Image sourced from Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) website
“We are finally hearing people questioning the growth paradigm that has dominated our lives, our politics, our vision of the future. If growth is not contributing to the sum total of our wellbeing, to our sense of fairness, to our safety in the streets, to having a secure home; if ‘growth’ is instead only benefitting a privileged few and damaging our environment, what’s the point of it? Why are people working so hard for so little in return? I believe these are questions that at the heart of a movement away from the cult of growth and hopefully towards a wellbeing economy – but for us to get there, we are going to need to recapture politics and power to reshape our future.”
Naila Kabeer
Renowned feminist economist, Professor Naila Kabeer, grew up in Bangladesh and came to the UK to study economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the 1970s. Since then, she has worked at various universities, published multiple books and articles, worked with NGOs, and is now a professor at LSE. Her new book Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the ‘Bangladesh Paradox’ launched just last month. In this Q&A, Naila talks about the changes she has seen in the field of economics throughout her career, her views on the relationship between academia and creative writing, and shares information about the new forward-thinking Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy Programme that she is co-directing at LSE.
Could you tell me about your background and what first inspired you to study economics?
I was born in India but moved very early on in life to East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh. Growing up, my mother had a big influence on me. She was always very determined that women should not be dependent on others for a living, that they should have a degree of self-reliance. It was her idea that I should study something that would get me a decent job – so to some extent, she influenced my decision to study economics. However, I do think the fact that economics was a very male-dominated discipline also attracted me. I wanted to break down barriers.
What was it like studying economics in a very male dominated environment?
Even now, economics remains the social science that abstracts itself more than others from the messiness of the real world. It is dominated by a view of a world in which individuals pursue their own interests, their interests are best served by market forces and that their collective progress can be measured by how much they can produce for the market, in other words, by economic growth. If some countries were poorer than others, it was because they did not have what it took to grow. If some people fell behind, it was because they did not try hard enough, their own deficits. And gender was completely absent from what I was taught as were most forms of inequality. Economists saw the world through aggregated concepts like investment, trade, savings and poverty, and individuals in terms of their budget constraints. They had little interest in the lives of those who lived in different places, what motivated them to try and improve their lives or what constrained them from doing so. Economics was, and still is, expressed through the medium of equations, symbols, and graphs– and in all honestly, because it was completely removed from the real world, it was very boring.
What inspired you to continue pursuing academia?
I actually ended up leaving the Economics department halfway through my PhD. I had decided to explore why people in Bangladesh had so many children, and whether it was the influence of tradition or whether there was an economic rationale to their behaviour. My supervisor in the department recommended I read the work of Gary Becker for inspiration. Gary Becker, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, believed that parents round the world decided how many children to have by comparing the earnings they could expect from their children with the costs of raising them. But I did not buy into the idea that people decided how many children to have using the same calculus they used for any other kind of investment. I wanted to do my own field-based research and talk to people themselves about their reasons for having children. Since the Economics department did not approve of such an approach, I joined the Department of Population Studies and went off to spend a year in a village in Bangladesh where I could follow my intellectual instincts.
Population Studies, unlike Economics, is a very interdisciplinary field and I felt much more at home there, drawing on the insights of different disciplines rather than restricting myself to one. Later I joined the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex. Development studies is also a very interdisciplinary field. At IDS, I became a part of a group of feminists who were very critical of the way economists understood the world, and in particular, their dismissal of the unpaid work that women did within the home precisely because it was not done in exchange for pay but rather out of love or duty. These sentiments had little place in economics. Since the 1990s, feminists working in economics and related subjects have carved out a new field of feminist economics which allowed people like me to find a home. I call myself a feminist economist because most of the questions I ask are rooted in the economy, but the economy is broadly defined to include paid and unpaid work, production and reproduction, markets, households and community. The answers I offer tend to be interdisciplinary, which means I do not dismiss the insights of economics, but I also look to anthropology and sociology for what they can contribute.
What does feminism mean to you?
To me, feminism means fighting for a world where a person’s gender identity and sexual preference has no bearing on their life chances, on what they choose to do with their lives and what they are able to achieve. Feminism is about equality of opportunities as well as equality of outcomes, about being able to choose the kind of life you want to lead, rather than one that other people tell you that you must follow.
“We need a much stronger feminist reworking of economic thought, we need to make economics more human-centred and holistic, more attuned to the inequalities that the current growth paradigm has generated and to the harm it has inflicted on people and planet.”
Naila Kabeer
Which one of your publications have you found the most rewarding?
I would have to say it was my first book Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. I wrote it very early in my career at a time when I was making the transition from the narrow confines of mainstream economics to the space opened up by feminist economics, and I was using what I was learning to critique mainstream development studies which was strongly influenced by economics. There were not many feminists from the Global South working in development studies at that time, so the book provided a bridge between two of the constituencies I was close to. For development studies scholars, it showed how a feminist perspective could transform their efforts to understand policy and practice in the Global South, and for feminists based largely in the Global North, it challenged the temptation to universalise their own experiences, as it made visible the specific nature of patriarchal structures in different parts of the world.
How do you relate your research to policy and practice?
I did not do it straightaway. I remember while I was doing my PhD research in Bangladesh, I met Fazle Hasan Abed who was the head of what later became one of the biggest NGOs in the Global South: BRAC. The organisation is now very well known, but in the late 70s, it was just beginning. I remember talking to Fazle about my PhD over dinner, and he asked me “what are the policy implications of what you’re doing?”, and I said in a lofty tone, “I’m an academic, my job is to analyse the world as it is, it’s somebody else’s job to work out the policy implications!” However, my attitudes changed after the joined the Institute of Development Studies which is located at the intersection between academia and policy and which encouraged me to constantly ask what the implications of my research findings were for making the world a better place.
Do you think this was the beginnings of what people are now terming scholar activism?
For me, I think, yes, it was. The IDS was the right place to begin the journey. Not all scholars want to be activists, and not all activists are scholars but there are some of us who try to be both. We try to do serious academic work but we also take seriously the challenge of disseminating our findings to those in a position to make practical use of them. My own form of scholar activism takes me into very different circles so not only have I worked with progressive policy makers at national and international levels, but I have also worked with civil society organisations and trade unions – all of whom are dedicated to making a difference in the world in their own ways.
In your recent talk at LSE, Power and Storytelling, novelist Monica Ali mentioned that her award-winning novel Brick Lane was partially inspired by your work. What were your main research findings in your book, ‘The power to choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka?’
I was motivated to write that book – it came out in 2000 – by what was happening in the garment industry in Britain and Bangladesh. My home country Bangladesh was regarded as a traditional religious society, as opposed to Britain, which was considered a modern secular society. Yet in Bangladesh the garment industry was dominated by young women who were migrating on their own from the countryside and joining factories in the cities. However, in London, where a large Bangladeshi community were working in the British garment industry, I found that the factories were dominated by Bangladeshi men, while women from the community stayed at home while their husbands would bring them piecework orders that they could complete within the house. I thought this was a paradox – as in a conservative society, women are allowed to work in factories, but in London, they are expected to stay at home – and I wanted to understand why.
I found that the answer was partly due to the levels of poverty in Bangladesh, where a household needed to have more than one income. At the time of my research, it was getting harder for people to survive in Bangladesh, there were no public safety nets, so many women saw the garment industry as a place where they would get a regular wage. They left their villages and migrated into towns, on their own or with other women from their village, they lived in low-income neighbourhoods. They valued the anonymity that came with living in urban areas as no one knew who they were and no one could make comments about them.
In Britain, Bangladeshis, like many ethnic minorities, had very few occupational choices. For Bangladeshi men at the time, the only choices were to enter the catering or clothing industries, and they did not want women competing with them for these roles. So invoking cultural norms to confine women from their community to home-based piece work for the industry meant that they could be earning money, but in a way that did not bring them directly into competition with Bangladeshi men. Furthermore, as many Bengalis in London came from a particular area of Bangladesh, Sylhet, many knew each other. So, unlike in Bangladesh, where people came from all over the country to come to work in the towns, they did not have the same anonymity in London – what you did in London could be communicated back to their communities in Bangladesh, and there was also the fear of gossip from others within the London community itself.
And as your research focused on both Dhaka and London, did you meet any challenges when conducting your fieldwork across countries?
Working across countries caused no great challenge because I had grown up in one and had lived in the other for many years. There were people to help me in both places. There was one practical problem in London, though. A lot of Bangladeshis in London come from Sylhet, and people from Sylhet have their own dialect, which is very different from the one I am accustomed to. This meant that I had to have someone who understood Sylheti to help me conduct and transcribe the interviews.
What are you currently working on?
I have a new book that just came out at the end of September. It is called Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the ‘Bangladesh Paradox. It sets out to explain the remarkable social progress that Bangladesh made since its independence in 1971 despite being a very poor country. The book focuses on the progress Bangladesh has made in reducing gender inequalities in health, education and jobs. It uses the stories that men and women have been telling over the years since the country’s independence in 1971 to work out how they explain this change. What emerges from the book is how important women were in driving this change, the great determination of mothers to ensure that their daughters had a better chance in life than they had ever had, the determination of daughters that they would not be dependent on others for their every need. Education has proved to be an enormously powerful tool for change.
“The student-led July uprising that has brought that government down [in Bangladesh] is a manifestation of what my book is about – the energy and courage of ordinary people. They want to live their lives in peace but when they are pushed too far by those in power, they take their destiny in their own hands.”
Naila Kabeer
Women in Bangladesh have always wanted the best for their sons, it has long been a culture of strong son preference. But this is changing. They are using what resources they have to educate their daughters as well as sons, even in the face of social opposition, because they do not want them to suffer the way they did. Their own histories have led these women to change history because those daughters are going to grow up with a greater sense of their own worth and a greater willingness to stand up for themselves. With education, economic opportunities, TV, and mobile phones etc., the world has opened up in Bangladesh in a way that was not the case when I did my PhD field work – so I see a lot of positive changes. However, it is not all positive, as our democracy is still very flawed, (not that I see many great examples of democracy anywhere else) and we are still a poor country that is becoming more unequal, our governments have never been accountable to their people and the last years have seen the party in power become increasingly autocratic. The student-led July uprising that has brought that government down is a manifestation of what my book is about – the energy and courage of ordinary people. They want to live their lives in peace but when they are pushed too far by those in power, they take their destiny in their own hands.
During your talk at the LSE Festival, Power and Storytelling, you mentioned that writing academically sometimes means that you’re not necessarily free to tell a story as you see or hear it. Would you be able to elaborate on what you mean by this?
In my research, I always like to hear people explain why they do what they do and then I try and locate their explanation in the broader context in which they live, for instance, how it might have influenced what they thought they could do – but I also ask whether what they did in turn, had some impact on their context. This is what is described as the structure-agency framework the social sciences. When I am talking to people who are not necessarily educated, who have had very few privileges in their lives, I am always struck by the eloquence with which they try to draw you into their world, to see it as they see it. But they do not necessarily see or acknowledge how their worldviews, their explanations of change, might be circumscribed by the circumstance of their lives. So, I have to try and make sense of what are often conflicting narratives, why people might contradict themselves, why people who may appear to share the same circumstances might have very different views of what they considered possible, and it is also complicated by the fact that academics themselves hold competing views about similar realities.
This means that I can’t just offer a straightforward narrative based on what people say – I have to work out the reasons for contradictions, I have to offer evidence on why my interpretation of their narratives might be a more accurate reflection of their views than those of other academics, I have to place their stories in context. Academic texts are full of footnotes, references, citations of other peoples’ work, tables and statistics – all efforts to bring together different sources of information to tell the story. We have a responsibility to make sure that the statements we are making, and the conclusions that we are drawing, are based on a good body of evidence. Whereas if you’re a good fiction writer, you may also be striving to provide a plausible account of the world, but you can give much freer range to your own imagination in doing so. Your writing is not hemmed in by various conventions that often suck the life out of it!
Do you believe that there is a relationship between academic and fiction writing?
Academics are telling stories. Their stories are based in evidence and statistics, but they’re still trying to tell a story. My story, in the book, Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox, is about how Bangladesh went from being a culture that has a very strong son preference, to now being a country where daughters are almost equally valued. I believe it is the responsibility of the academic to ground their statements in solid evidence. But an example of a book which I think embodies the truths that academics seek to tell is by fiction writer is by Philip Hensher, who was also at the LSE Festival event. His Scenes from Early Life relies on the stories his husband, who is from Bangladesh, told him about growing up there in the years before and after the 1971 war for liberation. If an academic had written that story, it would have been very different – full of facts and figures, dates and references. But while I imagine Hensher’s fictional account stays true in spirit to what his husband told him, it also vividly brings to life the world that I grew up in and the country that I knew.
Since publishing your first book, Reverse Realities: Gender, Gender Hierarchies in Development Thoughts in 1994, what notable changes have you seen in your field(s) of research?
One thing is that we have moved from simple notions of gender and gender inequality to a more complex one. Throughout my career, the intersection of class and gender has been at the heart of what I do, but over time I have had to broaden my analysis of inequality, to take into account of other identities that are bound up with class and gender, such as race, caste, location and migration status. There has always been a recognition that women are not uniform across the world, but we also now recognise that there is a far greater internal diversity within the categories of gender than was previously imagined. But because my focus has largely been on those at the bottom of the hierarchies of their countries, certain kinds of identities – gender, race, caste – feature far more in my research than others.
The other thing that has changed has been the growing presence of social media in our interactions with each other. Social media is reshaping the way we think and communicate with each other, its influence, for better or for worse, is all-pervasive, far beyond anything that you would have imagined in the 1970s and 1980s. So, I think digitalisation and globalisation have changed things; culture itself has changed. There have been some positive aspects, but also some very negative.
What changes have you seen specifically in the field of economics?
Economists have finally woken up to the male-shaped model of the world that they worked with, that it fails to connect with the economic forces they are supposed to deal with (for instance, most failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis), that it excludes those whose unpaid labour provides the foundations on which the market economy operates and that, and not surprisingly, that the economics profession has very few women. I see some efforts within the profession to rethink their conceptualisation of what matters in the economy, and to recognise that not everything that we value has a market price.
Image sourced from Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation website
I also see efforts to get more women into economics, but that is not going to make much difference if they subscribe to the same male-biased economics that has been the problem so far. We need a much stronger feminist reworking of economic thought, we need to make economics more human-centred and holistic, more attuned to the inequalities that the current growth paradigm has generated and to the harm it has inflicted on the people and planet.
What will you be working on next?
I am co-directing a new programme at the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE which looks at how we navigate gender injustice in a world where inequalities are rising everywhere and where the destruction of nature is bringing us close to the verge of extinction. I think these two trends, extreme inequality and the climate crisis, have become the biggest issues of our times, and they affect us all, but if we seek to address them without addressing gender injustices, we are very likely to reproduce the injustices of the past.
We are finally hearing people questioning the growth paradigm that has dominated our lives, our politics, our vision of the future. If growth is not contributing to the sum total of our wellbeing, to our sense of fairness, to our safety in the streets, to having a secure home; if ‘growth’ is instead only benefitting a privileged few and damaging our environment, what’s the point of it? Why are people working so hard for so little in return? I believe these are questions that at the heart of a movement away from the cult of growth and hopefully towards a wellbeing economy – but for us to get there, we are going to need to recapture politics and power to reshape our future. I hope that the large network of academics, researchers and activists that make up Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy Programme are going to be part of that change.
