Maria Floro

Maria Floro is a Professor of Economics at the American University, Washington, who has worked on various areas of gender equality. Her research has included looking at the relationship between environmental crises, and social reproduction crises, and also considered the linkages between women’s well-being and economic development, including how to improve the data quality and collection methods to understand this. She has worked in collaboration with other scholars and grassroots organisations in various countries, including Thailand, Mongolia, China, the Philippines, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Her analysis of time-use survey data highlights several important aspects of how to collect data on time-use, care work, and unpaid work effectively. In particular, she underscores the need to consider aspects of time-use such as work intensity. Time-use surveys are an important tool for feminist economists, but much of the data they garner is based on questionnaires that only have space for one activity per time slot. This means that multi-tasking, or being responsible for the care of others in the background of other tasks are missed in much time-use data. Floro argues that it is important to consider work intensity in order to be able to better understand the dynamics of both poverty, and wellbeing amongst women. With the increasing discussion of the effect of working-from-home and unpaid work on a mother’s mental health, this point is of crucial importance when discussing time-use.

More recently, Floro has published research on the connections, or the connections there ought to be, between Feminist Economics and Ecological Economics. A growing area of attention within Feminist Economics, Floro has written on sustainability with a gender equality lens, calling for sustainability scholars and activists to consider emergent crises of care and social reproduction. She presents findings that gender-equal societies and mixed gender groups are able to best manage natural resources and ensure equitable access to resources. She argues that merging the frameworks of the two disciplines leads to a more holistic understanding, and that policy needs to pay attention to the linkages between social and ecological sustainability, and the economics discipline needs to use tools that better understand the interconnectivity of economic, social and environmental systems (ref). She points out that the current economic system relies heavily on unpaid/undervalued contributions from both care work and natural resources, though mainstream models do not acknowledge either of these sufficiently.

Much of Maria Floro’s work asks important questions that mainstream economics refuses to, or cannot ask, nor answer. She questions for what purpose do we want economic growth, in which areas do we want growth, and other normative questions such as what we want to prioritize when designing economic, social, and environmental policies. Be this wellbeing, equality, or sustainability, much of her work helps us move past simple profit/utility-maximizing type economics to better understand the transformative potential of economics. She has also published on the importance of certain gender equality indicators such as asset ownership/labour force participation and care work allocations, in terms of both their ability to transform gender relations and social norms, as well as the role they can play in economic systems or even in shifting understanding of how, why and what we value.

Reading List:

Floro, Maria S., & Pichetpongsa, A. (2010). Gender, Work Intensity, and Well-Being of Thai Home-Based Workers. Feminist Economics, 16(3), 5–44.

Floro, Maria Sagrario. (1995). Women’s well-being, poverty, and work intensity. Feminist Economics, 1(3), 1–25.

Reksten, N., & Floro, M. S. (2020). Feminist Ecological Economics: A Care-Centred Approach to Sustainability. Sustainable Consumption and Production, Volume I: Challenges and Development, 369.