Chapter 3 GLOBAL GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK Chapter 1


Chapter 4:


Chapter 2


Environmental and gender security will both be elusive as long as economic systems based on the unsustainable assumption that production and consumption can and should continuously grow have primacy (Victor and Jackson 2015; Nelson 2009; Perkins 2007). A core insight of scholarship in this field is that classic economic models are framed by priorities that are stereotyped as male and reflect masculinist assumptions about how to measure economic activity (Box 3.7) (Gibson-Graham 2006; Elson 1998; Waring 1998).


GDP-based national accounting systems provide distorted views of gender, environmental and economic well-being (see also Section 2.7), while marginalizing both gender equality and environmental protection. At the same time, feminist economists point out that while “alternative” environmental economics as a field challenges the orthodoxy of GDP-based growth, it does so mostly while sticking close to the same tools and models used conventionally (which are centred on mathematical representations, notions of “rational agents” and sharing models of cost-benefit analyses). Moreover, ecological economics, like orthodox economic approaches, ignores the gender bias in such approaches (Nelson 2009; Ferber and Nelson 2003). Many feminist ecological economists suggest that more holistic, humanistic and care-based approaches to human relationships to the environment need to replace econometrics in order to bring both gender and environmental equity to the foreground in thinking about how to define a healthy economy (Nelson 2009).


Time poverty and unpaid labour, care and domestic work: In the past two decades feminist theorists and ecological economists have engaged with the conundrum of how to make a democratic and equity- enhancing transition to an economy based on less


material throughput (Perkins 2007; Eichler 1999; Elson 1998). One important element in this effort is to demand a more realistic accounting of what labour – and materials – it takes to keep economies running and communities and families functioning. A great deal of unpaid labour and “caring” work is at the heart of both productive and reproductive systems (Ghosh 2015; Boris and Parrenas 2010; Folbre 2006; Folbre 2003).


Unpaid labour – the largest share of which is performed by women – is uniformly ignored in mainstream economic accounts (Nelson 2015; Folbre 2006). Community activism, caring work that is not goods- based, and ecological restoration activities are the real forces that sustain economic and environmental well-being, yet none of these has a secure place in mainstream economic processes and measurements. Without the unpaid (and currently uncounted) time that women and men put into sustaining themselves, their communities and local ecosystems, there would be even greater unsustainability. The care economy goes beyond “unpaid work” to encompass social reproduction work, looking after children, the elderly, and the disabled, and the home-based services that keep families and individuals alive and in good shape (Ghosh 2015; Boris and Parrenas 2010; Folbre, 2006). While both women and men perform care economy functions, women carry out the largest share. Without the care economy, the formal economy would not function well.


Even given regional variations, women universally spend far more time performing unpaid work than men (Figure 3.2). Unpaid work is a major obstacle to gender equality, influencing gender gaps in all subsequent stages of employment (OECD 2014b; Seguino 2013;


Box 3.7: Counting out women and nature: reframing economics


“Women and nature share similar treatment in neoclassical economics. They are, variously, invisible; pushed into the background; treated as a ‘resource’ for the satisfaction of male or human needs; considered to be part of a realm that ‘takes care of itself’; thought of as self-regenerating (or reproductive, as opposed to productive); conceived of as passive; and/or considered to be subject to male or human authority. One would search in vain in the most paradigmatic models of economics for any inkling of where the materials used in production came from, or where the detritus from the production process goes. Similarly, one would search


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in vain in most descriptions of human agents for a discussion of where economic agents come from, or where they go when they are broken or used up. The bearing and raising of children, and the care of the aged and sick – traditionally women’s responsibilities – are, like nature, too unimportant to mention. The treatment of both women and nature as passive, exploitable resources is not, however, just coincidental, or incidental to neoclassical analysis.” Source: Nelson (2009)


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