Women, Work And Public Policy :: essays research papers

grammatical gender and the market are both concepts that carry tremendous power to learn society. Indeed, these institutions are so powerful within society that they can look invisible and immutable. Each of these influential constructs has occasion the crystalline lens through which a theoretical approach defines and analyzes the world womens liberationist theory centering on gender, and stinting theory centering on the market. Such a simple focus enables separately theory to function as an invaluable legal document in clarifying complex interactions. On the flip side, however, such a lens can also obscure the ability to enlarge mind beyond that initial analysis. In this way, the strength of focus can become a weakness, setting one analytical approach as alone paramount, and inherently discrediting other approaches. This has often been the case with the disparate stinting and feminist approaches to analyzing work and gender. A tax write-off of the economic and feminist ap proaches, however, would provide a more complex, applicable, and efficient tool than the confrontational stance that often pervades discussion. The deductive reasoning process would begin with realizing that, although both theories are extremely valuable methods of achieving an instinct of work, gender and society, neither theory provides a complete picture. Indeed, the very feature that they are such powerful tools, with defined focuses, makes it very difficult for each paradigm to comprehend and incorporate insights foreign to its bias. Such an effective synthesis would emphasize how the focus and methodological analysis of these two stances can be complimentary, and get out in the development of a more comprehensive, flexible analytical approach.The economic approach to society, including gender and work, focuses on the workings of an invisible hand which guides forces of planning and demand within a market constructed of aggregates. In this approach, human beings charter b y a set of rational rules that are predictable, graphable, and individual. Using these behaviors, economic man weighs the opportunity costs involved in economic choices and makes decisions at the margin to maximize benefits. Deductive reasoning and empirical knowledge comprises the methodology used to explain the interactions of these market forces. Within this purely theoretical world, economics appears to hold no biases that would influence its approach to labor or gender, because it impersonally uses formal models to simply emphasize how wages influence the forces of supply and demand. Economics, however, was non designed to exist as a theoretical construct. Instead, this approach applies the lens of the market to view the intricacies of everyday life as a perpetual cycle of supply and demand interactions.