Analysing Gender Inequality: A Further Step towards Agency Considerations
We have seen that, in order to better alert people on the risks of famines, Sen thought that it was important to present ‘the food problem as a relation between people and food in terms of a network of entitlement relations’ (Sen 1981).
He knew that such an approach needed to get into issues which were not ‘so clearly economic and legal, especially the notion of legitimacy’ (Swedberg 1990:255). In the original version of Poverty and Famines, there were chapters in which he tackled the problem of ‘perceived notions of rights’, but he finally decided to leave them out, in order to go straight to his important point. However, the notion of legitimacy eventually reappeared when he developed a gendered perspective on the problem of hunger (e.g. Kynch and Sen 1983; Sen 1987: 13; Dreze and Sen 1989: ch. 4). Sen sometimes used the term ‘extended entitlements’ to broaden the focus of entitlement analysis ‘from legal rights to a framework in which accepted social notions of “legitimacy” can be influential’ (Sen 1987: 13; Dreze and Sen 1989: 50). But he also developed the problem of ‘the perception bias’ in terms of basic capabilities[160] within the family distribution (Sen 1983a; Kynch and Sen 1983). The idea of a ‘perception bias’ refers to a situation where the systematic disadvantage of a particular group is not perceived, while documented analysis shows that the different family members do not enjoy the same basic capabilities. For Kynch and Sen (1983: 364), it maybe ‘closely related to a sense of priorities, e.g. there maybe magnification of the needs of the males in general and the head of the household in particular’. It may also be related to a perception bias of the respective contribution to joint prosperity, which in turn influences the respective legitimacy to benefit of it (Dreze and Sen 1989: 57). It may even be related to a bias in the perception of one’s own self-interest,[161] which ‘is in fact a “socially determined” perception’ (Sen 1989: 65).With the notion of legitimacy, Sen tried to raise concern about some rules in the distribution of food generally unquestioned by economic theories: the rules governed by mores, conventions and other social practices. And in this respect, he wanted to show that the class conflict was not the only conflict of interest that was deserving attention in the food battle; intra-family distribution was also an important issue:
Inter-household divisions, ownership rights and the rights of transaction and bequeathing are, obviously, relevant to the determination of entitlements of families. The perceived legitimacy of these legal or semi-legal rights has a powerful influence on the nature of personal and public action related to the distributional problem. While the lines are not so sharply drawn in the case of intra-household divisions, there are important issues of perceived legitimacy in that context as well. (Sen 1987: 13)
The relative deprivation of women became a central issue in Sen's writings in the early 1980s (Kynch and Sen 1983; Sen 1983a, 1984; Sen and Sengupta 1983). This work on gender inequality was initially confined to analysing available statistics on the male-female differential in India.[162] He started looking at the pattern of the allocation of resources within a family, on the basis of some available data, but also of some ‘freshly collected in India in the spring of 1983, in collaboration with Sunil Sengupta, comparing boys and girls from birth to age 5' (Sen 1999a). Sen's primary objective - and challenge given the difficulty of observation in that matter - concerned the diagnosis of sex-bias or not in the distribution of food within the family. He soon came to the conclusions that ‘there is some straightforward evidence of serious comparative neglect of female children, especially in distress situation', or that the overall decline in Indian mortality rates has gone ‘hand in hand with a decline in the female-male ratio... since 1921' (Kynch and Sen 1983: 370, 378).
In other words:There is no escape from the grave tragedy of the undernourishment of children (or sharper undernourishment of female children in distress situations...), or the unusual morbidity of women.... (Sen 1984: 346)
From empirical and local analysis, he gradually moved to a general theory of gender inequality (Sen 1989, 1990b). He remarked that there were misconceived theories regarding the economics of the family, or the distribution of resources within households.[163] Before thinking about public action to remedy what Sen considered as one the biggest injustices in the world, he proposed a novel approach to the economics of the family in terms of ‘cooperative conflict'. Basically the idea is that there are strong elements of conflict embedded in a situation in which there are mutual gains to be made by cooperation (Dreze and Sen 1989; Sen 1989, 1990b). Sen identifies four determinants of the outcomes of such cooperative conflicts: (1) the breakdown position, for example the separation of spouses or their cohabitation in a state of permanent strife; (2) perceptions of contributions to joint prosperity - often devalued when unpaid work is involved; (3) threats that the parties can respectively employ; and (4) the understanding of conflicts faced by the different parties - women sometimes value more the well-being of their family members than their own and contribute to perpetuating gender inequality. While education and politics can have a far-reaching impact on the deal women receive, Sen and Dreze above all - and very pragmatically - highlighted the undeniable importance of female participation in ‘gainful’ economic activities as a material factor in combating the special deprivation of women (Dreze and Sen 1989: 59).
Once again, the choice of the policy should not be confined to what the government can do. Sen demonstrates that issues of perceived legitimacy and entitlement can be deeply influenced by a re-examination of the social and political aspects of intra-family inequality and disparity.
In analysing gender relations as complex cases of cooperative conflicts with female deprivation as a consequence, Sen’s point is to provide ‘a basis for informed and enlightened public action in the broadest sense’ (Sen 1987: 13). While famines are extremely easy to politicize - ‘all you have to do is to print a picture of an emaciated mother and a dying child on the front page and that in itself is a stinging editorial’ - in order to bring quiet but widespread undernourishment, or the debilitating effects of lack of schooling, to public attention, ‘you need a great deal more engagement and use of imagination’ (Shaikh 2004).At the theoretical level, it is also critical to be a little more imaginative and less reductive. Firstly, if we want to address adequately issues of injustice, Sen’s empirical work on Indian economy and society shows that a relevant framework requires integrating the role of norms, rules and social perceptions of interests and legitimacy on behaviours. Secondly, he puts to the fore the presence of both congruent and conflicting elements in the diverse social arrangements between which we might choose:
Given the multiplicity of collusive solutions that exist, an important issue is the relation between alternative norms, rules, and perceptions and alternative cooperative solutions that may exist - some more favorable to one and others more favorable to another. (Sen 1989: 66)
While the impasse identified by narrow models of ‘individual rationality’ is invalidated by Sen (1989)[164] in case of cooperative conflicts, he nevertheless highlights another kind of problem related to ‘isolation’. Values and perceptions need social examination and discussion, especially when it is shown that one group systematically receives a lower share of the benefits of cooperation than another. Since the inequalities between men and women observed by Sen are not seen as ‘real inequalities’ by most Indians, it leads Sen to conclude that the value system underlying the sense of obligation and legitimacy in a society may obliterate the sense of inequality and of exploitation.
In other words, the nature of the perceptions that prevail in a cohesive and well-integrated family ‘may go hand to hand with great inequalities emerging from perception biases’ (Sen 1989: 68). Referring to Marx’s notion of ‘false consciousness’, Sen considers thus that the examination of different cooperative solutions shall be done in terms of some objective criteria like functional achievements. Simultaneously, notions of who is ‘contributing’ how much call for closer scrutiny since the ‘deal’ that women get vis-a-vis men is clearly not independent of the perception problem regarding contributions made by different people. Let us remark that the perception biases or false consciousness that Sen wants to undermine are important barriers to personal agency - barriers that ‘the traditional economic model which relates individual welfare to a clear introspective perception, or a choice-based concept, of advantage’ (Kynch and Sen 1983: 364) cannot identify, and a fortiori remove. In contrast, Sen’s study of within-family distribution tends to show that:the perception of reality - including illusions about it - must be seen to be an important part of reality. Non-perception of disadvantages of a deprived group helps to perpetuate those disadvantages. (Kynch and Sen 1983: 365)
In a nutshell, we may say that Sen has drawn three important lessons from his analysis of gender inequality in India: (1) it is crucial to take actual behaviours as a basis for reasoning on cooperative conflicts, rather than some ideal or hypothetical behaviour (e.g. rational behaviour); (2) in order to assess the merits of different cooperative outcomes, the informational basis shall be as objective as possible to escape perception biases; (3) if the social results - according to some objective criteria - are systematically unfavourable towards a specific group within the society, it maybe relevant to examine the value system that influences the behaviours that produce an unequal solution. In these matters, public reasoning is much more relevant than direct state intervention.
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