Naila Kabeer

Naila is a Professor of Gender and Development at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Her research interests focus on various aspects of inequality and how they play out within households, labour markets, and the wider economy. She has written on topics ranging from the social protection of informal workers to gendered perspectives of development discourse. She also produces work about the forms of collective action by poor and marginalized groups that seek a more just distribution of power, resources, and political voice and its relationship with individual empowerment and societal justice.

She is on the editorial committees of several journals including Feminist Economics, Development and Change, Gender and Development, Third World Quarterly, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies
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Her most notable contribution to feminist economics is arguably her work in examining inter- household dynamics from a feminist perspective. She has been highly critical of neo-classical interpretations of the household and resultant policies that view the household as a single, economic unit.

In her chapter “Jumping to conclusions? Struggles over meaning and method in the study of household economics” in the book “Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy”, Kabeer looks at Becker’s (1965,1976) “New Household Economics”; a dominant neo-classical conceptualisation of the household that still influences policy and economic understanding today.

Becker’s theory uses neo-classical microeconomic theory to describe resource allocation, utility maximisation and decision making within a household. His interpretation of household activity is based on the joint welfare maximisation of individual members of the household through the production of “x” goods subject to budget and time constraints. A household achieves maximum efficiency of production by allocating labour time in accordance to their comparative advantage so as to maximise marginal returns to labour. Therefore, depending on skills and education levels, time is divided between productive (market) and domestic (caring, cleaning and cooking) activities as well as leisure. As a result of efficient production, the total aggregate sum of household utility is maximised by efficiently allocating these ‘x’ goods across household members.

Kabeer points out that this interpretation derives directly from the tenets of neo-classical microeconomic theory, and so is invariably riddled with strong assumptions in order to hold. One important assumption is the existence of unified preferences of every member of the household. Within this conception, decision making is seen to be derived by aggregating these preferences. However, it is difficult to objectively decipher if these preferences are shared by all members of a household or whose preferences are taken into consideration to achieve a particular outcome. We are left to simply assume that the decision-maker has acted as a “benevolent dictator” and delivered inefficiently maximising aggregate utilities of each member of the household (Kabeer, 1998).

Kabeer also highlights an important implication of this conceptualisation. According to this theory, policy directed at increasing household income will be enough to maximise the welfare of each member of a household, and by extension, every member of society. This implies that it is irrelevant for policymakers to understand who owns assets or earns the income within the household so long as the “benevolent dictator” continues to be assumed as benevolent and ensuring the maximum welfare of each member of the household. Drawing on other works by feminist economists from around the world, Kabeer shows that this is in fact not based on reality (Kabeer, 1998).
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In her journal article, “Family Bargaining”, Kabeer reviews different social science approaches to the analysis of bargaining in the specific context of family-based households. Economic approaches have tended to focus on ‘the household’ and to treat its members as a set of individuals, differentiated by their economic characteristics and genetic endowments. While economic models of bargaining have yielded a number of useful insights into how decisions are made at the household level, they have been limited by their failure to take account of the specific set of social relations which distinguish the household as a social organization from other organizations in a society; the social relations of family and kinship. Despite the structural inequalities often built into household relationships, the fact that members of a household are usually related to each other by blood or marriage means that bargaining within the family tends to draw on relational as well as material resources; on love, affection, and loyalty, and also the more naked exercise of power through violence, coercion, and command. The article illustrates this distinctive aspect of family bargaining by drawing on the literature on the gender dynamics of household decision-making (Kabeer, 2001).
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In her book, “Reversed realities: gender hierarchies in development thought (Verso, 1994)”, Naila traces the emergence of “women” as a specific category in development thought and examines alternative frameworks for analyzing gender hierarchies. She identifies the household as a primary site for the construction of power relations and compares the extent to which gender inequalities are revealed in different approaches to the concept of the family unit. The book assesses the inadequacies of the poverty line as a measuring tool and provides a critical overview of an issue that has been fiercely contested by feminists: population control. While feminists themselves have no unanimous view of the meaning of “reproductive choice,” Kabeer argues that it is imperative for them to take a lead in the construction of population policy.

Reading List:

Works mentioned:

Kabeer, N. (2001) “Family Bargaining.” International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioural Sciences, 8: 5314-5319.

Kabeer, N. (1998) Chapter 4 “Jumping to Conclusions” in Jackson, C. and R. Pearson (eds) Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy, London and New York: Routledge

Kabeer, N (1994) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London: Verso.

Some of her other works:

Kabeer, Naila; Cook, Sarah (2010). Social protection as development policy: Asian perspectives. London New York: Routledge.

Kabeer, Naila (2010). Gender & social protection strategies in the informal economy. India: Routledge.

Kabeer, N (2000), The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labor Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.

Kabeer, Naila (1991). Gender, production and well-being: rethinking the household economy. Brighton, England: Institute of Development Studies.

Interview with Naila Kabeer - Zooming In With: Professor Naila Kabeer | Social protection and Covid-19
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/internationaldevelopment/2020/06/10/zooming-in-with-professor-naila-kabeer-social-protection-and-covid-19/