SchoolsMacroConceptsSchoolsPolicyModels
Macroeconomic school

Feminist

Feminist economics adds unpaid care, social reproduction, household bargaining, and gendered power to macro analysis.

Heterodox branch

School thesis

Feminist economics treats care, household bargaining, labor-market segmentation, and social provisioning as macro structures. Output can rise while the system that reproduces labor is being strained.

Feminist economics argues that macroeconomics systematically understates how much the economy depends on unpaid labor, care systems, and unequal bargaining power inside households and labor markets.

That changes how we read employment, growth, inflation, and welfare. A macro system can raise measured output while weakening care capacity, so GDP needs a welfare check.

Use when

The binding channel is visible

Unpaid care, household bargaining, social provisioning, labor-market segmentation, gendered exposure to shocks, and welfare beyond measured output.

Evidence burden

Show timing and measurement

Time-use surveys show large amounts of unpaid care work outside standard market-production accounts.

Rival check

Name the stronger alternative

A shock with no measurable distributional, care, or household-bargaining channel after micro data are checked.

Mechanism chain

From claim to policy rule

Claim

Binding constraint

Households, care, and power are macroeconomic structures inside the measured economy.

Mechanism

Transmission

Unpaid labor, gendered institutions, labor-market sorting, and household bargaining shape macro outcomes and the distribution of adjustment costs.

Policy read

Policy implication

Treat care, labor-market equity, and household power as central policy variables rather than social side issues.

Mechanism

Required conditions

The claim needs each step in the data; a missing link weakens the whole interpretation.

Provisioning

Care produces economic capacity

Unpaid and paid care sustain labor supply, human capital, health, and household resilience.

Incidence

Shocks are gendered and classed

Inflation, unemployment, austerity, and rate hikes land differently across households because care work and labor-market position differ.

Measurement

GDP misses part of the system

National accounts often exclude unpaid work that is necessary for measured production to continue.

Reads the economy through

care / social reproduction / gendered power / distribution

Lineage

Lineage and inheritance

Historical moves show which problem the tradition was built to solve and which claim it keeps defending.

Social provisioning

Economy as care and reproduction

Feminist economics starts from how societies provision life, including work that markets price poorly or ignore.

Care economy

Unpaid and underpaid labor

Care work can be economically essential even when it is unpaid, underpaid, or invisible in GDP.

Modern use

Distributional macro

The framework is strongest when policy affects household time, care infrastructure, labor supply, and welfare.