Why I am a feminist economist: Building an economics that understands the price and value of work

Speaker:
Professor Smriti Rao (Assumption University)

Smriti Rao is Professor of Economics at Assumption University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. Her research interests lie in feminist economics analyses of work, with a focus on India. She is especially interested in expanding our understanding of work to include the labour of ‘life making’ that many economic analyses continue to minimize. She is also very interested in understanding internal and international movements of people along the trafficking-migration continuum. Smriti has published in journals ranging from World Development and Journal of Peasant Studies to Feminist Economics. She is an associate editor of Feminist Economics, and serves on the Board of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).

Abstract:
Claudia Goldin’s recent Nobel prize is a long overdue acknowledgement of the importance of women’s work within ‘mainstream’ economics. And yet this acknowledgement is limited to the paid work of higher income women in high income countries. Meanwhile, economists across the globe have been working to construct a body of knowledge now called Feminist Economics. In this talk, I discuss some of the distinguishing features of feminist economics analyses, focusing in particular on how feminist economics as a body of knowledge has helped me better understand the world of work in India, my home country, and in other developing countries like India.