--- During the 1990s and 2000s, economic inequality continued to skyrocket, but gender equity began to stall. As leading feminist intellectuals such as Coontz, Arlie Hochschild and Paula England have noted, during this period the growth in American women’s labor force participation began to fall off, and so did their advancement in managerial and professional occupations. Low-income women also fared poorly, as they lost the right to welfare as an entitlement, and extreme poverty among female-headed households tripled. For a while, the gender pay gap continued to narrow, until progress there began to slow as well. How can Piketty help us understand these important developments? Piketty’s argument is that absent extraordinary government intervention, economic inequality will continue to soar, because the return on capital is likely to outpace the rate of economic growth. In short, economic inequality is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. If, as Piketty predicts, economic inequality continues to grow, this bodes ill for women. Evidence that suggests that there is a strong link between gender equity and economic equality, and that women are more likely to prosper in more egalitarian economies. As Blau and Kahn have shown, in countries with more equitable wage structures, women enjoy a narrower gender pay gap. Blau and Kahn have also found that women’s labor force participation in the United States is slowing relative to other economically advanced countries, and they identify our lack of family-friendly work policies as the chief culprit. ... One interesting effect of the growing importance of capital that Piketty does not explicitly acknowledge is that it may exacerbate wealth inequality between genders, too. The US Small Business Administration, in discussing access to financial planning resources, has noted that women have lower access to these tools. Piketty demonstrates that access to different types of financial investment sources has huge implications for the rate of return, which in turn affects growing inequality. Not only are women likely to have less wealth to invest, but at any given level of wealth, they are less likely than men to have access to financial instruments, exacerbating capital inequality because of gender discrimination. This criticism of Piketty should not demean his work but rather indicate where the discussion can go deeper. His assessment of the changing nature of inequality is quite alarming. The next step is to understand what exists beyond these broad contours. What things are not being counted. His analysis provides a basis to continue the discourse of inequality and looking at other factors that influence where a person falls in the distribution.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 22:12:44 +0000