Why Gender Matters in Economics by Mukesh Eswaran (review)

“A text is like medicine,” the art critic Pauline Kael complained in the mid-1990s. “[I]t’s a book you don’t want to read that is supposed to be good for you.”¹ Begrudgingly, she made an exception for texts in more technical fields, such as economics, where material can be reduced and codified, where tastes can be assumed, where standards of excellence and significance can be enforced by institutional authority.

Mukesh Eswaran’s Why Gender Matters in Economics is an oddity. Designed for a course on Women in the Economy, the text artfully demonstrates how economic thinking adds value to debates about sex and gender and how considerations of women have forced a reconsideration of the “science” of economics. In light of recent student-led demands for more diversity in the teaching of economics, it stands as a considerable achievement. Had the text offered a more playful alternative to the prosaic thought exercises and discussion questions that end the chapters, even the cranky Kael might have drunk the medicine and found it good for her.

The text promises a “comprehensive view of the economic lives of women” (ix). Building on the contributions of a long list of pioneering women economists—Esther Boserup, Joyce P. Jacobsen, Francine D. Blau, Nancy Folbre, Claudia Goldin, Marianne Ferber, and Anne E. Winkler, among others—it extends the analytical, topical, and geographical reach of women’s economic activities beyond labor markets to “sites of struggle” that produce different outcomes for women and men and occasionally different gendered behaviors in rich and poor economies. Gender and sex are not conceptually unpacked. The text follows common practice among economists in treating them as interrelated and contextually determined. The goal is to show how different economic outcomes matter to an understanding of women’s roles and to account for the differences.

The building blocks of empirical and theoretical scaffolding emerge from Eswaran’s impressively wide-ranging interdisciplinary synthesis of the literature, which keeps economic chauvinism at bay. Economic explanations compete for interpretive space with those of psychology, evolutionary biology, feminist economics, Marxism, and post-modernism. The value of the various approaches depends on how effectively they explain the differences in gendered behavior and outcomes that emerge in different situations at different sites. Eswaran places more value than I do on the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology and biology when trying to understand why men are more likely than women to engage in risk-taking and entrepreneurship, and why women are more disposed than men to save money (155, 143). I am concerned that his caveats about not using such arguments to justify the status quo might well go unnoticed. There are clearly more insights to be drawn from business, economic, and women’s history, especially when discussing the constraints and changes in social mores and customs. Moreover, given that most academic journals prove far more willing to publish articles about gender differences than similarities, I wonder about possible bias in the selection of sources.

Eswaran is optimistic that students with only a basic knowledge of economics can master the material. I am not so sure. Four modules are used to organize information. The first module introduces students to “fundamental matters,” which are defined as the “core mechanisms—economic, psychological, and social factors—that determine gender differences in behavior” (3). The language alone signals something different about an economist’s habit of thought. The OED traces the roots of “mechanism” to “contrivance, a machine-like structure of action linked to nature” (1756). Focusing on how and why an effect is produced tilts economics more toward the sciences. The tilt is no reason for more humanistically inclined students to disregard economics. The beauty of Eswaran’s “tilt” is that it manages to convey how a consideration of causal mechanisms can actually open rather than close debates about gender difference. As historians well understand, creative sense-making sometimes demands that old habits of thought be broken.

The title of a chapter in the...