Make it Practical #6: The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems, Nancy Folbre (2021)

We need to build new institutions to distribute the costs of care

Dear subscribers,

Last year I read the book, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy by Nancy Folbre. It took me nine months to read. It is one of those books you finish and think to yourself: “Wow. I just learned so much. But I cannot even begin to articulate what it is that I learned.”

I have spent the last five months trying to write about what it is that I learned. Finally, I am sharing with you my best attempt to articulate a few of the many, many things I learned from Folbre about patriarchal institutions, political economy, and care work – and the implications for our work in international development and feminist advocacy.

There are five lessons in this post, followed by takeaways for each.

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Lesson 1. The dismantling of patriarchal family structures, including family and personal status laws, has not coincided with the dismantling of patriarchal economic systems that exploit care work.

One of the themes for my earlier posts in the Make it Practical series is about the ways in which the international development sector has depoliticized the concept of ‘empowerment’ from its original radical, feminist, intersectional roots. This is particularly true when we talk about economic empowerment where the term itself suggests that economic empowerment is somehow separate from political or social empowerment.

Folbre makes a connection between this separation of the economic from the political, particularly with regards to care work. She explains how political rights for women achieved by feminist movements have advanced women’s political rights and self-determination. However, by dismantling the patriarchal family institutions only, it has resulted in leaving men “off the hook” for their caretaking responsibilities.

“the crumbling of explicitly patriarchal law has offered men, as well as women, important benefits, including increased freedom from paternal control and reduced obligations for the support of dependents.” (26)

The dismantling of patriarchal family institutions has resulted in greater freedoms for women, but our economic policies and institutions still rely on women to bear the responsibilities of care work.

“Traditional patriarchal rules offer women support for family care at the cost of subordination to patriarchal authority. Increased scope of individual choice, however, has a double edge: the absence of effective rules governing child support creates a high risk of poverty for many mothers and their children. The tally of patriarchal laws that have been – or need to be – stricken from the books should be accompanied by a list of new ones necessary to encourage more equal distribution of the costs of care.” (32)

Yes, women have more freedom to earn and control their own incomes, however caregivers are nonetheless presented with a false choice between “economic dependence on men who provide at least some support for family care or economic independence through wage employment that provides no support for family care. This is not much of a choice” (37).¹

Takeaways:

First, the solution is, of course, not to return to patriarchal familial systems. Instead, our movements need to be envisioning and building new institutions that distribute the costs of care across a society. This includes programs such as state subsidized childcare, eldercare, and healthcare and guaranteed income programs.

Second, Folbre’s point reiterates a warning to feminists from Bacque and Biewener’s article (which I summarized here) not to “cede the terrain of the economy” (Bacque and Biewener 2015, 6). Many feminist movements have been disconnected from movements for economic justice. As more and more international and national organizations and policymakers are turning attention to the care economy, advocates and feminists need to make sure we are connecting the economic to the political and be wary of any efforts to separate the two.

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Lesson 2: The problem of women’s disproportionate responsibilities for care work is structural. It cannot be reduced to just being a problem of unequal division of labor at the family or household level.

Many programmatic and policy recommendations in the gender and development sector are focused on encouraging men to take on more household and family care work. (I have also advocated for this as part of my work.) UN Women Arabic’s Instagram feed, for example, has been running a campaign called Because I am a Man, with numerous cartoons showing men happily cleaning and caring for children.

Folbre references groups like Promundo (now called Equimundo) and their initiatives encouraging men to taking on more responsibility for care work and other “traditionally female priorities.” She points out the limitations of this approach: “progress toward this model is discouraged by employers’ incentives to minimize labor costs and taxes” (209). She goes on to say that:

“Any competitive market economy that fails to adequately support care work penalizes caregiver regardless of gender: a ‘daddy track’ in employment is just as potentially harmful to career advancement and job security as a ‘mommy track’” (209)

Our current economic policies must be replaced with new policies and programs that redistribute the costs of care across society – not just within a household.

Takeaway: Familial and household dynamics matter, but in my opinion, the focus on gender roles within the household is taking up too much space in the gender and development sector. As Folbre points out, these efforts to get men to share more of the household workload are undermined by institutions that rely on someone doing the caregiving for cheap or free. We need to be wary of programming that only focuses on care work as a household issue. We need to be envisioning new support systems and the community and society level to share the costs and responsibilities of care.

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Lesson 3: The value of care work cannot be monetized on market terms. Doing so leads to continued undervaluation of care.

There is a trend in the international development sector to make the “business case” for employer-supported childcare. In doing so, organizations are trying to figure out how to monetize the value of care work as a way of showing how valuable it is to a business or overall economic growth. For example, the IFC’s Guide for Employer-Supported Childcare has a section on “results-based management” of childcare investments, including how these investments affect a business’s bottom line.

However, Folbre is clear that these efforts to measure the monetary benefits of care are misguided at best, and impossible at worst.

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to measure and capture the value of individual contributions to the maintenance and development of human capabilities, which helps explain why care work is underpaid even when performed for pay.” (198)

Moreover, trying to place a value on care in market terms ultimately leads to the devaluation of care.

“Care wage penalties differ considerably across countries because they are strongly influenced by specific labor market institutions that also shape overall levels of earnings inequality. Reliance on market forces [for care] leads to undervaluation.” (198-9)

Takeaways: The growing emphasis in the international development sector on care work and the care economy has the potential for powerful, transformational change. However, it is critical that advocates make publicly funded solutions to care work the goal, not solutions that are driven by revenues, profit, and market growth. We cannot rely on employer supported or private sector-driven solutions to care because care work is not something that can ever be truly valued in business terms.

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Lesson 4. Feminist movements and women’s economic empowerment programs must work to shift women’s bargaining power as both paid workers and unpaid caregivers.

If a policy or program focused on women’s economic opportunity or empowerment is not shifting the power of workers to bargain with their employers, then it is not empowering. Folbre points out that shifts in bargaining power have had a greater impact on women’s liberation than economic growth on its own:

“economic growth itself was less catalytic than shifts in the relative bargaining power of workers, women, and racial/ethnic minorities.” (144)

She also refutes claims that changes in economic incentives lead men to voluntarily renounce power (149), which only reinforces my skepticism around initiatives that purport to advocate for women’s economic empowerment by convincing people in power that it is a “win-win.”²

Folbre argues that it was mostly women’s personal and political bargaining power “that eventually persuaded men of the benefits of change”; ultimately, she adds, “the empowerment of women requires collective action” (150).

Takeaways: The international development sector’s focus on women’s empowerment is out of balance in the favor of employers. We need more investments in feminist organizing of workers and employees to build the bargaining power of caregivers.

In addition, there is an assumption in liberal women’s empowerment spaces that women need income wages to have bargaining power. This is certainly one way. But there will always be a need for unpaid care work and these caregivers need bargaining power too. And if caregivers rely on the market for bargaining power, they will always be at a disadvantage. This reinforces the need for publicly funded care investments, including childcare, but also programs like guaranteed income or universal basic income that can also increase caregivers bargaining power.

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Lesson 5. Market-centered, employer-supported childcare solutions exacerbate class and other inequalities.

Like the IFC toolkit mentioned above, many international organizations are pushing an agenda of employer-supported childcare services for their employees.³ Yet Folbre is clear that we cannot rely on the private sector to voluntarily provide and pay for care if we want to achieve any real version of social justice and gender equality. She says:

“Commitments to the care of others cannot be entirely voluntary or self-enforcing, especially in economic systems that encourage individual competition” (163).

One of the reasons for this is because concentrating paid care work solutions in the private sector may benefit some women, but at the expense of many other women.

An intersectional approach to care work and political economy forces us to see how “interlocking hierarchies” - including class, race, and citizenship - mean that care work and the devaluation of care is far more than just a gender issue.

“Reliance on a global care chain simply offloads care deficits onto others, with especially negative consequences for disempowered groups and low-income countries. The servants of globalization deserve better rights, better working conditions, and better pay.” (209)

This is a warning for the international development programs that promote employer-supported childcare. From what I’ve seen, these focus on the benefits of childcare services to the consumers – the (mostly) women who would be using the childcare. These initiatives rarely pay attention to the so-called empowerment of the childcare workers - who are also mostly women, but mostly women with lesser privilege, wealth, and power.

Takeaway: We cannot claim policy solutions for care work are a pathway to women’s equality or empowerment without explicitly talking about the childcare workers themselves. Programs and policies to expand access to affordable childcare and other forms of care must analyze and address class exploitation and other social inequalities that are relevant to the specific context in addition to gender.

1. This point was specifically regarding survey questions and points to problems in how attitudinal survey questions are worded and how they “imped[e] efforts to find a better, gender-neutral balance between autonomy and care.”

2. See, for example, this UNICEF report, “The Business case for employer-supported childcare.” https://www.unicef.org/rwanda/media/3536/file/Business%20Case%20for%20Employer-supported%20Childcare.pdf

3. IFC Launches Global Working Group to Develop Childcare Guidelines ILO, UNICEF, Goldman Sachs, Bright Horizons among those joining IFC-led initiative. October 2018. https://pressroom.ifc.org/all/pages/PressDetail.aspx?ID=18409.