We must evaluate economics from the outside in- dominant modes of thought and their androcentric assumptions don't just structure economics, they structure the political process we use to select policies and the moral attitudes we use to chose between them

(Sandra, Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective, Feminist Economics 1:1)

How might we accomplish our tasks of systematically identifying values and interests that constitute scientific projects, and thus that tend not to vary between legitimated observers, and of specifying the difference between those that enlarge and those that limit our knowledge? First, we can reflect on the familiar observation that it will be easier to identify the contours of a given conceptual scheme or paradigm from "outside" than from within its categories, concepts, puzzles and other preoccupations that usually fill up the entire horizon of our thought. We want to start off our thought from "elsewhere." Of course, there is nowhere that is outside all culture; there are no vantage points anyone could find that are not themselves also discursively constructed within power relations: that was the delusion of weak objectivity and its neutrality ideal that must be abandoned. Nevertheless, we still have useful resources, for we can start thinking from within another, different framework that enables us to look more objectively at our usually favored one. Where might we find one? Here, we can reflect on a second familiar observation that ways of life or distinctive kinds of activities tend to give rise to distinctive ways of thinking and seeing the world. What we do both enables and limits what we can know. Of course the sciences incorporate this insight in their understanding of the importance of having diverse methods as resources: each enables the researcher to interact in different ways with the world, and so to have the chance to know different things about it. Feminists have developed this line of thought by arguing that if one starts off thought from the kinds of activities or "life worlds" assigned primarily to women in any particular historical situation (in any particular class, race, ethnicity, culture, etc.), one can gain different and valuable insights not only about those activities but also about the kinds of activities and thought that tend to be favored by those groups of men who are not expected to do such "women's work." For example, one would expect, and can find, distinctive kinds of moral reasoning and insights into how the dominant institutions work arising from child care, care of the elderly, the sick, and of people's bodies and emotions more generally that do not arise in the administrative/ managerial "head work" that constitutes ruling in our kind of society (Carol Gilligan 1982; Harding 1986, 1991; Nancy Hartsock 1983; Hilary Rose 1983; Dorothy Smith 1987,1990). The time and energy for some people to perform the abstract, mental labor of administrative/managerial work is created by assigning the work of caring for their bodies and emotions, and the bodies and emotions of everyone else, to others - primarily but not exclusively women. Thus "women's work" is a precondition for the existence of the "autonomous" thought and will of the ideal human figured in Western political and moral philosophy. Far from being autonomous, this thought and will turns out to be dependent on the thought and activity of women and other groups whose distinctive sociality Western political and moral philosophy devalues and marginalizes. Theories of the political, the social, the economic, the moral, the rational and the intellectual that fail to discuss the valuable distinctive forms of these human characteristics arising from "women's work" are the functional equivalent of sociobiology; in excluding women's activities from the proper domain of their study, they implicitly assign these activities to the natural and misunderstand the conditions for and nature of administrative/managerial work. "Women's work" disappears into the natural for men who still associate it with the "motherworld" they struggled to leave behind as they grew up. The economists cited earlier have started off thinking about economic relations from the perspective of women's activities rather than of the conceptual schemes in the dominant institutions, including the discipline of economics, from which women have systematically been excluded. Starting off our thought from the lives of those who are assigned body and emotional labor is an empirical and theoretical project. It does not automatically flow or erupt into the consciousness of those who perform it. Women have had to learn to characterize their activities in terms of a double-day of work, to recognize sexual harassment not as "boys will be boys," but as a violation of our civil rights; to see rape not as a consequence of our "asking for it" or of the inevitability of some deranged men acting out; to see their lower wages not as a reflection of their lower natural talents and abilities or their natural obligations to domestic work, but as a matter of economic exploitation. Feminist insights are empirical and theoretical achievements, requiring political and scientific struggles against the dominant institutions and their discourses. The point is that "legitimated" knowledge communities tend to come from, or aspire to, the same social strata as do managers and administrators - the "rulers" of modern societies. No wonder the conceptual schemes of economics, sociology, political science, philosophy and other disciplines "echo" those of the dominant public policies. The social sciences "work up" everyday life into forms suitable for administrators to process; philosophy justifies these forms as rational, objective and ethically ideal. (23-4)