page_title: Feminist economics
section_title: Exclusion of non-market activity
hierarchical_section_title: Feminist economics / Critiques of traditional economics / Exclusion of non-market activity
caption_attribution_description: English: Domestic worker in Colombia Nederlands: Huishoudster in Colombia
context_page_description: Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure, and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented towards the goal of "enhancing the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities."
context_section_description: Feminist economics call attention to the importance of non-market activities, such as childcare and domestic work, to economic development. This stands in sharp contrast to neoclassical economics where those forms of labor are unaccounted for as "non-economic" phenomena. Including such labor in economic accounts removes substantial gender bias because women disproportionately perform those tasks. When that labor is unaccounted for in economic models, much work done by women is ignored, literally devaluing their effort.
  More specifically, for example, Nancy Folbre examines the role of children as public goods and how the non-market labor of parents contributes to the development of human capital as a public service. In this sense, children are positive externality which is under-invested according to traditional analysis. Folbre indicates that this oversight partially results from failing to properly examine non-market activities.
  Marilyn Waring described how the exclusion of non-market activities in the national accounting systems relied on the deliberate choice and the design of the international standard of national accounts that explicitly excluded non-market activities. In some countries, such as Norway, which had included unpaid household work in the GDP in the first half of the 20th century, it was left out in 1950 for reasons of compatibility with the new international standard.
  Ailsa McKay argues for a basic income as "a tool for promoting gender-neutral social citizenship rights" partially to address these concerns.
caption: A Colombian domestic worker. Neighborhood friends and family sharing household and childcare responsibilities is an example of non-market activity performed outside of the traditional labor market.
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