Exclusion of feminist economic thought spills up to gendered violence that goes ignored in macroeconomic policy – AND current structural fixes will fail, must prioritize diverse economic frameworks

Despite all this goodwill, disciplinary resistance to diversity will per­ sist even if individuals themselves are not discriminatory. Structural resis­ tance appears—at minimum—in the vertical hierarchy of the discipline, in evaluation methods, and in topical areas and alternative perspectives marginalized and devalued in economic thought. Entry and advancement in the discipline is subject to gendered (and racialized) power relations institutionalized in seemingly gender­neutral practices. Gender­biased student teaching evaluations and gender­biased peer review processes affecting publishing carry over to the evaluation of work for tenure and promotion review. Dominant group preferences, real or perceived, influ­ ence what economists study and how they study it. Gender ideology con­ ditions those preferences because economists are affected by social beliefs and values related to women, men, and gender relations. Moreover, the construction of valuable work as paid work alone in eco­ nomic thought has negative impacts on the visibility and perceived value of women and the work women do, including that of women economists. The fictional separability of paid work from unpaid work, the source of the labor supply, reinforces the degradation of unpaid work and those who do it.26 A changed understanding of the value of unpaid work could con­ tribute to changing the perceived value of those who do the work; it would likely be equity­enhancing. However, such a shift may be unwelcome, as it could disturb existing relationships that empower those associated with paid work relative to those associated with unpaid work. If the discipline is to become inclusive, our understanding of work must change in order to value the practical and theoretical contributions of nonwhite and nonmen people.27 I have sought to trace how these two points—persistent resistance to diversity and the construction of “work”—are connected by linking women and “women’s work” to actually existing economists. I found that economics remains a “man’s field” through structural resistance to women economists, through interpreting women’s economic activities as mar­ ginal to the “real business” of economics, and by delegitimizing feminist research about those activities. In practice, the delegitimization of femi­ nists’ paid work as economists is the devaluing of women’s unpaid work in economic thought. Because economic thought is influential outside the economics discipline, the delegitimization of feminist economic research devalues women’s unpaid work outside the discipline as well. The weight of the second point about work, that feminized unpaid work is associated with women to their disadvantage, is the same weight that has kept many women economists, especially feminists, from thriving academic careers. Critically, the association alone, whether or not it reflects reality for indi­ vidual women, is the foundation for bias that has kept women from getting jobs, from getting tenure, and even from the discipline itself over the past fifty years. The same weight, from the same source, has kept many more women from being hired and promoted outside economics as well. Efforts to “fix” structural resistance to diversity without addressing the devalorization of gendered work in the economics discipline are likely to have limited impacts. They may contribute to demographic diversity, but demographic diversity may not translate into epistemic diversity in a dis­ cipline that marginalizes critical thought. In effect, such efforts may have impacts inside the discipline but do little to shift the weight that the ortho­ dox conceptualization of work puts on women economists and women more generally. Hence, DEI efforts in economics are likely to remain uniquely challenging. As those efforts continue, “good apples” with influ­ ence should ensure that underrepresented economists have pathways to advancement with scope for genuine academic freedom. This is espe­ cially necessary when their intellectual contributions challenge the value systems and the unequal power relations that economic orthodoxy reinforces.