Feminist Economic Analysis

Since the 1980s a lot of researchers have tried to critique economic policies using feminist economics to better understand their impact on the various groups of society and their objective fulfillment. The first thing that becomes important before delving deeper into ideas is figuring out what FEMINISM is? What ECONOMICS is? And then understanding what may be the possible connection between the two. Feminism is an ideology that seeks equality between both the genders in all spheres and wants equal access to all resources for everybody. Economics is the social science that explains consumer behavior and how different markets for goods and services function and the kinds of decisions people make pertaining to the economy ie. Money. Economic

The studies exploring differential impacts of policies on the two genders are helpful in understanding how these policies can be improved but a concrete impact of this area of feminist economics in formulation of economic policies is still doubtable . A critical analyses of the existing literature to understand the concrete evidence it uses to challenge mainstream economics will help improve the efficacy of economic policies in entirety all over the

She disagrees with poverty being feminized by measuring the number of poverty struck households under female heads .To substantiate her claims she argues that only certain countries show this kind of a trend and this is a very narrow measure which masks the extent of poverty and focuses only on income and households as a unit. She wants poverty to include denial of opportunities and choices and wants the development indexes to measure human poverty. This idea is problematic because the ambit of the definition proposed by her is very wide and leaves a lot of scope for subjective interpretations. The measurement of human poverty poses practical problems related to finding measure and indexes to quantify this abstract idea. Also human poverty includes a plethora of things and she doesn’t specify which ones need to be prioritized .She advocates for the use of HPI as a measure but the problem with it is that it has only two categories of countries which are developing and industrial. She advocates for a feminist approach to understand the gender implications of poverty ,taking in consideration the restrictions that women face which men don’t ,which would help formulate better policies