Cooperation & Conflict in the Patriarchal Labyrinth

This essay offers a new way of visualizing structures of collective power based on gender, emphasizing the role of social institutions in shaping women\u27s ability to bargain over the distribution of the gains from cooperation with men. It makes the case for an interdisciplinary conceptualization of bargaining power that emphasizes the role of imperfect information and inefficient outcomes, and explains important parallels between structures of collective power based on gender, age, and sexuality, and those based on other dimensions of socially assigned group membership such as race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class. Recognition of the importance of reproductive work helps advance the project of developing intersectional political economy

To Honor and Obey: Efficiency, Inequality and Patriarchal Property Rights

Published in Feminist Economics, March 2001, 7(1): 25-44.

The Wages of Care: Bargaining Power, Earnings and Inequality

The uneven bargaining power of both firms and workers may be contributing to increased earnings inequality in the U.S. Econometric analysis of earnings from the 2015 Current Population Survey shows that the earnings of managers and professionals employed in care industries (health, education, and social services), characterized by high levels of public and non-profit provision, are significantly lower than in other industries. Overall, earnings in care industries are more compressed, with lower ratios of earnings at the 90th percentile to those at the 50th and 10th percentiles. The specific features of care work, including moral commitments, the difficulty of capturing added value, and the importance of teamwork help explain these patterns

Counting on Care Work: Human Infrastructure in Massachusetts

In Massachusetts, as in every other place in the world, all children need to be cared for and educated, everybody has physical and mental health needs that require attention, and some individuals need assistance with the daily tasks of life because of illness, age, or disability. The labor of meeting these needs – which we call care work – is a complex activity that has profound implications for personal, social and economic well-being. Care work is not just a cornerstone of our economy – it is a rock-bottom foundation. Care work provides the basis for our human infrastructure, and we need it to navigate through life as surely as we need our roads and bridges. This report measures the role of care work in the Commonwealth in 2007 by examining in detail three intersecting spheres: paid care work, unpaid care work, and government investment in care. We include in the care sector the labor and resources devoted to the daily care of Massachusetts residents, especially children, the elderly and those who are disabled; the provision of K-12 education; and the administration of health care to both the well and the sick, regardless of age

Affective equality: love matters

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser (2008). Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation

Developing care : recent research on the care economy and economic development

This paper contextualizes and reviews recent research on unpaid care work in the Global South, with a particular focus on projects funded through the multi-donor Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) program and IDRC. It offers a typology of paid and unpaid, market and non-market work activities and how they are counted—or overlooked—in current systems of National Accounts, with implications of these gaps. In the past five years, a large portfolio of projects brings unpaid care provision to the center of research on gender and development, and raises important questions about the definition of economic development itself

Work-life imbalance: informal care and paid employment

In the United Kingdom informal carers are people who look after relatives or friends who need extra support because of age, physical or learning disability or illness. The majority of informal carers are women and female carers also care for longer hours and for longer durations than men. Thus women and older women in particular, shoulder the burden of informal care. We consider the costs of caring in terms of the impact that these kinds of caring responsibilities have on employment. The research is based on the responses of informal carers to a dedicated questionnaire and in-depth interviews with a smaller sub-sample of carers. Our results indicate that the duration of a caring episode as well as the hours carers commit to caring impact on their employment participation. In addition carers’ employment is affected by financial considerations, the needs of the person they care for, carers’ beliefs about the compatibility of informal care and paid work and employers’ willingness to accommodate carers’ needs. Overall, the research confirms that informal carers continue to face difficulties when they try to combine employment and care in spite of recent policy initiatives designed to help them