Fieldwork as a Feminist Methodology in Economics – Developing Economics

What is a feminist methodology? Academicians and scholars of gender and feminist studies have focused on feminist research methodology since the introduction of gender studies as a course in universities.Feminist methodology has developed as a result of several objections towards traditional positivist research. Theory and methodology can be seen to be closely interrelated in a dialectical relationship wherein a feminist methodology can validate feminist theory and indicate the need for modifications. Many of the social sciences have theories that speak about human beings. But theory is rooted in reinforcing of experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of men. Even if women are being studied, the perspective and mode of the study have remained masculine, representing the dominant culture. As a result, research outcomes often end up justifying the status quo and the existing power relationships and myths about oppressed and other vulnerable communities. For instance, neoclassical economics has tended to reproduce gender stereotypes by portraying behavior in the marketplace (considered to be men’s domain) as guided by rational pursuit of self-interest, and behavior in the household (seen as women’s domain) to be governed by altruism.

Photo: Women in rural Assam weaving a mekhela chadar, which the women use for their own consumption but also try to sell whenever possible. There is a thin line of separation between work and leisure for most rural women.

Traditional science, moreover, maintains that the researcher and the researched are in different spaces. Positivist social science research requires the researcher to be value-free, neutral, and uninvolved, thus, maintaining a hierarchical and non-reciprocal relationship between the research subject and the research object. Maria Mies describes women researchers in such situations to be trapped in a “schizophrenic situation”, one where the researcher has to constantly repress, negate, or ignore her own experience of sexist oppression and have to maintain a so-called rational standard of the male-dominated academic world. Such an approach further hinders exploring areas like women’s perception of their own work, which have remained “hidden” due to andocentric biases. Mies’ historic work on the lace makers of Narsapur details such “hidden women” through the example of official Census data. While her estimate of women lace makers was about 100,000 in the area, these women were not recorded in the official Indian census statistics of 1971. The 1971 Census enumerated only 6449 persons as being engaged in household industry in Narsapur taluk, making the 100,000 women “invisible” despite the Census definition of the household industry covering exactly the type of work that these women did! Women workers, thus, remain invisible by official statistics by not including them as workers, even with abundant empirical evidence of their productive work. It is important to mention here that to conduct “objective” quantitative research, one does not necessarily have to be detached and unconcerned about the topic. Having a strong opinion on women’s work being hidden or invisible historically does not necessarily mean that research decisions will be any more biased thanif those opinions are not held.  

Mies calls for feminist researchers to integrate the repressed, unconscious female subjectivity into the research process. She asks for a replacement of the postulate of value-free, neutrality, and indifference with “conscious partiality” which can be achieved through partial identification of the research object. Further, she also calls for a view from below approach for feminist research rather than a view from above. Research must be brought to serve the interests of the dominated, exploited, and oppressed groups. Mies critiques the quantitative survey method for its androcentric bias and the hierarchical research situation, which can create an acute distrust among the research objects. This distrust is often greater for women and other under-privileged groups when interviewed, and such data often tend to reflect “expected behavior” rather than the “real behavior”. 

Thus, feminist research would imply a focus onresearch which does not overlook women, research outcomes which do not justify the existing status quo and myths about women, use “conscious partiality” instead of a value-free, neutral research, and alter the process of research into something which does not maintain traditional power relationship. Feminist methodology, thus, seeks to improve the lives of women who are subjects of research. Feminist methodology is based on validating personal experiences in the research process, using interdisciplinary approaches and combining activism with academic goals. Many feminists have suggested the use of qualitative methods or mixed methods to better reflect the nature of human experience or women’s work. Qualitative data, in conjunction with quantitative data, can develop, support, and explicate theory. Being completely objective toward our research seems a far-fetched idea, but we can ensure that our methods are as objective as possible. Sandra Harding used the term “feminist empiricism” to explain that social biases are correctable by stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry. Thus, “it is not the tools of the discipline that need an improvement, but the way they are applied.”

Feminist Methodology in Economics

In 1997, the journal Feminist Economics published a special Explorations section, guest edited by Michele Pujol, on methodology, ethnography, and data in economics and feminist economics. The idea was to discuss experiences with the use of qualitative data-gathering methods and address questions like how would economic research be enriched or transformed by the use of such methods, how might the range and focus of economic research questions or agendas be broadened, and what types of barriers exist to the use of such research methods in economics.

Strassman’s editorial page from the same mentions that,

“The conventional wisdom of the (economics) field holds that human actions cannot be identified by talking to people – that people cannot report reliably on their own understanding, motivation, and behavior. The only reliable source of information, according to such views, is revealed preference, what people are measured to do, not through what they say they do. The flippant suggestion that a researcher asks people about their actions always produces a laugh among economics audiences. No wonder that ethnographic and interview-based techniques have been so little developed in economics!”

Strassman further states that economic research is inherently qualitative regardless of how it is mentioned. All economic statistics are based on an underlying story forming the basis of definition. For instance, an unemployed person is often defined as someone who is looking for work. But an individual who has become despaired and given up looking for work is not considered “unemployed” by this definition. Narrative constructions, thus, are important in defining variables and statistics. 

Both neoclassical and Marxist feminists have been critical of the neoclassical work on gender relations and there has been work written on this. One way of overcoming the problems in both Neoclassical and Marxist feminist economics is the bargaining model. The bargaining approach can be applied to both the household as well as the labour market and makes it possible to discuss both the cooperative aspect of households as well as the conflicts that arise in these relationships. Folbre has suggested that bargaining models can give useful insights intothe relationship between women’s earning opportunities in developing countries and fertility rates and the relative survival rates of male and female children. Bargaining models have also been used by Heidi Hartmann and Elaine McCrate. 

Shalija, one of the author’s respondents from her fieldwork in rural Assam, owns this murhi (puffed rice) making machine. Shalija is a farmer, looks after her family, runs a murhi making factory, and also runs a women’s cooperative in her village. Without understanding Shalija’s “life history”, it becomes impossible to understand her “work”.

Fieldwork as a Feminist Method: Moving Away from Research on Women to Research for Women

National-level administrative household surveys, especially in the Global South, may not always be readily or consistently available. India, for instance, is right now going through a politics of data, with several delays and controversies on national-level surveys. Moreover, most of the large-scale surveys use proxy-reporting, i.e., they obtain all the information from one member, without talking to the women. Recent studies in India have found that when women respond to questions themselves, women’s workforce participation is likely to be higher than when men respond. Since women’s lives are often entangled with societal norms, relationships, production, and reproduction, understanding women’s work through secondary data alone often poses many problems. Further, the definition and measurement of women’s work and employment in the developing world have many challenges. Fieldwork with feminist research ethics and methodology can play an important role here.

Jacobsen and Newman found that economists rely heavily on a few data sources, particularly those collected by the government and are more likely to use survey data collected by another party. Their findings also show that papers with at least one non-economist author are more likely to use self-collected data like interviews, author design surveys, experiments, etc. Self-collected data or fieldwork through interviews, life histories, narratives, focus group discussions, and own design questionnaires which go beyond the traditional research way can help in developing alternative research strategies. We use certain examples of how self-collected data or fieldwork can help as a feminist research methodology in understanding economic problems. 

When Maria Mies took life histories of female lace producers and agents as well as of male non-producing traders, itwas evident that for men, ‘life history’ is identical with the history of their business. There isno mention oftheir wives, families, family problems, or other personal problems. The women remain hidden in some house in their village where they look after their household and children. The women, on the other hand, talked not just about their work or lace making, but also about their marriage, their relationships with their husbands, their family problems, and the problems they face in a patriarchal society. The personal and work lives are, thus, not separated.

Esim in her commentary published in the journal Feminist Economics refers to various power hierarchies that one might encounter during the research process, reflecting from her own research on gender constraints faced by women entrepreneurs in Turkey. First is the power dynamic between the researcher and the subject, even if the researcher belongs to the same nationality or is an insider. The researcher remains a university-educated woman which can make her an outsider. Second, the research setting with a structured survey questionnaire clearly indicates the one asking the questions and the one from whom concrete answers are being demanded. In such cases, focus group discussions can help as women have more voice with other women subject of the research. Focus group discussions can back up quantitative data but also provide perceptions, thoughts, and impressions of the women in their own words.

Abraham et al have found significant underreporting of women’s work when reported by men. They further found that women’s employment rate declines by nearly six percentage points when men report on behalf of women. Their work further found that detailed questions asking specifically about each kind of employment rather than one question on whether one is employed or not improves women’s employment rate by 10 percentage points, but no discernible difference exists for men’s employment rate. This increase is because of an increase in the share of women reporting unpaid family work.

Time-use surveys are another case in point as a tool in improving data collection on women’s work. Mies found that the average daily labour time devoted to lace making in Narsapur was 6-7 hours, much higher than what was stated in the reports about the industry. Devaki Jain et al’s 1979 work Women’s Quest for Powerwith 5 case studies gives insights intothe working hours of women in India engaged in dairy, papadmaking, and Madhubani painting. Ruth Dixon’s work in rural Bangladesh gives a similar understanding of women’s labour hours when engaged in agriculture.  

While doing my own fieldwork in rural Assam, India last summer (April-July, 2023), what I found interesting was how when women are asked what they do for a living, they often say that “we do nothing”. “Nothing” implies not working outside the household. This is a far-fetched reality since all of these women are engaged in several productive activities like animal husbandry, agricultural work, weaving, and other household industrial work, apart from all the “care” work. Madhura Swaminathanhad urged for a comprehensive study of women’s role in livestock activity as livestock rearing has become increasingly feminized as men have moved towards non-farm activities. It is only through probing and better framing of questions can one truly identify women’s work. 

Conclusion

Fieldwork, a colonial enterprise in itself, has seen attempts at being decolonized in recent years through decolonial scholarship and feminist research ethics. This has been done by using the research to induce social change, using “conscious partiality” rather than value-free and neutral objectivity, by bringing the researcher to the field or sharing own experiences thereby reducing the distance between the researcher and the researched, and not thinking of the fieldwork as a process to get the data filled.

The identity of the researcher is a potential factor that can affect the outcomes of the fieldwork. As described by Esim, despite being Turkish, while talking to female Turkish entrepreneurs, she remained an outsider due to her education and class relations. The researcher also faces other challenges due to her gender, race, caste, class, and other identities. For example, a married woman researcher visiting camps of Kalbeliya women performers in Rajasthan, located onthe outskirts of cities and towns, seemed incomprehensible and was ridiculed by some state officials during her fieldwork. Further, the researcher was also asked to keep the fieldwork restricted to only daylight and was often accompanied by a male informant who ended up dominating the fieldwork more than being helpful! While incorporating feminist research methodologies in one’s fieldwork can make the research process and outcomes better, the female researcher can also find herself in several such challenging situations.

With delays and controversies in the release of official data, primary research and fieldwork with feminist methodologies can help fill the gaps. Pujol, in her 1997 Introduction to the Explorations section of Feminist Economics’ special issue on methodology, ended it by asking for more training opportunities in the design and application of qualitative research methods so that they become more accessible to feminist economics. However, a 2019 paper published in Feminist Economics by Tejani found that the research published in the said journal hasbecome more empirical and more quantitative over time with a predominance of econometric methods and a decline in theoretical and methodological research. Witha very negligible focus on qualitative and mixed methods in university and college training in economics, there still seems to be a long way to go.

Ritwika Patgiri is a PhD Research Scholar at the Faculty of Economics, South Asian University, New Delhi. She tweets at @RitwikaPatgiri.