written by Aria Mia Loberti ’20

When a whole constituency is absent from our economic assessment, the result is ineffective policy.

Equal pay for women remains a hot-button issue in both American and global politics. However, analyzing women’s contributions to and compensation within the workforce and economy gives us a glimpse of only half the story.

Many well-accepted economic models are based on gendered assumptions such as the stereotype that women take care of the home and children while men are the so-called breadwinners or that families follow a nuclear or heteronormative model.

At the University of Rhode Island (URI), economics Associate Professor Smita Ramnarain uses gender as a lens in her research to understand what economic theories might miss in their assumptions and formulations and the impacts of these omissions. Her research falls at the intersection of feminist political economy and economic development and focuses particularly on gendered aspects of development in South Asia.

Statistics from such sources as the World Economic Forum, United Nations, and Oxfam, reveal widespread gender discrimination with respect to prosperity and wealth. These studies reveal that women, globally, are doing more work that remains uncompensated and unrecognized. A recent report from the New York Times explains that women spend four and a half hours per day on unpaid labor outside of the workforce, while in contrast, men on average spend less than half that time on such work. Men’s contributions, therefore, remain more visible in calculation of economic growth, while a large proportion of women’s work tends to not be recognized as work despite contributing to economic well-being.

These numbers are substantially higher in the developing world; for instance, in India, women’s unpaid labor takes up an estimated six hours per day. Prominent figures like Melinda Gates have sought to bring this issue to public attention. In her recent book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, Gates explains that, on average, women worldwide spend more than double the hours as men on unpaid labor, and that women in the developing world are at a particular disadvantage.

Studies reveal that women, globally, are doing more work that remains uncompensated and unrecognized.

“One of the biggest contributions of feminist economics is its ability to highlight that there are parts of the economy that do not come into markets or any sort of metric,” Ramnarain says, “but which are still very essential to social reproduction and human life. That is, these are the activities that reproduce society and the next generations of people.”

The unpaid, or reproductive, labor that is largely assigned to women due to gender norms — which includes maintenance and upkeep of the home, caregiving for children and family, cooking, fetching water, collecting fuel and fodder, providing education, and beyond — is vital but remains invisible in both data and policy.

Society tends to value paid work in the labor market more so than equally necessary work carried out in the home or private sphere; women are generally considered responsible for the latter.

“Their work,” Ramnarain says of these women, “is actually really essential, and they provide necessary and crucial services toward the reproduction of life and society but is not reflected in the economic data we collect.”

These data influence policymakers. When a whole constituency is absent from our economic assessment, the result is ineffective policy, even if well-intentioned, that fails to adequately bridge the sex gap.

Ramnarain also is concerned with women in nontraditional households (such as female- headed households), the labor force participation of women, and the distribution of women’s reproductive labor in the household: “The idea behind this kind of work is to highlight what is hitherto invisible in economics statistics and therefore in policymaking. I also want to understand how these policies impact women.”

One of her many recent projects considered widow-headed households in post-conflict Nepal. Many widows were being offered training for employment, but those skill-development and training programs often taught handicrafts.

Ramnarain notes, “These were not really a sustainable form of income-generation.”

She adds that Nepal changed its constitution to allow women the right to property ownership. However, many widows did not claim their family property, because they did not want to alienate their marital kin. The projects of recovery and rebuilding also tended to neglect women’s significant contributions and unpaid work in terms of providing for and maintaining their families and communities. Her study concludes that failing to examine women’s lives in a cohesive and economically illustrative manner will contribute to their continued marginalization in economic discussions.

Ramnarain received her Ph.D. in economics from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and recently authored a chapter in a collected volume (The Handbook of Gender in South Asia, Edward Elgar, 2020) exploring the continuum of gendered violence during mass conflict and in the transitional period after. In this work, she strives to understand violence against women in a post-conflict society as inclusive of not only interpersonal or domestic violence but also of property-based violence and dispossession, violence and exploitation at work, and human right violations and structural violence. She argues that the neglect and depoliticization of violence against women in societies transitioning out of violent conflict elides the deep connections between everyday forms of gendered violence, and large-scale structural violence.

Throughout her many projects, Professor Ramnarain’s passionate spirit and unstinting support of her students remain apparent. She has mentored multiple students through the College of Arts and Sciences Summer Fellows Program since its inception in 2018.

“Because I can work with students, my research agenda is also benefitted,” says Ramnarain. “There are so many opportunities in this department and
in the college that help me support undergraduate research, which I think is an important experience for students. Being able to build upon the synergies between research and teaching is very important to me.”

The unpaid, or reproductive, labor that is largely assigned to women due to gender norms — which includes maintenance and upkeep of the home, caregiving for children and family, cooking, fetching water, collecting fuel and fodder, providing education, and beyond — is vital but remains invisible in both data and policy.

She also co-produced and co-led the Fall 2018 Honors Colloquium, an annual flagship program at URI, the topic of which was Gender: Voices, Power, Activism. She and the other members of the colloquium core committee brought prominent feminist scholars from various institutions and backgrounds to URI, to offer a lecture series for the public in conjunction with a special course for Honors-eligible students.

Ramnarain says the experience was invaluable in that it allowed her to connect with students of all levels who have budding passions for these topics.
“I wanted to be in a public university,” Ramnarain says of her initial path to URI, “because there is an emphasis on all the right things in terms of students’ access to their education.”

She attributes URI’s emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration, its motivated students, and its broad set of resources to giving her countless tools for shedding light on crucial social issues that often go unaddressed or under-represented.

“The production of any form of knowledge tends to be a political process,” Ramnarain asserts. “It is incumbent on scholars to be aware of our roles and responsibilities in this exercise to the extent that we can. We do this work because there is a desire to better understand our world and the human condition.”