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Fearing fear: gender and economic discourse

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Abstract

Economic discourse—or the lack of it—about fear is gendered on at least three fronts. First, while masculine-associated notions of reason and mind have historically been prioritized in mainstream economics, fear—along with other emotions and embodiment—has tended to be culturally associated with femininity. Research on cognitive “gender schema,” then, may at least partly explain the near absence of discussions of fear within economic research. Second, in the extremely rare cases where fear and emotion are alluded to within the contemporary economics literature on risk aversion, there is a tendency to (overly-)strongly associate them with women. Finally, historians and philosophers of science have suggested that the failure to consider the full range of human emotions and experience may be itself rooted in fear: a fear of the feminine. This aversion to discussing fear—especially fear as experienced by men—contributes to serious problems, especially in regard to financial market instability and ecological threats.

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Notes

  1. Gender associations are, obviously, culturally variable. Table 1 describes associations that were influential in the Enlightenment and early development of science in Europe (see Fee 1983; Keller 1985; Harding 1986). Cognitive schema may take shape differently in other contexts and time periods, and may also be formed around other binaries—for example, spiritual/material, cultured/barbarian, Western/Eastern, European/African, and so on—some of which may overlap with, or add nuance to, gendered understandings.

  2. Perhaps this discomfort explains why Camerer's question appears as the title of a link in a Google search, but the link now goes to a paper with a different and less provocative title (working paper version of Camerer 2005).

  3. Pope (1985, 2001) proposes a formal solution involving epistemic periodization.

  4. Sen, for example, emphasizes that knowledge claims by an individual are dependent on a personal position that should be acknowledged (rather than denied); these claims form the foundation for stronger forms of ("trans-positional") objectivity arrived at through "discriminating aggregation" of positional views (Sen 1992, 4).

  5. This neglect has recently been powerfully pointed out by Taleb (2010).

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  1. Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA, 02125, USA

    Julie A. Nelson

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Nelson, J.A. Fearing fear: gender and economic discourse. Mind Soc 14, 129–139 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-014-0148-6

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