Women protesting on Budget Day 2012 Credit: Robin Hood Tax Campaign
Feminist economists have been struggling to get their voices heard in the UK. Mainstream media routinely ignore feminist economic ‘experts’ in preference for opinions from conventional economists who are ignorant of—or disregard—the distinctive contribution that feminist economics has made to understanding the impact of the financial crisis in the UK, particularly the ways in which the austerity policies have been designed and implemented by the Coalition government. There is a wide range of evidence, detailed below, that women have borne the brunt of these policies in terms of loss of income and public services. This continues despite resumption of economic growth in late 2013.
Feminist economics goes beyond chronicling the impact on women of policies that privilege markets and money over people—important though that is—and provides an understanding of the economy as a gendered structure. It shows that decisions about economic policies, including determination of where investment is increased and where it is withdrawn, which services will flourish and which will be run down, and whose living standards will be protected or boosted, and whose reduced, are not gender neutral, even though they may make no explicit reference to gender. Feminist economics also provides a basis for an alternative economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into economic analysis and economic policies; a feminist Plan F, rather than a Plan B.
