Conference Agenda

The one key area that broadly relates to women’s well-being has centered upon women’s work: their participation in economic activities; reproductive roles and family responsibilities - all of which are prescribed by gendered social constructs. These, often in overlapping capacities impact women’s life and work choices (often constrained) and have implications for their individual and social well-being. This study proposes time-use as a gender-neutral indicator to map women’s well-being objectively. The number of hours in a day is the standard resource that everyone has access to equally, irrespective of their gender, socio-economic class, etc...(means). However, as the Capability Approach points out accessibility to resources alone is insufficient to expand capabilities when there is no agency. A close study of time allocation patterns reveals the agency one has (or not) and helps capture gender differences and their intersections with other determinants (like education, inheritance, etc). Here time may be considered a resource, and time allocation patterns a reflection of their capabilities. This paper attempts to quantify the well-being of women in Meghalaya, a Northeastern state of India, using conventional parameters like resources, agency, and autonomy as well as time allocation patterns. Meghalaya presents an interesting study, as the major tribes in this state practice matriliny. This has invariably created an image that women in these communities enjoy a better social status than their counterparts in the rest of India due to lesser restrictions on mobility, greater participation in SNA activities, and access to property and resources owing to matrilineal inheritance and traditional cultivation techniques. The study also examines differences for women across employment status to test the contested relationship between women’s paid work and well-being. An analysis of the time allocation patterns aided by unstructured interviews and focused group discussions reveal how women exercise agency or make choices only to the extent that the structural norms in their society allow it.

This paper employs a decolonial feminist lens to critique the interdisciplinary discourse which underpins policy interventions aiming to reduce Global South women’s unpaid care and domestic work (UCW).

In gender and development (GAD) and feminist economics (FE) literature, there is a tendency to homogenise unpaid activities women undertake for their families and communities. Studies often refer to UCW as ‘burden’ and suggest women submit to reproductive, caring roles due to gender norms (read: local culture, traditions). Inspired by Mohanty’s critique of Western feminists ‘othering Third-World Women’ and Spivak’s contention that colonised people cannot speak for themselves, this paper argues for methodological pluralism to centre lived experiences of Global South women. Specifically, interpretive methods can complement prevalent positivism in FE to generate more locally-grounded empirical data for Global South women.

Social reproduction as a site of oppressive gender relations can be traced to second-wave feminists (liberal, socialist, radical etc.), reflecting the lived experiences of activists who were primarily White, Western, and middle-class. However, many African feminists contend that UCW can be empowering and fulfilling - a perspective I argue is widely overlooked in UCW discourse, and international development interventions. Many empirical studies focus on ‘empowering’ impacts of paid work, but there is a noticeable void of studies exploring positive aspects of UCW for women. This paper cautions against binary conceptualisations of paid/UCW, and universalisation of Western feminist notions of UCW being dis-empowering. Moreover, current discourse may perpetuate colonial stereotypes of Global South women having unfulfilled and oppressed lives, where UCW is their primary occupation.

Drawing on post-colonial and post-modern feminism, and decolonial theory, this paper argues current discourses may distort how Global South women experience their daily lives. Feminist debates around ‘differences’ are discussed, namely how factors such as race, class, age, religion etc. may shape women’s experiences of UCW. Given imperatives to decolonise GAD knowledge, an alternative epistemological and methodological approach is proposed. In the Handbook of Feminist Economics (2021), Schwartz-Shea highlights the potential of qualitative-interpretivist methods for FE. I propose drawing on anthropological methods: participatory methods, ethnographies, life histories and even using media. This may help challenge wide-spread imagery of Global South women’s ‘burdensome’ lives, and provide new insights around women’s labour motivations, beyond those drawn from secondary and/or aggregated quantitative data (e.g., time-use). Taking ‘unconventional’ methodological approaches may also help counter post-modern critiques of economists using reductive indicators to simplify and represent Global South women’s complex lived realities.

Complementing large-scale quantitative studies, revealing systematic inequalities in government economic systems, qualitative research allows us to gain insight into the lived experiences of daily lives, including unpaid care work and how it is distributed among not only women and men, but among different social groups. Despite recent survey-based studies indicating that during COVID-19 women absorbed the increased volume of household unpaid care work, evidence also suggests that some men took on more, especially childcare tasks. However, there is a lack of qualitative data exploring the possible long-term implications and experiences of these shifts, and what this may mean in altering the gendered organisation of paid and unpaid work. Bridging this gap, the study adopts a mixed-methods design, drawing from extant research assessing waves of pre-existing data sets from the UK household longitudinal household survey, and primary data collection, comprising of semi-structured individual and joint interviews with 15 heterosexual couples (n=45) to better understand the complex lived experiences of how unpaid care work is distributed and how gendered norms around unpaid care both persist and are also being ‘undone’.

The qualitative interview data suggest that whilst small re-negotiations of unpaid care work during the pandemic have occurred between some couples, there have been no significant renegotiations of gendered intrahousehold arrangements. However, the picture is complex; almost all couples espoused gender egalitarian attitudes whilst paradoxically – but often not out of their own choice – living nonegalitarian lives. The interviews showcased an increasing desire for male participants not only to be involved fathers, reflecting positive shifts in parenting practices, but also taking responsibility for household tasks.

This paper will discuss the complex lived realities of how couples experienced their relative intrahousehold divisions of care work in the context of potential changes induced by the pandemic, drawing upon the broader implications for theory development. In doing so, it will highlight the potential of feminist strategies and sustainable change, putting care and care work at the heart of policy and government systems – systems currently failing to value care work and its significance to the functioning of the economy. The interview data reinforces the importance of rich, qualitative based evidence to support recognising, reducing and redistributing care work, and to facilitate deeper shifts in attitudes and social norms, supporting longer-term changes in the gendered distribution of care worth both at micro and macro levels.

Since the 1990s, feminist economists have repeatedly emphasized that every economic system is based on ecological processes and caring activities. Within the logic of a capitalist market system, the neglect of ecology and care leads to the exploitation of nature and the environment, of paid and unpaid care work with disastrous consequences for humanity, as we see in the climate catastrophe and the global care crises. In the meantime, feminist economics has included the research on gender equality and differences, on dualisms and hierarchies, on privileges and power structures, on intersectionalities and queer studies.

On this basis, the following questions need to be asked again: How can we achieve a more sustainable and caring economy? What principles is a sustainable and caring economy based on and should it be based on? Which criteria do we need to assess the direction in which economies and societies are moving? In this context, two things are clear: The issues of ecology and care are all too often pursued seperately and need to be brought together. The principles of and for a sustainable and caring economy have to be situated-universal and queer-feminist.

This paper brings together debates on sustainability and care in science and research, as well as in civil society and social movements. Existing principles and criteria of justice and care, sustainability and development are brought together and critically reflected upon. The goal is to develop sustainable and caring principles (SCPs) that characterize a sustainable and caring economy, and to derive criteria from them. These criteria will form the basis to watch the development of societies and to assess how countries or regions are moving towards a sustainable and caring economy. Another question would be which organization is tasked with monitoring these criteria or whether a separate institution is needed for this task.