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Market values

There should be more to economics than self-interest, says a cadre of female scholars. Among other issues, these economists point to wage inequalities and child care.

In 1975, as the nation was churning in Watergate's wake, Nancy Folbre fled the stifling heat and conservatism of her home state of Texas and barreled into her future in a 1963 Dodge pickup. She drove north to a radical's refuge, the graduate economics program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Folbre never left UMass. She is now an economics professor at her alma mater, but Texas is with her still. In their mountaintop sanctuary near Amherst, she and her husband, Bob Dworak, grow ancho chilies and tomatillos in papery shrouds alongside the chard and sweet peas in their garden. Folbre grabs an apple from a bowl on top of the refrigerator. The kitchen door leading to the backyard is bracketed by two black-and-white photographs of her parents, from years ago, each of them astride a horse. She crosses the sun-speckled yard to a one-horse barn, where she trades the fruit for a nuzzling from her gelding, Prince of Ghazal. "I got a horse, I got a gun, and I got a pickup," Folbre exclaims, her joke out of synch with a soft voice that carries only traces of a Texas accent.

Nancy Folbre has always operated on the fringe, first as a radical college student in Texas, then as a Texan in Yankee Massachusetts. And now, she is a feminist outlaw challenging the orthodoxy in a discipline shaped almost entirely by men.

Folbre is seeking a deeper understanding of the poor job conditions and relatively low pay associated with what she calls "caring labor" - day care, nursing, and care of the elderly, which are professions dominated by women. Caring labor, she argues, illuminates basic flaws in the market mechanisms that are sacrosanct to her fellow economists. In standard economic theory, each individual is a "rational man," pursuing his or her own self-interest. In society, neo-classical economists argue, self-interests merge to create the best outcome for everyone. But, Folbre asks, if markets work so well, why are wages for child-care workers so low that the profession is plagued with high turnover, which makes it difficult for these caregivers to form good relationships with the children?

Economic theory is unable to answer such a question, because caring labor does not fit standard economic models that divide work into paid and unpaid labor. People who engage in caring labor, Folbre argues, are often willing to work at low wages because the intrinsic value of helping someone is a non-monetary reward that they also value. This, in turn, suggests that the nation, through its policies, should respect and value that work by ensuring that caregivers are paid adequately.

"It was a big epiphany for me," Folbre says, to discover that care providers are motivated by more than pay or profits. "Most people who go into care work think it's morally important and socially worthwhile. They think it's socially fulfilling. This shows you that the line - the market and non-market line - isn't what you thought it was," she says. Back in the kitchen, as she brews a pot of Puerto Rican coffee, Folbre explains how she has developed this view. "There was a lot of discussion of this in interdisciplinary feminist literature. What I've tried to do is build a bridge between that and economics."

Her words are often diplomatic, but Folbre's ideas are in part an attack on traditional economics, which she says has "become an uncritically pro-market discipline." Caring labor is the kind of issue that raises a bigger question for economists and for society: How self-interested should we be? "What the economics profession has said is there are no limits," says Folbre. "Don't think about it; just pursue your own self-interest, and everything will be fine." She pauses. "If you see that behavior spilling over into families and communities, it can create a big problem. Then you have to confront a bigger problem, which is just how much should you care for other people and who should you care for. That is a really difficult question to answer."

Folbre, whose dissertation was on the decline in fertility in New England during the 18th and 19th centuries, was recognized in 1998 for her originality with a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation. An eclectic scholar, she writes for audiences ranging from the popular - articles in The Nation magazine and cartoon-illustrated "field guides" to economic policy - to the scholarly. She has just completed a book, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family, to be published in April by the New Press, a nonprofit publisher.

Folbre's feminist take on economics places her far outside the mainstream in a profession focused on productivity curves and bulletproof mathematical models. But she's hardly alone. A growing cohort of women economists (and a few men) is forging links between economics and issues of particular concern to women. While their work runs through a spectrum of issues, they have come together to create a critical mass of research in areas once virtually ignored by economists. By injecting into economics, with its aspirations to precision, the messy issue of gender, they are trying to influence economic theories - to start a trickle that will flow gradually into debates on Capitol Hill and help change policies. They are, in various ways, trying to reveal the feminine side of economics.

Folbre stands on the left flank of feminist economists, among those who challenge the fundamental tenets on which economics was built. These women are, in their way, radicals, criticizing the "rational man" idea that underpins theories about the work force, industry, and what makes the entire economy tick. They question the profession's growing reliance on mathematical techniques that, in seeking to describe the mechanics of the economy as a physicist might demonstrate a theorem, only obscure what is important about an economy: whether its actors are better or worse off, whether its outcomes are fair.

There are traditionalists among the feminists, too, who apply the standard tools of their trade. But their subject is women's place in the economic landscape: women's pay, Social Security, women's work in the home. And a growing body of scholars in other countries is deciphering women's economic roles in developing nations.

Many of these researchers are baby boomers who came of age as feminism was turning society's assumptions about women upside down. Now in their 40s and 50s, they went to college as the Pill was redefining women's roles in society, and they were part of an influx of women into the US work force that would become one of the most significant events in American history.

There is Claudia Goldin of Harvard University, who wrote a definitive history of the women's labor market in the United States. And Francine Blau of Cornell University, who has devoted a 25-year career to determining why women who work earn less than men. Rhonda Williams of the University of Maryland traces how gender inequities intertwine with racial inequities. Julie Nelson, a fellow at Harvard's Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, has edited a groundbreaking book, Beyond Economic Man, in which leading feminist thinkers criticize the economics discipline. Rebecca Blank, a dean at the University of Michigan, and Randy Albelda of UMass-Boston study the economics of low-income women. Shirley Burggraf, at Florida A&M University, studies the costs borne by women who choose to work outside the home. Heidi Hartmann, director of the Women's Policy Institute in Washington, is trying to reshape the policies of a Social Security system in which elderly women often come up short. And at the University of Delhi in India, Bina Agarwal is exploring the lack of women's property rights in developing world economies.

In a prescient article published in March 1892 in The Economic Journal, the premier UK journal in the field, a British researcher named Millicent Garrett Fawcett, in response to a male colleague writing on differences in male and female wages, posited that because women were excluded from many jobs, they crowded into a few professions reserved for them, such as teaching, causing their wages to be lower than men's. But as opportunities opened to women and they fanned out into a range of jobs, wages for teachers would not decline, Fawcett argued. For example, she wrote, "If a woman doctor can earn from 500 pounds or 600 pounds to 1,000 pounds a year, her sister who has gone in for teaching will not calmly sit down and take a salary of 25 pounds a year as a family governess."

According to Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, professor emeritus at Stanford University, Fawcett's article was "remarkable" for its time, but her ideas went largely unnoticed. Decades later, Arrow says, a male economist would borrow and benefit from her ideas.

For decades, women economists like Marianne Ferber, 77, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, and Barbara Bergmann, 73, a professor at the University of Maryland and former member of President Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers, have devoted their careers to speaking out on the economics of women's pay, child care, and other policies affecting women.

While these pioneers struggled to be heard by their colleagues, feminist economists today are having some impact on their discipline. Yet economics continues to lag decades behind other fields, such as sociology, literature, and history, in accepting feminism as part of the debate. Look no further than the elite universities where the discipline's thinking is shaped. At Yale University, no women are among its 43 tenured faculty in economics. The University of Chicago and Stanford each have one tenured woman, out of 16 and 26 economics faculty members, respectively. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two of the 25 tenured faculty in economics are women. At Princeton, three out of 32 are women.

No woman has ever won a Nobel Prize in economics, and women's articles are still in the minority in the profession's most prestigious journal, The American Economic Review.

One reason so few women make it to the top is that while about one-third of all PhD candidates nationwide in economics are women, their numbers diminish as they advance from graduate student to faculty to tenured faculty, according to data provided by the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. By 1999, there were 68 tenured women and 986 tenured men at 77 educational institutions responding to a committee survey.

Indeed, the landscape is littered with women economists relegated to out-of-the-way universities or small colleges. Many women economists who do land at elite institutions win tenure in departments outside their field: women's studies, cultural studies, African-American studies, sociology, or industrial relations.

Claudia Goldin has been a resounding success within economics. The first woman tenured by Harvard's economics department, she commands her colleagues' rapt attention as she discusses the topic of a new paper: the impact of the Pill on women's careers. "Having sex is a good thing!" Goldin says, jabbing a finger above her audience of leading economists - nine women and a couple of dozen men - who are meeting on a hot day in July at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge. Goldin is refreshing their collective memory about 1960s norms, but she quickly turns from titillation to the jargon of her profession. "Not having sex," she says, "is a cost."

In the paper, Goldin and coauthor Lawrence Katz, also a Harvard economist, analyzed demographic data and found that federal approval of the Pill spurred women - now free to have sex without the risk of unplanned pregnancy - to pour into professional schools, postpone marriage, and sharply reduce their fertility. The effect, which took years to arrive after the Pill's approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, was nevertheless powerful. Thus, "young women's control over their fertility directly reduced the costs to them of engaging in long-term career investments," concluded the paper, a statistical study replete with the historical detail that is a trademark of Goldin's research.

What fascinates Goldin, an economic historian, about the Pill is that changes it set in motion ripple through women's lives today. "The impact that I want to have is also an impact that - and economists are terrible at this - makes people realize history is important," Goldin explains in an interview in her office at the edge of Harvard Yard. "What women did 10 years ago is important to what they do today. There are generations, cohorts, that move through time. Their past stays with them, and it's the baggage they carry with them."

At age "50-something," Goldin sees the reflection of women's history in her own experience. For example, Goldin did not have children as she single-mindedly pursued a career, but her niece - who represents a generation Goldin suggests may be reacting to baby boom women - won partnership in a law firm and then resigned to be a stay-at-home mother.

When she is able to collect historical data on her niece's generation, Goldin says, she plans to write another "big book," this one about college-educated women over the past century.

Goldin's early passion was not economics. Amid the nerds at Bronx High School of Science, she became interested in microbiology, and only after entering Cornell University did she amble from biology into economics, which seemed to have greater potential for studying people. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, she relished an atmosphere created by renowned economists on the faculty, including Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and Robert Fogel, who was her mentor. With Fogel heading her dissertation committee, she wrote a dissertation that later was published as a book, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820-1860, a Quantitative History.

Her path to tenure at Harvard was not swift or smooth. After a few years at the University of Wisconsin, she went to Princeton in 1973, but after six years there she was denied tenure. Hired next by the University of Pennsylvania, Goldin threw herself into a publishing frenzy that won her tenure there in 1985.

Then her star ascended in 1990 with the publication of her book The Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, from Oxford University Press. The fruit of a life's work, The Gender Gap burned brightly in the academic world. It is sweeping in scope, charting all facets of women's work and wages in the kind of comprehensive research project that is Goldin's standard. She unearthed evidence, for example, of early discrimination, such as "marriage bars" in firms of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which would refuse to hire married women and would fire women who married under their employ. The Gender Gap is a "big book," says Fogel, who is considered by the profession to be the dean of economic history. "If you want to understand the economics of the integration of women into the economy, not only recently but also the evolution, you have to read that book."

Suddenly, Goldin was formidable. Tenure offers flowed - from Harvard, Yale, even Princeton, which had given her up more than a decade before. Goldin chose Harvard, where she met Katz, who is her life partner as well as her colleague, and she remains there. What motivated Goldin to succeed? "I think the driving force was really her curiosity and her search for knowledge," says Katz.

Goldin tackles other big topics outside gender, including a book about technology, education, and the digital divide that she is working on with Katz. But the history of women will remain on her agenda. "Gender is always, constantly, a subject in my mind, and I'm never away from it," she says.

Goldin's stature has become a symbol of not insignificant change in the economics profession. But tenured women economists at the top of the field are still rare birds in a field stingy in its rewards for women. To get there, these women persevered through graduate programs with few women and, upon graduation, relentlessly pushed open doors that were often closed to them.

When Francine D. Blau entered Harvard's economics PhD program in 1966 with four other women and 63 men, her self-esteem had been fortified by her father, a teacher who cheered all of her childhood career aspirations - one was to be a lawyer like Perry Mason. It is not coincidence that Francine Dee Blau shares her first two initials with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While her life as an economist began at Harvard, her muse was her father, Harold Blau, who lived through the Depression and for whom FDR was a hero. And her specialty, differences in pay between men and women, grew naturally out of her curiosity about the economy's inequities, which were in sharp focus to her as a child living in the midst of New York City's diversity.

Blau's feminism came later. As the 1960s were ending and the feminist movement was inching through the female population, she was influenced by reading a book published in 1963, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. The book set out to expose the "true emptiness beneath the American housewife's routine" of kitchen work and diaper pails and clean sheets. Soon, Blau's growing interest in feminism would begin to merge with her interest in economics.

With Friedan's book, the mood of the nation may have been changing. Harvard's graduate economics program had not. Blau, as a woman, felt she "stuck out like a sore thumb." On her first day teaching, she recalls being asked by a male student why she was there. "I never felt inequities were the whole story, but it was a thing to motivate me," she says.

Her profession provided little guidance for her feminist views, so she read widely in history, sociology, and other fields. Her dissertation was on a topic considered unusual at the time, and it contained a breakthrough: Blau found that even in job categories that included both men and women, there were substantial differences in pay that could be explained by the fact that bigger, better-paying firms hired male workers, while women were relegated, along with the rest of the men, to smaller firms that paid less.

Today, Blau is a prolific statistical researcher and writer, widely viewed among labor economists as a leading authority on women's pay. But, in 1975, when her dissertation was completed, she felt "there was a little resistance to the idea that women encountered discrimination." There was also a feeling that "if a woman worked on this topic she would not be able to be objective. She'd have an ax to grind, whereas a man could be objective."

After a life's work, Blau has reached a complex understanding of why women earn less than men. She believes that women are less productive during their careers due, in part, to their "tendency historically to be secondary earners who drop out of the labor force" to have children. She adds, "I also believe they do encounter discrimination in the labor market, and that is an additional reason they earn less than men."

For example, Blau showed that as women grow older, the gap between their pay and that of men their age widens. Statistical work by Blau, along with her husband, economist Lawrence Kahn, also found that women have to improve their skills more, relative to men, merely to ensure that the pay gap remains constant; still more skills improvement is necessary to close that gap. In the skills race, Blau says women are "swimming upstream": If they do not continue to improve their skills at a faster pace, the pay gap will continue to widen.

Blau demurs when asked about the progress of her own career, preferring to focus on "women as a group." But, she concedes, "I did feel that it was a bit uphill some of the time. It can be even a subtle thing where you might feel like you gave a paper or made a presentation and maybe it went well, but somehow it didn't seem to stick." She adds, "The thing that is strongest in my mind is I really do feel I was eventually accepted."

Blau stayed 19 years in the economics department at the University of Illinois. It was there that she met Kahn and became a full professor in 1983. In 1994, she was recruited by Cornell's department of industrial and labor relations - Kahn was also hired - and she holds the Frances Perkins chair, named after the secretary of labor under FDR.

Blau's early potential was recognized by Wallace Hendricks, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With her dissertation nearly complete in 1974, she was a visiting scholar at Ohio State University when she sat with him on a panel at an American Economics Association meeting. "She was just plain outstanding," recalls Hendricks, who reported back to his chairman at Illinois's department of economics and labor and industrial relations that they had a good shot at recruiting a stellar candidate. Back then, he recalls, "the value placed on doing things like studying women was not as great as it would be today."

Even today, however, Hendricks believes that women's issues are subject to a "ghetto effect" in economics: Women who do research on gender and pay tend to be "labeled as being able to do a particular kind of thing. For women to succeed in economics, they should be in all kinds of areas in economics, but if they weren't there [looking at women's issues], nobody would be studying it."

Applying economic and statistical tools, as Blau does, to the women's labor market has illuminated what goes on with one-half of the population. "Anyone who wants to take serious account, in doing economics, has to know there are an awful lot of women in the world, and they are socialized differently from males," says Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I don't see how they cannot be important."

Yet, the question remains: Does gender have anything useful to say about economic theory overall?

Stanford University's Arrow, one of the most eminent economists, says women are engaged in gender research for an obvious reason: The economics of the family and related issues "strike a woman more forcibly than they might a man." But he argues that there are reasons economists often neglect or ignore gender: "It is part of a bigger thing which economists always had trouble coming to grips with, which is the influence of social factors that are not represented in the ordinary economic sense" - factors such as race, gender, and discrimination. While Arrow is highly supportive of women economists, he says gender has not risen to "the status of a `big topic' " in economics. "It's considered an interesting addition, not a fundamental thing."

The International Association for Feminist Economics doesn't buy that. Formed in 1992 to critique economic theory - Arrow, one of the association's supporters, sits on its board - the group argues that traditional economics fails to recognize that issues facing women are as much at the heart of economic theory as is the concept of a self-interested "rational man."

The association launched its own journal, Feminist Economics, to provide a forum for women frustrated that their articles were not welcome for publication in mainstream economic journals. In 1997, Feminist Economics was named the best new academic journal by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

The journal, says its editor, Diana Strassman, came into being because "there really were no outlets for the research feminist economists felt needed to be done. You couldn't get published in order to have your career advanced."

The field of economics is "very hostile toward women," argues Strassman, who has a Harvard PhD and whose own career was thwarted at Rice University when the economics department denied her tenure. After she filed an internal appeal against the university, Rice resolved the matter by hiring her in 1992 as a senior research fellow, an untenured post, at the university's Center for the Study of Cultures, where her scholarship has been supported.

The feminist economics association can be hostile toward mainstream economics, too. While economists such as Blau and Goldin hew to the mainstream when studying women, feminist economists question the field from the ground up. One member's recent talk at the Radcliffe Public Policy Center was titled "Beyond Capitalistic Patriarchal Economics." Feminist economists' efforts to be taken seriously have not been helped by the spectacular headlines they attract: After an association conference in Canada where scholars explored whether mothers should be given tax breaks for their contribution to society, a Toronto newspaper headline blared "Wages for breast-feeding."

And there is much curiosity about a leading intellectual and supporter of the feminist economics association who made a splash with the book Crossing: A Memoir, about undergoing a sex-change operation that transformed him from Donald McCloskey into Deirdre McCloskey. McCloskey, a prolific writer and former president of the Economic History Association, says her life change also informed her view of economics - in a recent book, she calls the confining world of economic scholarship "a boys' game in a sandbox."

Members of the International Association for Feminist Economics have something of a reputation as rabble-rousers. But Julie Nelson, one of the group's founders, hardly looks like a radical as she packs up her office in the fall of 1999, her long braid flat against the back of her pink T-shirt, preparing to leave Brandeis University after being denied tenure.

Then she reminds a visitor of the definition of radical: "Going at the root," she says, reaching down as though to pull a stubborn weed from an imaginary garden growing at her feet. That's what Nelson tries to do in her scholarship: uproot long-held assumptions in economics.

Nelson, along with colleague Marianne Ferber, edited a book that for the first time collected the work of feminist economists; Beyond Economic Man was published in 1993 by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Nelson, who has a strong mathematics background, criticizes the highly mathematical world of what she calls "masculine economics," which uses econometrics to prove everything from how the Federal Reserve's monetary policy works to why productivity has surged in recent years.

For Nelson, real-world problems are richer and more complex than what can be captured in econometrics. By relying on mathematics, the economists' standard tool, she explains, "you've already limited the question, and often limited the question down to where it's not very interesting anymore." A theorem that can be proved, she says, "tends to block from view alternative kinds of knowledge."

Many feminist economists do not use the mathematical techniques that are required for any economist seeking entrance into the inner sanctum, where the standards are no different for women. "There is a core of largely guys who cannot believe that anybody thinks differently than the way they think," says Rebecca Blank, a former member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.

Female economists who rise in their field learn to play a game that requires that the full weight of mathematics be brought to bear on the subject, explains Blank, dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Blank, who earned her PhD at MIT in 1983, believes she was accepted into the club because she has "all the right training. I can stay in the room with the guys when they want to talk economic models and empirical work - and boy, does that matter."

Nelson, who has published in the profession's most mathematical journal, Econometrica, is more critical of the profession's quantitative exercises. Rather than cram ideas into models of markets and efficiency, this mother of two calls for "focusing economics on the provisioning of human life." Such a focus would bring child care, health care, and other human needs into the mix of policy as well as theory.

Nelson believes her feminism has cost her professionally. Before joining Brandeis, she had held tenure in the economics department of the University of California at Davis. (She left to follow her husband at the time, who had gotten a job in Boston.) In a claim filed against Brandeis with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in 1998, she said Brandeis's economics department failed to complete a standard tenure review used to evaluate all candidates and denied her tenure "because of her achievements in feminist scholarship."

Brandeis's attorney Alan Rose strongly denies that allegation, which he calls "completely false." Rose noted that two women in past years have been tenured by Brandeis's economics department. The MCAD has said Nelson had probable cause in filing the complaint, which was pending before the commission at the time this article was written.

Even Nancy Folbre, secure for years with tenure from the University of Massachusetts, reluctantly admits to feeling marginalized at times by her profession. She says she has led a "charmed existence." Yet she wonders why her full calendar of speaking engagements around the world only rarely includes invitations from her colleagues in economics.

Folbre's work on the family receives high praise from prominent economists such as MIT's Solow, but he believes that her work is "unfashionable" in economics. "The typical way of doing economics is to think of the family as a unit, of a single mind, one decision. It's like an atom - you don't split it to look inside. Nancy Folbre isn't the first, but she's the most important person who's said that that's not so," says Solow. "The work that she does ... is not what generally pays off in tenure and kudos and all of that."

And so Folbre's amazed reaction to a telephone call a few years ago from Adele Simmons, then president of the MacArthur Foundation, might have been expected. Folbre had applied for a research grant, and she was sure Simmons was calling to tell her the grant application had been denied.

Folbre instead was stunned by good news: She had been selected for a lucrative MacArthur grant for her feminist economic research. The MacArthur, though it came from outside her profession, freed her to finish a book. Perhaps more important, it gave her "a boost of confidence and boldness and license to be less risk-averse," she revealed last winter in a letter to fellow feminists.

"I'm chipping away," Nancy Folbre says in an interview at her plain kitchen table in Amherst. "I probably won't ever make it into The American Economic Review," the professor says, her quiet voice gaining force. "But whenever I see an opportunity to penetrate one of those bastions, I do it."