This dissertation investigates the origin, content and impact of gender and liberalization policies within the region of Telangana in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. My analysis is based upon a year of fieldwork in the region as well as data from the National Sample Surveys. I argue that making women favored ‘clients of the development process’ gave the state in Andhra Pradesh legitimacy within local politics as well as with external funding agencies, smoothing the transition to a liberalization regime. However, the policy context of liberalization has meant that the state has reduced its share of expenditure on ‘social reproduction’ in recent years and the substantive content of its ‘women's empowerment’ policy is a highly publicized thrift and micro-credit program for women. While this program does address women as autonomous economic agents, it fails to account for the fact that hierarchies of gender are cross-cut by class and caste. In claiming to empower women through a program that lacks fiscal support and relies upon the expenditure of time and resources by participants themselves, the program serves to re-emphasize these hierarchies and tends to exclude the poorest, lowest caste women. Meanwhile there has been an increase in female labor force participation in the postliberalization period. This increase is best explained as the result of a ‘supply push’, reflecting the agrarian distress in this region. There is little improvement in the conditions under which women and men labor. As a result employment may not be translating into increased empowerment for women. Furthermore, the cultural context that shapes gender inequality in this region is also changing as denoted by an expansion of the practice and amounts of dowry. Dowry in Telangana may indicate a shift away from egalitarian marriage practices and a reduction in the level of material and emotional support a woman can claim from her natal kin. While this change predates liberalization policies, it increases overall economic insecurity for women in the region. It must thus be taken into account by policy makers if they do not wish to exacerbate the economic vulnerabilities of women.

Homeownership is widely considered to be of benefit both to the individual household and to society at large. Yet a number of obstacles stand in the way of successful homeownership for many women. Chief among them are familial status discrimination in mortgage lending and lack of sufficient income. This dissertation analyzes mortgage lending data from Boston and finds that women, more than men, when applying for mortgages are disadvantaged by having children. Furthermore, white working mothers are disadvantaged more than their stay-at-home counterparts, while black or Hispanic stay-at-home mothers are disadvantaged more than their working counterparts. Alternative types of tenure such as community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives are discussed as viable options for women who are underserved by conventional markets. A survey of members of eighteen such groups provides support for this conclusion.

This dissertation is constituted by three distinctive chapters or essays, but the unifying theme is how a more careful consideration of female labor supply may better inform assessments of economic growth and structural change. In chapter I, I use the insights of both cooperative and noncooperative bargaining theory to develop a household model of female labor supply. Particular attention is given to how this model applies to the developing world, including how the effects of larger social shifts such as technological change and fertility decline are mediated by bargaining and inequality in the family. In chapter II, I develop a theoretical foundation for analyzing how gender roles in the household affect foreign direct investment in a developing country context. It is argued that the extent to which women and men share the costs of social reproduction at the household level is a central determinant of female labor supply and the profitability of investment. I combine a model of family structure with a structuralist macromodel to investigate the effects of various public policies on women's wages and employment. A major goal is to specify the constraints imposed by international capital mobility on the prospects for increased equality and living standards for women. In chapter III, I reevaluate economic growth in Taiwan between 1965 and 1995 by developing an alternative measure of economic production that accounts for both market and nonmarket production in the form of domestic services provided by women in the home. I find that social services, a category that includes social services provided in the market and the home, is the lead employer of Taiwanese labor between 1965 and 1995. Another key finding is that many of the factors driving growth in the market sector also shape growth in the nonmarket sector. Despite trend declines in the relative size of the nonmarket domestic sector, it has probably continued to grow throughout this period, primarily because of productivity gains in household production and the effects of demographic change.

This dissertation conducts a class analysis of prostitution using the class analytical framework developed over recent years by AESA (the Association of Economic and Social Analysis). It remedies the neglect of class analyses of sex work in the literature on this industry, and demonstrates the very different insights such an analysis makes possible. It moves beyond the debates on prostitution that interrogate the buying and selling (or commodification) of sex on the market, to analyze the very high rates of profit (or surplus extraction) circulating within some sectors of this industry. It argues that there exist different class structures of prostitution (slave, feudal, independent, capitalist, and communal), which differently impact the rates of surplus extraction, the services produced by sex workers, and their working conditions in general. More specifically, the dissertation argues that the class relations of prostitution affect the extent to which sex workers are able to choose their clients, the number of clients they see, the services they provide, and thus their ability to protect themselves from unsafe, dangerous, or degrading work. The dissertation also demonstrates the unique influence of culture, politics, and the law in shaping the economics of prostitution, and thereby offers a new kind of economic analysis of the contemporary sex industry. The various moral judgments, laws, social policies, court decisions, enforcement standards, informal policing practices, and industry self-regulation shape and constrain in particular ways the earnings obtained by sex workers, the prices of prostitution services, and generally the cost and revenue flows within the sex industry. The dissertation draws on a comparison of the different regulatory climate in the U.S. and in the Netherlands to show how different moral and regulatory regimes prohibiting or permitting prostitution activities can contribute to the emergence of new class structures of prostitution and the suppression of others. The dissertation thereby contributes to the current rethinking and debates over prostitution as a contemporary industry with powerful social effects.

Does the underrepresentation of women in school administration reflect differences in preferences or discriminatory selection criteria? To examine this question, this dissertation examines the criteria used to promote teachers into school administration and the consequence of these criteria for equity in promotions and school quality. In this dissertation, promotions are modelled as the joint occurrence of two sequential events: (1) teacher supply to the promotional queue and (2) school board demand for administrators. The empirical challenge is to statistically identify the supply and demand-side of promotion when only the joint occurrence of these two events are observed in the data. Drawing from a large nationally representative data set matching teachers, schools, administrators, and school districts, I test the hypotheses that access to school administration is not solely determined by qualifications, i.e. that discrimination plays a role. Key results show that when teacher desire for promotions and credentials are controlled for, men are more likely than women to be selected for promotions. Additional evidence suggests that women's promotion disadvantage may not stem from limited search strategies or an inability to manage schools. I conclude with an analysis of the pay gap between male and female principals. Results show that after controlling for a variety of human capital, school environment, school level and locale variables, male principals earn 5.4% more than female principals. This translates into a yearly $2,205.4 income gain.

This dissertation examines how race and gender interacted with economic variables to shape a class transition involving African American domestic laborers from 1863 to 1980. African American women performed household labor traditionally assigned to their racial group during slavery under new economic conditions that developed after emancipation. After slavery, these women were forced to contract their labor to white households and produce feudal surplus. The analysis suggests that African American women radically transformed the feudal economic and social conditions of paid household labor well into the twentieth century. These women were agents of a class transition from feudalism to independent commodity production. African American women, gradually and through small-scale incremental changes, redefined and standardized their jobs as household workers so that they were increasingly able to exchange pre-specified services for a given amount of money. These workers also developed creative strategies to break the continued association of their race with servitude. Rather than being inherent attributes of paid domestic work, flexibility and autonomy were outcomes of strategic choices made by African American women establishing themselves as independent producers of a service. This dissertation also examines how the material conditions and changing economic subjectivity associated with this class transition profoundly affected the construction of race and gender identities. By engaging in individual and collective actions that radically transformed the domestic labor process, African American women not only challenged and subverted the racialized and gendered associations of such work, but also produced new meanings of Blackness and womanhood. An understanding of the complex interactions of race, class, and gender in this historical example helps us make sense of contemporary inequalities as well as identify strategies for social change.