Feminist Approaches to Time Use

The recognition that unpaid work time needs to be incorporated in all analyses of the economic choice, both in individual decision making and in the study of economic growth, business cycles, and the effects of macro policies on individuals is a fundamental tenant of feminist economics. The analysis offered goes beyond simply adding up time by emphasizing other important aspects of time use like who else is around, the time of day when an activity takes place, and subjective well-being of time use. On the macroeconomics side, the representative agent model is rejected for models in which consumers differ by gender, age, sexuality, race and ethnicity, migration status, and income class. Time poverty and its relationship to income poverty and the macroeconomic effects of recession and austerity are also explicitly analyzed.