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Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries, and Ingrid Robeyns

Amartya Senprovides insights into what led him to examine gender issues intellectually. `My early encounters, when I was a student,' he says `with the role of tilted attitudes and positional observations and slanted habits of thought did prove, in retrospect, highly educational for me. I do see myself, in part, as a feminist economist, in addition to having other descriptions to which I respond.' A book excerpt:

— Photo: D. Krishnan

Amartya Sen: "The question of power is central to gender relations."

What factors first led you to examine gender concerns intellectually? For instance, you have often said that your experience during the Great Bengal famine shaped your interest in and work on famine. Have any such social or personal experiences shaped your work on gender?

My interest in inequality, which goes back to my school days, was initially quite fixed on class divisions. My involvement with gender inequality grew more slowly. There was much greater concentration on class in standard politics (including standard student politics), and when in the early 1950s I was studying at Presidency College in Calcutta, it was taken for granted that class divisions were incomparably more important than other social divisions. Indeed, when later on, in the late 1960s, I started working on gender inequality (I was then teaching at Delhi University), many of my close friends still saw this as quite an `unsound' broadening of interest, involving a `dilution' of one's `focus on class.'

But in addition to that political issue of priority, it is also true that class-based inequalities are, in many ways, much more transparent, which no one — even a child — can miss, without closing one's eyes altogether. Even my sense of agony and outrage at the Great Bengal famine of 1943, to which you refer (and which did strongly shake even my nine-year-old mind), was linked to the class pattern of mortality.

There was, of course, evidence of inequality between men and women as well. But its severe and brutal manifestations (on which I researched much later — from the late 1960s to the 1990s) were well hidden from immediate observation. And the less extreme expressions were confounded by a prevailing attitudinal fog. For example, in comparison with the firm aspirations of the boys in my class, the girls, even very talented ones, seemed far less ambitious, with much less expectation. But this had the outward appearance of a difference in their respective `preferences': `Who are you to tell people what they should do with their lives?' My troubling thoughts about the widely held implicit belief that men's preferences were more focussed and their interests, as a result, demanded more attention than women's, seemed to be superficially answered by the fact this was an assumption that women typically made themselves — not just men. I was really struck by the fact that the female students seemed as convinced as the boys that there was no real issue of gender inequality, at least in their lives. I guess those discussions, confusing and frustrating as they were at that time, later helped me to understand, in retrospect, how gender inequality survives and flourishes, working in a valuational mist that engulfs all and which works by making allies out of the victims.

Many years later when I started working on gender inequality, those baffling memories proved very useful for my understanding of the nature and mechanism of gender inequality, and got me particularly interested in studying the role of values and `positional' observations as part of the process that sustains gender disparities. But, of course, I had not seen all this at all clearly in my student days.

Indeed, later on, when I got involved in gathering new empirical data on gender inequality, the attitudinal fog made regular appearances. For example, in the spring of 1983, I studied (with the help of wonderfully enthusiastic associates) the health status and weight of every child below five in two substantial Indian villages, and found that girls, born as healthy as the boys, gradually fell behind, mainly as a result of differential healthcare. But even though the physical evidence for it was quite conclusive, I was still being reassured by the parents that boys and girls received much the same attention, except that the boys' `needs' were quite different from those of girls. Also, when the admission data from Indian hospitals that I was able to collect and use (with the help of a great collaborator, Jocelyn Kynch) gave clear evidence that girls had to be a lot more ill for them to be taken to a hospital, compared with boys, the family's own beliefs and theories seemed to perceive little discrimination in treatment, only a sharper recognition of the seriousness of the ailments of the boys. So my early encounters, when I was a student, with the role of tilted attitudes and positional observations and slanted habits of thought did prove, in retrospect, highly educational for me.

To turn to a different type of influence, I should also add one tremendously tragic personal experience, much later in life, that helped me to understand better one particular aspect of gender inequality. In 1985, with the sudden death of my wife, Eva Colorni (who was a strong influence on my work on gender), I had to raise, as a single parent, two children (respectively 10 and 8 years old when Eva died), through their childhood and teenage years. I did, of course, have excellent help from my friends, but I also acquired a much clearer understanding of some of the problems that working mothers face in pursuing a career while looking after children. This `learning by doing' directly enriched my understanding of gender relations, and especially influenced my conceptual formulation of the interconnections between household obligations, outside work, and the division of benefits and chores of family life.

Your work has been inspirational to feminist scholars on many fronts. Indeed many of us claim you as a feminist economist. Have some feminist writings also influenced you? Also, has a gender perspective contributed to any of your theoretical formulations?

I am very interested in the works of contemporary feminist economists, and I have enormously benefited from the richness of contributions in this growing field (the journal Feminist Economics itself, under the proficient editorship of Diana Strassmann, has done a tremendous job in facilitating this remarkable development). But a long time ago, my interest in feminist ideas was particularly stimulated by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It is, of course, a truly visionary book, and it made me think about subjects I had tended to neglect in my earlier years. I was, however, also interested in the question as to how such a great book could be altogether ignored by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, who would have gained so much from reading her. This applies not only to the issue of women's deprivations, but also to such general matters as the understanding of how to think about `rights' in general, especially for any deprived group, women or any other underprivileged group.

Mary Wollstonecraft was also ahead of the `human rights' thinkers who, while differing from Bentham's legalism, saw human rights to be, as it were, `legal rights in waiting,' that is, as ethical claims that must be legalised for them to be effective. Wollstonecraft's analysis of the variety of processes through which subjugation and deprivation come about pointed to the constructive role that `recognition' can play (even without formal legalisation). This provides a kind of theoretical backdrop to the non-legal but influential `Universal Declaration of Human Rights,' adopted in 1948 (more than 150 years after Wollstonecraft's book). It also provides a prescient understanding of the need for activism (well reflected in modern feminist movements — campaigning for rights of women and also of underprivileged men), employing a variety of means, such as political agitation, public debates, and monitoring of iniquities and abuses. Since the deprivations of different groups have much in common, Wollstonecraft's gender perspective opened the way to the understanding of other kinds of denials and rejections. That, by the way, is one reason why the relevance of feminist economics extends far beyond the specific domain of gender relations (important as that domain is). Similarly, Ester Boserup's 1970 Women's Role in Economic Development gave me several insights, especially about the linkage between women's economic activities and the deals that women get.

I do see myself, in part, as a feminist economist, in addition to having other descriptions to which I respond. This is partly because of my direct involvement with gender-related issues, but also because of my conviction that the perspective of gender inequality gives us real insight into asymmetries and deprivations of other kinds as well. Inequality (in which I am comprehensively interested) may not be an undifferentiated whole, but nor is it a mechanical mixture of disparate components that do not interact with one another, nor in any way resemble each other.

You ask about the impact of feminist ideas on my `theoretical formulations.' There is quite an embarrassment of riches here. My understanding of inequality and deprivation in various fields was directly influenced by what I learned about the nature, causation, and mechanism of gender inequality. For example, my scepticism about relying on utility or on unscrutinised preferences for moral assessment, or for political evaluation, or for social choice, has been strongly influenced by what I have learned from studies of gender inequalities, particularly about the role that adaptive preferences and attitudes play in socially sustaining these inequalities. This certainly has had a substantial impact on the formulations I have used in moral and political philosophy, and in social choice theory, and also on my understanding of the process of economic development and social change.

Many argue that although you have written extensively on gender inequality, you do not directly address the question of power within gender relations. Do you agree?

I do not think I can agree with that. I cannot even understand how it could be possible to discuss gender inequality extensively (as it is suggested I have done), without going into the question of power within gender relations, since power is so central. In fact, the importance of power is part and parcel of my understanding, both directly and indirectly, of gender inequality.

First, if one is assessing gender inequality not in the mental or psychological scale of utilities, but primarily in terms of the real `capabilities' that women and men respectively have (which is how I formulate the problem), the powers they respectively have — to do or be what they value — are constitutively important. This can vary from such elementary powers as not being subjected to physical abuse or violent assault and the freedom to lead unsubjugated lives (where power can enter in a very crude form) to having the opportunity to develop one's talents and to achieve self-respect and the respect of others (where power can take more sophisticated forms). So power is directly involved in the `assessment' of gender inequality.

Second, on the `causal' side, one type of power asymmetry leads to, or helps to facilitate, power asymmetries of other types. Power has a central role in what I call `cooperative conflict,' which is central to my understanding of gender inequality within the family and ultimately in the society at large. Women and men have both congruent and conflicting interests affecting family living. Because of the extensive areas of congruence of interest, decision-making in the family tends to take the form of the pursuit of cooperation, with some agreed solution, usually implicit, of the conflicting aspects. Each of the parties has much to lose if cooperation were to break down, and yet there are various alternative `cooperative solutions,' each of which is better for both the parties than no cooperation at all, but which respectively give different, possibly extremely different, relative gains to the two parties. In the emergence of some cooperative solution among the many that are available, the powers of the two parties play a crucial part: for example, the more powerful party can obtain more favourable divisions of the family's overall benefits and chores.

There are thus far-reaching causal impacts of the presence and use of powers of different kinds, from physical powers (even the asymmetry in brute physical strength) to institutionally mediated powers (such as the social powers arising from traditional roles inside and outside the household). I would have some difficulty in grasping how someone can read, say, my `Gender and Cooperative Conflict' (in the Irene Tinker collection: Persistent Inequalities, 1990) and still think that I am not interested in the role of power in gender relations. Perhaps the point is not about whether the concept of power is being used, but about the frequency with which the word `power' occurs in my writing, as opposed to the ones I tend more often to use, such as `empowerment' or `capability' or `freedom' or `agency' or `threat' or `vulnerability.'

(Excerpted, by arrangement, from Capabilities, Freedom and Equality: Amartya Sen's Work from a Gender Perspective, eds. Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries, Ingrid Robeyns, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006, pp. 347-353.)

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