Interview with Professor Radhika Balakrishnan: Feminism Within Economics

I interviewed Professor Radhika Balakrishnan, a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. She studies and teaches about feminism within economics, and the intersections of various related fields.

Her bio reads:

Radhika Balakrishnan is faculty director at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, which incorporates feminist values to strengthen and bridge voices for human rights toward social justice and self-determination, and a professor of women’s and gender studies. She is commissioner of the Commission for Gender Equity for the City of New York and a member of the Global Advisory Council for the United Nations Population Fund, and she was co-chair of the Civil Society Advisory Committee for the United Nations Development Program (bio and photo from Rutgers Global Health Institute).

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the fields of women, gender, and sexuality studies, human rights, and other social justice work? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

I’ll take one of those questions at a time because they happen in my life at different points. I think social justice issues were always in my DNA. I came to the United States when I was 12, and before that, I grew up in India.

Even when I was in India, my relatives would call me the women’s libber because I have two brothers and I never understood why I didn’t get to do whatever they wanted. So, I think that that kind of feminist instinct was there in me from when I was a kid. I give some of the credit to my mom. I’ll give you an example. One of the things I used to do as a kid was climb trees. As I got older, I had skirts on and people would stop letting me climb trees. But, my mom gave me pants, and then I was able to climb trees.

Then, I came to the US. It was a complicated time in the US, but I moved to Chicago and then went to college. In the 70s, there was a kind of ethos of protests in the media and, especially since the Vietnam War was occuring. Drafting was over by the time I went to college, but there was still a lot of activism on campus.

This was also a time in which feminist studies were starting to come about. But, there was no program or department or anything like that. But, we had reading groups and we read things on our own.In graduate school, I ended up studying economics.

I was always interested in issues around feminism and, and gender equality. But I think what really triggered it is when I was in grad school, there was a faculty member who was harassing one of the students. In economics, I don’t know if you know, but we’re worse than mathematics and engineering in terms of the percentage of women. In the entire graduate program, I think there were maybe five women. And when I started, I was the only woman in my class. When that faculty member was harassing one of the students, it was horrible. The human resource person was like “Why are you complaining? That’s how guys are. Don’t worry about it.” I was very taken aback by this.

One of the other professors recommended to me that I go and teach in women’s studies, because I was teaching banking and money management and things like that. So that’s how I ended up getting interested in feminist studies as a discipline, and as a field of research.

That’s how I kind of got into it in terms of my activism. Also, I ended up writing a dissertation in economics that was focused on issues of gender inequality, and it was focused on India. I went back to India and did field work. And at the time when I wrote it, it was very unusual for people in economics to write about gender. I was even told by one of the people that I should go to sociology because they said that the topics I was studying about gender don’t belong in economics.

But, there were obviously many mentors of mine who steered me in the right way. Then a group of us got together about 30–31 years ago, and started the International Association for feminist economics, which never existed before. As a field, it wasn’t recognized. But now, there was a journal where we could publish in the field.

Three years ago, I was a president of the association. So now, someone who might want to study economics can actually decide to study financing, which wasn’t an option when I was in grad school or undergrad. What’s great is that it’s now easier to have departments that have feminist economy as an undergrad program, especially liberal arts colleges. So, that’s how I did that and then the human rights work.

Also, I was always interested in issues of human rights and I was on the board of an organization called the US Human Rights Network. We were having our first meeting, and they were mostly activists — there weren’t that many academics, or at least academic activists. I consider myself a little bit of both and and there were a lot of people advocating for issues around economic rights, such as the end to poverty, the right to housing, the right to education, etc.

I remember we were in a breakout group and I said, “What kind of economic policies do you need in order for these rights to happen?” In response, they said, “What do you mean?” I said “What are the kind of macroeconomic policies you want to have?” They said, “No, we’re advocates, we’re gonna fight for the right to housing.” I said, but “What are you going to tell candidates when they’re running for office that you want them to do?” Then I realized that there wasn’t really a field in that. Because of that, I started working with other people and brought together a team of people who are economists, progressive economists, and human rights activists. And I said “Okay, let’s start this field.” That was about 20 years ago. It’s still a burgeoning field, but it’s there.

What were your motivations for starting to write “Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice: The radical potential of human rights”?

I wrote a book before this one about economic policy, and human rights. This book was really the beginning of all this type of work. That was actually a two country study on the US and Mexico. It was really the first in depth work that has been done on connecting human rights and economic policy.

So we looked at different aspects of economic policy like fiscal policy, monetary policy, tax policy, and debt. We looked at each of those in both those countries and tried to see how to apply human rights law to address these issues. That was the first book. It was weird because we went with the progressive publisher in the UK, but they didn’t really do much to kind of get the book out.

The reason we went to them is because they promised to get it translated into Spanish because it was both in the US and Mexico, but then they never did. So very few people even know about the book, but that book actually took years of work. I worked with grassroots organizers in both countries and tried to make it a huge project.

After that, I also became the head of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), which was an organization at Rutgers. Upon doing all these other policy interventions while I was the head of the CWGL, I decided that we needed to put together one book where all of these kinds of thinking join together. The first book was really trying to articulate how economic policy and human rights go together. The second one was trying to get the word out about our thinking.

I co-wrote the second book with two of my colleagues who I still work with. We needed to get our ideas out because not a lot of people who do work on human rights are very mainstream economists. So, we felt like we needed to do that. That came out in 2016. Now, we’re just about to start a new project or come up with a new set of ideas on rethinking where we were then and where we are now.

How does your work on the board of the Global Initiative of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights function in conjunction with your other research?

The person who heads the Global Initiative (GI) is Magdalena Sepulveda. When I was at the center at Rutgers, she and I worked together, and I tried to help her bring a feminist economic lens to the work that she was doing in the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. So, I’ve known her for a long time and I’ve worked with her for a long time. I have a huge amount of respect for the work that she’s done. When she took over the Global Initiative and asked me to be on the board, I felt like she was the one person I would be on the board for because the work she does is so good.

It connects to the work I do because the work that GI does looks at the role of the state and looks at tax policy and also feminist approaches to economic and social rights. It’s interesting because she’s a lawyer — a human rights lawyer — and I’m an economist and so the two of us really complement each other well in terms of bringing it together.

Boards oversee the fiduciary role of an organization, so it’s not quite that I get to go there and be a staff member. And I shouldn’t. But it’s great to be on the board of an organization that you really believe in and help steer it in good ways. They’ve been doing such great work and actually, their last conference, which was two years ago, was in Chile. They did this whole presentation on the role of the state. I was able to participate in their opening. So, I’m on the board, but I’m also very interested in the work they do, and actually, the next feminist economics conference is coming up in July in Rome. We’re going to do a panel to talk about a project that will hopefully be another book or something.

What are your goals for how you hope to see your research on human rights develop, specifically within the next few months or during the summer?

I do. I have a couple. Before COVID, I was working on a book. I’ve kind of put that book project on hold, but it originated out of a set of trainings I did — that’s another thing that I do other than teach students in universities; I also do trainings of popular education practice. And so I did a series of trainings before the election when Trump became president.

The idea was to help activists understand what the economic policy ramifications were for the issues that were coming up in the elections. I developed that training based on interviews that I did with activists in the past. For one project, I interviewed 30 activists around the country working on different kinds of issues, from payday loans to mining to all kinds of issues.

Based on the responses to the questions, I developed this three-day training, and then I did another three-day training based on responses from the first one. The second one was even more interesting for me because two-thirds of the people there were Native American. They come up with very different issues in terms of the role of the state.

The idea was that I was gonna write this book — I mean, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life doing trainings. There are very few books out there that explain economics and economic policies to activists. There are also very few people who write on women or gender studies.

So, I was gonna write this book based on those interviews to find out what activists would like to know about. I’d write it as an economist. But then, COVID hit; I had six chapters all outlined but then, the entire world economy shut down all at the same time. And then, and then 10 Guys got really rich. Suddenly, none of the old analysis made sense to me anymore. So, I kind of put that book on hold. I told myself that I’ll rewrite and maybe revisit it, but later.

So then I’m redoing this, but I’m also working on another paper right now that I presented a draft of at the London School last month — but I still haven’t quite finished it. It hasn’t clicked in my head fully yet. This project is looking at trying to derail the idea that GDP is the evaluative mechanism by which you should understand the health of an economy.

When people say the economy is doing well, they mean that the GDP went up. That’s how it’s judged. So, there’s some interesting work now that looks at well being as an indicator rather than the GDP. For example, you could have a high GDP, but incredible levels of inequality and horrible health outcomes. So, I’m trying to look at that and see whether the current human rights framework helps us understand that different way of looking at GDP. But central to it, which is where I’m still trying to figure out more information, is to put into that the issue of climate change. What do you do with climate change?

There’s also a bunch of work coming from Latin America based on indigenous work. I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of reading these works and about these topics. As I said, I’m trying to put these four things together. The semester is almost over, and so maybe I can spend some time reading and figuring this out. Hopefully sometime this fall that work will come up while this other work is continuing.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

My advice would be to go with your gut and to go with what you believe in. Don’t listen to people who say “That’s not good.” If I had done that, I wouldn’t be where I am. What’s great for your generation is that you have access to anybody you want. For example, you got to email me and now here I am talking to you. That didn’t happen in my time. This is one thing that I owe to the next generation. I’d say go with your gut and use whatever ways you can to find people.

In terms of podcasts, I have a bunch of stuff on my website there. But, I haven’t really gotten into podcasts that much because I just, I just haven’t had the time. Hopefully it’ll get better and I will listen to more podcasts. One person who does write a lot (and it’s more global) is Isabel Ortiz. She writes a lot of stuff on policy, paper, debt, and other international affairs — it’s really good. I don’t even know if she has a podcast. Maybe she does. I have no idea.