Susan Himmelweit
Biographic Data
| ID | 213614 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Himmelweit |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Himmelweit |
| SIGNATURE | HIMMELWEIT S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2697-4204 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 355 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Saving for Retirement
Many countries’ policies are shifting the responsibility for funding retirement onto individual savings. But many individuals live in mixed-sex households where, given typically gender-unequal life-time earnings, opportunities to accumulate savings are also unequal. Thus, a gendered perspective on saving for retirement is needed. This article uses Australian individual and household data to examine conceptual and measurement issues in understandi…
A Care-Led Recovery From Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated employment prospects, particularly of women, and exposed the longstanding neglect of care systems and poor employment conditions of care workers. Most recovery programs propose to stimulate employment by focusing on investment in construction, ignoring gender equality issues. This paper argues for public investment in high-quality care services and better conditions for care workers to build a more gender…
Economics and Austerity in Europe
Feminist Perspectives on Care
Feminist theory across a number of disciplinary fields has made a significant contribution to the understanding of care and to the development of its policy and practice in a variety of societal contexts. Care is a key feminist concern because its provision remains so stubbornly gendered and this has important implications for what men and women can do. How care is provided, therefore, also has consequences for the functioning of economies and th…
Sharing of Resources Within the Family and the Economics of Household Decision Making
Over the last 3 decades, economic models have been developed that recognize that potentially conflicting interests may shape household decisions and the sharing of resources within families. This article provides an overview of how decision making within households has been modeled within economics, presents the main benefits and limitations of those models, and critically assesses their usefulness to researchers from other disciplines interested…
Unpacking Within-Household Gender Differences in Partners' Subjective Benefits From Household Income
The authors examine how contributions to household resources, indicated by employment status, influence satisfaction with household income (SWHI) for members of male/female couples. They take changes in SWHI, which may differ within couples, to indicate changes in perceived benefits from their common household income, benefits that can go beyond individual consumption. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 2,396 couples from 1996…
Financial Togetherness and Autonomy Within Couples
This chapter examines the implications of the concepts of togetherness and financial autonomy for gender equality, drawing on findings from both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative research explored the two concepts in individual interviews with men and women in low- to moderate- income couples. The quantitative research used the British Household Panel Survey to analyse the factors affecting the differing assessments of their …
The marketisation of care
The use of markets and market mechanisms to deliver care services is growing in both liberal and social democratic welfare states. This article examines debates and policies concerning the marketisation of eldercare and childcare in Sweden, England and Australia. It shows how market discourses and practices intersect with, reinforce or challenge traditions and existing policies and examines whether care markets deliver user empowerment and greate…
Policy on Care
This chapter considers ways in which policies on care may help or hinder progress on tacking gender inequalities.
Social Norms, Cognitive Dissonance and Broadcasting
The prospects for caring
This paper examines three distinguishing features of caring: that it involves the development of a relationship, that caring responsibilities and needs are unequally distributed and that social norms influence the allocation of care and caring responsibilities, to draw out their implications for analysing caring and its movement between unpaid and paid economies. Rising opportunity costs of caring are found to produce pressures experienced in dif…
Making Policymakers More Gender Aware
The UK Women's Budget Group (WBG) is a think tank focusing on the gender implications of economic policy that attempts to influence UK government policy to be more gender aware and adopt policies that decrease gender inequality. The WBG has had the overarching aim of encouraging the government to take account of gender in policy formation and to monitor and hold itself accountable for the gender effects of its policies. At the same time the WBG h…
Lone Mothers
This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum,…
The dilemmas of lone motherhood
The acute dilemmas facing lone mothers in raising their children and earning a living form a common theme across the articles in this special issue of Feminist Economics on Lone Mothers. Like other parents, lone mothers face difficult decisions in allocating their time to caregiving and income generation, but in their families there is only one adult to do both. Further, that one adult is a woman, who will generally earn less than a man, compound…
Choice and the Relationship between Identities and Behaviour for Mothers with Pre-School Children
This article reports on the findings and policy implications of a UK study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate mothers' decision-making with respect to the interlinked issues of the care of their pre-school children and their own employment. Mothers were found to have both internal and external constraints on their decisions. In the three areas of finances, childcare and working time, both personal identities and ex…
Making Visible the Hidden Economy
Throughout the 1990s, The Open University has been developing its research capacity in economics. Economists at the OU comprise a lively and expanding group with a wide set of interests ranging from development policy to decision theory, from Marxist theories of profit to libertarian foundations of environmental policy and from econometric analysis of large data sets through institutional economics to the use of case-studies in policy formation. …
Inside the Household
List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: From Labour to Care The' Family Wage': Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists M.Barrett & M.McIntosh Women's Domestic Labour J.Gardiner, S.Himmelweit & M.Macintosh Capital Restructuring and the Domestic Economy: A Marxist Alternative to Materialism J.Wheelock Domestic Labour and Employment Status Among Married Couples: A Case-study in Hartlepool L.Morris Domestic Labour Revisi…
Introduction - Children and Family Policy
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Feminist Economics on 02/12/2010, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457000337633
Caring Labor
Caring has two different aspects: the motivation of caring for other people and the activity of caring for them. Furthermore, good-quality care depends on the developing relationship between a carer and the person cared for. In paid employment, however, rela tionships are usually assumed to be reduced to an exchange transaction and motivation to be simply monetary, provoking concern about whether paying for care diminishes its quality and authent…
Gender, care and emotions
Diemut Elisabet Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £30.00, viii+281 pp.Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care and Economics, London: Macmillan, 1997, £42.50, paper £15.99, xiv+273 pp
The discovery of “unpaid work”
This paper questions the dichotomy of work/nonwork. It examines the way in which the category of work was expanded by feminists and economists to include much domestic activity, and considers some of the consequences of this expansion. It argues that the discovery of unpaid “work” involved an uncritical application and validation of a concept of work abstracted from a model of commodity producing wage labor in manufacturing. However, this concept…
Reproduction and the materialist conception of history
In this chapter we shall be exploring one of Marx's most important concepts, that of reproduction. We shall look at the ways in which he did use it and also consider the reasons why he did not use it in some other ways. It may seem strange to spend so much time on what Marx (and Engels) did not do, but considering this omission and the reasons for it may throw light on some fundamental features of Marx's method. In particular, it should help us u…
The Cambridge Companion to Marx
Marx was a highly original and polymathic thinker, unhampered by disciplinary boundaries, whose intellectual influence has been enormous. Yet in the wake of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe the question arises as to how important his work really is for us now. An important dimension of this volume is to place Marx's writings in their historical context and to separate what he actually said from what others (in particular, Engels…
More Than 'A Woman's Right to Choose
In just over twenty years since the Abortion Act was passed in 1967 much has changed for women. Above all, the greater availability of abortion has brought increased sexual and economic freedom to those who do not wish to be or become pregnant. There have also been concomitant changes affecting those who do wish to bear a child. Some of these are the direct effect of the Act itself, such as the dramatic fall in the number of healthy babies put up…
Value Relations and Divisions within the Working Class
The marketisation of care
The use of markets and market mechanisms to deliver care services is growing in both liberal and social democratic welfare states. This article examines debates and policies concerning the marketisation of eldercare and childcare in Sweden, England and Australia. It shows how market discourses and practices intersect with, reinforce or challenge traditions and existing policies and examines whether care markets deliver user empowerment and greate…
Caring Labor
Caring has two different aspects: the motivation of caring for other people and the activity of caring for them. Furthermore, good-quality care depends on the developing relationship between a carer and the person cared for. In paid employment, however, rela tionships are usually assumed to be reduced to an exchange transaction and motivation to be simply monetary, provoking concern about whether paying for care diminishes its quality and authent…
The discovery of “unpaid work”
This paper questions the dichotomy of work/nonwork. It examines the way in which the category of work was expanded by feminists and economists to include much domestic activity, and considers some of the consequences of this expansion. It argues that the discovery of unpaid “work” involved an uncritical application and validation of a concept of work abstracted from a model of commodity producing wage labor in manufacturing. However, this concept…
Choice and the Relationship between Identities and Behaviour for Mothers with Pre-School Children
This article reports on the findings and policy implications of a UK study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate mothers' decision-making with respect to the interlinked issues of the care of their pre-school children and their own employment. Mothers were found to have both internal and external constraints on their decisions. In the three areas of finances, childcare and working time, both personal identities and ex…
Sharing of Resources Within the Family and the Economics of Household Decision Making
Over the last 3 decades, economic models have been developed that recognize that potentially conflicting interests may shape household decisions and the sharing of resources within families. This article provides an overview of how decision making within households has been modeled within economics, presents the main benefits and limitations of those models, and critically assesses their usefulness to researchers from other disciplines interested…
Making Visible the Hidden Economy
Throughout the 1990s, The Open University has been developing its research capacity in economics. Economists at the OU comprise a lively and expanding group with a wide set of interests ranging from development policy to decision theory, from Marxist theories of profit to libertarian foundations of environmental policy and from econometric analysis of large data sets through institutional economics to the use of case-studies in policy formation. …
A Care-Led Recovery From Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated employment prospects, particularly of women, and exposed the longstanding neglect of care systems and poor employment conditions of care workers. Most recovery programs propose to stimulate employment by focusing on investment in construction, ignoring gender equality issues. This paper argues for public investment in high-quality care services and better conditions for care workers to build a more gender…
The dilemmas of lone motherhood
The acute dilemmas facing lone mothers in raising their children and earning a living form a common theme across the articles in this special issue of Feminist Economics on Lone Mothers. Like other parents, lone mothers face difficult decisions in allocating their time to caregiving and income generation, but in their families there is only one adult to do both. Further, that one adult is a woman, who will generally earn less than a man, compound…
More Than 'A Woman's Right to Choose
In just over twenty years since the Abortion Act was passed in 1967 much has changed for women. Above all, the greater availability of abortion has brought increased sexual and economic freedom to those who do not wish to be or become pregnant. There have also been concomitant changes affecting those who do wish to bear a child. Some of these are the direct effect of the Act itself, such as the dramatic fall in the number of healthy babies put up…
Unpacking Within-Household Gender Differences in Partners' Subjective Benefits From Household Income
The authors examine how contributions to household resources, indicated by employment status, influence satisfaction with household income (SWHI) for members of male/female couples. They take changes in SWHI, which may differ within couples, to indicate changes in perceived benefits from their common household income, benefits that can go beyond individual consumption. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 2,396 couples from 1996…
The Anomalies of Capital
Making Policymakers More Gender Aware
The UK Women's Budget Group (WBG) is a think tank focusing on the gender implications of economic policy that attempts to influence UK government policy to be more gender aware and adopt policies that decrease gender inequality. The WBG has had the overarching aim of encouraging the government to take account of gender in policy formation and to monitor and hold itself accountable for the gender effects of its policies. At the same time the WBG h…
Lone Mothers
This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum,…
Introduction - Children and Family Policy
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Feminist Economics on 02/12/2010, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457000337633
Gender, care and emotions
Diemut Elisabet Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £30.00, viii+281 pp.Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care and Economics, London: Macmillan, 1997, £42.50, paper £15.99, xiv+273 pp
Domestic labour and capital
Journal Article Domestic labour and capital Get access Susan Himmelweit, Susan Himmelweit Both authors teach economics in the University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Simon Mohun Simon Mohun Both authors teach economics in the University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 1, Issue 1, March 1977, Pages 15–31, …
The Anomalies of Capital
Value Relations and Divisions within the Working Class
More Than 'A Woman's Right to Choose
In just over twenty years since the Abortion Act was passed in 1967 much has changed for women. Above all, the greater availability of abortion has brought increased sexual and economic freedom to those who do not wish to be or become pregnant. There have also been concomitant changes affecting those who do wish to bear a child. Some of these are the direct effect of the Act itself, such as the dramatic fall in the number of healthy babies put up…
Reproduction and the materialist conception of history
In this chapter we shall be exploring one of Marx's most important concepts, that of reproduction. We shall look at the ways in which he did use it and also consider the reasons why he did not use it in some other ways. It may seem strange to spend so much time on what Marx (and Engels) did not do, but considering this omission and the reasons for it may throw light on some fundamental features of Marx's method. In particular, it should help us u…
The Cambridge Companion to Marx
Marx was a highly original and polymathic thinker, unhampered by disciplinary boundaries, whose intellectual influence has been enormous. Yet in the wake of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe the question arises as to how important his work really is for us now. An important dimension of this volume is to place Marx's writings in their historical context and to separate what he actually said from what others (in particular, Engels…
The discovery of “unpaid work”
This paper questions the dichotomy of work/nonwork. It examines the way in which the category of work was expanded by feminists and economists to include much domestic activity, and considers some of the consequences of this expansion. It argues that the discovery of unpaid “work” involved an uncritical application and validation of a concept of work abstracted from a model of commodity producing wage labor in manufacturing. However, this concept…
Gender, care and emotions
Diemut Elisabet Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £30.00, viii+281 pp.Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care and Economics, London: Macmillan, 1997, £42.50, paper £15.99, xiv+273 pp
Caring Labor
Caring has two different aspects: the motivation of caring for other people and the activity of caring for them. Furthermore, good-quality care depends on the developing relationship between a carer and the person cared for. In paid employment, however, rela tionships are usually assumed to be reduced to an exchange transaction and motivation to be simply monetary, provoking concern about whether paying for care diminishes its quality and authent…
Introduction - Children and Family Policy
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Feminist Economics on 02/12/2010, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457000337633
Making Visible the Hidden Economy
Throughout the 1990s, The Open University has been developing its research capacity in economics. Economists at the OU comprise a lively and expanding group with a wide set of interests ranging from development policy to decision theory, from Marxist theories of profit to libertarian foundations of environmental policy and from econometric analysis of large data sets through institutional economics to the use of case-studies in policy formation. …
Inside the Household
List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: From Labour to Care The' Family Wage': Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists M.Barrett & M.McIntosh Women's Domestic Labour J.Gardiner, S.Himmelweit & M.Macintosh Capital Restructuring and the Domestic Economy: A Marxist Alternative to Materialism J.Wheelock Domestic Labour and Employment Status Among Married Couples: A Case-study in Hartlepool L.Morris Domestic Labour Revisi…
Lone Mothers
This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum,…
The dilemmas of lone motherhood
The acute dilemmas facing lone mothers in raising their children and earning a living form a common theme across the articles in this special issue of Feminist Economics on Lone Mothers. Like other parents, lone mothers face difficult decisions in allocating their time to caregiving and income generation, but in their families there is only one adult to do both. Further, that one adult is a woman, who will generally earn less than a man, compound…
Choice and the Relationship between Identities and Behaviour for Mothers with Pre-School Children
This article reports on the findings and policy implications of a UK study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate mothers' decision-making with respect to the interlinked issues of the care of their pre-school children and their own employment. Mothers were found to have both internal and external constraints on their decisions. In the three areas of finances, childcare and working time, both personal identities and ex…
Making Policymakers More Gender Aware
The UK Women's Budget Group (WBG) is a think tank focusing on the gender implications of economic policy that attempts to influence UK government policy to be more gender aware and adopt policies that decrease gender inequality. The WBG has had the overarching aim of encouraging the government to take account of gender in policy formation and to monitor and hold itself accountable for the gender effects of its policies. At the same time the WBG h…
The prospects for caring
This paper examines three distinguishing features of caring: that it involves the development of a relationship, that caring responsibilities and needs are unequally distributed and that social norms influence the allocation of care and caring responsibilities, to draw out their implications for analysing caring and its movement between unpaid and paid economies. Rising opportunity costs of caring are found to produce pressures experienced in dif…
Social Norms, Cognitive Dissonance and Broadcasting
Policy on Care
This chapter considers ways in which policies on care may help or hinder progress on tacking gender inequalities.
Financial Togetherness and Autonomy Within Couples
This chapter examines the implications of the concepts of togetherness and financial autonomy for gender equality, drawing on findings from both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative research explored the two concepts in individual interviews with men and women in low- to moderate- income couples. The quantitative research used the British Household Panel Survey to analyse the factors affecting the differing assessments of their …
The marketisation of care
The use of markets and market mechanisms to deliver care services is growing in both liberal and social democratic welfare states. This article examines debates and policies concerning the marketisation of eldercare and childcare in Sweden, England and Australia. It shows how market discourses and practices intersect with, reinforce or challenge traditions and existing policies and examines whether care markets deliver user empowerment and greate…
Sharing of Resources Within the Family and the Economics of Household Decision Making
Over the last 3 decades, economic models have been developed that recognize that potentially conflicting interests may shape household decisions and the sharing of resources within families. This article provides an overview of how decision making within households has been modeled within economics, presents the main benefits and limitations of those models, and critically assesses their usefulness to researchers from other disciplines interested…
Unpacking Within-Household Gender Differences in Partners' Subjective Benefits From Household Income
The authors examine how contributions to household resources, indicated by employment status, influence satisfaction with household income (SWHI) for members of male/female couples. They take changes in SWHI, which may differ within couples, to indicate changes in perceived benefits from their common household income, benefits that can go beyond individual consumption. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 2,396 couples from 1996…
Feminist Perspectives on Care
Feminist theory across a number of disciplinary fields has made a significant contribution to the understanding of care and to the development of its policy and practice in a variety of societal contexts. Care is a key feminist concern because its provision remains so stubbornly gendered and this has important implications for what men and women can do. How care is provided, therefore, also has consequences for the functioning of economies and th…
Economics and Austerity in Europe
Economics (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (11 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (10 works) · Labour economics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Economic growth (6 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (6 works) · Work-Family Balance Challenges (6 works)