Feminist economics is still mostly discounted by the monopolies of Wall Street, universities and mainstream media—but it’s serious business.
It’s time to talk about women’s economics with attitude. It’s time to laugh at what is often absurd and call out what is dangerous. By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics will bring you news of hopeful and practical changes and celebrate an economy waged as life—not as war.
“The combination of the words ‘feminist’ and ‘economics’ was … laughable,” said Amherst professor and economist Nancy Folbre, now 70, reflecting in a video interview about the 1992 creation of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). That combo is now gaining cred, I’m happy to report, thanks to the formidable work of Folbre and the bold individuals of IAFFE.
This July, IAFFE is meeting for its first in-person event since COVID at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Their efforts to highlight solutions of the Global South prompted a Ms. interview with one of IAFFE’s board members, Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein. She is the author and editor of several well-recognized economic books, including The Black Social Economy in the Americas, Beyond Racial Capitalism and Community Economies in the Global South. A native of New York City, she is now an associate professor of global development at the University of Toronto.
Economics has never been part of the push to get more women involved in male-dominated fields called STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), possibly because then we’d be telling young women they should STEEM. I confess I often do—because despite progress, feminist economics is still mostly discounted by the monopoly on Wall Street and many of those pointed heads atop pyramids called universities and mainstream media.
Hossein has created the Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective (DiSE), a feminist collective of antiracist scholars “at the intersection of political science and economics.”
“We can’t separate the two subjects,” Hossein told me, rejecting old notions of a removed and God-like objectivity.
She’s seeking “transformation” of her field, which often poses as inescapable physics of natural law, not man-made conventions. Hossein’s research highlights ways that racialized women’s economic work thrives best with political innovation and action.
The public statement of the DiSE collective is: “We refuse to listen to elites and masculinist concepts of the economics and politics. … We are driven by plural economies, especially those community economies which operate below the surface. … We … zero in on the ways Black and racialized people have purposefully politicized economic solidarity to civilize business in society.”
Hossein claims a debt to the Australian economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, who partnered to write, under the pen name of J.K. Gibson, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, 1996, and A Postcapitalist Politics, 2006. They founded The Community Economies Research Network, which has generated a more complete picture of the real economy than Wall Street and money alone can paint. Their submarine view of an iceberg makes visible the bulk of out-of-sight and essential exchanges that keep our families, communities, and living planet afloat.
Several Americans serve as DiSE advisors—including Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard of CUNY; Dr. S. Charusheela of the University of Washington; Dr. Lisa Aubrey of Arizona State University; and Dr. Suzanne Bergeron of the University of Michigan. Their writing and research focus on cooperative finance, social enterprise, ethics and cooperative solidarity of the unbanked or underbanked. These are systems still often dismissed by economic orthodoxy and its vocabulary.
For instance, any of the labor done for no pay, such as childcare or homemaking for a disabled family member, is part of what economists—traditionally white, male and privileged—call the “informal” economy. The social glue of freely given care that makes us human is of little interest to the “formal” economy of international trade, banking, commodity supply and demand, corporate stocks and bonds and currency values.
Instead, the “formal” economy sees to it that a few powerful men get rich as quickly and easily as possible.
People don’t realize they can choose differently. We all believe in democracy. So why not democracy for the economic system?
Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein
Economics has never been part of the push to get more women involved in male-dominated fields called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), possibly because then we’d be telling young women they should STEEM. I confess I often do—because despite progress, feminist economics is still mostly discounted by the monopoly on Wall Street and many of those pointed heads atop pyramids called universities and mainstream media.
Traditional economics simply assumes the “free” reproductive and provisioning work of women and nature around the world. Giving birth can be a cash cow, but not for the mother, only for those who are said to “deliver” her. In the U.S., that’s hospitals. C-sections, the riskiest of deliveries, grant the formal economy the best and most punctual financial return of all: 32 percent of all U.S. live births—and 36 percent for Black mothers.
Hossein sees formal institutions’ routine dismissal of informal systems of finance, insurance and cooperative ownership of businesses working for community well-being as a serious stumbling block, even for progressives. Last June she called for radical love in business and society at the Harvard Business School, presenting the system of informal finance among Toronto’s racialized immigrant women in a film called The Banker Ladies. She argues their informal ROSCA system (Rotating Savings and Credit Association) is worthy not only of recognition, but also replication in our wider communities, building trust, skills and anti-racist relationships.
“We’re thinking about social profitability—not just pure profit and shareholder models,” she said. “I have trouble with people who are not actually talking about transformation. Can you imagine yourself doing business in a different system? Why not democracy in the way you bank? People don’t realize they can choose differently. We all believe in democracy. So why not democracy for the economic system?”
Her work is rooted in economic stories too often left out of our accounts and ignored by institutions still male and white.
“The academy has mirrored the corporate world, and that’s just the pattern that dominates the discourse, what we read, and how we understand systems,” she said. “Being a Black woman in the academy, I think my having some difference in my research questions, the questions I bring to the table, threatens this. Like the social economy I’m researching.
“I’m questioning its origin as European and male,” she continued. “Take Northern England’s Rochdale weavers, credited with beginning the cooperative movement, a number of them slave owners. When I say: Yes, that’s a good story, I accept that, but let’s move the timeline and go further back. Well, wait, Indigenous people had collective economies, and women have been the backbone of those systems, called by various names, human-centered kinds of economies. Then the script changes.
“Brazil has Kilumbos cooperatives, and across the Caribbean, there are rich systems both formal and informal. As you move around the world, people have centuries of experience. Ethiopia has a rich, dynamic history of cooperative economies, and Ghana, India, China. So many stories. Silencing those stories is not real research. It doesn’t show the limitations of what we think we know.”
Last month, an arrogant Congress insisted on work requirements for those Americans—the majority female, who couldn’t afford food—while their policy’s economy had just produced 242 brand new billionaires. Far from being “laughable,” feminists studying to discover what is most essential, and no longer misnaming those cooperative heartfelt qualities as “informal,” is serious business. Let’s get STEEMed.
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