Feminist Economics and Covid-19: Chicas Poderosas interviews Luiza Nassif
It was during an Introduction to Macroeconomics class that the then university student Luiza Nassif raised her hand. Taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, under Portuguese acronym), the discipline covered one of its most elementary themes: the GDP measurement, the Gross Domestic Product. By its traditional definition, the acronym represents the sum of goods and services produced over a year by a country’s economy. Every year, the index is put under the spotlight, as it’s considered an X-ray of the local economy.
For Nassif, there were questions left unanswered. “[I said]: ‘uh, but if everyone decided to bake bread at home, would the GDP drop?’ ” she recalls. Her classmates at UFRJ, more than a decade ago, laughed. Nassif spent an entire semester being mocked by colleagues because of what she describes as “a serious feminist concern.” For decades, women’s movements have called attention to how domestic tasks that do not go through the market, nor are financially compensated, end up left out of the GDP numbers. “What goes or does not go into the GDP [measurement] is arbitrary. There is no fixed basis for what should or should not be part of it. It’s not God-given”, says Nassif. “Someone decided that domestic activities that don’t take place in the market don’t enter [the equation].”
Nowadays, Luiza Nassif holds a doctorate in Economics from The New School for Social Research and is a research fellow at the Levy Economics Institute, both in the United States. She started her academic career focusing on development studies at UFRJ. Later on, Nassif would turn her attention to mathematical modeling — until the point where she felt her research was too abstract. While investigating strike movements by American workers in the doctoral course, she decided to change course. Nassif realized that it was impossible to explain her subject matter without considering race and gender issues and resorted to readings in feminist economics. In 2018, she presented a paper at the IAFFE (International Association for Feminist Economics) conference in New Paltz, in the United States.
Nassif teaches a discipline on the subject at Bard College, New York. She talked to Chicas Poderosas about what Brazil can learn from feminist economics about responses to the coronavirus crisis. The interview is the first of the Economina series, created by the Brazilian chapter of Chicas Poderosas to propose new ways of covering economic issues in journalism.
The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How did you start to study economics and become interested in a feminist perspective?
[Still in college], I started to study Economic Development, which has a strong connection with feminist economics from a methodological perspective. Especially in Brazil, where we read many Brazilian, Latin American authors who advocate for a standpoint on development. A view based on the country where they are based. They argue that development and development policies have to be designed by those from the countries [affected]. These are the people who understand the traditional structures, the specific concerns in the country, and how these policies might impact people’s lives. It is pretty similar to the argument that feminists bring to economics: they argue that gender-based policies need to consider women’s perspectives and claim that traditional economics is very biased. I came from a heterodox school — that is, not aligned with neoclassical economics — with a solid critical component. It made critiques to the mainstream [theories], be it in public policies or economic policies.
One of the things we did back in college was to analyze the syllabi of all courses and evaluate their diversity. [We found out] that the majority of authors were white men. When you realize it, it is clear that women have a lot to contribute to the area because so many of them have been neglected.
How would you define Feminist Economics? What are the main contributions of this area?
There is a general lack of understanding about it. [People believe] that Feminist Economics is biased, oriented by women’s perspectives. But it isn’t. Feminist Economics looks at the economy from a women’s perspective and shows that mainstream economics is biased. It’s economics from a white men’s point of view. We are highly critical of specific issues that are not even considered by mainstream economics because they focus on a male perspective. It is what happens when one studies economics: most of the authors are men. One of the things we did back in college was to analyze the syllabi of all courses and evaluate their diversity. [We found out] that the majority of authors were white men. When you realize it, it is clear that women have a lot to contribute to the area because so many of them have been neglected.
One thing that receives very little attention to this day and that feminists point out very well: the care crisis. We witness as women’s participation in the workforce falls drastically [during the pandemic]. This issue affects the GDP because we are talking about a productive part of the population that leaves the market. A feminist perspective lays bare problems like this, which [many economists] have neglected because they don’t even consider the care work part of the economy.
You mentioned the impacts of the pandemic from a feminist perspective. You recently published a study at the Research Center on Macroeconomics of Inequalities at the University of São Paulo (Made-USP) on multidimensional inequalities during this period. How do these inequalities operate, and how do they impact women?
We have observed this scenario and analyzed how it worsens from a health and economics perspective. Both dimensions affect each other negatively. People say that coronavirus does not discriminate, but in fact, it does. From an epidemiological perspective, it does. Some people are symptomatic, and some people die; it is related to comorbidities among patients. These comorbidities alone reflect social inequalities. For instance, we know that, in Brazil, the poorest are more likely to have diabetes. Obesity in the United States, on the other hand, is more severe among the poorest too. We named these conditions as multidimensional inequalities. The multiple dimensions of inequality include income, housing conditions, and pre-existing health history. They influence the consequences of this pandemic from both health and economic perspectives. Besides that, Brazil has historical, social inequalities: people weren’t living in similar standards, their income wasn’t the same, they didn’t have the same working conditions.
All of this impacts [society] in many ways. It doesn’t only affect the higher economic risks one faces, but whether and how likely one will be exposed to the virus. Picture, for example, a woman who works as a shop cashier. She takes a crowded bus to get to work, and later comes back home, where she lives in a tiny apartment with five other people. This person likely has a low income and supports her dependents, and she can’t simply leave her position during the pandemic. We have many vulnerabilities at stake, considering her previous conditions, that increase the likelihood of this person getting infected. There is also the likelihood of having comorbidities, for instance. She is more likely to die due to the virus precisely because of these factors that I listed here, which are related to poverty. The poorest among us can’t simply leave a job, and the poorest are most likely to suffer from pre-existing conditions. And poverty in Brazil is interconnected with race and gender. For instance, women have lower formal employment rates and often work in the services sector, which was hit the hardest by the pandemic or in precarious working conditions — especially considering Black women and men. This scenario doesn’t only reflect poverty or lower education rates, but structural racism and sexism. It is another critical point we’ve found based on the analysis of multidimensional inequalities. It isn’t driven only by income, but by gender and race too. The crisis thus exacerbates all these inequalities.
As a result, people deal with entirely different vulnerabilities during the crisis. We’re not equally exposed to the virus, and the likelihood of our exposure depends on pre-existing conditions. There is also the likelihood of facing complications, which will depend on one’s situation — for instance, if you can afford private healthcare or not. It all adds up to the point where the most vulnerable are hit hardest, from a health or economic perspective.
Turning to the economic side, and focusing on women specifically, what happens is that women lose more income because they face more precarious working conditions. They’re also overburdened at home. They’re also overburdened because the number of activities carried out in the domestic sphere has increased. Women already had long taken up these responsibilities, and this process has worsened. They lose more income, and they lose more jobs. They leave the workforce more often. It’s deteriorating. Picture an average middle-class nuclear family with a man who is married to a woman and has children. The risk of this woman losing her job is higher because of the areas where women like her make up most of the workforce. For example, the service sector: it was hit the hardest, and its working conditions are more precarious. If this couple cannot afford to hire a maid, and if someone in the family will have to take up the caring responsibilities at home, this person will likely be her.
In Brazil and the US, this scenario cannot be separated from racial dynamics. I recently presented a study to the Brazilian Parliament, which shows how ending emergency aid will affect poverty rates. We predict that, without emergency aid, the poverty rates among Black women will increase dramatically. This gap — what we call the poverty hiatus — isn’t primarily affected by gender; instead, it is driven by race, by the negative impacts on Black women. There isn’t a wide gap between white men and women when we focus on poverty rates. On the other hand, Black women are notoriously vulnerable during the crisis, and there’s little to no attention given to their situation.
Our inability to realize that there are groups with different levels of vulnerability, and to protect them accordingly, makes it harder to solve our problems.
From a feminist perspective, how do you evaluate our responses to the crisis?
First of all, precisely because we’re so unequal, we face more obstacles in our attempts to deal with the virus. With pre-existing conditions, for instance, it is harder to prevent the infection of certain groups. Our inability to realize that there are groups with different levels of vulnerability, and to protect them accordingly, makes it harder to solve our problems. For instance, Black people were more affected by the health crisis. If we ignore that in our vaccination plans or in an economic policy designed to support them, we risk increasing the infection rates. In the end, more people might get infected by the virus.
Social protection isn’t only a matter of morality, of protecting those of us who are most vulnerable. Protecting them means protecting us as a whole because this crisis has a lot of externalities. When someone falls ill, many others might end up infected from an epidemiological perspective. From an economic perspective, we can apply similar logic. This becomes even clearer in a study carried out by [Economics professor at the University of Sao Paulo] Laura Carvalho, Marina Sanches, and Matias Cardomingo. They argue that if it weren’t for emergency aid, our GDP would have decreased even more in 2020. This multiplier effect exists in economics: policies meant for the most vulnerable have a substantial value-added. That’s my first point. The second point is that we have witnessed a dramatic increase in gender and race inequalities, and there is a human rights issue at stake. We have to tailor our policies to these criteria and go beyond universal policies.
The emergency aid considered gender when it increased support for solo mothers, even in a broader, transversal policy meant for all. But it was primarily focused on income, not on gender, and it didn’t even consider race. However, precisely because inequalities are multidimensional, the aid generated a massive impact on race, even if race isn’t explicitly mentioned as a factor or parameter in the policy. What I’d say is the following: we need more policies that explicitly address racial and gendered disparities, not only income.
What is the difficulty we face when creating these policies in a crisis like this?
What I see is a sort of constant misunderstanding about these policies. People still think that there are only direct beneficiaries, but they don’t understand the broader positive impacts on society as a whole on a macro level. It is not a matter of not knowing how to design those policies, as if “wow, I can’t think of a good policy for this.” That’s not the problem. There is an underlying ideological question, a more political one: there isn’t a will to understand and address these questions, to care about them, and to the aggregate value in them.
Interview by Priscila Bellini
English translation by Priscila Bellini and Juliana Câmara
Copyediting/revision (English) by Isabelle Rumin
Spanish translation by Victoria Vidal
Copyediting/revision (Spanish) by Alejandra Vargas Morera
Design by Isabel W. De Nonno
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