“Feminism has been replaced by narcissism”
by Benjamin on August 5, 2009
What happened to feminism? asks the The Times today. Is it true that gender liberation has become “brunch and designer bags as in Sex and the City.” Is Maureen Dowd then right to say “Feminism has been replaced by narcissism and materialism, which are stronger isms”. The feminist cause has apparently been left behind after the advent of the “boomtime girls, part of that first generation to beat boys at [College], outnumber them at university and often out-earn them in the workplace. A decade of national prosperity won them that feminist ideal: economic equality” says Janice Turner.
Enter Feminist Economics – a school of thought, and journal, in the economics profession. The issue of gender empowerment has been worked into economics through this feminist economics, but does it further the feminist agenda? It doesn’t seem like it…
To my surprise I was told a few days back that there is a big difference between feminist economics and gender economics. Feminist economics, I was told, revolves around building (micro) models while ‘feminizing’ the rational agent – who is perceived to be male: The method for ‘feminizing’ him is to give the agent various emotional, altruistic or social concerns and brand this as a female way of approaching things (cue Larry Summers). Gender Economics on the other hand, was something like looking at the gender wage-gaps empirically and analysing them for policy issues and trends… One would have thought that analysis which encouraged equal pay would be counted as in the feminist branch, as opposed to the implicit assumption that a rational agent model is fine, except 50% of them are to some extent ‘irrational’. Where did it say that feminism is about assuming deviations from rational behaviour? This strikes me as not just odd, but wrong.
Feminist economics seems to defend the idea that as long as something is within the gambit of the market, and female irrational agents are included in the model, then the cause of feminism is helped – not to mention the welfare of society in a pareto world. I’m reminded of the Reith Lectures (worth a listen), where Harvard’s Michael Sandel made the wider argument that we have let the expansion of the market become our moral beacon in general. Regardless of the moral or feminist implications, the expansion of the market rules supreme. And so to with our (charicatured ?) feminist economics: The market sets the standard for what is best, and the agent, albeit an inferior agent to that of rational ‘man’, will simply respond to that.
Where the feminist cause decided to promote the inferior agent as its front-line economic tool is beyond me, but maybe that is proof of the dire straits that feminism is in today – if one believes the press.
Tags: Feminism, Feminist Economics, Gender, gender economics, Market, Maureen Dowd, Michael Sandel, Reith Lectures
