Women vs Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy

"Pryce is showing how, even by the logic of capitalism, there’s a problem. She argues that the subordination of women causes, and is caused by, market failure. And that, therefore, it should be unacceptable from an economist’s point of view—even if you are a traditional, Neoclassical economist—because the consequences of excluding women from the economy, the way that world society has, has pretty dire consequences for society. That’s one of my own messages too. I think people just don’t realise that it’s something that hurts all of us every day. I wanted to begin with this book because many people, I think, push back against the idea that women should be more intentionally included in equalising the economy, because they buy into the philosophy that markets are sacred, they regulate themselves, that sort of thing. But this is not a situation that should be left to that kind of naïve economic thinking. Oh yes. A lot of people don’t believe it. A lot of people are not aware of what the macro data show, or even what studies have shown. This is another reason why I want to talk about data specifically, as people based their opinions largely on personal experience, and everybody will have a different experience when it comes to gender. Some of us see gender inequality and don’t like it, and some of us don’t see anything, and some of us see it but would rather men and women stayed on unequal footing. “A lot of people are not aware of the extraordinary amount of data that we have on women’s subordination” If you are a person of the level of education and literacy that would read Pryce’s book, the women around you are likely to be in pretty good shape in as much as they will likely be well educated, have jobs, and seemingly have opportunities. So you might say, ‘oh, well that’s not a problem.’ Certainly, from a world culture perspective, very very educated Western women are an outlier. They are not even close to the global norm. So it’s good to have macro data so you can start to talk about the big picture. People used to say that women were just being emotional when they said they were not being treated fairly. Now we can point to the data, which show they are not being treated fairly. It’s the people who react to that negatively who are just being emotional. I think this allows me to segue into my next book choice."