Durable Critique

Amartya Sen’s work on gender inequality is too often underplayed

BY HIS OWN ADMISSION, Amartya Sen who has highlighted significant gender concerns in his work — from skewed sex ratios to “cooperative conflict” within the family — was rather late in recog-nising the importance of gender unequality. In an interview conducted by the editors of the volume under review, Sen believes that this is because gender inequality “survives and flourishes” in a “valuation mist”. It took a while, as well as some personal experiences — especially those of bringing up two chil-dren as a single parent after his wife, Eva Col-orni, suddenly passed away in 1985 — to un-derstand the significance and complexity of the discriminations women live under.

The three editors — including Bina Agar-wal who has done work on Indian women and land rights — set out to provide a tribute to and a critique of Sen. They begin by ackno-wledging that the humanitarian approach intrinsic to his work has made a crucial con-tribution to developing several aspects of feminist economics and gender analysis. The first part of the book comprises expo-sitions on various aspects of Sen’s work and ideas by eminent economists, sociologists, philosophers and even an investment man-ager; the second is a collection of Sen’s own essays and lectures on the central theme.

Much of the effort in the first section is to extend the foundational concepts of Sen’s work with regard to women’s inequality. Fabi-enne Peter, for instance, believes that re-search in social choice theory should investi-gate ways to make social choice more responsive to issues of participation and in-clusion.

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Similarly, Marianne Hill, an econo-mist, believes that while Sen’s capability ap-proach is valuable as a starting point, it does not go far enough in terms of taking into ac-count the impact of social power on human capabilities. Some in the volume argue that there’s need for an alternative paradigm to Sen’s language of “freedom”, while others maintain that “further levels of complexity” need to be added to Sen’s idea of freedom by testing it against empirical realities.

But it is philosopher Martha C. Nuss-baum’s passionate defence of her “open-ended” list of ten human capabilities which, she believes, are “central requirements of a life with dignity”, that forms the core of this volume. She argues that the capabilities ap-proach is useful in addressing sex equality, only if we formulate a list of basic entitle-ments without which no society can consider itself “just”. Nussbaum’s capabilities list, inci-dentally, ranges from “the capability of life and physical health” to “being respected and treated with dignity”. Sen, on his part, has a problem with “one fixed canonical list” of hu-man capabilities. He believes that any such list should be context specific and flexible.

Perhaps Ingrid Robeyns reads this debate be-tween the economist and the philosopher right, when she observes that their respective positions have their roots in their respective academic fields and expertise — Sen’s, in the field of social choice; and Nussbaum’s, in the philosophy of the good life.

A compendium can always be critiqued for its exclusions. But all things considered, this attempt to “claim” Sen for gender stud-ies, adds to the stature of the discipline, as it does to that of the Nobel laureate himself.