Gender Differences: The Role of Endogenous Preferences and Collective Action

Abstract

For the last twenty-five years, our society has scrutinized relationships between women and men to an unprecedented degree. In this discussion-at once a positive description of behavior and a normative evaluation of family life-neoclassical economics has contributed important insights concerning the connection between the labor market and the family. However, the neoclassical inquiry has proceeded in remarkable isolation from interdisciplinary and popular debates which have focused on the issue of power relations between men and women-a stance which ultimately restricts the explanatory scope of the analysis. The invisibility of power is particularly characteristic of the metaphor for marriage (Gary Becker, 1981; myself, 1987; Nancy Folbre, 1986). The exclusive focus on trade reduces social power to mere purchasing power, which is exercised over technical resources or consumption goods, not people. The transaction cost analysis of the family (Robert Pollak, 1985, and Paula England and George Farkas, 1986) has a richer conception of power relations between family members who are locked in bilateral monopolies, but here power seems to be little more than a phenomenon endemic to longterm personal relationships. In this paper I advance two different propositions concerning the mechanisms and consequences of power between men and women, and use them to consider some concrete questions about the household. First, the mechanisms of power include collective action (a point argued in other contexts by Douglass North, 1981; Amartya Sen, 1977; Albert Hirschman, 1985; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, 1986; and Heidi Hartmann, 1976). Second, the consequences of power include the social construction of gender. A discriminatory economic system produces men and women whose socially differentiated capacities for performing and enjoying various types of work are much more distinct than their innate endowments. In other words, preferences and productive abilities are endogenous. (In this paper, I borrow from the work of Hirschman, Sen, Gintis, 1972, and many feminist authors such as Alison Jaggar, 1983, to explore the endogeneity of preferences.) I use two questions to motivate consideration of these claims. The first concerns the informal marriage contract: why has men's participation in household labor and childcare been so slow to change as women's market income has increased? Time-budget studies generally show that men's household labor is not very responsive to women's market labor. At most, men took on about two more hours of household responsibilities per week in the 1970's when women's wage labor increased dramatically (Ellen Fried and Susan Settergren, 1986; C. Russell Hill and Frank Stafford, 1980; Hartmann, 1981). The second question concerns the formal marriage contract: why are there so many retDiscussants: Gary S. Becker, University of Chicago; Paula England, University of Texas-Dallas.