A Survey of Feminist Economics

The roots of the feminist economics which has come, the 1990s, to be widely recognized as in a distinct field of economics are to be found in theoretical developments in both neoclassical economics and in feminist theory from around the 1960s. The aims of this paper are to (1) delineate and discuss the four dominant approaches or schools of thought within feminist economics; (2) show how these schools of thought within feminist economics develop neoclassical economics in ways which enrich rather than undermine it, and (3) show how feminist economics can be distinguished from neoclassical economic analyses of women, such as research denoted as the new home economics undertaken by Chicago-trained economists. In short, the paper seeks to answer the questions What is feminist economics? and What difference does it make?