Episode Ninety One

Introduction

0:00Welcome to Smith and Mark's Walk into a Bar, a History of Economics podcast. I'm Jennifer Jung, one of your hosts for today, and I'm joined by my colleague, Francois Alisson. Hi, Francois. Did you get a beard cut? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Too lazy. Well noticed. Unfortunately for our listeners, yeah, they will not see it, but I'm happy to be with you, Jen. How are things

0:34going at Duke? Are you at Duke? Yes, I am right now. Finals have just ended, so here comes the summer vacation. I'm also joined by Jinla Akderich. Hi, Jinla. How are you? Hello. I'm also very happy to see you all. I'm in Ankara, as always. I had my class in the morning and came to join you here now. It's not summer. It's not spring. It seems to a little bit

1:06of winter day in May, a little bit. We have sun, but it's still cold. It was cold in the classroom this morning. I don't know. Hopefully soon we will also have spring and vacation period. Well, I hope for warm weather for you soon. I'm very excited to introduce today's guest. I have Professor Gian Domenica Becchio, who was a professor in the Department of Economics, Social Sciences, Mathematics, and Statistics at the University of Torino. She's the author of The Doctrine of the

1:38Separate Spheres in Political Economy and Economics, Gender Equality and Classical Liberalism, which was published by Paul Grave in 2024, which we'll be discussing today. Jinla, you've actually got the first question, so why don't I let you kick things off? Yes, I would like to say first something else, actually, about Torino. And in 20 days, I'll be in Torino because they are organizing this fascinating Eshet conference in Torino. You are in the local organization committee, actually.

2:10So, we met first year before to meet in 20 days in Torino. I'm so excited, actually, to be there. I hope you are not very tired because of the organization. It's a huge conference, 300 person actually applied, I guess.

2:30Yes, actually, it's nice. It's a big conference, a big conference, and it has been mainly organized by the other departments, but we helped them somehow. And it's very important for us, for all of us, to stay connected in this network of historians of economic thought because we are a niche, basically, but we need to fight for our discipline. So, it's very important to get connected into these conferences.

3:04And so, we have Italian associations for history of economic thought, the European, the HES, of course, and so many more in Latin America, in Australia, in Spain. So, it's very, very important to stay connected and to spread our research everywhere. There will be interesting academic debates in the conferences, but everybody will be happy because they will be in Italy. In Italy, yes, although, yes, Torino. Well, let's think across about the weather because, as you mentioned,

3:37it has been a weird spring with some days very hot and some other days very cold. So, it's basically going back and forth from winter to summer, which can be inconvenient, but let's hope for the best. Yes, Francois will be there, too. I will meet Francois, too. So, I'm really lucky, actually, this month. But let's go and see the questions and kick off this conversation, this meeting here.

4:09I will, of course, start by talking about your book. The idea was so interesting. I really liked the book. And we will first have some questions on your recent book. What are these separate spheres referenced in the book's title? And what makes doctrine of the separate spheres a doctrine? Let us remember the title of the book first, that our listeners would understand what I mean by my question. And then,

4:44we will keep talking a bit about the book in the following minute. Of course, the title is The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres in Political Economy and Economics, Gender Equality and Classical Liberalism. So, the idea of the separate spheres refers to the traditional belief that society is divided into two distinct and separate realms. The private sphere, which is basically centered around the household, and the public sphere, which includes both the market

5:16and the political arena. So, traditionally, women have been expected to excel in the private sphere by being good wives and mothers, providing love and care to family members. On the other side, men have been expected to excel in the public sphere by being productive workers and being engaged as good citizens and, eventually, leaders. This division is rooted in the belief that women are naturally,

5:49let's say, in records, compassionate and thus best suited to caregiving roles, while men are naturally, again, competitive and better equipped for the economic and political arenas. It is called a doctrine because it has been widely accepted and taken for granted, I must say, for at least two millennia, in fact, it can be dated back to Aristotle, without a serious and sustained challenge.

6:22To be honest, a critical discussion of this doctrine began in the 19th century with the rise of early feminism. This is the first wave of feminism, which brought together thinkers from various disciplines, including political economy. We will see how. However, some precursors of this critique against the doctrine can be traced as far back as the 17th century. For example, in John Locke's opposition to

6:53Filmer's defense of patriarchy, which was based on the idea that the doctrine of the separate sphere directly came from Adam and Eve and the choice of God to shape the society as a whole by adopting this dichotomy. During the Enlightenment, female thinkers such as Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft, either in France or in Great Britain, challenged Rousseau's strong support for the doctrine,

7:27as well as Bourke's strong support for the doctrine, by advocating instead for women's emancipations from domestic subordination. But my book will start basically with a broad description of these precursors. And then it will be much more focused when the doctrine of the separate sphere was adopted, either was analyzed, let's say, either for adopting it or for rejecting it by economists. And this

8:03happened in the second part at the end of the 19th century. Yes, actually, there seem to be two ways that the doctrine can figure in economists' thinking, either as an object of analysis or as a framework for economic analysis. What did the debates in each of these categories look like, especially in the head of economists? Yes, it depends on whom we are considering and when. To begin with, economists have analyzed the doctrine

8:37of the separate sphere in order to explain the traditional division of labour between genders in both the private and the public realms. They were, in a sense, compelled to address the doctrine when middle- and upper-class married women began entering the labour market in the late 19th century, as I mentioned earlier. This development challenged existing norms and changed traditional family dynamics,

9:07particularly in relation to men's roles as primary breadwinners. Economists of the time, such as Alfred Marshall, Thomas Carver, Richard Ely, Irving Fisher, and many others, all big names, largely reinforced the doctrine. They did so by adopting concepts like family wage and by applying the principles of comparative advantage to justify the traditional gender division of labour. So during this period, the doctrine primarily served

9:41as a framework for economic analysis as a framework for economic analysis. Economists evaluated women's demand for greater access to the public sphere, whether through employment or political enfranchisement, for example, using cost-benefit analysis. In the end, Moss concluded that the traditional division of labour was economically and socially efficient. So they basically reinforced the doctrine. Later, in the 1960s,

10:11the advent of human capital theory within economics, which was developed by economists like Gary Becker, Jacob Minster, Theodore Schulz, reshaped the discussion. These economists integrated the doctrine of the separate spheres into their analysis of gender roles and labour market discrimination. Becker, in particular, expanded his line of thought in what came to be known as new home economics. We will talk about that later. A research programme he pursued from the 1970s through the 1990s. This approach treated the

10:50household as a unit of economic analysis and was especially built on the assumptions of the separate sphere doctrine. So he argued that gender-based differences in human capital, along with biological and psychological distinction between genders, made the traditional division of labour between men and women economically optimal. At this point, the doctrine of the separate sphere had shifted from being a framework for economic analysis to being an object of economic analysis itself.

11:27Thank you, that's really fascinating. Let's move a bit further in time and I would like to ask you to tell us at what point in time did this doctrine of the separate sphere became less salient and what brought about its modern resurgence? Yes, so between the two periods that I've just mentioned, so late 19th century and 1970s, the doctrine became less salient, as you just said. Although two research fields

12:03emerged emerged in the American academia, home economics and household economics. Home economics was the scientific management of the household, which means the rational choice regarding consumptions of the family. That was in charge of women and aimed to increase the well-being of a single family and consequently of the society as a whole. Household economics emerged during interwar at the University of Chicago, thanks to the work of women economists of the time, such as Marion Talbot,

12:37Hazel Kirk, Elizabeth Hoyt, and especially Margaret Reid. Household economics is the analysis of households' production in competition with markets' production. So even though both home economics and household economics were focused on the private sphere, they adopted the doctrine neither as an object of analysis nor not as a framework. So that's why the doctrine became less salient. But the doctrine

13:14resurgence occurred in the late 1960s, early 70s, and was the consequences of a massive cultural and institutional changes that was affecting women's lives of the time. I'm of course talking about the sexual revolution, the legalization of divorce and abortion, the rise of women's studies within academia and outside academia, that were focused on the neglected history of women's contribution to human

13:48development in any field. And of course, I'm talking about the emergence of the so-called second wave of feminism.

13:59So we just talked a bit about home economics and household economics. Here's a name, a phrase that came up earlier when we first started this conversation, feminist economics, which is relevant now. And we're still moving further in time. Could you tell us a bit about what is feminist economics and how does that treat the doctrine of the separate spheres? And also, could you tell us a bit about how feminist economics has evolved since the 1980s? Sure. So feminist economics is an academic research field, officially an academic research field that emerged in the 1980s,

14:37primarily as a reaction to how mainstream economics, particularly Gary Becker's new home economics, was addressing gender issues and gender inequality. As mentioned, Becker reinforced the doctrine of the separate spheres by portraying it as efficient. We can talk about this later. Many economists of the time, especially women, rejected his view, described it not only as mainstream, but also as mainstream,

15:12that is based on a set of assumptions which were rooted in a masculine worldview. In 1992, just one year after Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize, a group of economists labeled themselves as feminists, and founded the International Association for Feminist Economics . Three years later, in 1995, they launched the academic journal Feminist Economics. And in 1906, Feminist Economics was officially

15:48recognized with its own GEL classification code, which is B54, placing it among other heterodox approaches to economic thought, all of which are under the B code, GEL code. So it is important, let me just add this, to note that the label Feminist before economics does not imply a unified, monolithic approach. Rather, feminist economics, as well as feminism in general, is a multifaceted field. The ideological spectrum of

16:28feminism itself ranges from Marxist perspective to radical individualism. And these different visions shape the way economic analysis provided by feminist economists is conducted within the field. So as a result, feminist economics encompasses a wide range of topics, including social reproduction, the economics of care, intersectionality, power relations, and more. Overall, feminist economics,

17:00especially as represented in the Feminist Economics Journal, has functioned as a broad umbrella, welcoming diverse and different perspectives and methodologies. All of them, especially at the beginning, in the first 20 years, challenged traditional economic models and assumptions, particularly those embedded in the doctrine of the separate sphere, those which actually reinforced the traditional division of labor between sexes and genders, and reinforced the status quo.

17:37So there's this person that seems to be a really major character that's come up in our conversation a few times already. We need to know a bit about Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker to to renovate this conversation. I'd like to ask a little more about more about the following. What is new home economics and how did Becker defend that?

18:01Okay, as briefly mentioned, the new home economics is a research field that has been founded, not just defended, but founded by Gary Becker, when he moved from New York to the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, early 1970s. New home economics is aligned totally with neoclassical standards, by emphasizing maximization and equilibrium,

18:33and by applying these methodological tools to gender issues and the economics of the family. At least initially, Becker pursued optimization under the assumption that the household operates as a single decision making unit. Later, to justify this in terms of individual preferences, he posed a paterfamilias, a male breadwinner who was both powerful and altruistic enough to ensure

19:13that it was in everyone's interest to behave as if his utility function was their own. He was a benevolent male breadwinner. Becker's new home economics explained the rationale behind the institution of marriage by forcing the traditional division of labor between spouses. It models family behaviors as a rational responses to

19:44economic factors, such as prices, incomes, technologies, and of course, preferences. Within an individualistic framework that excludes, basically, any social and cultural factors from the economic model. Becker first introduced the price theory of marriage in two papers devoted to the economics of marriage. In the first, he employed human capital theory to explain how households sort breadwinners,

20:18male, from home-makers, female. In the second, he applied the theory of comparative advantage to explain the division of labor between couples. He showed that the marriage market may actually reach a Pareto optimum condition. This means that no individual can change mates and improve their well-being without simultaneously

20:48worsening someone else's condition. In addition to this assumption, Becker specified that his model of marriage implies that men and women usually acquire different human capital due to labor market conditions responding to physical and biological differences. As in any other market tending towards equilibrium, the following conditions are satisfied. They are the division of roles in the marriage market is

21:18determined by marginal productivity, preferences are revealed, and mates compete given their budget constraints. So, more generally, Becker considered marriage as a long-term commitment to ensure protection for women. He regarded market-oriented investments for boys and household-oriented investments for girls as optimal strategies, by arguing that the highest returns are achieved in a society when roles are specialized based on

21:53gender differences. Similarly, according to Becker, the choice to divorce can be explained by constructing a total utility function of a couple and considering bargaining costs.

22:08That's why in my book I labeled Becker's new home economics, the doctrine of the separate steers on steroids, because it's, let's say, scientific reinforcement of the status quo, actually is the application of neoclassical or mainstream whatever economics to the traditional division of labor between men and women and the economics of the family.

22:40Today, I just want to add, the application of neoclassical economics to gender issues and to the economics of the family is commonly referred to as the economics of gender. So, in a previous book of mine, I referred it to gender neoclassical economics. But officially, the gel codes, the gel label for the application of neoclassical economics to gender issues is called economics of gender.

23:14So, basically, today we don't have any more new home economics. The development, the present development of new home economics is labeled economics of gender. Okay, thank you. Let's now turn to a feminist economist on which you worked quite a lot, Barbara Bergman. Who was Barbara Bergman? How would you situate her within the field of feminist economics and what distinguished her from other feminist economics?

23:47Thank you very much. I'm really affectionate to Barbara Bergman. I'm actually working on her intellectual biography for Palgrave. So, I'm very glad to talk about her a little bit. So, Bergman was a founder of the feminist economics, a founder of Yaffe, so the association, and a founder of the journal. She was trained in mathematics and economics, and she initially, she got her PhD in the late 40s, 1940s.

24:23So, initially, she examined race and gender-based occupational segregation, and then she moved towards gender inequality in the labor market, in order to investigate research distribution within families and also the division of labor between spouses. She immediately, in the 80s, rejected Becker's new home economics. Anyway, before becoming a feminist economist, Bergman was each one separately. She was a feminist and an economist.

25:00Her biography and her work testify that these two aspects of her identity have always been intertwined in her life. She was a child of a second generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who lived in New York, and she often expressed feeling of double discrimination as a Jew, both as a Jew and as a woman. We are talking about late 40s, 50s, in the 50s, in the 60s, and so forth.

25:34She analyzed economic matters by adopting an empirical approach and by applying this approach to sex and racial segregation in the marketplace, as I mentioned earlier. And finally, she extended it to the economics of the family. So basically the same topics that were analyzed and scrutinized by Becker in the same period. In addition to her academic work, Bergman was also involved in extra academic activities aimed at both

26:09spreading the meaning and the goals of feminist economics and reinforcing her call for affirmative action to support specific policies in order to improve the condition of women and children, who were and still are the weakest part group of the society. Her efforts included participating in congressional hearings, providing testimonies, and contributing to newspapers, columns such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

26:43In contrast to many feminist economists who tend to advocate the adoption of a female state of behavior by emphasizing cooperation, emotions, and feelings against the male style of behavior, which is rooted in competition, rationality, and efficiency. Barbara Bergman believed that the only possible ticket to gender equality was a totally

27:17androgynous model that makes possible for women to inhabit the same world as men currently do. And this may be possible through a significant government support program aimed at high commodification. So her feminist agenda was centered around affirmative action aimed to balance work and family and family labor between men and women as the only possible path to gender equality.

27:53So this requires a dual strategy, ensuring equal opportunities in the job market for men and women in the same terms, but also fostering an equitable distribution of responsibility between spouses in managing household affairs and raising of children. So I really liked her vision before liking her economic theory and model, because I get, I think that, I believe that

28:29that many feminist economists and many feminists in general, they tend to consider the feminine, the traditional feminine set of values superior to the man's value. And somehow doing so, they reinforce the doctrine. They just overcome the terms. While Barbara Bergman's attitude was an attitude totally devoted to equality. Equality between the two genders. And of course,

29:07equality between human beings in general. We can add ethnicity, sexual identities, and so forth. Okay, we really look forward to see this biography of Barbara Bergman in the coming. Still on her, Bergman, as you told us, and as you wrote, was also active politically. How did her academic

29:39interests carry over her political interests? And what kind of policy measures did she recommend?

29:46Yes, Bergman pointed out a strong program of affirmative action, as well as anti-discrimination laws. She insisted on the importance of hiring more women and black people in the police, for example, to change the common attitude according to which law and order was a white man's prerogative. This is just an example. She continued by inviting readers, especially from the newspapers, to consider that the alternative to affirmative action was often the continuation

30:17of habits, ways of thought, old boy networks that make only white men look suitable and competent for certain jobs, and make everyone else appear to be unsuitable. So she believed in the nudging role of affirmative action and suggested a possible solution for the gender wage gap, for example. She usually, she was used to show data, data provided by the U.S. Census or Statistical Institute,

30:49everywhere. And she explained that, for example, the gender pay gap was not due to women's part-time or temporary interruptions, such as maternity leave, rather to a form of discrimination that must be ended by a set of national pay equity guidelines, for example, aimed to help women in traditional occupation. Bergman was active in proposing many, many plans, many, many, many ideas. All of them were

31:23mainly oriented towards a reinforcement of child support payments, free child care for kids below five years old, tax credit for families with children. In fact, for Bergman, only high quality child care allows mothers to join the labor market. So she proposed three possible solutions, child care provided by the private sector and financed by federal or state money, a higher educational

31:54requirement for child care workers and better information on child care provisioning. She also presented the policies that would improve the lives of single mothers and their children, such as health care and child care measures, along with a program that would find stable jobs for single mothers workers and would fund a return to school for girls or women who dropped out of school when they became pregnant outside marriage. She insisted in promoting government provision of aid for covering family expenses,

32:32services. And she believed that all these provisions, all these help from the state would have been much more effective than a basic income, for example. So she emphasized the labor market equality rather than insisting on quotas, for example, or rather than insisting on making care work paid. That was quite

33:13popular and still is quite popular among other feminist economists or economists of the gender. So she, for example, she was against housewife salaries or paid parental leave, unless it's not for both.

33:35Why? Because this measure would have reinforced, according to Bergman, the sex role case system, which is the doctrine of the separate sphere, by pushing women within their traditional role of wives and mothers and mothers and men within the traditional role of breadwinners. If you pay a housewife, you will reinforce the doctrine. You will push women to stay at home, to stay in the private sphere. Rather, she was in favor of, again, of affirmative action oriented to policies able to guarantee equal opportunity in the labor market,

34:09regardless of gender and marital status. Thank you very much. So then the last question on Barbara Bergman. In 1981, Barbara Bergman published a paper in the American Economic Review titled The Economic Risk of Being a Housewife. Can you set this paper in its historical context for our audience, please? Sure. Well, 1981 was a crucial year because Becker published the first edition of his A Treatise on the Family.

34:44And that book was a comprehensive systematization of new home economics. Barbara Bergman's paper, published in the American Economic Review, was a reaction to Becker's book. So she criticized, and I'm quoting Becker's income to the advantages of the division of labor among spouses as biased by its perspective of a male member of a traditional family.

35:16Her, Barbara Bergman's aim was to highlight the greater economic risks associated with being a housewife, compared to working in various occupations in the public sphere. There are physical hazards associated with incidents at home and domestic violence, which occur more frequently than physical assaults in the workplace. Additionally, housewives received non-cash and untaxed benefits instead of a regular salary,

35:52income and pension. According to Bergman, being a housewife is one of the riskiest occupations due to its high variability in payoff. This is because of the possibility that a marriage might end in divorce, leading to poor financial consequences for women. The financial and emotional trauma of divorcing is much higher than the trauma of getting fired.

36:24This is another point. Moreover, while a former employer has basically no power over a former employee after firing them, an ex-husband usually remains responsible for alimony and child support and maintains a great power. on his former wife, economic power, but also psychological power.

36:54Bergman concluded the paper that by saying that being a housewife is not always truly a choice. This is another difference with Becker. For Becker and his followers, everything is a matter of individual preferences, which is not always the case according to Bergman and other feminist economists. Rather, very often being an housewife, it's a self-imposition, it's a choice determined by social pressure.

37:33At the end of the paper, Bergman say that to be an housewife functions as a caste, which is perpetrated by the education provided to female children. So, this education often includes the legend of Prince Charming and most important, it includes the lack of preparation for labor market. So, that was a paper that was very important. First, because again, it was a precise critique to Becker's

38:14book and also because it was published in the American Economic Review. So, it was widely read by the entire academia, by the entire community of economists. Thank you very much. And that was pivotal also for, you know, developing what in 1980s was the very beginning of a feminist economics.

38:46So, we just heard about Bergman's reaction to Gary Becker and new home economics. How did, so zooming out a little bit, how did feminist economics kind of more broadly react against new home economics? And what were the kinds of methodological shortcomings of the, in quote, orthodox school of thought that they, that they identified?

39:08Yes, as I just said, the use of neoclassical methodology and theory in order to provide an economic theory of marriage and family disappointed many women economists of the time, prompting them to create feminist economics in response. So, the pioneers of feminist economics shared a critical attitude towards Becker's economics of marriage, as well as a sense of urgency to challenge the discipline as a whole.

39:39I've already said that new home economics model justified the subordination of women by adopting assumptions biased by traditional gender stereotypes. These assumptions simultaneously ignored the separate identities of family members, and they underestimated non-economic factors. So, feminist economists criticized Becker's approach for his omission of the economics of care, the role of power and obligation in cultural and social norms,

40:10and for having reduced family dynamics just to a matter of preferences.

40:17There were many economists who, to be honest, there were many mainstream neoclassical economists who enlarged and developed Becker's approach after Becker. In terms of the doctrine of the separate sphere, but they never rejected it, actually. They refined the model, but they never reject the doctrine of the separate sphere. In terms of the doctrine of the separate spheres, I just want to mention the model proposed by Lundberg and Pollack in 1993,

40:49in the same period when the International Association of Feminist Economics was founded. They conceptualized household members as joint decision makers regarding some matters, while maintaining separate spheres regarding other issues. And they assumed exogenous separate spheres, where each person specialized in a particular sphere, the traditional division.

41:22Lundberg and Pollack considered specialization by gender a pervasive aspect of family life, with men being responsible for earning income in two-parred families, and women being responsible for supplying household service. They suggested, again, a separate sphere equilibrium in the family. That required a minimal coordination among spouses. But again, each spouse is considered a decision maker within their own sphere,

41:54able to optimize their decision under the constraints of their individual resources. So that was the development of Becker's model by some followers, some followers, economists of the time.

42:16And of course, feminist economics reacted against this methodological and theoretical model provided by neoclassical economics. I go back to your book.

42:33Some of the women mentioned in the book are well known, and some are not. So how did you decide upon the scholars you would consider in the book?

42:45Yes, so this is a book of history of economic thought, history of economic ideas. So when working on the history of ideas, economic or otherwise, there are typically two approaches. One can either focus on topics, paradigms, concepts, by tracing their origin, development, adoption, rejection, or the resurgence over time, or one can examine how specific scholars or school of thought contributed to the evolution of those ideas within their historical and cultural context.

43:26Since the core of my book revolves around a well-defined and relatively straightforward idea, which is the doctrine of the separate spheres within the history of political economy and economics, I chose to adopt the former approach, that is, I focus on scholars and economists who directly engaged with this concept. For example, while Mary Wollstonecraft is well known for her pamphlet and indication of the rights of women, Mary Estelle's earlier analysis on marriage and divorce,

44:03though less recognized and known and basically neglected and forgotten, had a significant influence at the time. So I wrote about her, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she was not an economist by profession, but a journalist and a novelist who offered a powerful critique of the doctrine, against the doctrines, especially in its economic dimensions. Remarkably, as early as 1898, she described the political economy of her time as androcentric,

44:40a term that feminist economists would echo almost a century later in criticising mainstream economics. As I mentioned before, they say it's not just mainstream, it's also mainstream. So the first time this idea was used by Perkins Gilman in late 19th century. So it depends whom and when. In addition, let me say that I tend to follow the so-called hair story approach, which prioritized the recovery and recognition of female scholars who have been forgotten or overshadowed.

45:19For instance, Harriet Harvey, who was John Stuart Mill's wife, wrote extensively about women's emancipation, the enfranchisement, the enfranchisement of women, marriage and divorce in a very modern terms. Yet it is Mill's pamphlet, the subjection of women, that remains celebrated, while Hardy's more progressive views and earlier, which even challenged Mill's own endorsement of the separate spheres, remained in his shadow.

45:55So in my book, I try to reverse this tendency and gave her and other neglected boys the attention they deserve. Thank you. I still have one question about Barbara Begoban, and it is about what is her legacy today? Can you tell us a bit about that? Yes. Well, let me summarize what I just mentioned earlier. I believe that her legacy today can be summarized in several points.

46:28Let me just put on the table three major points. First, a methodological approach to real economic problems that begins with the importance of considering empirical data in order to understand discrimination and inequality, rather than relying on standard sets of assumptions about human rationality reinforced by regressions that tend to confirm theoretical scenarios without taking reality into account.

47:00That was Barbara Begoban's methodological approach.

47:05Second, Begoban's vision of feminist economics, which should not be understood simply as economics for women, but rather as a more accurate and inclusive economic theory overall. Third, Barbara Begoban's commitment to a progressive agenda aimed at reducing gender inequality in both the public and the private spheres.

47:38This includes engaging in the dissemination of gender inequality issues beyond academic circles, participating in public debates, speaking to young people, writing for non-academic audience, doing these podcasts, and not just writing papers for a small group of peers. I think these are three of many points which definitely belong to Bergman's legacy for us as scholars,

48:14but us as citizens, and us as both men and women. Thank you for that. Now turning our eye towards the present and the future, do you think that with the recent award of the Nobel Prize to Claudia Golden, do you think this might in the future lead to a new turn in the economics of gender and what would that turn look like? Actually, I'm skeptical. So Claudia Golding has had the great merit of combining economic analysis,

48:50gender dynamics, and a historical approach, which is great. And I'm glad and happy she got the Nobel Prize. She got the Nobel Prize by herself, so no other male colleagues share the prize. She's fantastic. But she remains a mainstream neoclassical economist, which might be fine for some.

49:18I'm not arguing this. But as a matter of fact, she remains a mainstream economist. So allow me to share an exchange I had a couple of years ago with an economist of gender. So mainstream economist dealing with gender. I'm not saying her name, but she was presenting a paper here in Torino at the International Festival of Economics, which takes place in late May every year. We have such big names as guests. Anyway, she was presenting a paper which to me seemed quite

49:55close to a feminist economics approach. So I asked her, are you a feminist economist now? And she replied to me something that was very important for me to understand the mindset of our colleagues. She replied, I have always been a feminist, but I will never be a feminist economist. I didn't ask further details because I actually understood what she was meaning.

50:27So that's one side of the story. Economists working on gender

50:34are unlikely to abandon mainstream methodology, models and theory. On the other side, within feminist economics, it seems to me that, especially in the last 15 years, there is a convergence towards the economics of gender. Why? 40 years have passed since the emergence of feminist economics as a challenge to mainstream economics. The pioneers and the founders are now either retired

51:14or they are no longer with us. The ideological framework and the historical context have changed. And the academic job market has its own strict, tacit or explicit rules, which influence the younger generation of economists working on gender issues. So, nonetheless, the struggle for gender equality within and outside academia, again,

51:47will continue regardless of which theoretical approach we adopt. So, we need to fight the right fight. And we can use our own intellectual weapon, either if we are closer to neoclassical economics or closer to heterodox approaches to gender issues such as feminist economics.

52:16That those are all of our questions for today. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Professor Becchio, for sharing with us your work and your time. And for our audience. Yeah, of course. For our audience members, her book is, once again, The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres in Political Economy and Economics, Gender Equality and Classical Liberalism. And be on the lookout in the future for her biography on Barbara Bergman. Yes, definitely. Thank you so much. I'll be at Duke soon, because at Duke there is Barbara Bergman's archive, which I've already

52:52checked it. But there is also Jaffi's archive, which is now ready. So I'm going to, you know, dig into it in order to see Bergman's specific role in Jaffi's. She had quite, she was, I mean, as mentioned, she was quite a peculiar one, a kind of a bear. So she had some problems in, you know, in sharing her ideas, proposals for Progressive Agenda and so forth. So it's going to be very

53:29interesting to find something new, hopefully. Fantastic. Well, let me know when you're around. Well, actually, at the end of August, I guess. Fantastic. Thank you so much, everyone. Join us again next month for another episode of Smig's and Mark's Walk into a Bar, a history of economics podcast.