Feminist Economics

ISSN: 1354-5701 (Print) 1466-4372 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfec20

Gender, Development, and Globalization:

Economics as if All People Mattered

İpek İlkkaracan

To cite this article: İpek İlkkaracan (2016): Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics
as if All People Mattered, Feminist Economics, DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2016.1213410

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2016.1213410

Published online: 10 Aug 2016.

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Download by: [Cornell University Library] Date: 15 August 2016, At: 05:41
Feminist Economics, 2016

Book Review

Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, by

Lourdes Benería, Günseli Berik, and Maria S. Floro. London and New York:
Routledge, 2016. 320 pp. (11 b/w illus.). ISBN: 9780415537490 (pbk.).
US$50.00; 9780415537483 (hbk.). US$140.00.
Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered is an
invaluable compendium not only for academics and researchers, but also
for policymakers and practitioners working in this area. Lourdes Benería,
Günseli Berik, and Maria S. Floro, feminist economists with substantive
contributions to the field, demonstrate their mastery of the material
through the skillful use of language that addresses readers from different
disciplines and positions of engagement in the field. The volume stands as
a comprehensive reference book as well as excellent teaching material for
academics and researchers. It is also geared toward informing policymakers
and practitioners of gender and development. Reaching out to such a
broad audience is very much in the spirit of feminist economics, which
advocates for a more accessible and alternative economics.
The first two chapters of the book lay down the conceptual groundwork
through a comprehensive historical review of the central concepts and
themes, organized under two topics: The conceptual evolution from
women in development (WID) to gender and development (GAD; ch. 1)
and the theoretical, methodological, and thematic underpinnings of
feminist economics (ch. 2). This is followed by an analytical overview of
the literature on the gendered implications of economic globalization
under neoliberalism (ch. 3), and a close-up look at evolving and diverse
gendered patterns of paid work and labor markets (ch. 4) and at unpaid
work and the care economy (ch. 5). The final chapter, which I find to
be the most interesting, addresses questions of policy and action with
a forward-looking perspective. Under each topic, the authors present a
theoretical-conceptual, as well as empirical and historical, analysis of the
academic research literature, weaving in the intersecting policy debates. I
find this dialectic between academic writing and policy documents (ranging
from the International Labour Organization’s Decent Work agenda and
the World Social Forum to the World Bank’s Development Reports) to be
one of the most appealing contributions of this volume.
As the six chapters of the book are stand-alone pieces, readers can choose
any chapter and start reading whatever they are interested in. Pick any
 BOOK REVIEW

issue – say, feminization of labor through the process of globalization,

or recognition of and accounting for unpaid work, or methodological
debates in feminist economics – and look up the relevant chapter in
the detailed contents pages, go to that chapter, and you will access a
comprehensive analytical review of the academic literature as well as the
policy debates. When Gender, Development, and Globalization arrived in my
mail, I was working on an analytical overview of the treatment of unpaid
work in macroeconomics. So I began by reading chapter 5 on unpaid
work and the subsections of chapter 2 on alternative macroeconomics,
macroeconomic policies, provisioning, and well-being. In addition to
providing a comprehensive analysis of the main debates in the literature,
the authors also present a wealth of references. There are an impressive
fifty-two pages of references, with close to 1,000 entries!
In their introduction, the authors state, “The book is about the
multiple gender dimensions of development, globalization, labor markets and
women’s work since the 1970s” (p. xxiii). This multiplicity of dimensions is
reflected throughout the book. In presenting evidence, the authors identify
the relevant geographic and social contexts and avoid generalizations such
as low-income versus high-income regions or women versus men. They
seek to address the multiple inequalities at the intersection of gender,
class, race, ethnicity, and origin, aware of differentiated life experiences
contextualized with respect to time and location. Moreover, while Gender,
Development, and Globalization puts forth a deep critique of neoliberalism,
it also points out its contradictory tendencies such as women’s increasing
participation in paid work resulting in some empowering effects at the
same time as the emergence of new constraints on women’s agency or the
persistence of existing ones.
Benería, Berik, and Floro’s analysis of gender, development, and
globalization results in a number of important assessments with forward-
looking implications. As the authors acknowledge, there has been an
impressive integration of gender issues into development policy agendas.
Yet they also point out how some of the ways this integration has proceeded
constitute obstacles to genuine progress. Namely,

• Instrumentalization of women in policy design toward the goal of

maximizing economic growth;
• Mechanistic approaches toward gender mainstreaming in policy; and
• Promotion of gender equality without regard to the other social
inequalities it intersects.

I find this warning extremely relevant as a long-time researcher and

activist working in this field in Turkey and the Middle East and North
Africa region. While, in the past two decades, gender inequalities have
been increasingly acknowledged as an important part of the economic
2
 BOOK REVIEW

and social policy agenda in Turkey, they are inevitably subsumed to

market solutions embedded in the neoliberal agenda. For example,
the Turkish government’s recent policy initiative to improve work–life
balance and support women’s labor force attachment has adopted flexible
(part-time, home-based) work as its main strategy without any provisions
for public care services. In response to the critiques by a progressive
alliance of policy researchers and women’s nongovernmental organizations
and demands for public provisioning of care services with universal
coverage as a necessary component of promoting gender equality in the
labor market, the neoliberal alliance of the government, World Bank,
and G-20/W-20 proposed at best low-cost, community-based, or public-
subsidized, but private-sector initiated, service provisioning as the solution
(İpek İlkkaracan, Kijong Kim, and Tolga Kaya 2015).
This example at a national scale goes to support the important assessment
by Benería, Berik, and Floro that many programs and policy reforms
targeting gender equality but subsumed under the neoliberal paradigm
tend to neglect the macroeconomic forces and their interplay with social
and institutional structures – foremost, labor markets – that “allow unequal
gender relations to prevail in markets, HHs and societies” (p. 235). In a
context of neoliberal macroeconomic policies and the downward spiral
of labor market conditions, women’s constrained choices involve difficult
trade-offs. Neoliberal policy design blindly assumes these constraints and
difficult trade-offs as a given, and then proposes piecemeal solutions with
no potential for a truly redistributive challenge and sustainable progress.
In their final chapter, the authors also point out that the neoliberal
mindset accompanying economic globalization has also culminated in
the tendency to view poverty reduction (very similar to the case of gender
equality) as a development issue separate from issues of overall inequality,
distribution, and sustainable development. It bears heeding the authors’
warning that this mechanistic nature of the orthodox approach to
inequality and poverty has shaped gender-mainstreaming efforts, and poses
a significant barrier to advancing a genuinely progressive agenda.
Yet the book ends on an optimistic note, identifying the sources of
leverage for moving forward. First, the authors point to the dialogue
and alliances between feminist and heterodox approaches to economics
and development. They draw out the strong complementarities between
alternative development approaches such as the capabilities, human rights,
human development, or even the new developmentalist perspectives and
feminist economics or GAD perspectives. They show how the conceptual
link between these different strands of work can be built around what they
call “the social provisioning approach” of feminist economics, where the
economy is conceptualized as involving not only market but also nonmarket
activities aimed at human provisioning. Second, after reminding us that
“change requires social movements,” they also emphasize the importance
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 BOOK REVIEW

of agency and social movements (including feminist and ecological

movements as well as movements for alternative economies such as the
solidarity economy movement) in advancing the call for a socially and
ecologically sustainable economy.

İpek İlkkaracan
Department of Economics, Faculty of Management, Istanbul Technical University
Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: ilkkaracan@itu.edu.tr
©2016, IAFFE
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2016.1213410

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
İpek İlkkaracan is Professor of Economics at Istanbul Technical University,
Faculty of Management, and a Research Scholar with the Levy Economics
Institute in New York. She serves as the expert on Turkey in the European
Network of experts on Gender Equality (ENEGE), the Associate Director
of the Women’s Studies Center at ITU, and a board member of the
International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).

REFERENCE
İlkkaracan, İpek, Kijong Kim, and Tolga Kaya. 2015. “The Impact of Public Investment
in Social Care Services on Employment, Gender Equality, and Poverty: The
Turkish Case.” Istanbul Technical University Women’s Studies Center in Science,
Engineering, and Technology, and the Levy Economic Institute of Bard College.
www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_8_15.pdf.