The Guardian view on feminist economics: Adam Smith never had to scrub children’s plates | Editorial
When God created man, runs the old car sticker, she was only joking. When God created economics, however, he was very definitely a him. Yvette Cooper invited, and duly received, rightwing disdain last week, after the Labour leadership hopeful dared to suggest that possession of a pair of X chromosomes might have a bearing on how a leader would set about running UK plc. Her intervention shone a rare light on the obscure but important corner of academia that is feminist economics.
Tasked with introducing this unpromising breakfast-time topic on BBC radio, Jim Naughtie initially spluttered out these two words as if they sat together as oddly as, say, Yorkshire physics, or socialist chemistry. But a pithy turn from Oxford University's Professor Jane Humphries soon enlightened him and all but the most reactionary listeners that economics was, after all, a field in which there really is a case for a distinctive feminist slant. Nearly 300 years on from Adam Smith's birth, male hegemony in the field was - until comparatively recently - challenged only by brilliant exceptions, such as Joan Robinson. And this dominance has made itself felt at every level of the discipline, from the intellectual foundation stones up.
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