Ann Jennings

On the Possibility of a Feminist Economics: The Convergence of Institutional and Feminist Methodology

The purpose of this article is to examine feminist and institutionalist views on epistemology and methodology to see if they are compatible. The reason for undertaking this examination is the belief that a truly feminist economics, as opposed to economics done by feminists or economics about women, will necessarily be the result of feminist explorations in epistemology and methodology. Put simply, if feminist thought is meaningful in economics, it must make a difference in the analysis. The two major paradigms in the discipline of economics, neoclassical and Marxist, are both uncongenial to feminist views on epistemology and methodology. A tremendous amount of scholarship has been devoted to incorporating gender into these paradigms, but in the final analysis it remains an ad hoc addition, not really central to the epistemological, methodological, or theoretical core of the economics discipline as defined by these two paradigms. Institutionalists have, with a few notable exceptions, ignored gender in their analysis. We will argue that this omission is not the result of