Episode 1: If Women Counted

[MUSIC PLAYING] Thermalist economics isn't just about women, or a women's economy. It's about trying to give value to things that have been, I think, very deliberately devalued under capitalism. There's something about wanting to interrupt a kind of economic model that doesn't mean we have to return to some kind of milky set of feelings, but means that we rethink what value means. Looking at what is usually presented as, you know, inevitable, natural order of things as something that is actually sometimes designed, and many times means informed. If we want to highlight the impossibility, but also maybe start to imagine what a possibility of a less oppressive, gendered labor might look like, like the feminist red horizon, it is a place where reproductive labor is shared as much as productive labor. Based on simple principles of not exploiting another cent of equality, inclusion, that is. Essex are on caring for people. It's a great pleasure to call to deliver his budget statement Mr. Chancellor on the extractor. What do you want your economy to be? What do you want it to look like? What should we value within our economy? How should we measure success? All of those kinds of big questions, which we don't often tend to look at, really, when you think of the economy, because it's often talked about or conceived of as this kind of black box, you know, it's already made and done, that we humans have to kind of dance around it and make sure we don't anger the beast too much. (indistinct chatter) This is true currency, a podcast about feminist economics. Over the next six episodes, we're going to be looking at what an economy is and what propositions feminist economics holds for doing things differently. Exploring relationships between work and care, we're going to hear from women and care roles, from people at the forefront of women's struggles and work advocating for change, from organisations and individuals supporting low paid and marginalised women exposing some of the financial inequalities that exist in the UK today. I'm Amy Fennick, and I'm Ruth Biel, and we're artists and mothers who collaborate under the name of the alternative school of economics. The way we work as artists is to learn together with others, to find out about economic ideas that can initially seem opaque. We do this collaboratively, so that we can give space to the personal experiences and expertise of the people we meet as part of the learning process, connecting everyday life to the bigger picture. Sometimes this process produces ways, however small, of challenging institutions, systems and language that can be exclusionary. And this podcast shares some of this process, and we're hugely grateful to everyone who's given their knowledge and voice to help us explore these ideas. These moms are really contributing, 'cause they raise these children to help prominent people in the society. They look after their husbands to come out and walk and contribute to the taxpayer and for the development of the country. I think we shouldn't just be referred to as, they're just moms sitting at home that feels like we're useless. So we've been exploring economics together for about eight years, but we've never specifically explored feminist economics. And as women, artists and mothers, we wanted to find out more about it. Yeah, and we've been artists in residence that gas works and art gallery and organisation based in Lambert, in South London. And as it's a participation residency, they've supported us to start a reading group about feminist economics and to connect with local communities and to reach out to people who could help us understand what feminist economics is. - Feminist economics is about recognising those elements of the economy which aren't always recognised. And there's a whole school of environmental economics and there's a big crossover between the two. It's about recognising that social reproduction is as important as production. How we as a society continue how we careful, bring up, educate and so on. The next generation, how we care for people when they're old, is central to the economy. It's not something separate over there that can be dealt with separately. That's Mary Ann Stevenson from the Women's Budget Group. They're an organisation which scrutinises government policy. They work to provide numbers and data to help people understand the impact of those policies. They also propose alternatives for a more gender-equal future. We'll hear from Mary Ann again in a minute. But first, we should tell you a bit more about why we wanted to do this. - Yeah, so for me personally, becoming a mother created this big shift in my understanding of how women have viewed in society and where they exist within the economic system. And when I first became a mother, I definitely had this strange feeling of being outside of things, of being outside of capitalism and this idea of what productivity was. But at the same time, I was working really hard looking after my child's and keeping her alive. - Yeah, I think I had this idea before I had children that things could be equal, but of course they're not. And it's more complicated than just a division of labour. It's actually about having the baby, breastfeeding the baby, and then this gap that opens up between who's doing the caring and who's earning the money. And it's not like my partner doesn't do anything at home. He totally does, he's more domestic than me. It's just ridiculously hard trying to do everything and be there for your children's needs whilst holding down pretty much anything else. But yeah, it's different for everyone. My experience really isn't universal. - It's important to say that we're both white women. We're non-disabled. We benefit from cisgender privileges. We've been brought up in the global north and have both been to university. - Yeah, and all of that gives us power and privilege and capital. So, you know, for us, moving through the world is not a daily challenge. And we're also given opportunities to make art and speak and write. And we're aware that others may not be. We really wanted to make sure that we heard from women with all kinds of experiences because we know that the economy affects different women differently. And when we say women, we mean all those who identify as women. - Yeah, and also women have different feminisms. And even feminism can mean different things to different people. - In this episode, if women counted, which is a title inspired by the founder of feminist economics, Marilyn Wearing, we'll hear how women are both part of and excluded from the economy. - We see ourselves very much as a feminist organisation within the women's movement, putting the feminism into economics and the economics into feminism. Here's Mary Ann from the Women's Budget Group again. - I wasn't quite involved from the beginning. The Women's Budget Group was founded in about 1989. It was a group of women who were very concerned that when the budget came out every year, you'd have all these reports in the media saying, "You know, this is how it affects a single man. "This is how it affects a family. "This is how it affects a retired couple." There was very little analysis of how budgets might affect women and men differently. - So they got together and it's a mixture of academics, women from the voluntary sector. I think quite a few from development to organisations, feminist activists, others got together to watch the budget every year and to produce a response saying, "This is how we think it will affect women." - And it seems that the way the country's economy is measured is flawed. - The problem with GDP is that it only measures the public world of the economy. So it only measures that which can be costed and counted where there's a transfer of money from one person to the other, one organisation to another. It doesn't take into account unpaid care. So if somebody pays somebody else to care for their child or for an elderly parent, that is a contribution to GDP. If they do that care work themselves, it isn't. So our whole notion of the economy is based on the idea that only certain things count, only certain things matter, and then when we're thinking about what's good for the economy, we think about what's good for that public bit. The other problem with GDP, I think, was particularly the focus on the need for constant growth of GDP. We're in a situation of climate crisis. We need to take action to deal with that and having an economic model that is based on the idea that we need to keep growing, we need to keep consuming more and more and more stuff in order to keep the economy growing more and more and more, and that's the measure for success. It's very dangerous. We actually need to think about how we can change what we do. We need to think about a greater focus on renewable energy and also on moving away from a kind of a disposable model of consumer goods, where what you want to do is buy lots of things relatively cheaply and throw them away when you're finished with them. So we need to start looking at the harm that we're, or the damage that's been done as well by society. When we're thinking about the economy, it's like we only think about one bit of it. So we think about this little bit, which is about the transfer of money and labor from different groups. And there's the two bits that are ignored are the kind of what you might call the domestic economy, what's happening in the private sphere and all what's often seen in classic economic terms as externalities, things that aren't like the environment. And actually, we all depend on ourselves. Mae'r i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w i'w Mae'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hynny'n hy "I guess it's a human experience, and that's care for individuals, but also care for the planet so that we have somewhere that we can live in, that our children and hopefully grandchildren could live in safely." "I don't know if you've read the book who cooked Adam Smith's dinner." "That's that central question. Adam Smith says, "The man doesn't get his dinner by the generosity of the butcher or the baker or all of these things. It's an economic transaction. They're acting in their self-interest to send in the bread and the meat." "But that comes to a fundamental question. Who actually cooked his dinner? Turns out it was his mother for most of his life." "She wasn't paid. She wasn't acting in a self-interested way. I mean, you might argue that maybe she has an interest in supporting her son, but there is something else going on there which isn't about economic self-interest. It's about human relationships." "And so, you know, an economics that doesn't recognise the significance of human relationships is missing half the picture." "Whether you're a feminist or not, you can't ignore Adam Smith's influence on how the economy works. He had this idea of free market capitalism so that the markets would regulate themselves through competition. He also came up with gross domestic product or GDP, which measures the market value of goods and services in a specific time period." "And he was so influential that we've been stuck with this way of measuring economic health for 300 years." "Just to kind of talk about this more personally, about often women who are parents feeling like they have to keep the fact that they themselves have children kind of quiet when applying for jobs." "You know, we were very kind of clear because we were setting up a feminist economic space that that would not be the case with this, but I, as a freelance artist, quite often, and I'm sure you guys will find the same." "I quite often don't disclose that I have a child until after I've been offered some work, so the kind of precarious kind of work that I do, and the fact that often being an artist requires travelling, it can require going away on residences, which is not necessarily something that's easy to work." "If you have a child, I generally won't mention it, and I feel like there's something deeply unfameless about the fact that I keep that undisclosed, but actually that's kind of how I have to do it to get by." "That's Sally Rutherford, who will hear more from later in the series. She talked to us about the specific experience of being an artist and a mother, something we can both relate to." "And it's an acknowledgement of the biases that exist there, isn't it? So that you know you can do the job and you will do the job and you'll make it work." "In order to prevent somebody discriminating against you, you might not disclose things, which is a kind of privilege because there's other things that people can't not disclose about themselves." "But interestingly, I have asked a number of male friends who are artists, who have children, if they ever feel like that's something that they can't talk about, or they're conscious of having to keep quiet about it, and none of them have to do that." "No, it's a sort of badge of honour." "Oh, it's not even, yeah, it's literally not a problem, is it? So because the assumption is that it won't affect their working hours." "Yeah." "That's a better." "We also spoke to Catherine Boom, another artist, about her project Company Drinks, and how artists can reimagine economies." "Here she talks about how artists sometimes radical approaches, sitting relation to capitalism, and about meeting Catherine Gibson, whose book Take Back the Economy, talks about the idea of the economy as an iceberg." "Suddenly we could use a language that didn't have to be anti-capitalist, and I think for her the iceberg and the act of recognising yourself in the wider economy and to recognise your active, daily contribution to the economy." "She describes it as a kind of emancipatory act, and once this is done, you're part of it. You're not like constantly in opposition, you might be suppressed, and you might be really invisible, and really poorly paid, but it doesn't mean that you're expelled from this realm of economy." "Now for us with Company Drinks, where we use this iceberg model a lot, we are saying okay, Company Drinks is like, it's a kind of drinks cabinet, as an economy is on top, you see all the drinks, and they look like commodities, and they look like drinks in bottles, but if you open the cabinet, you see all those kind of other economic factors that actually allow us to exist." "To then make everybody an investor in what's happening is a kind of liberating emancipating act to some degree." "So this image of an iceberg is really powerful, because it makes the economy so much easier to understand, it puts all the visible bits of the economy at the top, and then all the other stuff that is invisible under the water line." "So we took this idea to a series of creative workshops that we ran at Henry Forced at Children's Centre, round the corner from gasworks. "About ten women attended, put their children in a crash, and we had this really nice focus time to talk about motherhood and care, and women in the economy, whilst at the same time we were doing drawing and collars and screen printing." "It would come out as a status also, I think also think about being simple." "It's quite amazing how this, you can print from paper, actually, and it comes out really well, and we'll probably get a few screen prints from it." "But I think it's kind of planning a bit in the head, so let's do that." Here's one of the attendees of the workshop, K Rose, talking about her design. "I've got this tree that I feel I'm representing myself here, that's me, well that's me, the roots, I'm the root, that is under the soil that people don't see. But this root is actually the source for this tree to survive, that's where the tree gets its food, water, manure, everything that it needs to grow. But I'm under the soil, people don't really see, I'm contributing to this. These leaves and branches are people in my family, my friends, the community, the society where I live, and my children, these are all the branches, the leaves, this is what it's representing. And I'm here alone, the roots, giving all the support to this tree. So under here, one minute I'm doing the cooking, the roots are representing me during the cleaning. There, the roots is representing me being the safety officer around with the children keeping them safe. Other roots is representing me during the washing up. Other roots is representing me helping my elderly relatives. And the other one is the love giver, and the other one is listening to my friends, these are all the roots representing different things. I'm supporting my family, I'm the educator, the alley educator in the home, all these roots represent different things to this plant. Sometimes I find when we talk about a caring economy in the context of feminist economics, there's a kind of often an assumption that that means that women are inherently more caring, which I think is not true. You know, we have to work at caring, caring is work, it's not something that comes naturally to us just because we were born as women. We weren't born as brilliant mothers, any of us. We weren't born as fantastic carers for the elderly, in the same way that we weren't born brilliant or cleaning toilets. You know, it's not, the fact that that does not necessarily come naturally to women is overlooked. This is so true, and I think those gender stereotypes start at such a young age, you know, we expect girls to be more caring and more sensitive, and then that carries on into adulthood. We ask Mary Ann, what being at the bottom of the iceberg, where all that invisible labour, that unaccounted for labour happens, what that means for women. I mean, what's really interesting, I think, is, you know, many of the issues that we were looking at 30 years ago are issues that we're still looking at today. So, looking at how spending on public services is particularly important for women, you know, women are more likely to be poor than men, they're more likely to need public service. a fydd hynny, a fydd hynny gweithio, a fydd hynny gweithio, a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio, a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Mae hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny gweithio a fydd hynny. Bwch, mae'n gwaith i'n gwaith yw'n gwaith sydd hynny'n gwaith sydd iawn i'n gwaith i'n gwaith i'n gwaith i'n gwaith i'n gwaith i' ac mae'n gwneud o'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r llwy'r ll Mae'r i'r unrhyw yn gweithio yma, mae'n gwasanaeth yma, mae'n gwasanaeth yma'n gwasanaeth yma'n gwasanaeth yma. Mae'n gwasanaeth yma'n gwasanaeth yma'n gwasanaeth yma. Mae'n gwasanaeth yma'n gwasanaeth yma. Mae'n gwasanaeth yma. Mae'na gwasanaeth yma. i'w i'w i'w i'w'r starwyd. We made another connection locally with an Indo-American refugee and migrant organisation or Irmo and we met a really great group of parents there who self-organises Ampler which translates as Latin American Parents Association and they help each other out with issues like housing and access to healthcare and education. Together we worked out what would be a useful way to collaborate and we decided on audio podcast workshops and they recorded testimonials and advice to share with other families who are newly arriving in the UK. Here's Janine Moros Nujane, a project manager at Irmo who was part of our workshops. She also translates for us here. So Irmo is a charity that's been going for over 35 years and it's kind of evolved in that time. It supports Latin American migrants living in London. Around 2008 the financial crisis meant that a kind of third wave of Latin Americans were coming to the UK and these were people who had migrated already from Latin America to Spain, Portugal, Italy, other European countries and because of the financial crisis, found themselves without jobs, losing homes and really really struggling so you know they came to the UK. So I'd say that the majority of the people we see are still people who are dual nation also EU citizens and are likely to be kind of affected by kind of Brexit. We offer immigration advice, welfare and housing advice, we have an employment mentoring service and this is mainly for people who've been here for over a year, have got a bit of basic English and it's about kind of stepping up in the workplace in terms of you know maybe accessing London living wage or if they're people who want to kind of move out of cleaning and those sort of sectors. We also offer English classes for children, young people and adults. We have a school admission service helping families get their children into school. Not just the hostile environment but I think cuts to public funding have meant that you know services are really there's so much pressure on services so trying to push people away from those services, making it harder, questioning their right to accessing services. So with school admissions for example, applications have got more complicated now, the proofs of address that are accepted are more complicated. Before it could have been just a bank statement now, it has to be something like a council tax bill which is really hard for most of our families to get because they're subletting and not paying council tax and then also questions around visas where they've come from, those are sort of things that are coming up more in school applications. We kind of realised that actually whilst we often explained the school admissions process like how it should work, we found that a lot of the time the way parents got their children to school was not through following that necessarily but actually going directly to schools or because they knew someone who worked at a school or someone at the school spoke Spanish and so we realised actually they had a lot of experience knowledge and skills that they could share. My name is Ada Baby. I've been here for three years now and I come from Spain I was living in Spain for 19 years. Well, the association started because we came to bring children to see the governments and we gathered all the mothers and once we talked a little bit and we were telling the experiences of how we lived, how we were here, how we passed the children and then with Sara, with Janine. We started to talk about how we lived, problems with language barriers, housing, how we live, how we lived, how we grew up, and how we were able to live. The association started because we used to come here on Fridays to drop our kids off at the homework club. The mothers would sit together, we talk, talk about how we lived, problems with language barriers, housing, how our kids lived, the inconveniences of our work, and then through talking with Sara and Janine we started to think about organising ourselves and we thought it was a good idea to organise so that we could bring more mothers who could share their experiences. I have a question about whether this is sort of feminist element to that, to why you decide to organise together because of the issues that as mothers you face. I think we are 100% feminists. It was so inspiring, meeting this group of women who were finding ways to support each other, literally using something as simple as a WhatsApp group to share resources and build solidarity. It's been really interesting to hear these different perspectives describing the challenges that women face. From a start financial inequality that Marianne and Marianne described, to expectation and societal norms, to really complicated and intersectional experiences, but also how feminism can mean working together and just making women count. We're going to come back to capturing an alien Marianne later in the series to hear about their ideas for doing things differently. In the next two episodes, we'll be taking a look at the different forms of wage work women do and the multiple layers of discrimination and exploitation affecting women in feminised industries. Until then, take a look at our extra resources, a reading list of texts and links which expand upon some of the topics talked about in this episode. You can find this at www.gasworks.org.uk True currency about feminist economics, produced by Amy Fennick and Ruth Beale from the Alternative School of Economics, with sound production by Lucia Scazocchio from Social Broadcast. It was commissioned by Gasworks and supported by the Paul Hamlin Foundation and Arts Council England.