Thursday, January 29, 2009

Apparently women in the UK are losing their jobs due to the recession far more rapidly than men.

1 comment:

John Powers said...

The constellation of posts you provide always gets the thoughts turning. And yes the dynamic blogroll contributes! Putting some recent post together with this one. I love Oli's push back on Patterson and Scribe's reflections. And for me at least your interest in coding a maker's market seems connected.

Trying to think about my own situation and community, I feel poor because I don't have good connections.

Ivan Illich in Gender contends that capitalism requires uni-sex assumptions, but that real lives are gendered. Women get abused in economic relationships in part because gendered presumptions about roles require women to contribute more to what Illich called the gray economy; stuff like the work required to get to work.

Peer productions it seems to me bears some resemblances to the gray economy, at least that it exists in tandem with the money economy.

Looking at my own situation of being isolated in meat space, some of the reasons are related to my role as caregiver, so it gives me some window into the dilemma some women face in terms of accumulating links in a netocratic sense. Online there are platform where I can make some links.

A maker's market might be more important for women than men. Hum, or at least it may be that there's no reason to impose uni-sex assumptions on such a platform.

I think that Oli is probably right about a "winner take all" shaking out economic efficiency. But that's going to make lots of us redundant, so gig-onomics will be more common too.

In a maker's market there's a male presumption towards the money economy. But your baby rota thought experiment illustrates that much of what we need really is more in the gray economy than the money economy.

I'm sure Causa Operaria is right about employment in this crisis. And that's one reason to try to envision a maker's market from a female perspective. I also think that women might uniquely contribute to such a market's success.