Mainstream economics is plagued with gender biases – patriarchal and capitalist structures are intertwined and reinforce gender biases, perpetuate income inequality, and commodify women’s labor

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