The Sex Factor
Page 23
Economists tend to assume that we can each freely make choices and that we carefully think about every decision. That should be no different when it comes to having children. In fact, given the impact on our lives, it should be even more the case than when choosing a car or what to have for dinner. But, according to US data, amongst young unmarried women, 60 per cent of births are the result of unplanned pregnancies.5 In the United Kingdom, for young women in the 20‒24 age group, the proportion of all pregnancies that are planned is less than half, standing at around 40 per cent.6 This means that the majority were either unplanned or fall into the mysterious category of ‘ambivalence’. For women aged 16‒19, the situation is even more worrying, as only 12 per cent of pregnancies are planned. Globally, the average is almost one in two.7 Given the costs of raising children, which exceed £200,000 per child in the United Kingdom in modern money, each addition to the family makes a big difference, never mind an extra two, three, four or more children. If we are to make sure that women have control over their lives, much more needs to be done.
Comparing our lives today with those of our female ancestors shows just what is at stake.8 When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me stories about her own grandmother who, like me, was small, slight, had long hair and was good with numbers. As it turns out, although her mental arithmetic might have put her at the top of the class, she wasn't so astute when it came to choosing a husband. You could say that the man she married loved drink quite a lot more than he loved his family. My great-great-grandmother gave birth to more than ten children, including at least six boys and, so the story goes, she would regularly send two of them to wait outside the local pub to beg their father for money before he spent it all at the next pub. After years of abuse, she finally got her own back: when her husband tried to escape wartime conscription on the basis of what he claimed was a disability, she secretly told the conscription officers that they should wait for him outside the pub the next evening. Needless to say that he didn't remember to limp in the right way after an evening of alcohol. She was finally free ‒ in one way at least.
Seeing your own children go without must be one of the most heartbreaking feelings any mother can experience. Without the benefit of modern-day contraception, women like my great-great-grandmother must have felt entirely out of control. Every time she missed a period, she must have realized that there would soon be an extra mouth to feed, meaning spreading her earnings ever more thinly and reducing the portion sizes for existing children.
We all have stories like these, and we all know what a difference the welfare state could have made. Child allowances, paid to the mother, free health care and maternity benefits could, I'm sure, have transformed her life along with those of many others. What such personal stories also reveal, however, is that there is another cause of poverty. In the case of my great-great-grandmother, it's easy to see that freedom to control her own fertility would have transformed her life just as much as the welfare state ever could. Feeding, clothing and nurturing two, three or even four children instead of ten or more would have made an immeasurable difference to the family's standard of living. Giving women the power to control their own fertility is not just about rights for women, it is also about giving families what they need to keep the wolf from the door, affecting the lives of the boys and girls of the next generation.
As we saw earlier, at the root of the West's economic riches was the way in which late marriage restricted fertility. The fact that female bodily freedom has been limited for most of history helps to explain why economic prosperity is so rare ‒ and so recent. With women lacking control over their wombs, it's not that surprising that the human race was, until recently, condemned to a life of dearth and deprivation. We tend to assume that poverty reduction has been a result of ‒ depending on whether you are right or left leaning ‒ capitalism or the welfare state; from the point of view of women, control over their bodies must surely be near the top of the list. And, as we saw earlier in the book, the lack of freedom for women in poorer countries not only affects their home economies but also has serious adverse spillover effects on richer economies, including on their wages, inequality and economic growth.
If economists truly want to make the most of their homo economicus assumptions, they need to bring women's bodily autonomy into the picture. Rather than simply assuming individual agency, economists need to do much more to address the lack of it – and be cognisant of attempts to restrict it, even in rich countries.
Family
Economists like to divide the world up in a very simple and straightforward manner. It is a world consisting of twin spheres: the market and the state. It is a division that underpinned the great showdown between capitalism and communism and that led to the notion that to make the market work better we need to shrink the state.
Political thinkers and economists alike have been reluctant to delve beyond the public sphere, believing that life outside is personal rather than political.9 As we have seen, economics developed at a time when the home and the market were becoming increasingly segregated along gender lines, which led it to prioritize the market and to fail to properly consider the important interactions between the two. However, as feminists know well, personal is political. It is fundamentally necessary to understand what happens in the private sphere if we are to understand what is happening in the economy overall.
In A Treatise on the Family, the economist Gary Becker decided to take a walk into this unknown territory, applying market concepts to the family.10 He modelled the family as if it were a business – one in which people think about efficiency and make calculated decisions about whether to get married, how many children to have and whether to go out to work or stay at home. He argued that traditional gender roles – the idea that men go out to work and women remain in the home – were the result of an efficient process of specialization.
There is, however, a fundamental flaw with this Becker-led way of thinking about the family, an approach which has become known as New Home Economics: the assumption of altruism. Although economists assume self-interested behaviour in the public sphere ‒ in markets and in politics ‒ they are seemingly happy to assume completely the opposite in regard to the family: that the family works harmoniously as a unit to maximize ‘household’ utility.
The reality is that we cannot assume that family members are altruistic towards one another. Accepting that is key to understanding where poverty and inequality originate. As we saw in part I, for many of the world's poorest women ‒ in the past and in the present ‒ marriage is not a free choice. The resultant dynamics of family life are, therefore, highly unlikely to be altruistic. Instead, the family becomes the site in which inequalities are propagated and poverty is passed on from generation to generation. That's even the case when marriage is a free choice, when who is earning what can soon start to affect who in the household has the biggest say. Only by understanding this can we even begin to get to grips with the challenges faced by women and the way these interact with the wider economy. Little wonder, therefore, that economists’ forays into the home have come under fire from feminist economists, including Nancy Folbre.11
Folbre has developed an alternative to Becker's altruistic model of family life.12 In an article entitled ‘Exploitation Comes Home’, she applies Marxist thinking to the household. In contrast with Becker, Marxist feminism sees the family as a hotbed of conflict. Family harmony is not taken for granted, and decisions made by individual members cannot be automatically treated as ‘efficient’. The relationship between the patriarch and other family members is seen as analogous to that between a capitalist and workers: imagine all family earnings and resources going into one pot, from which all members receive just enough to subsist, with the ‘surplus’ accruing to the patriarch. Although this might seem far-fetched, it is not entirely amiss.
Take the example of my own grandparents. Their life was pretty typical of working-class families in the north of England. However, despite working f
ull-time, my grandmother was solely responsible for all of the household chores and raising the children. In return, she received a weekly household allowance from my grandfather, as was fairly common in those days. This was topped up by my grandmother's own earnings and, where necessary, she would take on extra work, such as cleaning jobs in the evenings, to make ends meet. The rest of my grandfather's income was spent on himself, on things like cigarettes and bingo. Only when my grandmother accompanied him to a meeting to discuss his pension entitlement, for which he thought her mathematical eye might come in useful, did she realize the full extent of the discrepancy between what he had been earning and his ‘housekeeping’ contribution. Funnily enough, he was a lifelong socialist and yet, rather ironically, had been treating his own wife and children in the same way that he thought capitalists treated their workers.
Of course, not all families are the same. In fact, as we've seen, the way families work exhibits tremendous variety across the world.13 That variety includes how new couples are formed in the first place ‒ the extent to which it is the choice of the individuals or that of their families; whether marriages are expected to be within or outside the family; whether newly married couples are absorbed into an existing household or form their own household; whether assets change hands upon marriage, and women's status in regard to property; how children born outside of marriage are looked upon; whether there is an onus on younger generations to care for older generations within the home; and how inheritance is dealt with. All of this, however, matters deeply for the autonomy of women.
Gender equality and associated prosperity cannot be achieved when there are so many restrictions on women's freedom that come from within the home. The gender gap in the market will not close until it also closes within the home. But, it will not close within the home unless it closes within the market. Where there are fewer market opportunities for women, more demands will be placed on them within the family, and, where that's the case, the more restricted they become in terms of their ability to achieve their potential in the public sphere. In other words, gender inequalities within the home and the marketplace act to reinforce one another. That explains why gender inequality can be so difficult to beat and the prosperity that builds on equality so difficult to bring about. However, economic policy makers can make a difference, if only they open their eyes. Giving women more rights over household income has been shown to have a significant effect on the welfare of the wider family, leading to greater spending on basic facilities (such as toilets), health care and education.14 Sadly, in the case of Britain, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. The new benefits system is one that pays benefits into the bank account of the chief income earner (typically male), increasing rather than decreasing their bargaining power at the cost of their partner.15 Economists still need to open up life within the home if they want to defeat inequality and poverty.
From Family to Dependency
As we have seen, agency is central to economics. People are assumed to be free individuals, interacting anonymously through the marketplace. The notion of being a dependent is largely alien, and the phrase ‘dependency’ carries with it some rather negative connotations. However, whilst the majority of us spend a large portion of our lives directly contributing to the economy in a financial sense, from the time of our birth to the day of our death we each face numerous periods of dependency, from infancy and childhood to periods of study, pregnancy, illness, unemployment and old age. Dependency is as much a fact of life as death and taxes, and it leaves us vulnerable ‒ a vulnerability with which women have, historically, been intimately familiar. In the words of Avner Offer, ‘[i]n these circumstances there may be no agency, no two feet to stand on, nothing to sell, no bargaining power, and restrained cognitive capacity.’16
In ‘traditional’ societies, dependency was dealt with by the family. The family was, in a sense, the original welfare state.17 One of the major restrictions on women's freedom is a set of social norms premised on the idea that women exist for the care of others within the family. However, this reality is made invisible by economics. Whilst economists measure and model those who receive direct monetary reward for their work, they ignore unpaid labour, and it certainly hasn't been thought worth including in national economic accounts.18 And, they model labour as an input into production, ignoring the fact that labour is itself an output of another production process, one involving reproductive and caring labour.19
According to Sabine O’Hara, ‘care’ is in fact central to all economic activity. The market and the world of business does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum.20 It depends intimately upon life outside of the market: on the care provided within families and communities (which, for example, serves to provide a healthy and well-functioning workforce); on the state of trust within society; and on our ability to sustain the natural environment. Economists' neglect of this dependency of markets upon non-market activity ‒ and the human dependencies within it ‒ has resulted in an undervaluation of the contribution of family, society and the environment to our economy. The problem is that care depends on all of those things that economists typically ignore: reciprocity, altruism and responsibility for others.21 Economists cannot get to grips with care until they become more flexible in terms of the assumptions they make about human behaviour.
Only in recent decades, as more and more women have joined the labour market, have economic policy makers been forced to face the problem of dependency in terms of increasing demand for child and elderly care services. In the past, society burdened women with the responsibility of care by restricting their freedom outside the home.22 The question it now confronts is where it wishes to go from here: how will we manage dependency? Assuming it away, or assuming that we can all cope with it privately by taking out insurance and pensions, fails to get to grips with a vital part of human existence and would likely leave women juggling both paid work and care. Given the big changes taking place in the economy, politics and society ‒ the ‘rise of the robots’, the ‘gig economy’, the ageing population and restrictions on immigration ‒ this is a question that is in fact becoming more, not less, pressing. And it's one that should be thought of as central to many of the problems we now face: stress; fertility falling to below population replacement levels; low wages in the care sector; the gender wage gap that results from the unequal distribution of care; and a slowdown in productivity and economic growth as the care economy expands.
Amongst feminist groups, there is an increasing call to treat care, including child care and elderly care, as part of the economic infrastructure that should be funded by the taxpayer. That's because children do not just represent a private benefit for their parents, they are also a public good, without which human life could not continue. That means whether or not we ourselves choose to have children, we all have a stake in ‒ and a responsibility to contribute towards ‒ the care of the next generation. Furthermore, if we ignore care, it will only serve to perpetuate gender inequalities within the home, inequalities that in turn erupt in the market, costing the economy. Realistically, leaving care to the market either means leaving care to women or leaving the ‘needy’ without support.23 Finally, as Susan Himmelweit argues, we cannot just treat care like any other good or service. There are three features that distinguish care: it ‘involves the development of a relationship’; ‘caring responsibilities and needs are unequally distributed’; and ‘social norms influence the allocation of care and caring responsibilities’.24 All of this means that leaving care entirely to the market can only be expected to produce problems. One thing is for sure: the current approach to the provision of care is not working. Hence we are facing a ‘crisis of care’.25
Having made the case for state intervention in the realm of care, we must also add a note of caution. Socialist societies from the time of Robert Owen have frequently aimed for the complete socialization of care. But the end point of this approach was the destruction of the family.26 This drive to eliminate the family is vis
ible throughout Soviet architecture. Housing designs included communal dining rooms and shared laundry facilities. According to Engels, the family is the last vestige of a bourgeois society; it directs our actions inwards, rather than outwards for the common good. It encourages us to pursue private property and to think in an individual-centred way. Socialists argued that the joys of sex were constrained by our concern for the consequences: the need to feed the resultant mouths. By socializing care, socialism promised a society free of individualism - and with freer sex.27
Society
As far as economists are concerned, individuals are born into the world with their own well-developed tastes and preferences. We then engage with each other through the market, doing the best we can to achieve those exogenous needs and desires. However, feminist thinking highlights the fact that being human involves a process of socialization, of being socialized into the family and community.28 Our preferences and desires are not, therefore, exogenous and independent; they are in part socially constructed. By assuming they are stable, economists accept rather than seek to explain gender differences: they attribute gender differences in pay, in the choice of occupations and in the gender division of domestic labour to the different ‘tastes’ of men and women.29 And, by adopting a bargaining approach to explain economic outcomes such as pay, they ignore the difference between the actual value of work and its perceived value, with work that is labelled ‘female’ carrying lower rewards.30 As Frances Woolley notes, if we are to fully explain women's disadvantage, we need to endogenize tastes by recognizing the role of society.31
From Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir to more recent writers such as Nancy Folbre and Clare Chambers,32 feminists have long pointed out that what men and women want from life is framed by a socially constructed view of gender roles: that, for example, men should earn and women should be carers. Wollstonecraft writes that ‘men endeavour to … render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow-creatures who find amusement in their society’.33 Or, more simply in the famous words of de Beauvoir, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’34