The connections between the world of money and profit and the world of care and concern are of great importance to society. Traditionally, the "public" world of markets and government was the realm of men, while the "private" realm of family and social relationships was entrusted to women. While some of women's tasks were largely instrumental-cleaning and cooking, for example-many tasks contained more personalized and emotional components. Women were in charge of children, elderly, and the ill; maintaining personal relationships; offering emotional support, personal attention, and listening; embodying (or so it was understood) sexuality. This social contract is changing. As women move increasingly into the world of paid work, many of these traditional intimate tasks are being performed in relationships that include the explicit movement of money. Paid child care, nursing homes for the elderly, talk therapy and phone sex are just a few examples. What are economists to make of this trend?This essay analyzes the consequences of this mixing of realms of "love" and "money" for economic analysis, societal well-being, and public policy. We document the empirical magnitudes of the shifts from nonmarket to market time use, with an eye to their gender dimensions and implications for economic theory. On a more philosophical note, we point out that most current intellectual conceptualizations of these economic issues are inadequate. Whether commentators celebrate the movement to the market or bemoan it, the use of unexamined assumptions and outdated rhetoric is endemic to the literature. An a priori judgment that markets must improve caregiving by increasing efficiency puts the brakes on intelligent research, rather than encouraging it. Likewise, an
Abstract. While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that 'women are more risk averse than men', this conclusion merits investigation. After briefly clarifying the difference between making generalizations about groups, on the one hand, and making valid inferences from samples, on the other, this essay suggests improvements to how economists communicate our research results. Supplementing findings of statistical significance with quantitative measures of both substantive difference (Cohen's d, a measure in common use in non-Economics literatures) and of substantive overlap (the Index of Similarity, newly proposed here) adds important nuance to the discussion of sex differences. These measures are computed from the data on men, women and risk used in 35 scholarly works from economics, finance and decision science. The results are considerably more mixed and overlapping than would commonly be inferred from the broad claims made in the literature, with standardized differences in means mostly amounting to considerably less than one standard deviation, and the degree of overlap between male and female distributions generally exceeding 80%. In addition, studies that look at contextual influences suggest that these contribute importantly to observations of differences both between and within the sexes.
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If caring work were well paid, would it lose some of the special, emotional, interpersonal aspects we want in "real" care relationships? Some fear that the introduction of "market values" would lead to such an outcome. This article seeks to bring to light some logical fallacies and insufficiently expunged gender dualisms that may lie, unexamined, under such concerns. Examining the ways we think and talk about markets, meanings, and motivations, it argues that the foci of feminist concern should instead be the concrete structures of caregiving and the problem of under-demand.Caring, Labor, Wages, Dualism, Markets, Commodification,
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