered” often falls into the bracket of “mainstream” violence research. Such research focuses chiefly on incidences involving boys/men, although this may not be acknowledged forthrightly in these analyses, and a systematic structural gender analysis is commonly missing from mainstream violence research. The de-emphasis on gender in such research occurs in the context of patriarchal gender systems in which researchers are invariably situated. Empirically, it is quite clear that violence is a highly gendered social occurrence, so feminist explanations provide context for the continued discounting of its centrality in core explanations. The gendered nature of violence is identifiable “through perpetrators’ characteristics, their decision-making, and its effects,” as Kaiser and Hagan (2015, p. 79) noted in a study on genocide in Darfur, wherein they concluded that all studies of such offenses should consider gender. Given that research focusing on the violence of boys/men is largely constitutive of “mainstream” social science inquiries into violence, the absence of a systematic structural gender analysis is both endemic and largely unacknowledged, a theoretical shortcoming that is aided by multiple conventions within the social sciences. Beyond the segregation of topics on women, gender, and “gendered” violence into specialized subareas, these conventions include the overrepresentation of men as research subjects in violence research without categorizing such research as specialized, the absence of identifiers for men in research that is presented as the study of people, and underpinnings of gender essentializing based on largely unspoken presumptions of biological determinism. These latter points collectively lend themselves to the discounting of men as gendered actors, and to the interpretation of social life, culture, and social structure through a shallow understanding of gendered processes when men, especially, are studied. Multiple studies have found that girls/women are underrepresented in samples used in criminological assessments in both sociology and criminology journals (Hannon & Dufour, 1998; Hughes, 2005; Sharp & Hefley, 2007). That men commit more violence than women traditionally justified the tendency to focus research and theoretical development on men (Britton, 2000; Hannon & Dufour, 1998), yet this reasoning is inconsistent with general principles of social science methodology where comparison is the foundation of social inquiry. “When researchers sample only men because men commit more crime,” Hannon and Dufour (1998) noted, “they are often sampling around the dependent variable by excluding a group known to be disproportionately located on one side of the mean” (p. 64). Significant differences in the perpetration of violence based on gender should justify more research focusing on women and gender, not less, given that social conditions and expectations for women provide a contradistinction to 1100 Violence Against Women 29(5) men worth exploring as scholars theorize on the cultur men worth exploring as scholars theorize on the cultural and structural (rather than individual or pathological) roots of violence. Additionally, the theoretical shortcomings associated with oversampling men are compounded by the tendency in scholarship to reference studies conducted on men as representing the proclivities, conditions, and opportunities of all people. Hannon and Dufour (1998) found that about 90% of articles with samples of boys/men overgeneralized in their title for both time periods. When the sample was comprised of women, the title reflected the sample composition in all cases except one, indicating the tendency to include identifiers for samples of women. Contemporary scholarship often builds upon a scaffold of overgeneralized research presented as research about human conditions and behaviors. In a similar manner, societal and historical harms largely perpetrated by men are often discussed in nongendered terms, allowing for the neglect of gendered perspectives in assessments of these social occurrences. For example, Chief Executive Officers of the transatlantic investment banking system who contributed to the 2008 global economic crisis played a role in “inflicting endemic and catastrophic levels of systemic violence upon the global population at large” (Ellis & Wykes, 2013, p. 85). Although a group largely consisting of men inflicted tremendous harm, these acts are not typically conceptualized as a form of men’s violence, demonstrating “the massive falsification of consciousness that patriarchy [and capital hegemony] continues to purvey” (Ellis & Wykes, 2013, p. 85). With respect to climate change, Cuomo (2011) observed that “the implication that humans as a species have caused climate change” is misleading and obscures the “people and particular cultures, nations, industries, and economic systems” (p. 697) overwhelmingly responsible for these environmental impacts. “Men, primarily wealthier heterosexual white men from the global North,” wrote Wonders and Danner (2015) “have disproportionate influence over decisions shaping the causes, consequences, and responses to climate change through their domination of economic and political decisionmaking” (p. 403). Universalizing responsibility for social issues such as climate change detracts from an acknowledgment of the systems and groups primarily responsible for these global harms that disproportionately impact women and other vulnerable populations (Wonders & Danner, 2015). With respect to mass atrocities such as genocide, Nyseth Brehm et al. (2016) observed that the de-emphasis of social characteristics such as gender is common in the literature, which often focuses on men but does not analyze gender. Talking about men in general terms not only treats the exclusion of women as nonsignificant, but also renders men as a social group invisible. When it comes to violence, women’s gender is more likely than the gender of men to be marked as a factor in their collective behaviors or experiences. Because men are treated as “generalized people,” their behaviors/social conditions are implicitly framed as nongendered. Women are identified and separated out, and thus become the group that “needs to be explained” through a gendered analysis. By failing to explicitly equate gender with boys/men and their behaviors, numerous researchers fail to incorporate a meaningful gender analysis in their work (for a detailed discussion, see Ellis & Wykes, 2013). When scholars include gender in their assessments, the treatment is often shallow, such that it does not capture the extent to which gender structures social life. In an analysis of over 300 pieces in three of the most highly ranked journals in criminology, Sharp and Hefley (2007) found that nearly 85% of the articles either ignored gender, focused solely on men, or simply controlled for gender in the analysis. Similarly, in Davies and True’s (2015) analysis of research on conflict-related sexual violence, they argued that such studies “unintentionally compartmentalize gender, often treating it as a single, isolable variable,” and in doing so, “neglect the volume of feminist research that reveals that gender cannot be disaggregated from instrumentality and political violence” (p. 496). Although research on conflict-related sexual violence has been consequential in reconceptualizing these acts as mass atrocity crimes and as political in nature, the research also ignores the centrality of gender in explaining this class of violence, rendering theoretical explanations, and thus policy responses incomplete (Davies & True, 2015).5

Meanwhile, intersectionality theory has been proceeding from its roots in legal studies, beginning with Kimberle Crenshaw’s defining article in which she coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how black women could be discriminated against as black women rather than as a sum of discrimination against women and discrimination against blacks. The term has gone on to be widely used both in academic circles and by activists seeking to end disparities. While the concept of intersectionality has not been widely noted by standard economists, other than the occasional use of interaction terms in empirical analyses, feminist economists have argued for use of an intersectional approach to economic research in much of their writings.

Feminist economists have also been more likely the other economists to emphasize the intersectionality of gender disparities with other forms of labor market disparities. The compounding burdens of age discrimination and race and ethnicity and caste discrimination need not be simply additive but can be more interrelated, possibly even multiplicative. For example, the wage penalty associated with being a disabled African-American woman may not be the sum of the penalties for being African-America, being disabled, and being a woman. Feminist economists have also tried to explicate more fully the reason why gender intersects with other factors and leads to disparities, using bargaining theory to consider why the layers of gender with other factors such as ethnicity, race, and immigrant status can reduce a person’s relative status as each part increasingly weakens their relative standing in relation to those in the majority or stronger or more powerful group. Race and ethnicity have been two of the main areas of overlap with gender that feminist economists have specifical considered, both by comparing racial inequality to gender inequality to bring out both similarities and differences, and increasingly by considering their intersectional nature. Feminist economists have generally argued that it is important to consider all dimensions of inequality that interact with gender rather than solely focusing on gender in their studies. This includes a strong consciousness of how class and immigrant status also interact both with each other and with race, ethnicity, and gender. The focus of feminist economists on the importance of using multiple methods in empirical research, including using interviews to bring out narratives of overlapping inequalities, allows for theses more nuanced approaches in tandem with analyzing the numerical inequalities in areas such as pay and participation in paid labor by different overlapping demographic categories.

In her essay “What’s Radical about [Feminist] Radical Political Economy,” Jennifer Cohen highlights attention to processes of social reproduction and care provision that include unpaid work (2018). Her comprehensive account enables me to focus on another distinct, though related, issue: the conceptualization of collective identity and conflict—more pointedly, Whose identity? Which conflict? Here, I part ways with Marxist feminism. Feminist scholars coming from the Marxian tradition tend to analyze processes of social reproduction in class-centric terms, describing employers as the primary beneficiaries of family commitments that lower the cost of producing labor power. This was built into the early Wages for Housework slogan and comes through very clearly in Sylvia Federici’s account of the transition to capitalism in Europe, depicting capitalists as inventors of patriarchal practices such as witch hunts (2004). Fast-forwarding to the US economy today, Katherine Moos provides detailed estimates of the changing distribution of the costs of social reproduction between employers and workers (2021). The riveting polemic titled The Care Manifesto points its most accusatory finger at capitalism, with little attention to the precapitalist antecedents of patriarchal institutions (Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Folbre 2021a). None of these accounts ignore nondirectly-class-related issues: sexism, racism, colonialism, and homophobia often enter the narratives. Yet these phenomena are typically subsidiary to economic analysis of capitalist dynamics, and their relevance derives largely from the ways in which they impede the development of class consciousness. The common derogation of the term “identity politics” on the left implies that it is a form of false consciousness (for an inspired polemic on this topic, see Walters 2018). Marxist economists generally insist that the concept of exploitation should be reserved for class dynamics alone (Chibber and Veneziani 2021). As I argue in my recent book, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (2021b), a more nuanced picture of collective conflict has long been visible in the Marxian theory of collective conflict, deeply embedded in a term that Marx devised, and Lenin often deployed: the “aristocracy of labor.” Andre Gunder Frank (1967) elaborated in detail on the tensions between rich countries and poor ones overlaying the class divisions within them. As the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright made plain in 1968, professional/managerial workers often find themselves in contradictory class locations. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, first published in 1983, argued that racial capitalism extracted economic value from the racial/ethnic identity of subordinated groups (2005). The term “racial capitalism” obviously raises the same question as “patriarchal capitalism”; movement from a single-system to a dual-systems label implies a new ranking of priorities. It hardly seems incidental that African American and Latinx women were among the first to challenge such ranking, introducing the term “intersectionality” to picture the coexistence of many different dimensions of group-based inequality (Crenshaw 1990; Collins 1990, 2019; Romero 2017). This approach is closely linked to critical race theory, which explicitly analyzes racebased exploitation. Yet it also invites consideration of a variety of forms of inequality. Kimberlé Crenshaw (2015) notes that intersectionality is an “analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power.” It reaches beyond race/ethnicity, gender, and class to socially assigned identities based on categories such as sexual orientation and citizenship. Most radical economists Folbre 193 have been slower than sociologists to move beyond a class-centric analysis, perhaps because the Marxian definition of exploitation focuses on the extraction of surplus value in wage employment (relative lack of diversity in the economics profession may also be relevant). However, critical race theory is deeply embedded in the stratification economics approach developed by William Darity (2022) and others. Also, traces of intersectionality are evident in the pages of the Review of Radical Political Economics even before the year 2000. For instance, Evelyn Nakano Glynn (1985) explored “racial ethnic women’s labor,” and Randy Albelda (1985) described labor market segregation by both gender and race. Rhonda Williams (1987) explored dynamic interactions of class and race (1987). Robert Cherry (1991) examined tensions between corporate profitability created by “struggles against patriarchy and Jim Crow.” Rhonda Gottlieb (1984) and Julie Matthaei (1995) outlined radical analyses of sexuality. More recently, explicit critiques of heteronormativity have been published (Nguyen 2023). Articles like these set the stage for a major paradigm shift.