Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Khemraj, Tarron

Area of Concentration

Economics

Abstract

Economic knowledge is communally created. Since its beginning, the creation of knowledge in economics has been exclusionary of both women as epistemic agents and women as economic actors. The chronic hermeneutical marginalization of women from economic theory has resulted in epistemic injustices which both impair women as knowers in economic academia and create damaging “gaps” of knowledge in the truth-seeking process of economic theory and methodology. This in turn, strips women of the hermeneutical tools to understand and effectively communicate their lived economic reality to those knowers outside of their social position. Further, these epistemic injustices also disproportionately harms women’s economic experiences in lived reality through the effects of ill informed policy. In this work, I use philosophical frameworks to map where injustices have occurred in the creation of economic knowledge, in both a methodological and historical context. This work involves a brief analysis of Smith’s demarcation between the household and the market, and an illumination of the lost mothers of economics. I then discuss how such injustices have resulted in faulty methodology in using Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of well-being. The paper concludes with epistemic virtues that truth-seeking economists should purposefully include in their testimonial sensibility to engage in creating a more truth oriented economics.

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