Beyond the Coronavirus: Understanding Crises of Social Reproduction

From a feminist political economy perspective, the unfolding of the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritizes profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritizes life-making or social reproduction. This paper argues for a more systematic understanding of crises of social reproduction under capitalism, stressing the difference between such crises for labour, and those for capital. The coronavirus crisis represents an extraordinary example of a crisis of social reproduction for capital, but this paper examines crises of social reproduction for capital and labour that arise from the more ordinary workings of capitalism. The paper focusses on the unfolding of such crises in the global South, using the case of India to illustrate the usefulness of such an analysis

Women and the Urban Economy in India: Insights from the Data on Migration

Rates of permanent economic migration by women into urban India have been low and falling, in contrast to other parts of the world where urban capital has drawn upon young, single women as a reserve army of labor. In this paper I use NSS surveys from 1983 to 2008 to investigate the socio-economic correlates of economic, follower and marriage migration by women to urban India. The results indicate that low urban female economic migration rates are not a statistical aberration due to incorrectly designed survey methodology and that a lack of supply of “good” jobs may be reinforcing male breadwinner norms. I argue that both falling economic and rising marriage migration rates for urban Indian women appear to be a result of urban economic inequality and insecurity. This data suggests that it is not the state-market tussle (that economists tend to be preoccupied with) but rather the interaction between family and market, and the continuing resilience of the patriarchal family in that struggle, that is the most remarkable feature of the Indian social and economic landscape

Labor and Social Reproduction

This essay discusses the importance of embedding the concept of social reproduction within critical agrarian studies. I begin by reviewing the debate over the definition of social reproduction and then discuss what we know about the possible specificities of social reproduction in agrarian societies of the global South. I make the argument that societal transformations in the contemporary agrarian South can be usefully understood as the unfolding of the dynamics of social reproduction. If that is the case, a successful politics would have to take those dynamics into account

Work and Empowerment: Women and Agriculture in South India

This paper explores the implications of women’s work in agriculture in Telangana, a region in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. I suggest that higher capital costs for cultivators post-liberalization increased the pressure to contain wage costs in a region where women form the majority of the agricultural wage labour force. Under such conditions, when women perform both own-cultivation as well as agricultural wage work in the fields of others, they face pressure to restrict bargaining for higher wages, contributing to a widening gender wage gap. To the extent that wages shape intra-household bargaining power, the empowering effect of workforce participation for such women would thus be blunted. From available NSS data I provide some preliminary evidence in support of this argument

How (Not) To Count Indian Women\u27s Work: Gendered Analyses and the Periodic Labour Force Survey

Unit-level Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data have been helpful in depicting the intensity of the employment crisis in India even before the Covid-19 related economic collapse. However, from the perspective of effective gendered analyses of the economy, the PLFS has failed to improve upon the old Employment–Unemployment Survey (EUS), and in one way has taken a step back, making it more difficult to understand the range and extent of women’s economic activities. It is past time that the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) adopted the now well-established recommendations of feminist economists, and reformed its data definition and data collection so as to better account for women’s work

Migration, Crises and Social Transformation in India Since the 1990s

Since liberalization, urban migration in India has increased in quantity, but also changed in quality, with permanent marriage migration and temporary, circular employment migration rising, even as permanent economic migration remains stagnant. We understand internal migration in India to be a re-ordering of productive and reproductive labor that signifies a deep transformation of society. We argue that this transformation is a response to three overlapping crises: an agrarian crisis, an employment crisis, and a crisis of social reproduction. These are not crises for capitalist accumulation, which they enable. Rather, they make it impossible for a majority of Indians to achieve stable, rooted livelihoods

Understanding Human Trafficking Origin: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis

Feminist work on global human trafficking has highlighted the conceptual difficulty of differentiating between trafficking and migration. This paper uses a cross-country UN dataset on human trafficking to empirically evaluate the socio-economic characteristics of high trafficking origin countries and compare them to patterns that have emerged in the literature on migration. In particular, we ask how and how much per capita income and gender inequality matter in shaping patterns of human trafficking origin. Ordinal logit regressions corrected for sample selection bias tell us that trafficking has an inverse-U shaped relationship with income per capita, and, controlling for income, is more likely in countries with higher shares of female to male income. These results suggest strong parallels between patterns of trafficking and migration and lead us to believe that trafficking cannot be addressed without addressing the drivers of migration

Reproductive Work and Female Labor Force Participation in Rural India

The current debate over female labor force participation in India has failed to sufficiently account for the reproductive work of women. Using NSS data on reproductive labor, we investigate the possibility that a “reproductive squeeze” raises the opportunity costs of labor force participation for women. A variety of multinomial logit regressions reveal a robust positive relationship between the shares of non-discretionary food and non-food expenditure and the likelihood of performing reproductive labor, relative to being in the labor force. We also find that an indicator of greater social provisioning by the state is positively correlated with rural women’s labor force participation, all else constant

Gender, Household Structure and Financial Participation in the United States

Despite considerable work on gender and access to financial services in the developing world, there have been few studies on this issue in the United States. In this paper, 2007 and 2010 US Survey of Consumer Finance data are used to study the differential impact of children on the likelihood of being unbanked and underbanked for couples, male-headed households and female-headed households. After controlling for various aspects of socio-economic status, logistic regressions indicate that an additional child increased female-headed households’ likelihood of being unbanked and underbanked. This child penalty is stronger for female-headed households than for couples or male-headed households. This result cannot be explained solely on the basis of demand side factors, including income, and calls for further research into the supply-side dynamics of access to financial services in the US

Indicators of gendered control over agricultural resources: a guide for agricultural policy and research

Although the importance of women’s contribution to the agricultural sector in developing countries is now widely acknowledged, there is little systematic evidence on how gender gaps in control over resources have changed over time in response to agricultural policy and technological interventions. In particular, few large-scale, national-level studies examine these effects for developing countries. This is surprising in light of the pervasive impact of agricultural technology and policy innovation on gender differences in control over productive resources for agriculture. Women are farmers and agricultural laborers in every part of the world. They are often responsible for the storage and processing of agricultural products. In some parts of the world, they play a key role in marketing crops. In almost all contexts, they play a central role in ensuring household food security, a goal that in turn affects crop choice and other agricultural decisions. Thus, every agricultural intervention is likely to impact women and, depending on the particular context of gender relations, impact them differently from men (Meinzen-Dick et al 2011)