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An International Journal of Basic Income Research, Vol. 3, Issue 3, December 2008)

Which regime promotes the further progress of this revolution, and which impedes it? Government provision or subsidization of child care in a welfare state encourages paid work for mothers. Large cash grants, such as BIG, encourage withdrawal from the paid labor force. So do lengthy paid parental leaves, such as those offered by Sweden, which can amount to an entire year, and can be extended to two years. These long leaves give employers a motive to deny women jobs that have duties that are not merely routine, that require on-the-job training, and that lead to promotions and careers. This provision is probably at least partly responsible for the persistence of the high degree of occupational segregation by sex that is characteristic of Sweden’s labor market. One alleged advantage for women that is claimed for BIG is that it would reduce their dependence on the labor market, a male-dominated arena, and thus a major site of their oppression. In fact, proponents of BIG proclaim that one of their aims is to allow parents to stay home with young children. Under current cultural conditions, the vast majority of those who would do that would be women with a high-waged male partner. A lone mother trying to live on BIG exclusively would be condemned to a standard of living far below the mainstream. For this reason, the full-blown implementation of BIG schemes in the near future should not appeal to those for whom gender equality is an important goal (Robeyns, 2001). Perhaps in the future, participation in housekeeping and parenting activities will have become less differentiated by gender. Then BIG would affect the behavior of both sexes more equally, and would have lost its anti-equality effect. In the meantime, it is not hard to believe that BIG would be more destructive of gender equality than Low Provision would. 4. Conclusion A welfare state with generous child care provision but without lengthy parental leaves would promote progress for women in the labor market, and would deliver goods, services, and cash grants to those with special needs, of which women presently form a major part. A BIG regime, by reducing women’s presence and success in the labor market, would reverse the gains in women’s status and opportunities. It would also fail to respond to the sizeable needs of the increasing cohorts of lone mothers. For those reasons, it would be even worse than the “Low Provision” regime of the United States. In terms of its effect on gender equality, it would be the worst of the three alternatives.

An International Journal of Basic Income Research, Vol. 3, Issue 3, December 2008)

An important difference between BIG and a welfare state is that in a BIG regime benefits are spread evenly over the population, while in the latter most benefits are targeted toward those with special needs that are expensive to fill – those who have children requiring constant care, those whose income is insufficient for decent housing, those whose children could profit from an expensive college education, and so on. Obviously, a high proportion of those having such needs are women, lone mothers in particular. Benefits targeted toward those with particular needs can be universal in the sense of being open to all who have such needs regardless of income, marital status, or gender. But targeting allows awarding very expensive benefits to only part of the population -- those in particular need of them -- without requiring that huge sums be expended to deliver to everybody benefits of equal value. A second difference is that BIG gives cash, while a welfare state gives a significant proportion of benefits in the form of goods and services, or vouchers that can only be spent on these. This insures that public money goes to fill publicly agreed-upon needs and that taxpayers’ money is not spent on things of lower public priority or that are wasteful, such as gambling or larger cars. Another feature of in-kind benefits is that they deter labor force participation less than cash benefits do. On the contrary, some in-kind benefits, such as child care, encourage it. The targeting and non-cash features of a welfare state reduce opposition to the state provision of benefits. When expensive benefits in the form of goods and services are given to those who obviously need them, the fact that they are not given to those who do not need them is not a cause for resentment, or at any rate less of a cause for resentment than the distribution of hugely unequal cash benefits would be. The superiority of a welfare state over BIG for the support of lone mothers is obvious. If they hold jobs, and relatives are unavailable to care for their children, the cost of decent-quality child care may amount to half their earnings or more. A BIG might pay in whole or part for child care, but using it in this way puts lone mothers at a disadvantage compared to those who can use the BIG grant to raise their standard of living – better food, clothing, housing. A welfare state, by contrast, recognizes the particularly acute needs of lone mothers and addresses them, and creates an equalizing effect not provided by BIG. The vast majority of lone-mother families cannot have a mainstream standard of living without earning a salary plus receiving government help with health insurance, high quality child care, higher-education expenses, andhousing. In the absence of such provision, even a BIG of $10,000–20,000 going to such a family would not suffice to put it on a par with other families, because the lone-mother family would have to spend the BIG on child care or forego paid work. It is increasingly important that government programs be structured to address the needs of lone mothers and their children. Lone mothers are not some minor part of the population. The proportion of the population living with a spouse dramatically declines year by year, as marriages are delayed to later ages and the high divorce rate persists. At the same time, the proportion of children born to unmarried women increases. The households of unmarried cohabitants, into which an increasing proportion of children are being born, are even less stable than the households of married people. Lone mothers are chronically short of time, and the majority have low earnings. In 2006 in the United States, the median two-earner family had income of $76,000, the one-earner couple had $54,000, while the lone mother had $29,000. Clearly, the lone-mother family is very far down on the totem pole. Part of the public resents births to lone mothers as imposing taxpayer costs that births to married couples avoid. Such resentments are minimized when lone mothers are earners (i.e., they are not “lazy”), and the in-kind benefits they get are also available to other parents.

Many claims are made on what a basic income might achieve. Claims for a basic income include re- ducing poverty and benefit traps, cutting bureaucracy, matching security systems to better correspond with changes in working life, increasing wages, supporting cre- ativity and entrepreneurship, reducing unhealthy depen- dencies within relationships, increasing wellbeing, and the list continues (Kela, 2016). Some also claim that a basic income would reduce gender inequalities in soci- ety (McKay, 2001). However, the basic income move- ment makes no claims to be an explicitly feminist project (whilst acknowledging there are various feminisms).

In some ways, a basic income would be similar to existing ‘cash for care’ policies, which are not generally associated with increased gender equality (e.g. Mandel, 2009). In part, this is because such cash benefits reduce political pressure to provide comprehensive care, educa- tion and health services. Although advocates of a basic in- come are clear that a basic income only replaces benefits up to that amount, and in no way replaces existing ser- vices, it is quite common in parental leave policy debates, that cash benefits are explicitly used instead of provid- ing care services for very young children (e.g., Kurowska, 2019). The concern is that should such political trade-offs around resources occur, and should a basic income be seen as a replacement for early years education and care services as political compromise kicks in, this would have significant gendered implications.

Should the state not take action too with regard to gender equalities? Norms will develop: there is no such thing as total ‘real’ freedom. Legal frameworks how- ever, such as parental leave policies can see changes to norms, even those as deeply embedded as parenting practices. In Sweden, such statements are hardly contro- versial, but choice and gender equality are sometimes contrasted, and the limits to state intervention are con- stantly renegotiated. Basic income would potentially change the bound- aries for state intervention, which for many sounds intu- itively positive, and may well bring many benefits. How- ever, if the state does not intervene regarding gender- equality, gender norms will be determined by other less visible forces, such as the power dynamics within house- holds. It is likely that a universal basic income has the potential for empowerment for all, but for this to be achieved, attention will need to be paid to its potential for gendered outcomes. The concerns raised here regarding the limitations of empowerment for women from a basic income— particularly with regard to whom remains holding the baby, doing the majority of domestic work and the ma- jority of both formal and informal care work—are not in themselves arguments against the implementation of a basic income. However, there are certainly strong rea- sons to not let basic income replace other structures that have been shown to be relevant for gender equality, in particular the ones directed at supporting families, such as parental leave and childcare services. McLean (2015, p. 2) notes that ‘basic Income is in some ways a microcosm of wider feminist controversies regarding how the state can recognise the unpaid work women largely do without reinforcing existing inequal- ities, also known as Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma (Lister, 1995; Pateman, 1988)’. Indeed, feminists involved with policy making sometimes find themselves falling into one of two camps: that of a more pragmatic approach and that of a more idealistic approach. The former aim to take the situation they see at a current time in front of them, such as mothers doing most of the childcare, and to sup- port women in that situation. The latter might rather take issue with the root imbalance of this situation and aim to create a new situation where fathers are doing more childcare. Arguably, many aspects of the current Swedish welfare state are more radically ambitious than the idea of basic income in that it seeks change to the gendered division of both paid and unpaid work. The implemen- tation of a basic income would be gender-neutral and so, in theory, fathers and mothers would have the same sup- port. In practice, however, and especially given the likely low level of basic income, this policy might have the (un- intended) consequence of encouraging a return to the breadwinner model of parenting, with one parent bet- ter able to stay at home, but another parent still need- ing to remain firmly attached to the labour market. Once again, we have a political movement, which has not fully embraced the challenge from radical feminism to move us beyond the ‘fundamental biological condition’ as ob- served by Shulamith Firestone (1970, p. 1) towards an equal distribution of care work.

Tax and transfers can also affect gender income gaps in the future through affecting employment outcomes and access to education and health today. Direct taxes (their progressivity, the unit of taxation and the definition of the tax base, including child allowances or credits) and transfers tend to affect family and labour supply decisions in an interrelated fashion, determining whether disposable income is sufficient to cover the fixed costs of entering employment (extensive margin), and conditional on employment and how many hours to work (intensive margin) of the second earner, usually women. To the extent that spending on education and health benefits women, investment in their human capital will likely affect job opportunities in the future. Most countries have individual-based PIT with some elements that are family-based, such as tax reliefs or cash transfers designed in complex ways to trade-off equality and work incentives objectives (Christl et al., 2021; Coehlo et al., 2022; Deloitte, 2017; Thomas and O’Reilly, 2016). Individual-based refers to systems where each individual files their own tax return on their earned and unearned income regardless of their marital or cohabiting status; family-based refers to joint filing in couples. In family-based taxation (or joint filing systems) the same tax rates apply to singles and households with multiple adults, but the way thresholds are set to account for the fact that income covers two or more people varies across countries and can affect incentives to work by changing the net returns to employment. This is because the second earner pays tax rates at the higher brackets of the income tax schedule.16 Deductions from taxable income or tax credits or cash transfers based on household composition and income are common. In SSA, 16 out of 54 countries allow deductions for children, and sometimes dependants more generally, including the elderly or spouses (McNabb and Granger, 2022), and this can affect work incentives of adult household members. When the system is combined with means-tested tax credits based on family income, effective marginal tax rates on second earners’ income can become very high (Brewer et al., 2010). The choice over how to design a progressive system of tax and benefits for couples or families that minimises distortions, from a normative point of view, will depend on a range of assumptions and parameters, including household decisions over work (paid and unpaid) of the primary and secondary earner, intrahousehold income sharing rules and social prioritisation of family welfare relative to individual welfare (Bargain, 2008; Kleven et al., 2009). Family-friendly fiscal policies, such as subsidies to childcare services and statutory paid parental leave, may also affect gender gaps in income and labour market outcomes. The arrival of children affects women’s economic welfare and time use more than men’s, and childcare support and paid parental leave can help women combine paid work and motherhood better. Subsidies to childcare services can take many forms, from direct public provision of services to subsidies provided to households (demand-side) or providers (supplyside). Parental leave fiscal policies include the cost to the government of a cash transfer programme for parents (more often mothers) of new-born or adopted children for a certain period so they can take time off work and look after their family.17 These subsidies can redistribute income, but can also affect employment outcomes for women more so than for men. To some degree, they are thought to encourage the redistribution of unpaid care work from mothers to the state and men (UNICEF, 2019). They are likely to influence women’s employment more than men’s not only because they are sometimes targeted specially to mothers – like subsidies to paid maternity leave – but also because female labour supply is more responsive to changes to taxes and benefits (Fabrizio et al., 2020; IMF, 2012). Considering the net effects of taxes and social spending jointly on gender income gaps is key, since individual instruments may serve a multitude of objectives, one of which may (or may not) be redistribution, including across genders. The primary function of tax systems is typically to mobilise revenue to finance public spending. How revenue is raised matters, however, not just for horizontal and vertical income distribution, but also for other policy objectives, including ensuring a conducive environment for business and investment through stable and transparent policy and fair and efficient administration of taxes. Through adjustments to relative prices, taxes can also provide incentives or disincentives for consumption or production that have wider costs or benefits to society (usually addressed through excise taxes). Broadbased consumption taxes are thought to be less progressive but better able to raise public funds efficiently, which can be used to finance social spending that benefits women, including progressive programmes. Social protection systems may also have multiple objectives, including smoothing consumption over a lifetime and reducing poverty. Choices over how to balance social insurance and poverty alleviation will vary across countries, with some having a smaller focus on poverty alleviation, and this will mediate the gendered impact of systems. The fact that women live longer than men on average can perhaps provide some legitimate grounds for differentiation in social security contributions and income from pensions and annuities in a more actuarial-based system, including providing different annual benefits for similar contribution histories (Stotsky, 1997). Several tax and spending instruments are covered in the analysis. On the tax side, the focus of this report is on the following: i) direct taxes (the evidence covers mainly PIT on earned income and some studies on property and land taxes, but some discussion on corporate income tax (CIT) and other wealth taxes is provided); and ii) indirect taxes. Simplified tax schemes for small businesses and other non-tax public fees are also included in the discussion since this issue has been at the centre of debates in LICs. On the spending side, the following categories are covered: i) cash (or direct) transfers, both contributory and noncontributory; ii) indirect subsidies; iii) subsidies to childcare and parental leave; and iv) in-kind transfers on education and health (often the two largest and easiest to allocate in-kind transfers). Investment in infrastructure, including roads, water and sanitation, despite its importance for women’s outcomes and gender inequalities, is beyond the scope of this report. Tax administration practices, including differences between male and female tax officials, may have gendered impacts on effective tax burdens. In the context of tax, this area is capturing more attention from policymakers and researchers (ATAF, 2022; Joshi et al., 2020). An emerging body of descriptive evidence suggests that there are likely gendered impacts of tax enforcement because of gendered differences in tax officials’ behaviour and because different types of activities are subject to varying degrees of monitoring and harassment by tax officials. This is not covered in this report, but it is a fruitful area for further research on the gendered impact of fiscal policies. The issue of how benefit administration may have gendered impacts on the incidence of benefits could also be explored further.

In this study, I have investigated the relationship between income taxes and the modification of horizontal income inequality between family types using harmonized data from 30 countries in the LIS. I have argued that taxation is a genuine aspect of social policy, which merits the attention of sociologists interested in comparative welfare state research. Throughout the analysis it became evident that income taxation is an essential instrument of horizontal inequality modification. In line with my expectations, I showed that the average effective tax rate was positively correlated with the reduction in income inequality between family types. This also held for tax progressivity when controlling for tax level. I then examined the role of familialization tax policies, which foster the individual’s dependency on family context. These familialization policies in the tax code were found to be negatively associated with the welfare state’s capacity to reduce income inequality between family types. As expected, joint assessment of married couples in general and income splitting in particular seemed to diminish the redistributional power substantially. The empirical findings suggest that the prevalence of joint filing cuts the tax-induced reduction in income inequality between types of families by almost half. On the other hand, de-familialization policies appeared to strengthen individual autonomy and mitigate inequality. However, I did not find consistent evidence that single-parent allowances enhance redistribution between family types. These findings are consistent with previous research suggesting that tax allowance policies benefit middle and higher income households (Avram, Reference Avram2018; Stebbing and Spies-Butcher, Reference Stebbing and Spies-Butcher2010). Inverting the progressive structure of the income tax, fiscal benefits for married couples at the upper income deciles reduce the distributive potential of income taxation. However, it seems that these familialization tax policies in general not only impede effective redistribution, but also hinder individual autonomy and gender equality (Orloff, Reference Orloff1993; Saraceno, Reference Saraceno2016), but that, in the case of taxation, these policies may create inequalities between types of families at the same time. Welfare states without joint filing not only have significantly higher levels of between-family-type inequality reduction but greater individual autonomy due to individual filing as a critical de-familialization policy. At the country level, this interpretation may imply a lose-lose situation of family dependency and income inequality. In this context, the individual is thus confronted with economically beneficial family dependency at the cost of a loss of individual autonomy. As familialization policies provide additional benefits for breadwinners with dependents, they discourage more autonomous individual arrangements. Second and as widely discussed within the literature on labour market incentives for secondary earners (Jara Tamayo and Popova, Reference Jara Tamayo and Popova2020), familialization policies in the tax code potentially hinder female labour market participation. The tax code promotes a strong breadwinner model in most countries with joint filing and progressive income taxation due to lower marginal tax rates for the primary earner. Again, while this is widely known to exacerbate gender inequality (Sainsbury, Reference Sainsbury1999; McCaffery, Reference McCaffery, Martin, Mehrotra and Prasad2009), as the study at hand indicates, it is also associated with greater income inequality between family types at the macro level. In some countries, however, the beneficial treatment of married couples also applies to same sex couples implying similar incentives for their division of labour. This study is limited in several ways. First, the countries were not selected randomly. Nevertheless, external validity should be substantial due to the diverse set of countries. Second, the dependent variable measures inequality between the six most prevalent family types, but this fits some countries better than others. In countries with a high share of multi-generational households, the findings do not reflect the actual situation of many families. Furthermore, population characteristics and cross-country differences in the reliance on social security contributions may lead to an underestimation of the relevance of tax benefits. Therefore, the relationship of interest may be stronger than indicated in this study. Lastly, information on taxes may be inaccurate. However, in the LIS, the tax information from the countries used in this study is mainly derived from register data and/or national microsimulations and should, hence, be sufficiently reliable. The social and political implications are, however, manifold. As this article has shown, these tax mechanisms may foster horizontal inequality. In the light of rising inequality and escalating public debt, it is debatable whether these tax expenditures are desirable or affordable. For the public budget, tax benefits essentially represent a loss of revenue. Hence, the forgone tax revenue could be used for social transfers to the poor. In other words, politically these familialization tax policies seem to cut public revenue and foster inequality, while socially they appear to promote family dependency and a traditional division of labour. This study contributes to our understanding of the consequences of institutionalized differences in the tax treatment of family types. It sheds light on the pivotal yet largely overlooked role of taxation when scrutinizing horizontal inequality between family types. Focusing on (de-)familialization tax policies with different consequences for inequality, this study emphasizes the role of family tax policy as a form of social policy.

In the light of the ongoing scientific discussion on rising inequality, many scholars have called for the welfare state to intervene. However, welfare states differ in many aspects. Among the most influential topics in the literature is the welfare state’s effort to redistribute from rich to poor in order to reduce poverty and inequality. Welfare states undertake redistribution through transfers and taxes (Prasad and Deng, Reference Prasad and Deng2009). Nevertheless, welfare states do not solely redistribute from rich to poor (vertical) (Bergh, Reference Bergh2005) but also between groups, such as gender, race or different family types (horizontal) (Stewart, Reference Stewart2008). Different types of families (defined by marital status and the presence of children) may be treated differently because tax systems provide family type-dependent benefits, including child allowances, marriage premiums or preferential tax schedules. However, if family-related aspects in the tax code systematically benefit those family types that have a higher income (e.g. married couples) compared to those with a lower income (e.g. single parents), then the reduction in income inequality between these family types may be lower than expected. In general, the traditional married family pattern is commonly associated with positional advantages when compared to other family formations (Maldonado and Nieuwenhuis, Reference Maldonado and Nieuwenhuis2015). Married couples tend to have higher disposable household incomes and low poverty rates, while single-parent families are associated with a higher risk of being poor (McLanahan and Percheski, Reference McLanahan and Percheski2008). If marriage is, for instance, associated with substantial institutionalized economic advantages, such as favourable tax brackets, single parents are systematically excluded from those benefits and gains. Hence, the horizontal redistribution system may hint at implicit political and social norms towards certain family formations (McCaffery, Reference McCaffery1999). It is therefore crucial to learn more about the welfare state’s mitigation of horizontal inequality. In other words, the institutionalized structuring of horizontal income inequality between family types matters because social risks are not distributed equally across family types. These policies of horizontal redistribution, however, may encourage de-familialization by enhancing individual autonomy (e.g. single-parent allowance) or promote familialization through strengthening individual dependency on the family (e.g. joint taxation). Familialization tax policies disincentivize labour market participation of secondary earners and are, hence, associated with a traditional division of labour that exacerbates gender inequalities (Dingeldey, Reference Dingeldey2001). The modification of inequality between household types that is due to familialization tax policies is implicitly a question of gender inequality. If family formations with a traditional division of labour are systematically privileged by tax benefit policies, the distributive outcomes are gendered as well. In addition, these policies vary greatly across countries (Bussolo et al., Reference Bussolo, Krolage, Makovec, Peichl, Stöckli, Torre and Wittneben2019). Nevertheless, previous research has widely neglected the significance of tax policy as a means of social policy (Ruane et al., Reference Ruane, Collins and Sinfield2020). Therefore, the present study aims to understand how income taxation modifies horizontal income inequality between family types in a cross-national comparative perspective. To answer my research aim, I examine income inequality between the six most prevalent family types (married without children, married with children, unmarried without children, unmarried with children, single parent, single) of non-retiree households before and after income taxation across welfare states. To this end, I draw on harmonized income and tax data from 30 countries in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and estimate between-family-type Theil indices as measures of inequality before and after deducting income taxes. In order to assess how welfare states’ tax policies structure income inequality between family types, I empirically identify family-related tax policies and evaluate their impacts using linear regression. In the present study I build on the concept of ‘horizontal inequality’ from public and development economics and apply it to fiscal sociology. Broadly, horizontal inequality can be understood as any social, political or economic dimension of inequality between defined groups and thus it allows for adaptation to any structural dimension (Gachet et al., Reference Gachet, Grijalva, Ponce and Rodríguez2019). Hence, horizontal inequality generally refers to inequality between countries, regions or ethnicities (Stewart, Reference Stewart2008). The approach of horizontal inequality between family types emphasizes inequality as an outcome, which is structured by treating different family types differently. Previous research studying income redistribution across welfare states has tended to neglect horizontal inequality and inequity, rendering it the ‘orphan child of tax policy’ (Gravelle and Gravelle, Reference Gravelle and Gravelle2006). On the one hand, the comparative redistribution literature examines tax systems across welfare states in general (Prasad and Deng, Reference Prasad and Deng2009) and studies their inter-individual distributional effort (Kammer et al., Reference Kammer, Niehues and Peichl2012), or its development over time (Caminada et al., Reference Caminada, Goudswaard, Wang and Wang2019). On the other hand, the body of literature interested in horizontal family-type redistribution usually singles out poverty (Brady et al., Reference Brady, Finnigan and Hübgen2017b) and hence only looks at a very specific aspect of inequality. Notably, some recent studies highlighted the significance of tax benefits for redistribution (Coady et al., Reference Coady, D’Angelo and Evans2019). However, few studies directly compare between-family-type inequality, typically through referring to hypothetical households using a microsimulation model (Immervoll, Reference Immervoll2011). In response, the present study aims to bridge the gap between the extensive comparative literature on the effect of taxation on vertical inter-individual inequality and the limited research on between-family-type redistribution. This study contributes to our understanding of familialization tax policy in general and the welfare state’s modification of horizontal income inequality in particular. Assessing the role of taxation as an institutional set-up that assigns additional benefits to certain family patterns is of considerable societal interest. Indeed, if being a member of a certain family type is associated with salient disadvantages, both economic and social well-being are affected. Therefore, I argue that because family patterns have become increasingly diverse in recent decades, inequality between family types has become a significant dimension of horizontal inequality. If different family types are treated differently due to their family status, then redistribution is not just about the individual’s success in the labour market, but his or her embeddedness in family formations as well. In the following, I will briefly discuss previous research regarding family types in general (2.1) before addressing the specific literature on vertical (2.2) and horizontal inequality and redistribution (2.3).

Everyone needs care, women are expected to provide more than men, the rich are better able to buy it than the poor, and the work of care is often assigned to those who have little choice but to perform it. The organization and distribution of care are structured by social norms, legal rules, and patterns of wealth ownership that reinforce unequal responsibilities and opportunities. The “care sector” of the economy produces, develops, and maintains the human capabilities on which the larger economic system depends. It also accounts for the aspects of social wealth that cannot be measured in money terms: health, education, and happiness all have intrinsic value. Their provision requires vast resources, effective administration, and difficult decisions. The Care Collective treats neoliberal capitalism less as a specific structure of institutionalized power than as an invidious state of mind. They have a point: free-market ideology (I would never call it “logic”) urges every man for himself, survival of the fittest, and devil take the hindmost. Most introductory economics courses still encourage students to believe the individual pursuit of self-interest promotes the common good, and that efforts to “do good” actually end up doing harm. This ideology serves the interests of a small, financially engorged elite. Yet it also serves the interests of all those in a position of relative advantage—those who fear that obligations for the care of others would reduce their competitive edge. Racism and nationalism, in their populist incarnations, are just as bad, if not worse than neoliberalism, and completely inconsistent with neoliberal ideals of free markets and capital mobility. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who helped storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 did not speak for the capitalist class. A large swath of the non-college-educated white working class in the United States supports Republican policies antithetical to both their class interests and their national interests. There is nothing patriotic about multinational corporations that chase the lowest possible global labor costs and routinely shift domestic profits to foreign tax havens. The real marvel of conservative power lies in its apparent ability to channel populist sentiments to its own advantage despite these contradictions—to market itself as a strong and manly path to a national prosperity unencumbered by responsibility for other people’s needs. This power is generally enhanced by racial/ethnic divisions, fear of immigrants, mobilization against those defined as “others” even when they pose no threat. Social media often take the blame for apparently irrational political alliances, but we should also look to the cultural romance of white supremacy and the solipsistic masculinity of video games such as World of Warcraft. The Care Collective clearly agrees that the care agenda must directly address social divisions based on gender, age, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and citizenship, as well as class. They just do not say much about specific obstacles that cannot be blamed on capitalist institutions: domestic violence, sexual harassment, police brutality, hostility to sexual nonconformists, anti-immigrant xenophobia. It would be far easier to challenge the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1 percent of global wealth holders if the 99 percent were less divided. Unity cannot be assumed—it must be achieved. Hopes for building a strong care coalition rest on the potential to convincingly demonstrate benefits for the overwhelming majority of the population, financed in ways that reduce gross inequalities of wealth and income. In policy terms, this points toward universal benefits such as family allowances and/or a guaranteed basic income rather than means-tested programs that stigmatize the poor. Equally important is the development of efficient public services that avoid both the perverse incentives created by for-profit provision and the bureaucratic inertia of top-down administration. Such policies could help reduce social division and build the solidarity required to successfully address a host of other pressing global problems, such as climate change

A second important function of the state is to ensure that existing resources are redistributed in society. The issue is complex, since there are no clear answers as to what constitutes precisely the optimal level of redistribution. Should everyone have access to the same quantity of resources, or should some resources be allocated to some specific groups and individuals? If so, who should be targeted? Why? How? In sum, the redistribution of resources rests on normative considerations about equality and differences among citizens. Modern societies have provided some answers to these questions with the establishment of the welfare state. Although some early initiatives appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, the welfare state as we know it today was implemented during the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War in the case of Canada. Broadly speaking, the welfare state can be defined as fulfilling a social-solidarity function, by providing some basic social rights (e.g., access to free healthcare services and universal education), and offering minimal economic security to all (through pensions, social assistance, employment insurance, etc.). Nowadays, public policies associated with the welfare state makes up most of the modern state activities. As Fig. 23.1 indicates, more than 60 per cent of all Canadian public spending is dedicated to funding of healthcare, education, and social services, the three sectors commonly associated with the welfare state. Fig. 23.1 figure 1 The Canadian welfare state. (Source: author’s computations with data compiled by Statistics Canada. Canadian Classification of Functions of Government (CCOFOG) by Consolidated Government Component. CANSIM database, Table 10-10-0005-01; accessed, March 15, 2019) Full size image Public Expenditures At first sight, public services provided by the welfare state do not appear to target women and men differently: all people, regardless of gender, are entitled to receive public services, such as healthcare services, education, and professional training. The same is true for sexual minorities: individuals cannot be denied a public service (e.g., healthcare) because of non-heterosexual desires and practices or because they self-identify as genderqueer or gender non-conforming. There are some obvious exceptions, such as programmes designed for maternity leave or to provide specific medical care (e.g., gender-affirming surgery), but these instances are infrequent. In practice, however, the welfare state is far from being as gender neutral as is often claimed. Its policies are based on some preconceived ideas that advantage some and disadvantage others. One factor that many feminist scholars have identified as a cause of this inequality is the inability (or unwillingness) of the welfare state to consider the contribution of unpaid work and care activities (Sainsbury 2013). Social-assistance programmes provide a good illustration of this situation. In Canada, most of these programmes implicitly assume the superiority of private markets to generate personal income. Therefore, social-assistance programmes seek to provide minimal basic income to those unable to enter the labour market and earn an income. The data presented in Table 23.3 show the major sources of incomes of women and men for various age groups in Canada. As we can see, the earnings of women lag those of men at all stages of life. This inequality is created primarily by private-market mechanisms (labour, investment, and private retirement income). Although this imbalance is alleviated by government transfers, it does not disappear. In reality, government transfers marginally correct the income difference. For instance, government transfers reduce the income gap between women and men aged twenty-five to sixty-four years by about only one-tenth.Footnote4 The situation is even more puzzling for elderly women: on average, men receive more government transfers than women, even though their market income is higher. Table 23.3 Major sources of income, per capita, by age group and gender, 2017 Full size table Gender differences are also noticeable for specific categories of government transfers. For instance, women rely more on public pensions than men do.Footnote5 Furthermore, women receive more support from pension programmes that specifically target low-income Canadians, such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) and the Spouse’s Allowance (SPA). Meanwhile, women are the primary beneficiaries of child benefits. It must be noted that the federal child-benefit programme does discriminate on the basis of gender, as women are explicitly identified as the usual beneficiary. On average, women aged between twenty-five and sixty-four years receive $2400 per year in child benefits.Footnote6 This amount is higher for women with low income, especially for single parents (additional help is provided with social-assistance programmes). Although significant, these amounts do not cover all the costs related to raising children, especially when both parents are in the labour market. For instance, a recent study has shown that the median cost of childcare services was between $6500 and $8000 per year per child in various parts of CanadaFootnote7 (Maire 2014).

Law shapes the economy and economic principles shape the law. 139Neoclassical economic theory is the predominant economic model supporting the development of law. This economic analysis of law examines issues from the perspective of marketplace efficiency. 140An outgrowth of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand theory, neoclassical economic theory eschews even "a minimum level of governmental interference" or state intervention in economic affairs. 141 "Neoclassical economics describes the economy as a state of equilibrium, in which the forces of supply and demand interact to achieve optimal allocation of society's resources." 142Its axioms are premised on "voluntary, informed, and rational (i.e., utility maximizing)" economic decision-making. 143Neoclassical economics models are also based on perfect competition. 144The market fairly and efficiently allocates resources and achieves a societal equilibrium as individuals make "self-interested economic decisions." 145 Neoclassical economic models are centered around "systems of generalizations." 146This system "describes the relationships among a range of stated variables," and the analysis of [*665] variables can be used to predict changes in other variables. 147This is particularly significant when discussing discrimination considering two neoclassical economics principles. The first is the axiom of static equilibrium, which means that the market responds to external stimuli as necessary and achieves a new equilibrium, a new resting point, repeatedly. 148The second is the axiom that competitive economies eliminate discriminatory wages. 149Theoretically, this means that over time race discrimination should diminish. The ever-widening racialized wage gap is an indication that the market has not responded to the exogenic conditions that produce racialized economic inequality. Income inequality and wage gaps, at every economic level, continue to plaque the Black community Neither of the neoclassical economics theories of discrimination, statistical and taste, provide an adequate explanation for the racialized gender wage gap. This is, in part, because of the variables used in neoclassical economics to analyze discrimination in general, and intersectional discrimination in particular. 151The statistical discrimination model explains employment outcomes based entirely on "rational expectations equilibrium." 152It equates employers' beliefs about workers' skill levels with "the willingness to hire." 153The employer then determines the amount and degree of its human capital investment based on its expectations. 154The employers' self-fulfilling, rational expectations determine workers' actual skill [*666] levels. 155Whether these presumptions are correct or become "the self-fulfilling prophecy" is the question that often is raised regarding the phenomenon. 156Expectations often turn into reality for no reason other than they were based on flawed, even biased, selections. 157 The employer's system "can have multiple equilibria with distinct employment and wage levels, each with correct expectations." 158When employment varies among groups, that difference is explained by pointing to different equilibria. 159Yet, there is no critical evaluation of the equilibria factors nor policy employed when there is a poor or weak equilibrium. 160 Critics of neoclassical economics reject the employers' rational belief of group low productivity. Instead, this result is explained by human capital theory. 161Employers "learn" that they can pay less-productive employers less. Alternatively, employers might determine that the less-productive employees are productive. As that information is disseminated in the marketplace, other employers might hire the newly labeled, productive employees. 162Employers who did not "experiment and learn' would be less profitable, while those who take the risk of experimenting can pay lower wages for the same quality of work. 163 Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker developed the taste for discrimination framework. Becker posits that discrimination occurs when an employer is "willing to pay." 164Taste discrimination differs, however, because the employer is obviously biased. Discrimination occurs when there is a preference to a person with a particular characteristic, despite the equal or superior qualifications of a less-desired person. 165If an employer [*667] is prejudiced against a person of a specific race or sex, the question becomes, how much more is the employer willing to pay to avoid hiring the less-desired person. 166Wage discrimination is sustainable in the presence of employers who prefer prejudice to profits. 1 Challenges to the neoclassical economics model are numerous because of its impact on legal decision-making. 168To the extent that the present economic models influence legal decision-making, a critical assessment safeguards rather than limits employees' economic choices instead of licensing employers' choices that are a pretense for illegal economic conduct. Moreover, legal rules need to expand beyond economic rationality. Law has relied heavily on rational-person economics in evaluating discriminatory conduct based on the essential differences between men and women. However, when making gender decisions law has not accounted for the interdependence of social structures and human relationships. In an effort to analyze the marginalization of women's economic contributions, economist Marilyn Power coined the term "social provisioning." 169Her sole objective was to broaden the traditional market measures of work and its pecuniary value to include those contributions that were either low wage or [*668] performed outside of markets. 170Power identified five categories: (1) care work and unpaid labor; (2) well-being as economic success; (3) race, ethnicity, and class classifications; (4) agency, individual choice, and power dynamics; and (5) ethical goals and values that require a critical analysis of their effect on economic markets. 171Specifically, she argues that a feminist economic perspective would assign a quantifiable value to the effect of the category in economic production and exchange markets instead of having the economic effect go unmeasured. 172Eliminating these embedded economic outcomes is essential to closing the racialized wage gap.

Within the perspective that approaches gender and social protection systems through a labour lens, there is also a focus on the gendered dynamics of informality, decent work, and the ‘future of work’. One study that we reviewed examines the role of labour unions in mobilizing around women domestic workers’ access to decent work in Bangladesh, including full access to the national social protection system, inclusive of contributory social security (Ghosh, 2021). The study found that the unions’ focus on national legislation and policy bore some fruit by enabling domestic workers to form collectives, and guaranteeing maternity leave for domestic workers, although implementation of these rights still lags. Others consider rising automation and gig work, finding that while many of the gendered challenges facing social protection systems aren’t novel or unique to ‘future of work’ trends, there is a real risk that these trends exacerbate pre-existing gender inequalities, and as such, policymakers would do well to adapt social protection system design to reflect these (Bastagli and Hunt, 2020). The third main approach we identified suggests that social protection systems should align with human rights principles. Sepúlveda Carmona (2017) argues that the principles of equality and non-discrimination can be better utilized to overcome wide and persistent coverage gaps for women, including through application to various system components and mechanisms such as personal identification systems and targeting mechanisms. In South Africa, Matthews (2020) applies a human rights perspective to the conceptualization and implementation of the national social protection system as it interacts with labour policy. Focusing in particular on the concept of non-discrimination, the article finds that gendered and racial discrimination in the labour market perpetuates the exclusion of Black South African women from accessing social protection.

The welfare state represents a key interface between economic and political systems and forms of gender relations and power. Its development was premised on particular forms of economy (industrial capitalism), polity (andrarchies, that is, government by men), family (heterosexual nuclear models) and division of labour (male breadwinner) that resulted in women’s exclusion from full participation in the public sphere. Welfare states and associated notions of citizenship based on an ideal male worker reinforced women’s financial dependence on men by limiting their social rights and ability to make claims to public resources. Women’s lesser social rights often came together with weaker substantive political rights and represented a barrier to their full citizenship. By focusing on state-market relations and social provision relating to the sphere of production, mainstream analyses of welfare states were also cast in these masculine principles – although, framed in formally gender neutral terms –which relegated women and gender to obscurity. In this context, the emergence of research on gender and the welfare state constituted an important reorientation. First, feminists broadened notions of social provision to also include measures related to reproduction (Shaver 1994; Lewis 1992) and expanded the notion of social citizenship to incorporate care (Knijn and Kremer, 1997; Lister, 1997; Siim, 2000). They called attention to the family and its relationship with the state and the market in the production of public welfare (Daly and Lewis, 2000; Orloff 1993). They have been at the forefront in bringing in the influence of ideas, discourses and ideologies alongside political ideologies (Sainsbury, 1996; Duncan and Edwards, 1999; Lewis, 1992). They revealed the importance of gender in shaping the politics of welfare states (Sainsbury, 1999; Koven and Michel, 1993; O’Connor et al. 1999; Skocpol, 1992). So many and multifaceted have been feminist contributions to the study of welfare states that they have fundamentally reshaped the key analytical constructs used in its analysis. Feminist analysis of welfare states has now established itself as a vibrant area of research, and gender concepts and perspectives have become increasingly part of the everyday language with which researchers and policy-makers talk about social policy. Growing political concerns about women’s employment, work-family reconciliation, care deficits, ageing populations and children’s outcomes have also contributed to put gender high on the research agenda, and instances of collaboration between gender and non-gender scholars are increasingly observable (Orloff and Palier, 2009; Béland and Mahon, 2016). The distance between feminist and mainstream academic communities is now apparently smaller, and the value of gender perspectives is clearly recognized by mainstream researchers. Nonetheless, notions of care, dependency and reproduction still hold an ambiguous place in mainstream analyses (Orloff, 2009a). Issues about the place and respective value of care and paid work create divisions among feminist welfare state scholars. At the core of this literature is a strong normative concern about altering the unequal gendered division of labour, but there is also disagreement about the best way in which this is to be achieved. For many feminists paid work, and the economic independence it provides, is the precondition of women’s liberation (Orloff, 1993). Yet, others insist that gender equality requires that social rights should be attached to care (Knijn and Kremer, 1997). Much of the history of gender and welfare state analysis can be characterized as a pendulum oscillating between those different principles. As Ruth Lister (1997: 178) writes, ‘we are torn between wanting to validate and support, through some form of income maintenance provision, the caring work for which women still take the main responsibility in the private sphere and to liberate them from this responsibility so that they can achieve economic and political autonomy in the public sphere’. The article provides an overview of comparative research on gender relations and the welfare state through the lens of the tensions between care and paid work. First, we discuss how the intellectual enterprise of gendering welfare state analysis emerged and how it shifted feminist views of the welfare state. Secondly, we devote major attention to the comparative turn in feminist analysis of welfare states, the research agenda it established and the major reorientation it produced on mainstream studies. In sections three and four, we turn to the centrality of care in feminist theorizing on the welfare state and the normative perspectives that have tried to overcome the tensions between care and paid work as alternative routes to gender equality. In section five, we illustrate how this tension has shaped women political activity in the welfare state. We conclude by identifying the emerging challenges which need to be addressed by future research. 2. Bringing Women and Gender In To bring gender into the analysis feminist scholars initially focused on women and their relationships to the welfare state. A prevailing view maintained that women were the objects of policy. Women’s relationship to the welfare state was characterized as one of dependency, and in its most extreme form, the state was an instrument of women’s oppression (Wilson 1977). Other analytical perspectives, adopting ‘claims’ and ‘statuses’ as starting points, transformed women into actors – as claimants, beneficiaries, employees and citizens (Peattie and Rein 1983; Hernes 1987). Women’s relationship to the welfare state as mothers was also examined. In short, the strategy of focusing on women made women visible in the welfare state where they previously were invisible. Including women made it possible to compare women and men, which revealed a gender division of welfare and differentiation in social rights. Breaking down the poor by gender disclosed the feminization of poverty (Pearce 1978). This phenomenon reflected the duality of the welfare system that differentiated between women and men in terms of type of social entitlement, benefit levels, political legitimacy of social rights, and administrative intrusion in private lives (Nelson 1990). Finally, the strategy of bringing women into the analysis exposed the male bias in assumptions, concepts and theories. A case in point is T.H. Marshall’s social citizenship (1950), one of the most important concepts in the welfare state literature. The concept of social citizenship put social rights on a par with civil and political rights in attaining full citizenship, and Marshall underlined that social rights had the potential to strengthen the capacity to exercise political rights. Feminists criticized Marshall’s description of the evolution of civil, political and social rights on the grounds that it did not fit women’s historical experience (Hernes 1987: 27). Especially damaging to women’s social citizenship was that Marshall’s conceptualization upheld a division between the public and private spheres (Pateman 1988). Since being in the public sphere was for Marshall the precondition for social rights, women in the private sphere were denied equal rights, and their rights were derived from their husband’s rights and activities in the public sphere.

Among the many contributions that women can make to a company, it turns out that share price may be the most significant of all.55 The third trope of “womenomics” has been perpetuated by a growing number of financial and accounting firms in recent years. While its usage may overlap with the other two tropes, this line of argument is even more firmly rooted in the idea that women are good for business. The term “womenomics” was first used by Kathy Matsui in an investment report produced for Goldman Sachs. Matsui, who was looking at the prospects for growth in Japan at the turn of the millennium, argued that the growing number of women who were entering the workforce (out of both necessity and choice) were also becoming an important source of income and consumption growth. In the context of Japan’s declining birth rate, it was believed that women were key to offsetting the negative impact of a shrinking labour pool over the long term.56 Within this framework, womenomics was used to refer to the process of figuring out the economic implications of shifting market trends, which included the identification of those companies most likely to benefit from these trends. Following on from Matsui’s original report, Goldman Sachs published a series of additional forecasts based on the wome- nomics approach.57 Following on from this, in 2006, The Economist magazine pub- lished “A Guide to Womenomics”, emphasising the enormous potential of women as a vast “untapped market”.58 A second and related catchphrase that has recently emerged is the “gender divi- dend”. In 2011, the financial consulting firm Deloitte released a report entitled The Gender Dividend: Making the Business Case for Investing in Women, which emphasised the “steady benefit that is earned by making wise, balanced investments in devel- oping women as workers and potential leaders as well as understanding women as consumers and their impact on the economy and the bottom line”.59 In a related piece, Anne Weisberg, Deloitte’s “Director of Talent”, reiterated the two main arguments in favour of hiring a greater number of female workers. The first argument is that companies must be driven by “talent” and that underu- tilising or ignoring women decreases a firm’s potential competitive advantage. Implicitly drawing on work famously carried out by Gary Becker in the 1950s, the message here is that it is not women per se who make good investors, but rather that discrimination is based on an irrational preoccupation with individual bodily markers of difference that creates a competitive disadvantage since it obstructs the natural workings of supply and demand.60 The second argument is that women are needed to better understand the power of women as consumers. “The bottom line—and that is what this is all about—is that there is a Gender Divi- dend to be reaped by any company or country that invests in women”.61 Echoing these private sector views, in that same year, the newly formed UN Women released a report with an almost identical title: The Gender Dividend: The Business Case for Investing in Women. This report further develops the notion that countries are like businesses and that the economic, legal and cultural barriers to women’s participation in the economic and political spheres ultimately harm a country’s national competitiveness. While the report cites the same handful of sources as the private sector report, it diverges from many of these reports in emphasising gender equality an important goal in itself. However, in stressing the need to “liberate the world’s greatest untapped development resource”,62 the report also reinforces the essentialisation of women found in the “women as saviours” discourses and frames women’s bodies as commodities in need of unleashing (or exploitation) by market forces. From the perspective of the body, an interesting contradiction emerges within the “womenomics” approach, as it both assumes the existence of a universal female investor who brings certain feminised talents to bear on investment decisions while simultaneously reproducing the ideas that men and women are ultimately equal, success in the field of finance is based on merit and financial markets are gender-blind. That is, even when viewed on its own terms, the business case for gender equality in finance raises irresolvable questions about how financial markets can be conceptualised as both responding well to women’s unique (and embo- died) investment styles while also being fundamentally gender-neutral. Two studies are useful for further evidencing this contradiction, which is perpe- tuated by many of the same people most vociferously advocating the broader TBF agenda. The first is Micky Lee’s analysis of all of the investment guides for women published in the US between 2002 and 2011. Lee found that all of these investment guides share a conception of the “Universal Investor Women” who is heterosexual, does not receive any support from her community (with the exception of one book targeting African American women) and is a natural investor, despite lacking financial literacy and ultimately being socialised to think otherwise.63 According to Lee, these books acknowledge the multiple roles played by women as workers, mothers, wives, and so on. They also naturalise women’s place in the domestic sphere, using analogies about trips to the grocery store and efforts to lose weight, and suggest ways that this experience can be used to help women succeed in the masculinised realm of finance (i.e., “women tend to nurture their investments”).64 For some of the authors, this is linked to biological explanations (i.e., “women’s relative lack of testosterone compared to men means they may actu- ally be hard-wired to be calmer, more disciplined investors”).65 Yet, despite appealing to women’s unique talents as investors, these books ulti- mately claim that their investment advice applies to both men and women, as the market is fundamentally gender-neutral: ‘gender is not a factor on any level in mastering the nuts and bolts of smart financial management’ (Orman 2007, 1); ‘the basic principles of investing are the same, no matter what your gender or station in life’ (Morris and Morris 2003, 6); ‘whether stocks, bonds, or real estate, investments do not care if it is a man or a woman’ (Kiyosaki 2006, 7); ‘money is gender- neutral’ (Bodnar 2006, 1); ‘discrimination in financial matters is not the barrier it once was. “Green is green”’ (Bridgforth and Perry-Mason 2003, xxv).66 Statements such as these contradict the earlier claim that markets are masculinised as well as the broader claim that women’s biology and their naturalised positioning in social reproduction renders them uniquely capable investors. A second work that has identified a similar contradiction is Melissa Fisher’s eth- nography of the first generation of women working on Wall Street. Drawing on interviews conducted throughout the 1990s and 2000s with the first generation of women to establish themselves as professionals on Wall Street, Fisher empha- sises the extent to which women themselves worked to create the image that their femininity offered them particular advantages in finance. In the 1980s and 1990s, this was especially the case for women working in research and brokerage, where women “invoked and reframed the figure of the financial ‘consumer’ in order to sell themselves as professional subjects of economic expertise”.67 Accord- ing to Fisher, this performance of femininity worked well for some of the “Wall Street women”, who were able to conform to acceptable standards of womanhood while simultaneously drawing on gendered stereotypes in order to suggest that they could act as guardians of the interests of their clients and their firms.68 Fisher offers a number of criticisms of this gender performance, not least of which is the role that it has played—and is currently playing with renewed vigour—in using women’s positioning as mothers and carers as a means of legiti- mising the power of financial elites.69 However, of immediate interest here is her finding that insofar as the women she interviewed were keenly aware of the ways in which their gender affected their career trajectories on Wall Street, they consistently returned to a narrative of gender neutrality in markets and a “complete faith in the objectivity and transparency of numbers within the world of finance”.70 I draw attention to these contradictions not to suggest a resolution, but rather to emphasise that even on its own terms, the “womenomics” trope cannot resolve the underlying contradiction that stems from a neoclassical view of markets as objec- tive, neutral and natural systems and the everyday gendered experiences of women in finance. Rather, womenomics is helping to reproduce the myth of homo oeconomicus and to externalise the operation of gender power relations to the operation of financial markets in ways that legitimise the ongoing deepening of finance. As noted in the first theoretical premise, this is not simply a discursive move since the andocentrism of this model has direct material and distributional implications for the allocation of resources.

The best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women.44 The second, and interrelated, “women as saviours” trope builds on the idea that access to finance will help integrate women into the economy as workers and entrepreneurs, as well as consumers who can use credit to buy goods and accumulate assets. This will ultimately have the effect not just of empowering women, but also of stimulating stagnating national economies post-GFC, particu- larly in the Global South, where women’s labour remains a vast and “untapped resource”. As World Bank President Robert Zoellick argued in 2010, a “host of studies suggest that putting earning in women’s hands is the intelligent thing to do to aid recovery and long-term development”.45 Echoing this sentiment at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) High-Level Policy Dialogue on Women and the Economy, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that “[t]o achieve the economic expansion we all seek, we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come. That vital source of growth is women”.46 The “women as saviours” argument is evidenced in the WEF Gender Gap Index, which puts forth the argument that women are key to economic recovery, particu- larly in the so-called emerging BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China).47 The WEF reports draw on literature published by a handful of banks, investment and accounting firms that seek to empirically document the women as saviours effect. The name of Ernst & Young’s series, Groundbreakers: Using the Strength of Women to Rebuild the World Economy, is explicit in this regard, as is Goldman’s Sachs’ “Womenomics” and Deloitte’s “Gender Dividend” (more below). The business press has also picked up on this line of argument, publishing articles with titles such as “Women: Saviors of the World Economy?” and “Fixing the Economy? It’s Women’s Work”.48 This discourse further intersects with arguments that suggest that more women at the helm of the world’s leading banks and finan- cial firms would have prevented the GFC by reining in the excessively risky testos- terone-driven behaviour of men.49 If it is the case, as the historical materialist literature on financialisation suggests, that part of what has driven the expansion and deepening of finance is a crisis in profitability in other parts of the economy, then women’s bodies seem to have emerged as an important terrain upon which to displace the contradictions of capi- talist accumulation. However, as with other “spatio-temporal fixes”, as they are described by David Harvey,50 the positioning of women as “underutilised resources” ripe for exploitation by global capital ultimately reproduces further con- tradictions, not least because it ignores the vast amount of biological and social reproductive labour that takes up much of women’s time and energy. As Diane Elson put it over a decade ago, in the context of debates over the structural adjustment policies (SAPs) being imposed by the International Financial Insti- tutions (IFIs), women are an “over-utilized rather than an under-utilized” resource.51 At the same time, drawing on the third theoretical premise, which is that finan- cial deepening differentially produces bodies, this trope can be seen as working to produce women in the Global South as “people of the body”. This is done in ways that contradict the erasure of bodies and embodied forms of difference that takes place through the spread of credit rating and risk assessment tools in places with more developed financial systems. In other words, whereas much of the discourse surrounding the need to extend finance to women (and certain racialised min- orities) in the advanced capitalist world—think, for instance, of Margaret Thatch- er’s “Ownership Society” in the UK and its replication in the US under Clinton and George Bush—is based on the idea that gender does not matter in economic decision-making, when referring to the Global South, gender is precisely what makes women better financial risks. This argument relies on an observation made by David McNally that “[a] central feature of bourgeois thought [ ... ] has been its othering of the body and its embody- ing of the other”.52 McNally’s observation (which itself draws on the work of Marxist feminist Himani Bannerji) is ultimately pointing to the differential pro- duction of bodies through processes of embodiment-disembodiment. It is also a key point from which one can identify the contradictory tendencies inherent between the “women as saviours” argument and the argument that has been raised in reference to financial deepening in the developed world, which asserts that finance erodes gender difference by removing the body entirely from decision-making. This latter discourse is well captured by the senior vice-president of small business banking at one of Canada’s large banks, who recently explained that what has happened “is that we have moved to a very standardised risk model, like a grid, where you look at a standard set of factors like credit rating, debt service coverage, and the value of any security a borrower is providing”. This means that ultimately, “the human element has been removed and, along with that, the risk for gender bias has been removed”.53 Whereas in Canada (and elsewhere), the “financing gender gap” is presumed to be best addressed by allowing technological progress and market forces to disap- pear the body, in the Global South it is the mothering/nurturing body that is privi- leged. Again, the contradiction here is not simply theoretical but rather actively produces embodied forms of social differentiation as the altruistic and maternal roles of certain groups of women are “re-traditionalised”. This then exacerbates what Sylvia Chant has called the “feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation” while leaving socially constructed masculine behaviour intact.54

The social turn in international development, signifying the inclusion of dimensions such as gender and poverty, attempts to redress destructive practices of past decades and offer solutions for a more equitable and sustainable future (Stiglitz 1999). In contrast to prior development practices, women are reframed as active agents of development (World Bank 2001a, 2012). Feminist scholars and activists questioned the possible hidden agendas in this social turn (Bergeron 2003). Feminism has often been co-opted to support neoliberal goals of reducing state-led development and penetrating Global South markets (Eisenstein 2009; Fraser 2009), and the emphasis on women’s entrepreneurialism reveals a neoliberal model of competition, privatization, and market-based development. Feminist debates on the Global South woman entrepreneur centers on the microfinance industry and the women who use their services (Karim 2011; Keating, Rassmussen, and Rishi 2010; Radhakrishnan 2015; Rankin 2001). These works are critical in revealing the neoliberal project behind the microcredit industry, but they do not connect women’s experiences with so-called entrepreneurialism to their economic and social positions as informal workers. I focus on the informal economy because the microfinance movement reflects the characterization of informal work as self-employment (De Soto 1989; World Bank 1995, 2001b). In searching for the entrepreneur, a range of workers in low-paying and menial jobs are enveloped under its label, including waste scavengers (Rogerson 2001), day laborers (Valenzuela 2001), and homeworkers (Gough 2010). I build on labor scholars’ critiques of this mischaracterization (Breman 2013; Harriss-White 2003) by contributing a feminist analysis that acknowledges the role of women’s unpaid work in shaping their experiences with paid work. In this article, I compare the lived realities of women informal workers with the construction of an abstract gendered entrepreneurial subject. I define the gendered entrepreneurial subject as a development industry discourse that emphasizes neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency through the market. Two characteristics of entrepreneurialism are capital to invest and the autonomy that accompanies self-employment, and I examine these two characteristics in subcontracted home-based work: paying for costs of production (i.e., capital) and the temporal/spatial production process (i.e., autonomy). Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 30 home-based garment workers in Ahmedabad, a large city in northwest India, I find that women’s actual experiences with the informal economy contradicts the abstract, universalized representation of the gendered entrepreneurial subject. Rather than self-reliant neoliberal subjects, this production system results in constrained subjectivities shaped by women’s economic and social positions. Workers’ ability to provide for their families is limited by their need to invest in their work and the potential to work (and earn) as much as they are willing to. This article builds on feminist theory by exposing the contradictions of the gendered entrepreneurial subject and revealing the alternative subjectivities produced in this production system.

The post-Washington consensus, a departure from the 1980s economic policies defined by structural adjustment programs, acknowledges that inclusive and sustainable development must address both social and economic dimensions (Stiglitz 1999). Increasing capabilities, especially women’s, is essential (Sen 1999). The emphasis on women’s empowerment (World Bank 2012) and unpaid care (UN Women 2015) reveal a shift from state- and market-dominated analyses to considering multidimensional aspects of global restructuring. However, the social turn remains grounded in economic thinking (Bergeron 2003). According to the World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report, gender equality is “smart economics” because it enhances productivity and improves outcomes for the next generation (World Bank 2012). Promoting women’s entrepreneurial abilities and increasing their market-based opportunities are key poverty reduction strategies to achieve these goals. This is reminiscent of past development strategies’ reliance on gendered constructs, such as the global market’s use of young women as docile, nimble, and cheap labor power (Elson and Pearson 1981) or the unequal burden placed on women as a result of structural adjustment policies (Acosta-Belén and Bose 1990; Benería and Feldman 1992). The gendered entrepreneurial subject is an example of what Bergeron (2011) describes as economic performativity, an economic description used to frame and normalize people’s actions. In this era of social development, economic performativity reproduces universalized notions of women, work, and the family to “transform subjectivities toward neoliberal aims” (Bergeron 2011, 154). For example, the construction of the Third World woman into the “rational economic woman” (Rankin 2001) assumes universal principles of entrepreneurship for women in developing countries (Radhakrishnan 2015). Meanwhile, state programs and programs led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) continue to rely on women’s unpaid labor in the home and community while reinforcing neoliberal ideologies of self-sufficiency (Neumann 2013). This article is not a study on microcredit enterprises; however, I am in dialogue with critiques of development initiatives that rely on neoliberal entrepreneurialism to address social inequalities. The gendered entrepreneurial subject places responsibility on women while ignoring (and relying on) the decreased state support of social reproduction due to neoliberal restructuring (Bakker and Silvey 2008) and the increased informalization of the labor market (Breman 2013; Harriss-White 2003). I find that the World Bank’s framing of gender equality as an asset for productivity and the next generation and its emphasis on entrepreneurialism misrepresent women’s gendered experiences with the informal economy. Women experience informal work differently than men because of gendered constructs of work and care (Blumberg 2001), and while working at home would seem to lessen conflict between these roles, it intensifies and reinforces women’s social reproductive roles. This heightened burden challenges the World Bank’s stated goals for gender equality. The Informal Economy and Entrepreneurialism More than 84 percent of the nonagricultural workforce in India is in the informal economy (ILO 2013). Workers in the informal economy, work that is not recognized or protected by legal and regulatory frameworks, face a range of vulnerabilities, including “limited access to social protection, denial of labour rights, and lack of organization and representation” (ILO 2013, 1). Yet there is growing interest of the informal economy as a site for entrepreneurialism (see Thanh, Thi, and Turkina 2013; Webb et al. 2013; Williams and Gurtoo 2011; Williams and Nadin 2010). Building on De Soto’s (1989) argument of the informal economy as a response to state-imposed constraints in the formal labor market, informal workers are rational actors choosing to operate outside of formal regulations (Webb et al. 2013). Labor scholars have criticized this mischaracterization of informal work. They argue informal employment is the result of the unequal relations of production between workers and capital (Breman 2013; HarrissWhite 2003; Hill 2010). The informal economy is not a “safety net” (Singh, Jain-Chandra, and Mohommad 2012), nor is it an outcome of rational choice (Webb et al. 2013). Rather, it is a production relationship that relies on the downgrading and fragmentation of work for capital’s profit (Breman 2013). Karides (2010) links the micro-enterprise expansion under neoliberal development regimes to failures of past development strategies, relying on informal and unpaid labor to support the loss of formal work. Labeling informal work as an opportunity overlooks its cycle of pauperization (Breman 2013) and the social structures and relations that limit one’s “choice” of work (Harriss-White 2003; Hill 2010). For example, when women work, they are more likely to work in the informal economy (Chen and Raveendran 2011) and in segments of the informal labor force with the lowest earnings (Chen, Vanek, and Heintz 2006). The case of home-based workers, presented in the following pages, demonstrates the need for critical accounts of social relations of power in production and social reproduction to avoid misinterpreting informal workers’ needs.

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Beginning in the mid-sixties, a new round and form of capitalist expansion shifted the epicenter of production from Fordist factories in the rich countries to assembly plants in the poor, prequel to the neoliberal era. An integral element in this process was a concomitant shift in the privileged subject of exploitation, from a putatively breadwinning patriarch in the global north to a pin-moneyearning, docile young woman in the global south.27 Since then, much of global production has been organized around the expectation of and search for a paradigmatically feminine, “cheap, docile, and dexterous” worker.28 Thus, what I came to term the “trope of productive femininity”29 has become a defining feature of managerial hiring and labor control strategies in plants in the global south, even in periods and areas in which men are incorporated into these feminizing structures. Within these discursive frameworks, masculinity remains very much part of the story. In classic fractal form, this exploitable feminine subject emerges in contrast to men on both sides. Before her, we find the endangered, first world, unionized breadwinner. Her objectification is counterpoised to his capacity to operate as an active subject, her passivity to his action on his own behalf, the essential triviality of both her productive and household contribution to the centrality of his. Nonetheless, it is she who is the danger, destroying him, taking his job. Under neoliberalism, the breadwinners of the global north are a dying breed. At the same time, her image is recursively juxtaposed against a less successful masculinity nearer by. Productive women workers are contrasted to their unruly brothers, local young men who have no access to breadwinner masculinity but nonetheless fail to meet the standards of true feminine exploitability.30 Coded as unruly, undisciplined, inappropriate workers of last resort by transnational managers, these young men, like their counterparts around the globe, become excess, categorically unfit. And it was within these contrasting gendered discourses that the maquila labor force was constituted and in the context of that market that the struggles over production itself took place.

Unleashing women’s economic potential will make economic growth and recovery faster and more equitable. Economic empowerment makes other rights possible for women. (Michele Bachelet, former Executive Director of UN Women) The first “financial empowerment” trope is based on the idea that the private sector, governments, international institutions and civil society all have a role to play in improving women’s access to credit (generally provided by private lenders), which is key to their empowerment. While this is part of a much longer historical trajectory in the underdeveloped world that has been perpetuated though microcredit and other initiatives, banks and other lenders—including payday and high-cost lenders—have also come to adopt the message that their pro- ducts serve a social purpose as they help to empower individual borrowers. Despite decades of evidence from the field of GAD that disturbs the notion of a direct link between financial access and women’s empowerment,22 “financial empowerment” has become increasingly central to the international aid industry and the development arms of many states (with DFID, for instance, arguing that the empowerment of women through financial inclusion is key to alleviating poverty globally).23 At the international level, the OECD recently developed a new initiative called the International Network on Financial Education, which has a special focus on women’s financial empowerment through education.24 In June 2013, the OECD, whose project on gender equality is focused on the “Three Es: Employment, Education and Entrepreneurship”, also teamed up with the G20 and the World Bank to host a conference on financial empowerment. The pervasiveness of the “financial empowerment” trope becomes even more evident when it is considered in relation to the overlapping tropes about the need to “bank the unbanked”, which is advocated by the World Bank among others, and to promote “financial inclusion” among the world’s poor.25 Without ever defining empowerment, the report underlying the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Mobile Money programmes, for example, discusses the need to empower women by reducing the gender gap in mobile phone ownership, which is closely linked to financial inclusion via mobile banking.26 In many of these instances, the term “empowerment” has been de-linked from questions of broader social transformation, individualised and transferred onto individual women’s bodies through the production of entrepreneurial subjects. This is not merely a discursive move as evidenced, for instance, in research done by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) that has tracked where the money for women’s rights is actually going. In 2011, the group surveyed 1,119 women’s organisations in over 140 countries and actually found a decline in support from many of the donors that have historically funded them.27 They also found funding from corporations, individual philanthropists and social enterprises to be almost non-existent.28 This suggests that the broader move to corporate-led initiatives will have important implications for grassroots women’s social organis- ations, which are increasingly having to rely on membership fees, individual donations and income-generating activities. As Eyben and Napier-Moore document in their genealogy of the use of the term “empowerment” by development institutions, current usages of the term differ from that of the 1990s when women’s empowerment was elevated from being something necessary for “development” to being a matter of social justice in its own right. Indeed, one of the successes of the gender and development movement was the location of empowerment within broader ideas about participation, power and equality. A decade and a half later, though the term is often used in contradic- tory ways (including within particular institutions themselves), it has become a much more technical term that is often narrowly associated with microcredit pro- grammes and political quotas for women. Empowerment here comes from the presence of women’s bodies in particular institutions rather than the promotion of gender issues per se. It is also linked to women’s ability to engage in paid labour and/or entrepreneurship.29 Empowerment has also been linked to results-based instrumentalist research agendas that seek to show how empowerment delivers specific development out- comes. An example of such a (TBF) research agenda is the “Third Billion Index” developed in 2010 by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Co., which is part of the global PwC group). This index ranks countries in terms of “how effectively they are empowering women as economic agents in the marketplace”. Women’s econ- omic participation is then correlated to countries’ general economic growth and well-being, mainly in the areas of health, early childhood development, security and freedom. In a recent report—for which Cherie Blair wrote an introduction— it is noted that women’s empowerment is no longer only the business of govern- ments and NGOs, but also the responsibility of the private sector, which is coming to realise that “women’s full participation in the world of work is not merely a social good but an economic necessity”.30 The private sector has a role to play in, among other areas, supporting female entrepreneurs and financing women-owned business. The Third Billion Index draws some of its inspiration from the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index. The purpose of the index is to identify the gap between men and women in the areas of (1) economic participation and opportunity, (2) educational attainment, (3) health and survival and (4) political empowerment. These gaps are then mapped onto the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report and various measurements of GDP. Although its focus is wider than women’s economic participation, the WEF (which is a private, business-led international organisation) similarly claims that there is a “strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its national competitiveness”. This means that those countries with the smallest gender gaps, namely in the areas of political and economic participation, health and education, are also the most competitive countries globally.31 According to the WEF, “[a] country’s competitiveness depends on its human talent—the skills, education and productivity of its workforce. Because women account for one-half of a country’s potential talent base, a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilises its women”.32 Drawing on the first theoretical premise established above, it is a rather bitter irony that while these indexes do recognise the importance of a healthy and edu- cated workforce for the functioning of economies, they fail to acknowledge the work that is involved in these forms of biological and social reproduction. Rather, reproductive labour as a whole is obscured, as the index fails to account for household and domestic-related phenomena, including unpaid work. Accord- ing to Chant and Brickell, the same can be said for the Third Billion Index, the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Gender Inequality Index.33 While unpaid reproductive labour is systematically ignored, women—or more specifically, women’s bodily capacities—are produced as “marketizable and exploitable commodities”.34 Drawing on the third premise, it also becomes evident that an exclusive focus on measuring gaps between men and women obscures much more complex gender dynamics at work under neoliberalism.35 In particular, it obscures the ways in which certain gender gaps, or gaps between women as a group and men as a group, are narrowing compared to gaps among women (i.e. along class, racial and other lines) and among men. For example, while the gap between male and female par- ticipation in the labour force has been declining globally since 1990, this has largely been due to a worldwide fall in male labour force participation rates.36 At the same time, according to the WEF’s methodology, where gaps have been closed, the index does not go on to measure those areas where women have achieved more than men. As such, it does not capture the closing of gaps as the result of falls in the political, economic and social attainments of men and boys. Thus, while women’s bodily capacities are valued as potentially untapped commodities, those of men and boys are devalued. Returning to the issue of the broader promotion of women’s financial empower- ment, a perspective of the body draws attention to the forms of gendered violence that have been shown to accompany particular forms of financial deepening and attendant collection techniques. Lamia Karim’s recent study of Bangladesh is only one of a plethora of studies documenting the link between microcredit and increased violence against women in the household and in public (i.e. through flog- ging and other means).37 Violence and aggressive intimidation techniques have also been used by debt collectors against women in the US, who are seen as more likely to submit to aggressive tactics than men, not least because their caring obligations tend to render them less geographically mobile.38 Debt-related suicide has also been documented across the globe, in countries at a range of levels of economic development.39 While issues of financial empowerment are deeply intertwined with the pro- motion of entrepreneurship as an almost unambiguous good, this also fails to capture the specific conditions under which different groups of people engage in this form of work, which has a differential impact on the production of bodies. As Sébastien Rioux reminds us, “Marx was particularly attentive to the ways in which capital is inscribed on the bodies and in the flesh of laborers, documenting as he did how long hours of work, unregulated environment, and dangerous working conditions produced tired, diseased, maimed, unhealthy, overworked, stunted and injured bodies”.40 Although I cannot fully survey the conditions under which different entrepreneurs labour, it has been well documented by groups such as the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor that women in the advanced OECD countries are much more likely to turn to entrepreneurship because of the earning potential it offers than women in the developing world who are more likely to engage in this work due to a lack of alternatives.41 World Bank research shows that while sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of women entrepreneurs of any region, they tend to have smaller businesses (which are often concentrated in the so-called “informal” sector), to be self-employed rather than employ others, to be concentrated in low value-added businesses and to have a lower value of return than men.42 In terms of finance, this then suggests that the latter group of women are prob- ably more likely to be borrowing to finance their immediate reproduction (as described by Federici above) than the former, where the link is less direct. They are also likely to work under difficult physical conditions. In one study of over 422 women street vendors in South Africa, for example, 54 per cent reported a work-related illness or injury. A significantly larger proportion of self-employed women reported illness or injuries, with 47 per cent reporting having received burns during their work, 12 per cent reporting cuts, 21 per cent reporting headaches and 11 per cent complaining of musculoskeletal problems. Approximately one in four women also reported some form of abuse while working, such as sexual har- assment, physical abuse or robbery.43

Foucault identifies a theory of human capital that relies on a specific notion of homo economicus as one of the unique elements of American neoliberalism. Whereas the classical liberal homo economicus was a ‘partner of exchange’, the American neoliberal version is ‘an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 226). With this model, neoliberalism seeks to extend the economic realm and economic thought into ‘a previously unexplored domain’, and on this basis inaugurates ‘the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 219). The ultimate end of this process is the attempted ‘absolute generalization’ of the ‘economic form of the market’ throughout the ‘social body’ and the ‘whole of the social system’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 243). With neoliberalism, economics becomes an apparatus of how individuals, as homo economicus, pursue their self-enterprise in the face of scarcity. Because of the novel emphasis on analyzing the rationality of homo economicus, and because American neoliberalism seeks to render the entire social field intelligible through economic analysis, the question of how far homo economicus can be generalized becomes vital (Foucault, 2008, pp. 268–269). At stake for American neoliberalism is the ability to diffuse the rationality of homo economicus throughout society. The problem that behavioral economics poses in this context is this: Is the model of homo economicus accurate? And if not, can homo economicus be produced? As to the first question, the research program of behavioral economics challenges the empirical validity of the strategic rationality, strictly understood, of the American neoliberalism that Foucault critiques. However, homo economicus as economic subject, and the spread of this model throughout the social realm, is not wholly contingent on its verifiability as a completely accurate description. Instead, homo economicus is more of a grid of intelligibility, an epistemological matrix of economic and social relations. Furthermore, while behavioral economics does indeed challenge the veracity of the perfectly rational, self-interested, utility-maximizing model of homo economicus, it does nothing to upset the broader model of an individual allocating scarce means to varied ends. Indeed, much of behavioral economics is the attempt to systematically theorize and model that strategic rationality, even if it is different than that of the classical formulation. That is, while problematizing the content of homo economicus’ strategic rationality, the form remains unchanged. Camerer and Fehr (2006) push this even farther (unwittingly closer to Foucault, one could argue), contending that more robust formal models of behavioral economics would further embed the economic across the social field, with a ‘unified, and powerful, approach’ able to ‘inform’ not just economics, but social sciences more broadly, the biological sciences, and ‘governments, philosophers, and lawyers’ (p. 52). This indicates the closeness of contemporary behavioral economics to the tendency of neoliberalism to generalize the economic interpretation to the entire social terrain. Moreover, behavioral economics is in many ways an attempt to produce a more rational homo economicus, one more well suited to be an entrepreneur of the self on the market. Jolls (2007), for instance, argues for using the legal system to ‘de-bias’ individuals, claiming that ‘legal policy may respond best’ to non-rational errors ‘by operating directly on the errors and attempting to help people either to reduce or to eliminate them’ (p. 137). If the market cannot fix the individual, perhaps governmentality can fix individuals for the market. A prevailing thought among some behavioral economists is that the biases, errors and miscalculations individuals make prevent them from realizing their own self-interest. If this is the case, then those deviating from the neoclassical model are in effect ‘imposing externalities on themselves’ (Camerer et al., 2003, p. 1221). An asymmetrical paternalism that seeks to correct these errors is hence understood as helping people to ‘behave in their own best interests’ (Camerer et al., 2003, p. 1212). Thaler and Sunstein (2008) offer a similar defense of their own libertarian paternalism, arguing that this mode of governmentality enables individuals to be ‘better off as judged by themselves’ (p. 5). However, who is this self-blocked from achieving their real ends, and from where do these real ends come? They derive from the truth of the market. The authors claim that the economic agent is the one who deems certain ends best, but it is a certain market that generates particular agents with a set of specific ends that trains, manages and subjectivizes these actors in the first place. They are still the selves and ends of homo economicus, only this time homo economicus, as an economic subjectivity, has to be produced, through apparatuses such as behavioral economics. Ultimately, we should not be surprised that homo economicus must be produced, for the truth of the market, and the marketization of the governmental state had to be produced historically as well, as did liberal notions of freedom.Footnote9 Similarly, I argue, homo economicus and his freedom must be produced, and behavioral economics is intimately entangled in its production. An apparent paradox arises: How can homo economicus be absolutely free but also a central element of governmentality? I argue that this seeming contradiction is resolved once we understand first that freedom and homo economicus both have to be produced, and second that this production occurs with direct reference to the market and to the neoliberal economic logic of the market. Within this framework, then, behavioral economics functions as a contemporary apparatus engaged in the production of homo economicus and his freedom, an apparatus that submits what it has produced to a judgment of truth located in the market. This is an eminently neoliberal practice. Kiersey (2009) maintains that in analyzing neoliberalism, we must understand homo economicus as ‘subject to government’, as an ideal type ‘which must be produced in actuality’, meaning that one of the crucial questions to ask about neoliberalism is that of ‘how does actually existing capitalism produce [this] subject’ (pp. 381–382). Along similar lines, Brown (2005) argues that neoliberal governmentality figures humans as homo economicus through the production of economically rational actors and the imposition of market rationalities that cultivate and enact neoliberal life (pp. 40–41). What is necessary, though, is to identify and analyze what, precisely, these practices producing homo economicus are. We should conceptualize behavioral economics as an indispensable technique of this generation of economic subjectivity, for it explicitly recognizes that homo economicus indeed does not exist, and then goes on to posit and advocate for means by which he could in fact be produced. The unequivocal objective of behavioral economics is to cultivate subjects that more closely conform to market logics. Neoliberalism is a ‘new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects’, and homo economicus is a ‘creature whose tendenc[ies] must be fostered’ (Read, 2009, pp. 28–29). More attention must be given to the specific modes by which economic theory and governance specifically engage in these processes of neoliberal subjectification, such as behavioral economics. An analysis of the rationalities of behavioral economics is, I contend, vital for any attempt to account for, theorize, or criticize neoliberalism, for behavioral economics introduces new technologies of power into neoliberal governmentality in a way that buttresses neoliberal hegemony.

Whereas debates ensue about the compatibility of economic and caring motives or the relationship of gender equality in the labor market to household labor,68 at a basic level nonwaged or low-waged care work remains essential to the functioning of market productivity.69 The embeddedness and function of caring labor in the larger political economy has been obscured by its conceptualization as a private family matter, love, and natural to women. As Glenn puts it, Characterizing work in these ways serves the interests of capital by defining this form of labor as separate from and outside the political and economic system. By denying that caring serves to maintain the labor force and therefore the productive processes, these conceptions help corporations and their investors evade responsibility for paying the costs of sustaining workers and families. ... It also serves the interest of men as a class by defining caring work by women as part of a natural order and therefore immutable.70 She argues that global capital benefits by eliminating the costs of “reproduction” to maximize profits, but so do men as a class, “who on average carry less of the burden and enjoy more of the benefits of caring work.”71 Whereas the global economy in its present form would stop functioning without nonmarket caring labor, the ways in which the work of social reproduction ensues perpetuate harmful structural inequalities.72 Women’s entrance into the workforce has advanced without any reduction in the average workweek for workers to meet caring responsibilities; US workers work longer hours than their counterparts in all other industrialized nations, experiencing a “time bind” as they attempt to meet career and caring demands without public child care or paid leave, a bind familiar to working class families. As Hochschild laments, “In the end, both First and Third World women are all players in a larger economic game whose rules they have not written.” The employment of migrant women as a cheap labor source serves the ends of capitalism particularly efficiently, given that “neither capital nor citizens pay for their reproduction, maintenance, or education.” Hence employers lack incentive to question this “ideal-worker setup.” Women’s entrance into the professional workforce also “coincided with the international deregulation of markets and crumbling job protections.” Dominant cultural strains of individualism and meritocracy reinforce this form of capitalism concerned with maximizing output and profit while minimizing or eliminating labor costs. Their influence helps eclipse structural injustices from view, framing struggles for survival or the “time bind” in terms of luck or personal choices alone. Regardless of position or gender, in today’s globalized economy the ideal worker is conceived of as “ economicus unconstrained either by dependency or requirements homo concerning job security, schedule, levels of pay, or free time.”78 Hinze characterizes this ideal as a “mythic, masculinized creature whose performance on the public economic stage depends on the decidedly non-mythic, material toil, and care work of a cadre of backstage supporters in the familial household and beyond.” To sustain the myth, this care infrastructure is moreover “systematically obscured in daily workplaces, excluded or underreported in most measures of economic productivity, and rarely adequately rewarded.”79 In US context, this invisible infrastructure also helps sustain the related myth of meritocracy, which further undermines the cultivation of solidarity.80 Hence the individualism shaping the ideal worker also impacts (lagging) social responses to care needs. Cultures that tout individual responsibility tolerate gendered and racialized inequalities with respect to care labor due to dominant assumptions about the provisions of a free market: “The state is not mandated to respond to those inequalities, nor does it have to establish mechanisms to ensure more equitable distributions of either social goods or responsibilities.”81 The agency of those who benefit from domestic labor is bolstered and the myth of meritocracy sustained. Individualism inhibits government responses to the commodification of care labor in such cultures as it drives the need for workers to mask the “backstage support” that makes possible their public contributions. Individualism also characterizes dominant notions of parenting in the West (among Euro-American families in particular). If children were viewed more as a collective good and their care a public responsibility, such societies could reimagine not only care infrastructures, but also the damaging ways individual accounts of responsibility for children’s success inure us “to the social structures that contribute to the growing gaps among the advantaged and less advantaged children.”82 Given cultures that describe us as workers, parents, and working parents actions.83 Against a backdrop of individualistic and neoliberal capitalistic culture, the intersectional operations of gender, race, and citizenship oppression similarly serve to entrench an exploitative caring infrastructure. They are, of course, also interconnected: a dual-spheres division of labor is not only a patriarchal structure that subordinates women, but also a social strategy that has deployed status obligations and affective motivators to ensure the provision of caring labor for the market.84 Dependency care expectations continue to be imbued with culturally potent meanings, playing on status obligations, stigma, guilt, as well as vocation. Kate Manne’s recent work frames gendered. Care labor in terms of “an illegitmate sense of male entitlement," rooted in the social expectation that women "give traditional feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them.” Correlations of precarious and poorly paid work to female workers “undergirded by the influential (‘cheap, docile, dexterous’) myth of ‘productive femininity,’” further exemplify this deep-seated relationship between difference and capital in modern market economies.” In US context, assumptions about women’s labor have often

reflected the experiences of heterosexual, middle to upper-class white women, such as those portrayed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.87 As bell hooks points out, Friedan addressed neither who would manage the work of social production if more women gained access to professional work, nor the needs of women without men, children, means, and race privilege.88 Given US historical practices of racialized servitude, “Courts, as well as customs and mores, continued to protect the property interests of employers in the labor of racialized workers despite the banning of formal indenture and chattel slavery” through the mid-twentieth century.89 As Glenn notes, “Racist ideology justified coercion by negating the personhood of people of color, thus rendering them and their labor ‘at the disposal’ of whites and employers. These assumptions have lingered in the treatment of household domestic and care employees as ‘hired property.’”90 Delores Williams’s work on social role surrogacy details the antebellum and postbellum forms this structure of domination has taken.91 Both coerced surrogacy, “legally supported in the ownership rights by which slave masters controlled their property, for example, black women,” and voluntary surrogacy, “the social pressures that influenced black women to continue to fill some surrogacy roles” after emancipation, have served to perpetuate exploitation.92 Coerced surrogacy (in areas of nursing, childrearing, sexual gratification) in slavery bound Black women “to a system that had respect for neither their bodies, their dignity, their labor, nor their motherhood except as it was put to the service of securing the well- being of the ruling class white families.”93 Williams recounts the establishment of the Black Mammy Memorial Institute in Athens, Georgia, for example, to underscore how white citizens worked to “perpetuate the mammy roles so that the comfort of the white family could be assured by a type of black female servant who (after slavery) was properly trained in the skills of nurturing, supporting, and caring about the well-being of white children ... and [ensure] that the black family had to become more patriarchal in its structure and values in order to resemble the slave owners’ households.”94 This history impacts the exclusion from labor law protections that leaves domestic workers “vulnerable to conditions of de facto servitude.”95 The purchase of low-wage caring labor from women of color by white class-privileged women in the United States has sustained a “racial division of reproductive labor,” a two-tier hierarchy among women.96 As this has become a transnational affair in recent decades, the employment of migrant women does not enable affluent women to enter the workforce, Barbara Ehrenreich and Hochschild insist, “it enables affluent men to avoid doing the second shift.”97