Women, Families, and Caring

In an essay to celebrate Women’s Day, I urge our leaders and men to learn how to nurture families and grow caring societies, rather than inducing women to join the economic workforce and work like men to prove their worth and grow economies. 

  My essay is composed from extracts from my book, Shaping the Future: How to Be, Think, and Act in the New World (2023). 

Feminine World Views and Masculine Economies

Soon after Donella Meadows had written Limits to Growth (1972), the Club of Rome’s warning that the Earth had run out of resources to sustain consumptive economic growth, and before Go Brundtland’s Our Common Future (1987), a UN Commission’s call for inter-generational equity, another remarkable woman, Hazel Henderson, published Creating Alternative Futures (1978). 

Hazel Henderson was an unusual woman. Born in Britain, she dropped out of school, moved to New York, got married, and had a baby. Bringing up her child, she became worried about air pollution in the city. She organized a group called “Citizens for Clean Air”. She got ABC and CBS, the major US TV networks, to establish an air pollution index. 

She realized she had to teach herself economics because every time she wanted to organize something there was always some economist telling her it would be uneconomic. She plunged into an intensive reading of economics, sociology, political science, and philosophy. Her public activism continued. Her ideas, now supported by her insights into economic theory, began to be heard in policy circles, too. She was invited to be a member of the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, a member of President Carter’s economic task force, and an adviser to the Environmental Action Foundation. She founded and directed several organizations, including the Council on Economic Priorities, Environmentalists for Full Employment, and the Worldwatch Institute. 

The sub-title of Henderson’s Creating Alternative Futures is The End of Economics. She said “Economics (as it has developed thus far) is likely to remain an appropriate discipline for accounting purposes and various analyses of micro-areas, but its methods are no longer adequate to examine macroeconomic processes. Macroeconomic patterns will have to be studied in multi-disciplinary teams within a broad ecological framework. In micro-areas, like the management of a business, it will have an important new role: to estimate as accurately as possible the social and environmental costs of economic activities—the health costs, and costs of environmental damage and social disruption, and to internalize these costs within the accounts of private and public enterprises.”

Henderson was an active feminist. She pointed out that “The values and attitudes that are favoured and vested with political power are the typical masculine values—competition, domination, expansion, etc.—while those most neglected and often despised—cooperation, nurturing, humility, peacefulness—are designated as female.” Henderson explains, “The masculine values are essential for the male-dominated industrial system to work, but feminine values are most difficult to operationalize.” 

Henderson ascribes values of humility and cooperation to women and values of domination and competition to men. This is not an industrial-era idea. It is as old as recorded history and is embedded in the religions of the West and East. 

In Abrahamic religions, God, the creator and ruler of the world, is visualized as a man. In the old Bible, God created a man in his own image and a woman was born of man (Eve from Adam’s rib). Her role is to support him in the world. In this worldview, men are destined to dominate, and women must be humble in the presence of men. Similarly, in Hindu traditions, the supreme incarnations of God are described as men. The trinity of Shiv, Vishnu, and Brahma are three men. Incarnations of God on Earth—Krishna and Ram—are also men. Women, even when described as goddesses, are generally consorts of male gods. 

Henderson points out that, throughout history, men have designed forms of large organizations to embody masculine values of domination and competition to produce large-scale results and expand their powers. On the other hand, women nurture families and communities with values of humility and cooperation. Their concept of an organization is quite different. 

I have advised companies around the world for 30 years to improve their organizations’ capabilities and obtain the best from the human potential within them. I led the worldwide organization practice for two international consulting companies and wrote some books appealing to business leaders: The Accelerating Organization: Embracing the Human Face of Change; Shaping the Future: Aspirational Leadership in Beyond; and Transforming Capitalism: Improving the World for Everyone. 

Whenever I would begin an engagement with an organization, I would ask all present in the room—board members or managers—to draw a picture of an organization on a piece of paper. Always, as expected, most depicted hierarchies—pyramids and boxes at different levels with upward reporting lines between them. Occasionally, some would draw pictures of webs of relationships. Those who drew such unconventional pictures were invariably women in the early 1990s when I started using this exercise to uncover mental models. Twenty years later, pictures of webs and clouds began to appear more often, but pyramids and hierarchies continued to dominate. Control with domination—the masculine way—remains the underlying “theory-in-use” for organizing people. 

Game theory is often used by military strategists, corporate leaders, and economists to analyse the behaviours of competitors and develop winning strategies. “Tit for tat” usually turns out to be the best strategy for both parties in game theory. If the other is cheating, you too must cheat. 

The golden rule in all moral traditions is, “Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.” The rule is not, “Do unto others as is done unto yourself.” Not “Tit for tat,” but “Turning the other cheek.” “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind,” Gandhi said. 

The objective of competitive games in the economy, in politics, and in war is to win. The game humanity must learn to play in this century, to improve the world for everyone, is a game of cooperation, not competition. 

New models of leaders who do not wish to, nor need to dominate, are required. New models of governance of the commons must be adopted, at all levels—global, national, and local—for equitable and sustainable solutions to the inter-related, systemic crises described in the SDGs.

The Worthiness of Human Beings

The most important productivity ratio any manager should be concerned with is how to get the most output from the scarcest or most expensive resource the enterprise has. A universal practice, in corporate, as well as national accounting, is to measure productivity as output per unit of labour. This presumes that human labour is the scarcest resource and that it should be substituted by other resources, such as capital. 

Human beings are abundant in India, whereas financial capital is relatively scarce. Therefore, the productivity of the Indian economy should be measured by how many good jobs each unit of financial capital produces. Companies, too, should re-examine their strategies for global competitiveness. Value the potential of Indian people. Engage them, nurture them, and care for them. They can be their competitive advantage. India’s policymakers and investors, whether foreign or domestic, investing in enterprises in India, must nurture workers as appreciating assets, not as burdens. This will make India’s growth more inclusive and faster too.

All nations are societies composed of human beings. The purpose of a country’s economy is to improve the well-being of all its citizens. 

Longevity has been increasing in all countries, developing ones as well as rich ones. In fact, the change in demographics with more older people is becoming a new challenge for economic policymakers, with too few working-age people compared to older ones.

Concepts of capital and resources in an economy are like concepts of stocks and flows in general systems theory. Concepts of stocks and flows are being applied to measurements of social and natural capital in the emerging discipline of sustainability studies. The language of economics is seeping into accounts of natural and social systems.

Stocks are inert. They can be safely stored and used when required. Living systems are not inert. They continue to adapt and change on their own. When concepts of stocks and flows, and capital and resources, are applied to natural and social systems, they strip out the essence of living systems for the sake of accounting convenience. Economic accounting models are “incomplete”, as all mathematically rigorous models are, as Gödel, the mathematician, proved. They cannot map reality fully.

Resources and capital are concepts of static energy. Value is created when resources are used and their energies flow. Financial capital can create value for society when it is used wisely to put other resources to good use. However financial capital can be used also to create more financial capital short-circuiting messy interactions with the real world. It has been used mostly in this way in the last 25 years. 

Mariana Mazzucato points out (The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy) that “The fastest growing financial activities in 1980–2008 were asset management (making more money by investing in liquid financial assets and property). Finance makes money by serving not the “real” economy, but itself. The financial sector now accounts for a significantly growing share of the economy’s value-added and profits. But only 15 per cent of the funds generated go into businesses in the non-financial sector.” Share valuations have replaced societal values as measures of the worth of an enterprise. Guardians of financial stocks, including corporatized banks, use their capital to increase financial returns for their institutions, rather than to produce real value for society. They behave like owners of the stocks, rather than as trustees on behalf of society.

Human beings are neither “resources” nor “capital”. They are “assets” in society. The value they provide the social systems— families, communities, and nations—they nurture and are nourished by cannot be converted into financial valuations and must not be.

Economic institutions must be recoupled with social institutions. I mentioned five principal concepts economists use to diagnose the health of an economy: resources, capital, productivity, money, and trade. So far, I have concentrated on resources, capital, and productivity. I will turn in the next chapter to the differing concepts of trade in the economy and in society. 

Trade is the flow of resources in an economy. It is an exchange of energy and materials in different forms amongst economic actors. Trade is concluded by transactions amongst parties. Money is the currency for trade. 

Money and commodity trade are not the only forms of exchange among humans in societies. People also connect with each other in other ways. Relationships amongst them constitute a giving and receiving of value which is not expressed, nor expressible in monetary terms.

Our Family, Our World

India, as chair of the G20, the group of governments of rich countries that came together to save the global economy from the shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, has offered a vision of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (One Earth, One Family, One Future) to bring all citizens of the world together to make the world better for everyone, now and in the future. 

The world is not one family. No family turns out their children to remain hungry when they are in need, while elders stuff themselves with more food than they need and throw the rest to waste. The thrust of globalization in the past 30 years has been to create One Earth, One Economy, One Future. Not One Earth, One Family, One Future. 

A family form of human relationships is the basic unit of a good society. A corporate form of business is the basic unit of a modern economy. A family has a form; a corporation, too, has a form. Both forms have vertical and horizontal structures. The vertical dimension is the distribution of power amongst the levels of the organization; along its horizontal dimension at each level is the nature of relationships amongst its members.

In a corporation, the people on top are given legal decision rights to govern the people below. In families, parents and elders are given authority over others by social customs. In corporate organizations, workers are assigned roles and their performance in their roles is measured and rewarded. Their formal relationships are expressed in contracts and are expected to be “fair and square”. Good families work on the principle of “to each according to their needs” and “from each according to their abilities” even if their economic accounts do not balance. Families are bound by social values, not by financial valuations. 

The corporate form of organizations is more efficient than the social forms of organizations for extracting economic value from resources. Corporations have firm vertical structures for the efficiency of the economic enterprise. Workers and managers within corporate forms of organization must follow rules laid down by their superiors in the hierarchy. Compliance with rules results in the efficiency of the enterprise. When employees are admitted into a corporate organization, they give up their freedom to do as they like. Non-compliance with the rules can result in ejection from the organization. Employees are free to join another corporation that will admit them. There they must adapt to its culture and comply with its rules. Thus, the corporate form of organization is too much “do or die, not question why.”

The industrial economy discards workers. It does not add resilience to their lives. Flexible forms of work are making lives more precarious even in advanced economies. They do not provide social security to all human beings. Very few people in the developing world have the security of formal long-term employment and fewer people will have it in the developed world also in the future. We continue to look at the condition of the world through old lenses when we see it through statistics of formal employment and social security. We cannot understand our reality through statistics that measure old forms. Nor will we find the out-of-box solutions we need by scraping within old boxes for new ideas.

Forms of economies must be reformed to provide more care for people in future because they will not have secure employment in formal organizations. The provisioning of healthcare, education, and vocational skills must be improved too. Children need more care. People are living longer everywhere, and as they age, they cannot be discarded. Older persons will need more care too.

Families and communities have forms: they are not “informal” organizations. In an industrial economy all organizations conform to the form that fits an industrial economy. There is a bias in favour of the industrial form of organization because it creates more economic efficiency. Industrial economies are designed to grow the sizes of economies rather than the qualities of societies. 

Humanity must become one family. Rather than trying to put more economic efficiency into social forms of organization, we must put more humanity into economic organizations. Can you imagine a family without women? You can imagine an army without women though. Sadly, we are now training women to fight like men in armies. We are forgetting the value of living like a family. We are changing the shapes of our communities and the shapes of our families to train human beings for roles in the economy because we want our economies to grow. We seem blind to the collateral damage we are causing to the quality of our societies.

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam(One Earth, One Family, One Future): let us mean what we say and let us measure what we mean. We need a new vision of the future. To imagine a new future as one family, we must listen to the caregivers in our societies and families, who historically have been mostly women. We must listen to women for their vision of what the future of work should be, and to their vision of a better society for all.

The Values We Live By 

Breathing in and out to live is a horizontal process for exchanging oxygen with carbon in the atmosphere. Capitalism is a vertical process in an economy sucking financial resources and power from living beings in nature and society. 

Natural scientists’ models and their mathematical equations describe flows of materials and energy in the natural world. They have no need to adopt money to measure the values of the natural materials and energies represented in their equations. Economists imagine the natural world as a provider of resources for the economy and economists use money as the measure of the values of natural resources. Economists also ascribe money values to exchanges between human beings in society to fit them into their mathematical models of an economy. In the economy, money can buy anything.

Money as a measure of value converts nature and human beings into commodities which are tradeable with money prices attached to them. Land becomes a commodity that can be bought and banked as a financial asset. Living trees become commodities, their value determined by the amount of timber they will yield. Human labour becomes a commodity with a price to it in a labour market. Knowledge too is converted into property with a money value attached to it so that it can be traded amongst those who have money to buy it.

Money, though abstract and variable, has been adopted as the measure of the value of whatever is exchanged in transactions in an economy. The worth of countries, companies, and even human beings is measured in monetary terms. 

The worth of companies is measured by their financial valuations in stock markets. The real value to society of what the companies produce does not matter: it could be tobacco products or arms and ammunition that kill humans or medicines to improve their health. 

Even human beings are ranked by how much money they have: millions or billions of dollars. Those who have the most are admired most. The worth of human life to society is measured by how much money that individual may earn in her life. Thus, the compensation payable by Union Carbide for the loss of Indian lives in the Bhopal gas tragedy was determined by US courts to be an order of magnitude less than the levels of monetary compensations that are paid by American companies for American lives lost in industrial accidents in the US. Is an Indian human being much lesser than an American human being? 

Economists make sense of the world in the language of money. Whereas humans value many things which money cannot and should not buy, such as their dignity and their freedom.

Transactions or Caring Relationships 

Members of families pool their resources. They have emotional bonds with each other. They are not bound by rational contracts. They help each other, following the principle of “to each according to their needs and from each according to their abilities.” Their relationships are not transactions. What they give and get from each other cannot be measured in monetary terms.

The philosopher Kojin Karatani has analysed the evolution of human institutions in The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange*. He combines an analysis of the evolution of economic institutions with the evolutions of social and political institutions. He explains that “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual change. The changes in the economic foundations lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” Karatani begins with hunter-gatherers, as many anthropologists do, then to settled farming communities, and to the emergence of states. He goes on to the evolution of systems of governance of states from monarchies to electoral democracies.

Social and economic institutions are formed with vertical and horizontal structures. In the vertical dimension are systems of power of some over others in them. Patriarchs and matriarchs of families, tribal chiefs, monarchs, dictators, and elected governments are power relationships in societies for maintaining order within them. The power of the state arises from an exchange between the ruled and their rulers: those ruled are given peace and order in return for obedience to their rulers. Along their horizontal dimension are systems of exchange amongst their members. Trade is a horizontal system.

Karatani cites Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), the French sociologist and anthropologist who wrote an original comparative study of the relations between forms of exchange and social structures. Giving and receiving gifts is also a mode of exchange, Mauss says, with different rules than transactional modes of exchange. Amongst Mauss’ writings is a seminal essay, The Gift: Forms and Functions in Archaic Societies (1925), in which he says the cosmos is a gift from God. We should receive and return the gift in a spirit of indebtedness and enjoyment of the gift. 

In this view, the cosmos and nature grant humans the gift of life. In this worldview, nature was not created for humans to exploit. Tragically, scientific humans have the hubris to think that they can be smarter than nature and are now rapidly destroying the ground under their own feet. We must recover the humility of our ancestors, who were grateful for the gift they were given and who thanked the universe for allowing them to be alive. 

The universe and the natural world around us are pooled resources that belong to all species. Karatani says we must combine the gift mode of exchange along with other transactional modes in our relationships with each other to make economic growth more equitable and more sustainable. “One Earth, One Family, One Future” requires new systems of governance. All must govern the commons collectively. The commons must not be parcelled out to separate owners. The “tragedy of the commons” must be urgently converted into the “promise of the commons” to save the earth and all human beings from the ravages of climate change and wars.

Mauss explained that in primitive societies (tribal communities) there is no state, nor any distinction between economic and political structures. Karatani explains how economics has evolved as a sub-set of the study of systems and institutions. It has overwhelmed other perspectives of social systems in the 20th century. Economists’ mathematical models do not have room for the social and political systems in which economic systems are embedded.

The give and take in social relationships, such as amongst members of a family, involve exchanges of “non-economic” values, such as affection, compassion, and gifts and sacrifices for the needs of others. Anthropologists describe structures of relationships in societies and historians describe the changes in them. They do not use money to value relationships. Members of families do not need money to conduct relationships with each other. What they give and get cannot be, and should not be, measured monetarily.

Arun Maira

8th March 2025