The International Monetary Fund and the Discovery of Femina Economica
By: Elaine Coburn
It is not much of an exaggeration to write that the International Monetary Fund (hereafter the IMF or the Fund) “discovered” femina economica -- economic woman -- in 2013. Although the Fund had previously published about gender and the economy, that year the IMF’s first woman Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, released a working paper about the macroeconomic benefits of women’s participation in the formal paid labour force. This was the beginning of the Fund’s concerted, if uneven effort towards gender mainstreaming that other institutions, like the World Bank, had taken up much earlier. Since 2013, the IMF has developed a dedicated webpage, and hashtag devoted to “Gender and Economics”, as well as literally thousands of working papers, videos, posters, and blog posts. There, femina economica is celebrated: ,“She is the answer”, especially to improving “the bottom line…in home, firm and country.”
My article describes and explains the emergence of femina economica, her characteristics and her origins in a transnational business discourse. I then offer a brief critique of the IMF’s representation of women as naturally virtuous, embedded in heterosexual, nuclear households and challenge liberal feminisms that equate women’s participation in capitalist relationships with empowerment.
Femina economica is an elastic, shape-shifting figure. She may be a women entrepreneur in one of the poorest regions of the world or an elite actor in Wall Street, including powerful women like Lagarde herself. Wherever she is located, femina economica is productive and prudent. As Lagarde observed , in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, “If it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.” In particular, the Fund suggests that femina economica’s innate fiscal prudence means that her presence on corporate boards translates automatically into more cautious, but also more stable and hence more profitable medium and long-term investment strategies. Outside of the workplace, femina economica is equally valuable as an altruistic mother in the heterosexual household, investing wisely in her children, even at a cost to herself. Femina economica embodies a gendered virtue that is simultaneously economically and morally valuable.
In femina economica’s name, the Fund offers advice on as astonishingly wide range of concerns, from the changing gender composition of the economics profession to the correct utilization of national tax policies to incentivize women’s participation in the formal paid labour force. The Fund even ventures marital advice, suggesting that the implicitly heterosexual femina economica performs her best when her male spouse lends a helping hand with domestic tasks. One Fund article offers this heteronormative household advice: “Equal cooperation between husband and wife is happiness”. The famously technocratic, masculine IMF is here nearly unrecognizable from many of its more mainstream pronouncements. Certainly, the Fund is a considerably distance from the vigorous assertions that met Christine Lagarde, when she sought to introduce concerns about gender inequalities to the IMF. At that time, senior IMF economists informed her that gender is not “macrocritical”, hence irrelevant to the Fund. Today, in contrast the Fund explicitly links the household and the macroeconomic through the virtuous person of femina economica.
Why the sudden discovery of femina economica in 2013? Unprecedented liberal feminist leadership at the Fund, in the person of Christine Lagarde, combined with new policy space that opened after the 2008-9 economic crisis, throwing into doubt existing IMF orthodoxies. Reckless men were blamed for irresponsible investing, leading to the crisis, so that a prudent, sober femina economica became “the answer” to preventing future ones, while ensuring steady economic growth. The Fund mobilized existing frames about “women as smart economics” that, as Adrienne Roberts and Susanne Soederberg have observed, had been developed by transnational business,. This borrowing was relatively ideologically seamless, given elective affinities with the Fund’s neoliberal models that take for granted the benefits of participation in capitalist relationships. Specifically, women’s participation in the formal, paid labour force as workers is understood as women’s “empowerment”, along with women’s entrepreneurship and participation in corporate boards of for-profit enterprises.
Is femina economica a political advance for women?
Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson are among those feminists who have argued vigorously that economics and economic institutions need to move “beyond economic man”. And yet feminists might be careful what they wish for. In Antje Vetterlein’s words “we might ask whether it is desirable that the IMF becomes increasingly involved in social development in light of the observation of an increased economization of the social”. This is especially true when feminist aims are narrowly defined, as about economic productivity and when this productivity is rooted in naïve representations of women as always-already morally virtuous. Likewise, the IMF shows little concern for whether or not women’s participation in paid employment is well-paid and in safe working conditions. Nor does the Fund consider the social usefulness or ecological sustainability of women’s participation in the formal paid labour force, instead assuming that since this contributes to economic growth, this labour is by definition beneficial. In my article I argue we need to move beyond femina economica and instead ask what feminisms are necessary for socially, politically just and ecologically sustainable futures, all irreducible to the merely economic.
Read the full article: “Trickle-down gender at the International Monetary Fund: the contradictions of “femina economica” in global capitalist governance“
Elaine Coburn is assosciate professor, International Studies at York University's bilingual Glendon College. In addition, through the Faculty of Graduate Studies, she is a member of the Department of Sociology and the Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies programmes, both at York University. Elaine holds a PhD in sociology from Stanford University, and a BA in sociology and Canadian Studies from the University of Toronto. Prior to coming to Glendon, she was a researcher associated with the Centre d'analyse et d'intervention sociologiques (CADIS) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and assistant professor at the American University of Paris. She was formerly the editor of the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal Socialist Studies and is currently on the editorial boards of the Paris, France-based journal 'Socio' and the Canadian Review of Sociology. Her research interests include neoliberal forms of globalization, struggles for social justice and social theory, especially socialist feminist, Indigenous and anti-racist perspectives.
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