The new Gendered Economy series of short books critically examines our understanding of the economy through the lens of gender. It showcases how economic relationships, actions and institutions are directly affected by gender norms and challenges many of the tenets that underpin both the mainstream and heterodox interpretation of how economies function. James Heinz’s book The Economy’s Other Half underscores this in its aim to challenge “the status quo of the current practice of macroeconomics by bringing gender into the way we understand how the economy works”.

On the whole, neither mainstream nor heterodox macroeconomics, both in terms of theory development or policy formulation, pays attention to the role of gender in the economy and the implications of macro-level policies for gender equality. This book challenges that neglect. Starting from the premise that economies are shaped by gender relations and that macroeconomic policy is likely to affect every aspect of women’s and men’s economic lives, the book focuses on three specific areas of inquiry: firstly, how and why macroeconomic policies affect women and men differently, considering both fiscal policy (government spending, taxation and borrowing) and monetary policy (interventions that affect the money supply, interest rates and exchange rates); secondly, why the identification and measurement of the variables that form the basis of macroeconomics are incomplete and lead to poor policy choices; and thirdly, how investments in human beings, including unpaid and non-market care, affect the economy’s prospects, and people’s well-being, across generations.

Fiscal and monetary policies have large, broad-based effects on the economy influencing the level of demand, prices, employment, income distribution and productivity. Such policies, which fundamentally influence the productive capacity of the economy, are almost always designed and implemented without any specific reference to gender. It is usually presumed that macroeconomic formulation and policy advice is gender neutral because it does not explicitly target women and men. As this book shows, the difficulty with this conceptualization is that macroeconomic policies interact with structural features of the economy to produce distinct outcomes for women and men. Heintz demonstrates through detailed non-technical discussion of clear everyday examples, that macroeconomic policies are gender blind rather than gender neutral and, as such, raise the possibility of replicating and reinforcing existing inequalities between women and men.