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Reviewed by:
  • Regards croisés sur l’économie
  • Delphine Remillon
“Peut-on faire l’économie du genre?”[Can economic analysis afford to ignore gender?], Regards croisés sur l’économie, n°. 15, Paris, La Découverte, 2014, 240 p.

Every six months the team at Regards croisés sur l’économiepublish a synthetic overview of a major economic issue, written by economists specializing in the given area and specialists from other social sciences. Here the issue is “economics of gender.” The editorial introduction recalls a familiar paradox: whereas girls’ education levels rose throughout the twentieth century and have now overtaken boys’, inequalities between men and women persist in many areas of economic life: poor gender mix in particular occupations, lower pay for women, more difficult access to management positions, overrepresentation of women in part-time work, etc. How has economics research, with its specific methods (econometrics, experimentation, etc.), helped describe and explain these inequalities? What theoretical explanations can the science of economics provide? What political economy lessons can we draw from them? These are the questions discussed in this special issue.

In the first part, “What gender does to economics”, Fatiha Talahite recalls that economics was one of the last disciplines to take gender into account in its analyses and advances several possible reasons for this (pp. 14-28): economics is a more “masculine” science than other social sciences because situated at the intersection between them and the “hard” sciences; economics is a highly formalized discipline, characterized by a divide between an abstract theoretical core that cannot accept the notion of gender – homo economicushas no sex – and an applied level based on econometrics. Gender was of course more easily integrated into empirical studies, but the systematic construction of statistics by sex that makes such analyses possible is fairly recent in France. As indicated in the article “Genre dans la statistique publique en France” [Gender in public statistics in France”] (pp. 73-79), up until 1982 women were virtually invisible behind the male “head-of-household,” whose socio-occupational category was used as the reference in social mobility analyses.

Fatiha Talahite then shows that gender in economics shifted from analysis that followed the dominant paradigm to a feminist economics that applies the notion of gender to deconstruct theoretical concepts. The interview with Christine Delphy clearly illustrates the feminist economics perspective: Delphy sees a link between “the overexploitation of all women in paid work” and “the exploitation of most women in the private sphere.” This perspective leads in turn to a critique of economics for attending only to inequalities in paid work, and a critique of public policy (see below). Overall, this section shows that gender has not been integrated into all economic approaches (Keynesian economics, for example) and has had little impact on the foundations of economic theory. It is regrettable, [End Page 161]however, that a more diverse set of theories was not discussed and that institutionalist approaches did not receive more attention.

The subjects of Part II, “Why do they earn less?” and Part III, “The family: a woman’s affair?” are more traditional but the discussion is just as interesting. Part II focuses on the issue of educational and occupational “segregation.” Marie Duru-Bellat recalls that gender mix in jobs and study programmes has not progressed to anywhere near the same extent as girls’ schooling and women’s employment, and that education is still the main vector in occupational segregation, especially for the low skilled (office and manual workers); for managers the problem seems to occur at the hiring stage (pp. 86-98). Thomas Breda examines the low representation of women in scientific jobs and study programmes (pp. 99-116), reviewing and refuting three explanations put forward in the literature: discrimination against girls, differentiated aptitudes, and the idea that men are more versatile or have a wider range of talents; i.e., that “genius” is masculine. Only one possible explanation remains: gender stereotypes about feminine and masculine occupations continue to influence girls’ and boy’s choice of study programmes and disciplines. Séverine Lemière and Rachel Silvera then show that occupational segregation is more of a problem for women than men: women are concentrated in...

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