SOCIAL POSITION DA. Their model hides who is a worker and what is labor – means you should be skeptical of their topic knowledge is good offense!

One way that feminist economists have intervened in economics is by challenging the ostensible division of productive and reproductive labor, the latter referring to the provision of services required to create and sustain a person’s functioning, both physically and mentally, oftentimes called “caring” labor (Himmelweit, Reference Himmelweit2007; Himmelweit, Santos, Sevilla, & Sofer, Reference Himmelweit, Santos, Sevilla and Sofer2013). For instance, many have produced work critiquing the exclusion of emotional and household labor from economic accounts of value (Waring, Reference Waring1988) like gross domestic product (Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2000, Reference Nussbaum2003). Marcal (Reference Marcal2017) reminds us that Adam Smith, from whom economics inherits the famed parable of the butcher and baker, expressing how self-interest connects man with his bread, lived with his mother for much of his life and rarely cooked his own dinner, yet relegated such investments into social reproduction to the margins of economic life. It is perhaps illustrative that the parable of Robinson Crusoe is used in some economics textbooks to demonstrate how self-sufficient, rational agents allocate time to maximize well-being. Grapard (Reference Grapard1995) argues that the story of a white, male colonizer living alone is hardly representative of economic life and, furthermore, reveals the extent to which neoclassical theory is based on the erasure of social reproduction.Footnote 5 These and other feminist critiques charge that the self-supporting, rational caricature of economic life might “be typical of the perceived experiences of adult white male middle-class economists” (Barker, Reference Barker, Peterson and Lewis1999: 573; Strassmann, Reference Strassmann, Ferber and Nelson1993) but it is foreign to everyone else. From the epistemic perspective in which gendered norms around social reproduction are considered central for understanding economics, feminist economists have advanced the field’s understanding of a variety of topics, including sex discrimination in labor markets. In neoclassical economic theory, discrimination exists when differences in remuneration between sexes cannot be captured by variables like education or job experience; thus, discrimination is analytically treated as a “residual, stemming from the tastes of employers,” and as a “puzzle,” because it is seen as an inefficiency (Elson, Reference Elson1999: 611) that market forces tend to eliminate over time (Becker, Reference Becker1957). In contrast, from a feminist economic starting point, we might theorize labor markets—and the sex discrimination observed in them—not merely as expressions of individual preference or belief but as reflecting gendered social institutions in which economics is embedded, including the gendered expectations around caring labor. Following from this premise, some feminist economists suggest that “discrimination against women in the labor market may persist even though it is not economically efficient, in the sense of maximizing profits and output, because it is an effective way of empowering men socially and politically” (Elson, Reference Elson1999: 619–20) and, indeed, economically. Feminist economists extend critiques and contributions beyond those I cite here, including challenging androcentric bias in econometrics, measuring unpaid work as well as paid work in informal economies, and advancing the understanding of occupational segregation. While some feminist economists depart from neoclassical theory altogether, others work within the neoclassical tradition, publishing research that incorporates feminist insights to innovate and advance neoclassical theory and methodology (Barker, Reference Barker, Peterson and Lewis1999). What I wish to emphasize is the epistemic stance found in several of these streams of research, in which feminist scholars have interrogated and critiqued how social categories like gender, race, and class influence economic theory and research, rather than assuming that they play no role at all. Here, I highlight one technique they have used to study labor markets: foregrounding the social position of the knower. Deploying methodologies that may include but also go beyond the neoclassical, including qualitative studies in the traditions of organizational ethnography and economic sociology, many feminist economists seek to engage directly with the experiences of those influenced by labor markets, with particular attention paid to those occupying marginalized social positions. As a result, they are able to offer novel analytic insights into the gendered nature of labor markets. Such scholars hold that instead of seeing labor as exogenous, we should consider how labor markets impact people in ways that are relational, gendered, and fundamentally social (Ramamurthy, Reference Ramamurthy2003) and how gender norms around caring labor can influence formal labor markets (Ferguson & Gupta, Reference Ferguson and Gupta2002). By recasting labor as a site of study marked by social gender norms and power hierarchy, not natural laws, feminist economic epistemology helps us understand how social position matters for producing knowledge about business. In the section that follows, I illustrate how.