N Folbre
Biographic Data
| ID | 27641 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Folbre |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Folbre |
| SIGNATURE | FOLBRE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6868-9834 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 89 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1547 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 88 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Earnings inequality and the expansion of care services in the United States, 1985–2019
Earnings in care services are lower than in other industries, particularly among professional and managerial employees, and are more compressed than in other industries. The growth of primarily female employment in care services since the 1980s has buffered overall increases in wage inequality while slowing convergence in the gender wage differential
Care Provision and the Boundaries of Production
Whether or not they provide subjective satisfaction to providers, unpaid services and non-market transfers typically contribute positively to total output, living standards, and the social climate. This essay describes some quantitative dimensions of care provision and reviews their implications for the measurement of economic growth and the explanation of relative earnings, including the gender wage differential. It also calls attention to under…
The High Cost of Doing Good
Workers in care occupations and industries in the United States earn less than counterparts with similar personal characteristics in other jobs. We document considerable gradation within care services, showing that workers employed in social assistance earn less than workers in other care industries such as education and healthcare. We posit that social assistance providers are particularly vulnerable to pay penalties because their clients suffer…
Radical Offspring
This essay provides a brief informal reflection on radicalism from the perspective of intersectional political economy. JEL Classification: A113, B51, B54
Gender Inequality, Bargaining, and Pay in Care Services in the United States
The authors argue that paid providers of care services in the United States (in health, education, and social service industries) are less able than providers of business services to capture value-added or to extract rents because limited consumer sovereignty, incomplete information regarding quality, and large positive externalities reduce their relative market power. In addition, many care jobs enforce normative responsibility for others and re…
Beyond the clock
Can parental childcare be described as productive work? If so, is this work reducible to the specific physical activities designated in most time use surveys, or does it include more diffuse responsibilities for supervision, socialization, and management? These questions invite attention to debates over the meaning of work itself, which have been shaped not only by gender and academic discipline, but also by empirical results of diary-based time …
Work-family justice
It's an incredibly important moment to focus on work-family scholarship – and to consider research related to 'just' work and care in unsettling and challenging times. Against this backdrop, the 2022 WFRN theme was established. The conference gathered members from around the world toward building impactful scholarship for practices and policy. In this Voices piece, we draw upon WFRN presidential panelists' voices. The first plenary, 'The Meanings…
Care, Inequality, and Policy
This chapter explores the reasons for the link between care and the three distinct aspects of inequality. Empirical research shows that motherhood also reduces the wages of employed women, even if women do not reduce their hours of work. Lower access to earnings puts caregivers at a disadvantage in bargaining with their intimate partners. The role of markets in perpetuating and sometimes intensifying inequalities related to care provision helps e…
Telling Fortunes
Feminist political economy is not just about inequalities based on gender and sexuality. It reaches for new ways of thinking about individual agency and social structure, and challenges traditional definitions of exploitation and economic crisis. In this essay, a bit of intellectual history generates a rather optimistic vision of what could become a more creative, expansive, and pluralistic discipline
La Revue internationale du Travail et l'égalité entre hommes et femmes
L'autrice de cette introduction commente et analyse les diverses contributions qui composent ce numéro du centenaire de la Revue internationale du Travail sur les femmes, le travail et l'égalité entre les sexes. Elle souligne la nécessité de reconnaître que le travail des femmes est sous‐évalué, qu'il soit accompli dans leur foyer ou sur le marché du travail. Elle met également en lumière les divers efforts déployés pour remédier à ces problèmes …
Endogenous Growth, Population Dynamics, and Economic Structure
Even long-run macroeconomic growth models that allow for endogenous growth rely on simplistic assumptions regarding demographic regimes. This paper develops a model with more realistic variation in such regimes, including both excessively high and excessively low levels of average fertility. Variations in the structure of the market economy shape these population dynamics, and these trends in turn affect macroeconomic outcomes. Like early overlap…
Toward a More Careful Future
As a manifesto, this book is superb. In often electrifying language, it condemns the growing carelessness of global neoliberalism and its efforts to appropriate the rhetoric of care. I agree with so many of the Care Collective’s claims: “Neoliberalism ... has neither an effective practice of, nor a vocabulary for care” (4) and “the inherently careless practice of ‘growing’ the economy has taken priority over ensuring the well-being of citizens” (…
Essential Workers and Care Penalties in the United States
The new category of workers officially labeled “essential” in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States includes a large percentage of women working in care services. In many of these services, health risks are often considered part of the job and are uncompensated by hazard pay. Building on previous feminist research explaining the devaluation of care work, this paper uses the most recent available data from the US Current P…
Cooperation & Conflict in the Patriarchal Labyrinth
This essay offers a new way of visualizing structures of collective power based on gender, emphasizing the role of social institutions in shaping women's ability to bargain over the distribution of the gains from cooperation with men. It makes the case for an interdisciplinary conceptualization of bargaining power that emphasizes the role of imperfect information and inefficient outcomes, and explains important parallels between structures of col…
Manifold exploitations
The distinction between oppression and exploitation is overstated in traditional Marxian theory. Defined in terms of economic advantages gained from unfair bargaining power, exploitation can take manifold forms, characterized by intersections, overlaps, and interactions within complex hierarchical systems in which actors often find themselves in somewhat contradictory positions
Time, Money, and Inequality
The advent of nationally-representative time-use surveys has generated a wave of new empirical research on time devoted to unpaid work and challenged traditional resistance to considering its impact on household living standards. Measurement and valuation of such work can generate estimates of “extended income” on the household level, with significant implications for assessment of income inequality. While few such estimates have been generated t…
Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016
The Feminist Business Unfinished Business
The Intergenerational Welfare State
Demography is a realm of private decisions with public effects. In both highand low-fertility regimes, families make decisions that significantly influence the well-being of others. Excessively rapid population growth can threaten economic and ecological viability. Population decline can threaten cultural continuity and fiscal sustainability. As Paul Demeny has warned us, there is no invisible hand in the family that serves to align private and p…
Greed, Lust & Gender
When does the pursuit of self-interest go too far, lapsing into morally unacceptable behaviour? Until the unprecedented events of the recent global financial crisis economists often seemed unconcerned with this question, even suggesting that “greed is good.” A closer look, however, suggests that greed and lust are generally considered good only for men, and then only outside the realm of family life. The history of Western economic ideas shows th…
Varieties of Patriarchal Capitalism
Journal Article Varieties of Patriarchal Capitalism Get access Nancy Folbre Nancy Folbre E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 16, Issue 2, Summer 2009, Pages 204–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxp011 Published: 08 May 2009
Making Do and Getting By
We use pooled data from the 2003, 2004, and 2005 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) to explore the impact of non‐market household work on the living standards of the elderly. We describe how women and men allocate their time after they reach age 55 by race/ethnicity, age, and household structure. Focusing on those aged 55–64 and 65–74, we examine white, Black, and Hispanic differences in time use by gender, and compare women and men living alone an…
Time Use and Living Standards
Explorations
Time-use surveys show how individuals spend their time during the day or week, which provides evidence of the gendered division of labor within households and the interdependence of women's and men's paid and unpaid work. Time-use experts in the South face similar challenges to those working in other countries, but they also have to come to terms with the restrictions faced in less developed contexts – notably higher illiteracy rates and limited …
Reforming Care
This essay argues that concerns regarding the impact of work/family balance on gender inequality should be extended to broader analysis of all care work. Paid or unpaid care devoted to all dependents (including the sick and elderly as well as children) has distinctive characteristics that contribute to disempowerment and underpayment. Expenditures of money as well as time increase economic vulnerability. Public policies should provide greater sup…
When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work
Using data from Australia and the United States, the authors explore the effect of spouses' contribution to family income on how house- work is divided. Consistent with exchange-bargaining theory, women decrease their housework as their earnings increase, up to the point where both spouses contribute equally to income. In other respects, gender trumps money. The base level of housework for women is much higher. Among the small percentage of coupl…
Hearts and spades
The Cost of Caring
Caring work involves providing a face-to-face service to recipients in jobs such as child care, teaching, therapy, and nursing. Such jobs offer low pay relative to their requirements for education and skill. What explains the penalty for doing caring work? Because caring labor is associated with women, cultural sexism militates against recognizing the value of the work. Also, the intrinsic reward people receive from helping others may allow emplo…
Wages of Virtue
We examine the relative pay of occupations involving care, such as teaching, counseling, providing health services, or supervising children. We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth covering workers between 17 and 35 years of age. Care work pays less than other occupations after controlling for the education and employment experience of the workers, many occupation and industry characteristics, and (via individual fixed ef…
Holding hands at midnight
This paper puts recent feminist theorizing about "care" within an economic context by developing the concept of caring labor and exploring possible reasons for its undervaluation. It describes the relevance of tensions between neoclassical and institutionalist thought, as well as between pro-market and anti-market views. The final section explores the implications for feminist public policy
For Love or Money-Or Both
This paper explores the implications for economic analysis, societal well-being, and public policy of the movement of care services (such as child and elder care) from home to market. A broad empirical overview sets the stage for the argument that this process cannot be properly evaluated using only a priori judgments about the suitability of marketization. The context in which markets operate is crucial, and while the growth of market provision …
Cleaning house
The Unproductive Housewife
Demanding Quality
Paid care services such as child care, elder care, teaching, and nursing are vulnerable to competitive pressures that often generate low-pay/low-quality outcomes. Both workers and consumers suffer as a result. This article develops an economic analysis of the 'care sector' that emphasizes the potential to build political coalitions that could push for a high-pay/high-quality alternative
By what measure? family time devoted to children in the united states
We argue that previous research on time devoted to child care has paid insufficient attention to the conceptualization of care time. Three separate problems are evident. First, the conventional focus on explicit activities with children distracts attention from the larger responsibilities of “passive” care, which ranges from time when children are sleeping to time when they are in the same general area but are not engaged in an activity with pare…
Of Patriarchy Born
Of Patriarchy Born: The Political Economy of Fertility DecisionsEver since Malthus condenmed the brutishness of a working class that mindlessly reproduced itself, social scientists have had a tendency to assume that reproductive behavior could not be readily explained by rational motives.Even thqsc willing to concede the existence of intelligcnt choice in modern industrial societies have continued to assume that families in underdeveloped agraria…
Explorations
Time-use surveys show how individuals spend their time during the day or week, which provides evidence of the gendered division of labor within households and the interdependence of women's and men's paid and unpaid work. Time-use experts in the South face similar challenges to those working in other countries, but they also have to come to terms with the restrictions faced in less developed contexts – notably higher illiteracy rates and limited …
Who Should Pay for the Kids
This article emphasizes collective struggles over the distribution of the costs of children. Because the production of children's capabilities creates a public good that cannot be priced in the market, individuals can free ride on the efforts of parents in general and mothers in particular. We need to redesign the social contract in ways that encourage more sustainable forms of intergenerational altruism and reciprocity
Reforming Care
This essay argues that concerns regarding the impact of work/family balance on gender inequality should be extended to broader analysis of all care work. Paid or unpaid care devoted to all dependents (including the sick and elderly as well as children) has distinctive characteristics that contribute to disempowerment and underpayment. Expenditures of money as well as time increase economic vulnerability. Public policies should provide greater sup…
Counting Housework
Women engaged primarily in the provision of domestic services for family members make important contributions to total output. This article provides estimates of the size and sectoral allocation of the nonmarket household work force in the United States between 1800 and 1860. Those estimates are then used as a basis for several alternative imputations of the value of these women's work, which modify the historical picture of economic growth over …
To Honor and Obey
25-44
How Does She Know? Feminist Theories of Gender Bias in Economics
Research Article| March 01 1993 How Does She Know? Feminist Theories of Gender Bias in Economics Nancy Folbre Nancy Folbre Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1993) 25 (1): 167–184. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-25-1-167 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Folbre; How Does She Know? Feminist Theories of Gender Bias in Econom…
Essential Workers and Care Penalties in the United States
The new category of workers officially labeled “essential” in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States includes a large percentage of women working in care services. In many of these services, health risks are often considered part of the job and are uncompensated by hazard pay. Building on previous feminist research explaining the devaluation of care work, this paper uses the most recent available data from the US Current P…
Varieties of Patriarchal Capitalism
Journal Article Varieties of Patriarchal Capitalism Get access Nancy Folbre Nancy Folbre E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 16, Issue 2, Summer 2009, Pages 204–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxp011 Published: 08 May 2009
A Methodology for Revising Estimates
This paper responds to the debate over historical rates of female labor force participation. The discussion is presented in 3 separate sections. The debate over underenumeration of womens marketwork is 1st reviewed the authors noting problems of gender bias and chronological consistency. Next 3 recent efforts to compensate for underenumeration of self- or family-employed women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the national level are cr…
Household Production in the Philippines
Making Do and Getting By
We use pooled data from the 2003, 2004, and 2005 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) to explore the impact of non‐market household work on the living standards of the elderly. We describe how women and men allocate their time after they reach age 55 by race/ethnicity, age, and household structure. Focusing on those aged 55–64 and 65–74, we examine white, Black, and Hispanic differences in time use by gender, and compare women and men living alone an…
Explorations Gender and Aging
The contributions in this Explorations section reveal differences across countries in the support systems of the elderly and shows that poverty among the elderly has not been eliminated, even in rich countries. Social insurance systems with an adequate minimum benefit do the best job of avoiding poverty among elderly women. Poverty rates among older women are much higher than for older men and much higher in the US compared to other nations in th…
Gender Inequality, Bargaining, and Pay in Care Services in the United States
The authors argue that paid providers of care services in the United States (in health, education, and social service industries) are less able than providers of business services to capture value-added or to extract rents because limited consumer sovereignty, incomplete information regarding quality, and large positive externalities reduce their relative market power. In addition, many care jobs enforce normative responsibility for others and re…
Nursebots to the rescue? Immigration, automation, and care
This paper explores the rising cost of care services in affluent countries, with a particular focus on nursing. It suggests that competitive pressures lead to forms of 'over-commodification' that can both lower the quality of care and lead to deterioration of the work environment. While immigration and automation can help reduce costs, they can also pose threats to care quality. Care providers and care recipients need to collaborate in efforts to…
Population Growth and Capitalist Development in Zongolica, Veracruz
Of Patriarchy Born
Of Patriarchy Born: The Political Economy of Fertility DecisionsEver since Malthus condenmed the brutishness of a working class that mindlessly reproduced itself, social scientists have had a tendency to assume that reproductive behavior could not be readily explained by rational motives.Even thqsc willing to concede the existence of intelligcnt choice in modern industrial societies have continued to assume that families in underdeveloped agraria…
Household Production in the Philippines
Plant Closings and Their Regulation in Maine, 1971-1982
This paper describes the plant closing regulations adopted in Maine during the 1971 – 81 period and documents a pattern of relatively poor compliance with the advance notice and severance pay requirements of the law. Data on the number of workers laid off in major plant closings, on prenotification of workers, and on state and local unemployment rates provide the basis for an econometric estimate of the effects of closings with and without early …
The Wealth of Patriarchs
The Wealth of Patriarchs: Deerfield, Massachusetts, I760-I840 In I809, when Simeon Peck, Jr. requested public aid for his father from the town of Deerfield, the town's officials informed him that they would not aid parents who had children able to labor. Forty years earlier such a request would have been unlikely, for most eighteenth-century New Englanders assumed that it was their own responsibility to support their parents in old age. Forty yea…
Cleaning house
For We Are Sold, I and My People
Job Losses in Major Industries
Hearts and spades
Family Strategy
(1987). Family Strategy: A Dialogue. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 113-125
Plant Closings
The rhetoric of self-interest
Feminism and rhetoric: a parable Rhetoric and Feminism met on a morning run around the lake at Wellesley College. They were both there to work on Economics, trying to get him into better shape to deal with changing realities. rhetoric ( breathing heavily ): This is rough going. I can't seem to make these economists see the underlying assumptions that structure their models. They're all talking about me instead. feminism ( treading lightly ): I kn…
The Persistence of Patriarchal Capitalism Nancy Folbre
A Methodology for Revising Estimates
This paper responds to the debate over historical rates of female labor force participation. The discussion is presented in 3 separate sections. The debate over underenumeration of womens marketwork is 1st reviewed the authors noting problems of gender bias and chronological consistency. Next 3 recent efforts to compensate for underenumeration of self- or family-employed women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the national level are cr…
Women on their own
De nombreuses études d'histoire sociale féministe à la fin du 19e. siècle aux Etats-Unis affirment que l'accroisement chez les femmes de la tendance à vivre hors des traditionnelles families patriarchales crèait d'importantes ramifications culturelles et politiques. Pourtant les démographies n'avaient voué relativement que peu d'attention aux dimensions de ces facteurs. Rarement ils cherchèrent plus loin des indicateurs de ménages ayant une femme…
Understanding the Gender Gap
The Unproductive Housewife
The Improper Arts
105-121
Women’s Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875–1920
Married women’s entrance into the market economy proceeded at a slow but steady pace between 1890 and 1910. That, at least, is the impression given by conventional census measures of the percentage with “gainful occupations,” which practically doubled in both the United States as a whole and in the heavily industrialized state of Massachusetts (see Table 1). This impression is misleading on at least two counts. Declines in self-reporting and enum…
Women's Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875-1920
Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought
Counting Housework
Women engaged primarily in the provision of domestic services for family members make important contributions to total output. This article provides estimates of the size and sectoral allocation of the nonmarket household work force in the United States between 1800 and 1860. Those estimates are then used as a basis for several alternative imputations of the value of these women's work, which modify the historical picture of economic growth over …
How Does She Know? Feminist Theories of Gender Bias in Economics
Research Article| March 01 1993 How Does She Know? Feminist Theories of Gender Bias in Economics Nancy Folbre Nancy Folbre Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1993) 25 (1): 167–184. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-25-1-167 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Folbre; How Does She Know? Feminist Theories of Gender Bias in Econom…
Sex and Reason
Who Pays for the Kids
Three paradoxes surround the division of the costs of social reproduction:* Women have entered the paid labour force in growing numbers, but they continue to perform most of the unpaid labour of housework and childcare.* Birth rates have fallen but more and more mothers are supporting children on their own, with little or no assistance from fathers
Economics (59 works) · Political science (53 works) · Sociology (53 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (42 works) · Law (26 works) · Labour economics (21 works) · Demographic economics (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Gender Studies (16 works)