A lens of feminist politics is crucial to examine the violence undergirding the logic of concentrated economic power

In 2021, an insightful interviewer asked Margrethe Vestager, EU Commissioner for competition law and policy, whether it was “time for a feminist antitrust policy”. The interviewer noted at “feminist policy has been used to denote not just gender equality, but an approach that is more inclusive of all underrepresented people”. In her answer, Vestager set out a number of important ways in which current (EU) competition law enforcement takes gender prominently into account. However, the gist of this question, namely what role feminism and its rich and multi-faceted scholarship could play in competition law and policy, remained unanswered. Feminist approaches go beyond adding gender to the analysis and investigate the deeper layers of legal rules, economic models and enforcement practices that entrench gendered power structures, dynamics, and institutional arrangements and (re)produce various forms of inequalities. By investigating markets’ embeddedness in social relations and relations to other non-market sectors, feminist economists and feminist political scientists point out how markets are underpinned by gendered biases, for example, in the case of pink taxes that involve gendered price discrimination, or how concentrated economic power can be a reflection of social dynamics and existing structural economic inequalities. As Nancy Folbre compellingly argued “[a] narrow definition of the economy leads to a narrow definition of exploitation” something that directly speaks to concerns competition lawyers have with regard to analysing market power. Feminists’ analytical lens is, in fact, intimately related to the analytical lens of competition law. The focus of their analysis concerns power structures and dynamics, and they investigate how various social and economic actors are impacted by these power inequalities and strive to control excessive power and change existing social, economic, and political structures. However, the site and scope of their analysis differ. Competition law is concerned with market processes, economic structures, and activities and with economic power and its consequences on the competitive process. Feminists, however, repeatedly and forcefully called attention to those activities, processes and arrangements that lie outside of the market and the economy, and analysed how power and its allocation in and outside of markets impact women and vulnerable people. At its roots, feminism is about equal rights and at its core, it is about redistributing power. As women’s experiences (often fundamentally) vary, and their social positions are shaped by multiple forms of injustice at the intersection of gender, race, social position, and geographic location, feminist theories show how gender, in complex intersection with other identifying characteristics, has been a core element in distributing resources among individuals in society. These perspectives provide an opportunity to broaden the legal and economic inquiry currently applied in competition law, and to rethink its role in markets and society and its relationship with the state and society. Feminist social science is one way to re-imagine how competition law and policy could become more inclusive in its analysis, and enforcement and ultimately, contribute to inclusive and sustainable growth in societies. Feminist approaches help to unpack the wide diversity of roles and functionalities that markets and the process of competition may have in human society. By critiquing a universal concept of the market, and regulation of competition, they reveal the existence of multiple forms of “market competition” and, that (competition) law does not lie in a particular ‘sovereignty’ but in pluralism as a way to conceptualise and regulate market competition. By taking a contextualised lens and by drawing attention to the complexity of the economy, economic activities and the embeddedness of markets in broader social, economic and political contexts, feminism provides a novel methodology to reassess allegedly “neutral” and objective competition rules, economic models and enforcement practices. Through its multidimensional and pluralist analytical lens, with a strong focus on human diversity and agency, feminists challenged mainstream economic accounts of markets and market actors and emphasised the importance of social norms in affecting both the process and the outcome of economic processes. In contrast to neoclassical economists, feminist economists have underlined the embeddedness of markets in geographically- and historically-specific social relations and their relations to other non-market sectors. Arguing that a market economy is always “embedded” into “the other economy”, they contend that markets are based on power structures and the invisible labour of women and, hence form a system of exploitation that conceives labour as a source of wealth and accumulation.