Synonyms
Introduction
Feminist economics is a subdiscipline of economics that emerged in the 1980s as feminist economists started to interrogate assumptions embedded in their discipline that failed to take account of gendered roles and responsibilities and gendered social norms, particularly as they affected households and the market. As Benería et al. (2016: 56) observe, “mainstream economics defines the discipline principally in terms of optimizing the behavior of individuals.” Markets and transactions are theorized, and individual or group behavior is modeled mathematically with individuals or agents maximizing utility,Footnote 1profit, or well-being subject to financial or time constraints. Attempts to understand the household and realms where prices did not hold and transactions did not involve money or assets, theorized unpaid work being exchanged for financial or in-kind support provided by individuals engaged...
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Notes
- 1.
Utility is what economists call satisfaction. The concept of utility as it is used in microeconomics comes from Jeremy Bentham’s work on happiness in the eighteenth century. http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/
- 2.
Strategic life choices are synonymous with important life choices that help people live the lives they want, as opposed to other choices which are those with less consequential outcomes.
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Gammage, S., Smith, G. (2018). Feminist Economics and Agency. In: Poff, D., Michalos, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_147-1
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