Towards Gendered Rational Choice Theory

Towards gendered rational choice theory

Martina Belmonte

09/2012 Contents

1 Introduction 3

2 Revealed Preferences 7 2.1 Formal tools ...... 7 2.1.1 From preferences to choice ...... 9 2.1.2 From choice to preferences ...... 11 2.2 Rational choice ...... 12 2.2.1 The representation theorem ...... 12 2.2.2 Rationality as maximization ...... 14 2.3 Principles ...... 15 2.4 A comment on preference and models ...... 17 2.5 A debate on consistency ...... 19 2.5.1 Sen’s critique ...... 19 2.5.2 Binmore’s reply ...... 22

3 Gender issues 24 3.1 Framework ...... 24 3.1.1 Up to the third wave ...... 24 3.1.2 Gender, among others ...... 26 3.1.3 Gendered groups ...... 30 3.1.4 Drawing some premises ...... 36 3.2 The advancement of women ...... 37 3.2.1 A collective phenomenon: statistics ...... 38 3.2.2 A suﬀered and acted phenomenon ...... 39 3.2.3 An individual phenomenon: experiments ...... 42 3.3 A debate on choice ...... 47

4 Gendered choices 51 4.1 Something external to the choice ...... 51

1 4.2 Reasonable Inconsistency ...... 52 4.2.1 A new example ...... 52 4.2.2 Old examples ...... 54 4.3 Gendered epistemic value of the menu ...... 57 4.3.1 Inappropriateness of redescription ...... 57 4.3.2 Psychological explanation ...... 59 4.4 Revealed preference theory and gendered choices ...... 60 4.4.1 Back to Sen ...... 60 4.4.2 Diﬀerent kinds of problems and diﬀerent kinds of questions ...... 62 4.5 Other accounts ...... 64 4.5.1 Bossert and Suzumura on external norms ...... 64 4.5.2 Dietrich and List on reason-based choices ...... 65

5 Conclusion 68

References 75

2 Chapter 1

Introduction

The original intuition that motivates this dissertation is that rational choice theory might be useful to deal with some gender issues, and that gender studies might be useful to deal with some issues about rationality. I try to develop this intuition analysing what happens when agents choose an alternative recognizing themselves as woman or man. I argue that choices out of agents’ identification with gendered groups are not always rational. In- deed, if the gendered choice is disadvantageous for the group and the agent has concerns about gender equality the choice turns out to be irrational. Specifically, in my thesis I develop this intuition till the identification of a class of problems which are particularly interesting for rationality and gender issues. I call it the gendered epistemic value of the menu, because it exhibits a seemingly inconsistent choice when the menu is specifically relative to gender. The arrival point is that choices that violate the requirement of consistency because of gender constitute a specific class of problems and I argue that is worth to inquiry the normative conditions of rationality for it. When this idea was just a vague intuition in my mind, I started to look for feminist scholars who discussed rational choice theory. I found some papers, like England (1993), Friedman and Diem (1993), Folbre (1993, 1994), An- derson (2001), Peter (2003), Thalos (2005), Driscoll and Krook (2008), but it was difficult for me to pinpoint what all of them had in common. Indeed, some of them had economical concerns, others political, others philosophical, etc. In addition, some of them considered rational choice theory as a procedure to formulate collective decisions, others to analyse economical facts, others to justify democratic decisions, etc. Anyway, what surprised me was that none of them treated rational choice theory under a philosoph-

3 ical perspective and for individual choices in normative conditions - that is what I was looking for. An interesting consideration I found is Anderson’s distinction between the rhetorical and the formal aspect of rational choice theory. She writes “The formal theory of rational choice says that people tend to maximize their utility; that is, that they adopt as their end the maximal satisfaction of their overall scheme of preferences. The theory is formal in that it concerns only the relative rankings of a person’s preferences, disregarding the contents of these preferences or the individual’s reasons for having them. It says that an individual’s preferences fit into a single, complete, transitive ordering, and that individuals choose to satisfy the top ranked preference in that ordering.”1 Furthermore, she argues that formal rational choice theory is “either tautology or universal truth” and so that there aren’t relevant objections to it. On the contrary, her criticism is addressed to the rational agent of economic rhetoric: “he is self-transparent: he knows what he wants, and suffers from no unconscious drives that thwart his conscious desires. He is opportunistic: he takes the initiative in pursuing his goals, and actively seeks and promptly takes advantage of every opportunity to advance his goals. [...] He is self-reliant, and expects others to likewise look after themselves. He is cooly-calculating [...], autonomous and self-confident.”2 According to her, the agent sketched above is not only far from actual agents, but also undesirable, as normative models. Indeed, actions out of a sense of obligation, from some external force, altruistic, social norms etc. are not considered in that picture. Although she argues that the only aspect of rational choice theory that can be criticized is the rhetorical one, however she claims that the main task of the theory, that she identifies in explaining human actions, is carried out by rhetoric rational choice. The results that come up applying the theory are considered as carring a normative force, only thanks to rhetorical reasons: “if the concept of “preference” [...] were understood purely formally, as “whatever people, in fact, choose” [...] then the principle would have little normative force. Why should we think 1Anderson (2001). 2Anderson (2001).

4 that people choose well, or that what causes them to choose has any normative authority? [...] Economists have only one plausible reply: because, in general, people are autonomous choosers [...], and individuals are the ultimate normative authorities for themselves”3. In conclusion, she criticizes formal rational choice theory for failing to distinguish many kinds of preferences4 that an agent can hold, and for lacking normative authority without rhetoric rational choice theory. So, although her distinction between rhetoric and formal rational choice is worthy in order to reject feminist theorists that accuse rational choice theory to endorse a selfish agent and a “separative self”5, nevertheless it is not enough to support the use of rational choice theory for some gender issues. In response to this, I distinguish specific applications of rational choice theory in economic analysis and rational choice theory in itself. More, I specify that normative authority, as it will be shown in the first chapter, is not given by rhetoric features, but it is given by axioms that aim at grasping that behaviour that is a patently irrational behaviour. So, normative force is given by the adeguacy of the axioms in ruling out irrational behaviour. Axioms, however, can be criticized through the exhibition of cases in which agents fail to satisfy at least one axiom, but their behaviour is still considered reasonable. Indeed, I present in my third chapter the case of gendered epistemic value of the menu, that reveals that the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternative is inadequate to deal with some gendered choices. Rhetoric considerations, such as that the choice to stay at home made by many women is autonomous, opportunistic and self-reliant, can only justify some specific interpretations in applying the theory to concrete phenomena - but I am not interested in such applications here6. Therefore, from noting that formal rational choice theory can’t account for different kinds of preferences or that it has been employed in objectionable analysis, it doesn’t follow that it should be rejected. My aim here is to show that additional structures can be sought to enrich the theory and to treat some gender issues, still maintaining its formal aspect. A difficulty in looking at rational choice theory and gender studies simultaneously has been that they have different starting points: rational choice

3Anderson (2001). 4See also Folbre (1994). 5England (1993). 6For example, it is often quoted Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family, see for example Folbre (1994); Anderson (2001) criticizes Kristin Luker’s “Taking Chances:’ Abortion and the Decision not to Contracept”

5 theory, especially in the part of individual choice I consider, starts from individual’s preferences, taken as already given. Gender studies, on the contrary, often starts from the social dimension that affects individual preferences. Between individual actions and social outcomes, it seems that there is a gap. Folbre (1993), another feminist scholar, while she notes that the concept of preference used by rational choice theory is too thin for support- ing feminist purposes, also encourages to go beyond the dichotomy between individual choices and structural constraints. In the following, I have tried to develop this suggestion. Briefly, in the first chapter I define rationality as consistency, presenting a debate about consistency; in the second chapter, I present the problem of the slow advancement of women; in the third chapter I presented the gender epistemic value of the menu, which is an inconsistent choice made out of gender group membership. Finally, I argued that this case offers the possibility to inquiry into the normative conditions for rationality for a specific class of problems.

6 Chapter 2

Revealed Preferences

In the following chapter, I will fix the framework of revealed preference, to define a rational choice. Particularly, I will outline the route that leads to the definition of rationality, inquiring firstly into the conditions for preferences to build a maximizing choice function (ordering), secondly into the conditions for choice to represent an ordering (independence of irrelevant alternatives) (2.1). I will then specify that revealed preference is a formal notion, that has also an interpretation and that normative models treat abstract problems (2.2). After that, through the representation theorem I will give the definition of rationality as the maximization of the utility function, sorting the concept of utility out of misleading interpretations (2.3). I will consider then four principles that are being assumed: responsiveness to motives, maximization, neutrality and exhaustiveness (2.4). In the last section, I will consider a critique addressed by Sen to the consistency of choice as the only requirement of rationality, and I will conclude that, at least at a first interpretation, it is a blank shot (2.5).

2.1 Formal tools

The tools of the theory of revealed preference are choice functions and preferences. Preference is a binary relation over alternatives, choice function is a non-null subset of alternatives, formally: Deﬁnition 1 (Choice function) Let X be the ﬁnite and nonempty set of alternatives. C : X → P (X) is a choice function if and only if ∅= 6 C(X) ⊆ X. A characteristic of the theory is the absence of any reference to agent’s motives in making choices. The various reasons that inhabit the motiva-

7 tional sphere of subjects are deliberately not taken into account. Indeed, ’revealed preference’ exactly means that preferences, which are unobserv- able, are linked to choices, which are observable: choice is thought as expressing agent’s preference, and preference, in turn, is thought as nothing but what is expressed by agent’s choice. The common slogan is that revealed preference’s aim is to look at behaviour with anything other than behaviour1. As Binmore clariﬁes, indeed:

“modern decision theory succeeds in accommodation the inﬁnite variety of the human race within a single theory simply by denying itself the luxury of speculating about what is going on inside someone’s head. Instead it pays attention only to what people do”.2

However, revealed preference is a technical notion, and it differs from the notion of preference generally employed. In ordinary speech, the word ’preference’ is used with the general meaning of having a psychological positive attitude toward something, and specifically it is often used inconsistently. For example, it is common to say “I chose the first option, but I didn’t really prefer it. I just chose it to pleased my mother”, or “I preferred to shut up, even if I would have really spoken out”, etc. So, ’preference’ is referred to the chosen alternative, or to a state of mind. On the contrary, in revealed preference, the word ’preference’ means only the alternative chosen, without any reference to any psychological state. To emphasize the gap between the technical meaning and the current usage, I will distinguish three senses of ’preference’ which differ from the revealed one3. i) A preferred alternative can be thought as an alternative chosen because the agent likes it, rather than because she has the duty to choose it, or he holds some principles that support it (e.g. “I prefer to stay at home today, but I should go to work”). In this sense, preference is opposed to duty or principle. ii) Or, an agent could have a preference because she expects an advantage from the alternative he prefers, so in this sense, a preferred alternative is the most advantageous one. iii) Preference is also used in relation to agent’s self interest as opposed to agent’s altruism. In the sentence “no one really prefers to give money to charity” it has been assumed that preferences can be expressed only for

1The slogan ’the behaviour without anything other than behaviour’ dates back to 1949, when Little referred it to Samuelson’s revealed preference theory: “If individual’s behaviour is consistent, then it must be possible to explain that behaviour without reference to anything other than behaviour”, quoted in Bossert and Suzumura (2010). 2Binmore (2006). 3Hausman (2007).

8 alternatives chosen out of self-interest. iv) Meanwhile, in the sentence “if I really could had chosen, I would have preferred a world with no famine”, ’preference’ refers to the alternative I would have hypothetically chosen. All these meanings are diﬀerent from the revealed one. The relationship between choice and preference of an agent established by the theory of revealed preferences can be analysed in two ways:

1. it is possible to draw a choice function, which satisﬁes the principle of maximization, from a preference relation over alternatives: if the agent prefers an alternative, and she behaves rationally, then she will choose that alternative;

2. it is possible to deﬁne a preference relation over alternatives from a given choice function which satisﬁes the principle of maximization: if the agent chooses an alternative, and she is rational, then she prefers that alternative.

In the following, I will develop the point 1, from preferences to choice, and the point 2, from the choice to preferences.

2.1.1 From preferences to choice Here I show the three properties that the preference relation has to satisfy in order to be revealed by a maximizing choice function. These are the axioms to obtain a maximizing choice function. A preference for an agent i is a relation between two alternatives belonging to the set of alternatives A: i⊆ A × A. For all e, f ∈ A, e i f, means that the agent i prefers the alternative e to the alternative f.

Strong preference The axioms for the preference relation here considered are asymmetry, completeness and transitivity, which constitute what is called an ordering. Having them, it is possible to deﬁne a choice function which satisﬁes the principle of maximization. Being e, f, g ∈ A:

Axiom 2 (Asymmetry) If e f then f e. Imposing this axiom means that the agent has clear preferences over alternative. It rules out the possibility for an agent to be indiﬀerent between two alternatives: if the one is preferred, the other one is rejected. Indeed, it is easy to deﬁne, from the strong preference relation, another preference

9 relation, called weak preference relation, which includes the possibility to be indiﬀerent toward two alternatives. However, because it does not strictly aﬀect the cases I intend to consider, I will omit it, and I will consider only the strong preference.

Axiom 3 (Completeness) If e f then f e. This axiom states that the agent has preferences which are defined over the all set of alternatives. There isn’t any alternative that the agent ignores how to rank. It is important to note that the incompleteness must be distinguished from the indifference. Indeed, being complete is compatible with being indifferent. When an agent is complete, her preference might be feeble, reflecting contrasting attitudes, but finally it must be univocally formulated. This axiom highly idealizes the agent, which is thought as transparent to herself and with an opinion about everything4. Axiom 4 (Transitivity) If e f and f g then e g. The transitivity demand avoids that the agent runs into cycles of prefer- ences5, preferring e to f, f to g and e to g. An example of cycle is the ’money pump’: imagining that the agent starts with f, and pays a sum of money to someone in order to get what she prefers: so, f in exchange of e, g in exchange of f, and e in exchange of g. This would appear clearly irrational because he would return to the starting point, just with less money 6. Consider now the optimal element of the non-empty set of outcomes: Definition 5 (Optimal element) Being A 6= ∅ and ⊆ A × A, e∗ ∈ A is the optimal element if and only if e∗ e, ∀e ∈ A. Another way to write the definition above, linking it to the choice function ∗ ∗ S, is the following: C(A) = optA = {e ∈ A|e e, ∀e ∈ A}.

4Consider an agent who prefers a to b and b to c. Holding the completeness, the agent should prefer either a to c, or c to a. If she preferred c, she would have cyclical preferences, and if ¬(c a), than the completeness axiom forces her to prefer a.A critique to completeness (see for example Sen (1970)) emphasises that it is acceptable to be incomplete in such cases. 5To be precise, the property that avoids cycles is acyclity, which is weaker that transitivity. There is a big debate a about the weaker forms of transitivity (see for example Bossert and Suzumura (2010)), but I will assume transitivity for simplicity. 6The argument of ’money pump’ assumes that ’to prefer’ is equivalent to ’to be willing to spend money’, and that the agent has no reason to throw away money. More, it is directed against cyclicity, which is implied by the intransitiviy, but is something weaker. Sen (1970) rejects transitivity as axiom and assume acyclicity.

10 The choice function above satisfies the principle of maximization, because selects the most preferred element. The proposition below states finally that asymmetry, completeness and transitivity are suitable axioms for the preference relation that is expressed by a choice function which satisfies the principle of maximization.

Proposition 6 If i is an ordering, then the C deﬁned by (opt) is a choice function.

In order to be a choice function, C must be non-empty (by the very definition of choice function), or, in other words, it must exist an optimal element. Since the preference relation is not reflexive, there are at least two elements in E, and by the definition of optimal element, this exists.

2.1.2 From choice to preferences The question here is which property does the choice function require in order to reveal a preference relation that is an ordering. The idea is that an agent prefers the alternative x to the alternative y, if, whenever x is available, she chooses x and rejects y.

Revealed preference axiom The idea of revealed preference discussed above is grasped by the following deﬁnition:

Deﬁnition 7 (Revealed Preference) x y ⇔ x = C ({x, y}).

It is easy to show that the relation , as it appears in the deﬁnition of revealed preference, is an ordering.

1. It is asymmetric: indeed, if it were not, x y and y x, then x = C ({x, y}) and y = C ({x, y}). By the transitivity of the equiva- lence, x = y.

2. It is also complete: indeed, if C is a choice function, C 6= ∅. So, x = C ({x, y}) or y = C ({x, y}), and by the deﬁnition of revealed preference, x y, or y x.

11 3. To show that the relation is also transitive, it is required an axiom concerning the choice function, called the Axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives.

Axiom 8 (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) Let x, y ∈ X and X ⊆ Y . If x = C(X) then y 6= C(Y ).

If the choice function satisfies the independence axiom7, then the relation is transitive. Indeed, suppose it is intransitive and that the choice function satisfies the independence axiom: C ({x, y}) = x ⇒ y 6= C ({x, y, z}), and C ({y, z}) = y ⇒ z 6= C ({x, y, z}) and C ({z, x}) = z ⇒ x 6= C ({x, y, z}). But if follows that C ({x, y, x}) = ∅, which contradicts the definition of choice function. So, is transitive.

It has been established that the independence is the only property that the choice function must satisfy in order to reveal an ordering relation. A choice function that satisﬁes that axiom, is called consistent.

2.2 Rational choice

2.2.1 The representation theorem It has been established that a choice function reveals an ordering relation if and only if the choice function is consistent8. Now, I have to establish that the ordering properties of agent’s preferences allow to construct an utility function for the agent’s behaviour. The utility function associates a numerical value to each alternative, giving thus a formal characterization to the intuitive idea of maximization. The representation theorem states that the axioms of revealed preferences are suﬃcient and necessary in order to assure that it is always possible to associate to the outcomes of a decision problem some numerical values, in such a way that the numerical value associated to the alternative e is bigger than the numerical value associated to the alternative f, if and only if e is preferred to f by the agent. Roughly,

7There are many ways of formalising the axiom of independence, in relation to the speciﬁc form of preference relation we are considering. Here I shall consider ordering and this form of independence axiom. See Bhattacharyya, Pattanaik and Xu (2010) 8All this section section follows the presentation given in Hosni (2011), Lecture notes on rational choice theory, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.

12 choosing rationally will mean choosing the highest-ranked alternative - or, in other words, the alternative with the greatest number of utility.

Deﬁnition 9 (Utility function) Let x, y ∈ X be some alternatives, and ⊆ X × X. The function u, u : X → R represents if and only if x y ⇔ u(x) > u(y).

Theorem 10 (Theorem of representation) 9 The followings claims are equivalent:

1. is an ordering

2. the function u, u : X → R does exist.

To build an utility function from given preferences there is a standard model, that consists in giving the greatest number to the highest-ranked alternative, and the smallest to the lowest-ranked alternative. The other alternatives get numbers in the middle. An example could be the following: the preferences of agent i over alternatives e, f, g, h are g h f e. The easiest way to build an utility function is to associate the greatest number to g, say u(g) = 1 and the lowest to the e, say u(e) = 0. The number between 0 and 1 are associated to h and f, say u(h) = 0.8 and u(f) = 0.3 The representation theorem doesn’t state the way in which the utilities should be given to alternatives, and, as long as the ordering is fulfilled, every utility function is suitable. In the case above, for example, indefinite functions can be constructed: u0, which assigns u0(g) = 8, u0(h) = 0, u0(f) = −1, u0(e) = −1000; u00, which assigns u00(g) = 4, u0(h) = 3, u0(f) = −3, u0(e) = −4, and so on. The concept of utility associated to each alternative is thus ordinal, rather than cardinal. This means that it doesn’t matter if the intensity of preference for an alternative is strong or feeble because there isn’t any objective scale for agent’s preferences. To have a scale that measures the strength of agents’ motivation toward alternatives, it would be necessary to establish which is the (good and permissible) source of motivation: the pleasure, the happiness, the money, the peace, etc. In the history of philosophy several attempts have been made having this aim10. Anyway, to find out an objective standard to measure the utility is different from what I am considering here and I am employing an ordinal notion. This is an element that distin- guishes the concept of ’utility’ employed in choice function from the concept

9For proof see Kreps (1988). 10See for example Driver (2009).

13 of ’utility’ employed by utilitarianists: the former is ordinal, the latter has a cardinal element11.

2.2.2 Rationality as maximization Having deﬁned the utility function, it is possible now to give a formal deﬁnition of rationality under certainty.

Deﬁnition 11 (Rational decision under certainty) An agent decides rationally under certainty if and only if she maximizes her own’s utility function.

This deﬁnition refers directly to what I call the principle of maximization (and indirectly to others), and makes it more precise. The agent, choosing rationally, behaves as if she were maximizing her choice function. This doesn’t mean that she actually or intentionally maximizes what she has reck- oned her utility, but that someone else can build her utility function from her consistent behaviour - for example in order to predict it. An important remark is to avoid the ’causal fallacy’: an agent doesn’t choose nor prefer an alternative because that alternative has a greater utility number; quite the contrary, an alternative has a greater utility number because is chosen or preferred by the agent. So, the agent doesn’t choose because of the utility, but because of her responsiveness to motives: because the agent is purposive and responds to motives, and choosing of a certain alternative suits best them. Another important remark is to avoid to substantialise the utility: the concept of utility is indeed a ’thin’ concept, and according to Binmore “in the theory of revealed preference, utility functions are no more than a mathematical device introduced to help in solving choice problems”12. The utility function so might have whatever argument: the important feature of the utility function is that it makes evident the structure of the maximization. The theory of revealed preferences, and in particular the representation theorem, provides the argument of the utility function, only once either the choice or the preferences are given. The word ’utility’ is somewhat misleading because it is linked to the utilitarian philosophical tradition, but what it expresses in the contest of the theory of choice, is an index which

11This argument applies also to the utily for decision problem under uncertainty. Indeed, even if the presence of the subjective probability factor makes the utility overall ordinal, nevertheless the cardinal component of utility appeals to nothing substantive, as pleasure, happiness, and so on, but only to the probability an outcomes occurs. 12Binmore (2009).

14 is maximized by a function. To make clear this, let’s consider again the principle of mazimization, and let’s formulate it in another way: given a set of feasible alternative A, the agent chooses rationally if and only if she maximizes a certain index, f. Let x ∈ A, and let f(x) the index associated with x. The principle can be thus expressed by saying that the agent chooses rationally if and only if she chooses the alternative x∗, where ∗ ∗ ∗ x = maxx∈A f(x) = {x ∈ A|f(x ) f(x)∀x ∈ A}. In the theory the index f is called utility. It is worth to warn also about the confusion of tasks: to have deﬁned the utility function and linked it to preference and choice is an important mathematical result. It states that under certainty, the decision problem is (simply) a problem of maximization. Another issue is to deﬁne the index f: it might be, for example, an epistemological problem for the modeller, if the task is to model agents’ behaviour; it might be an ethical problem for the agent, if she has to decide how to behave in some ethically sensitive situation; it might be a political problem when the task is to take collective decisions13.

2.3 Principles

There are four basic principles14 that are relevant to my previous expo- sitions. Two of them concern the agent, and other two of them concern the modeller.

1. Principle of responsiveness to motives: following what is called the humean tradition about reasons15, rationality consists in reasoning in response to one own’s motives. ’Rational’ refers to a purposive behaviour, namely an action that has some positive relation to one’s

13Things actually are more complicated that this, and not so sharply distinguished to each other: a firm which commissions a research about clients behaviours and analyzes them only through the profit index, could be blind to other indexes that clients maximize, from their perspectives. The marketing campaign of the firm then, ignoring other motives, could unintentionally create situations that discourage agents to maximize another index, say the social cohesion, that they were previously maximizing instead. The initial epistemological decision about which index should be assumed has thus also ethical and political implications. In the following I will show a kind of choice that, being individual, still has a political aspect: the transindividual category of gender will make it possible. 14This section follows the presentation given in Hosni (2011), Lecture notes on rational choice theory, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. 15Williams, (1981).

15 own internal motives for acting16. These are given, and, whatever they are, a rational action is responsive to them.

2. Principle of maximization: given a decision problem, a rational agent behaves in a maximizing way, in relation to alternatives. The idea is to satisfy as many desires as possible, or, in other words, to rank the preferred alternative and to choose the ones at the top. I called the argument that is maximized by a rational choice function utility, but it can includes everything that agent might desire.

3. Principle of exhaustiveness: the model of a decision problem contains all and only the relevant information to the decision of an agent. This means that, once the set of feasible alternatives is fixed, it is not allowed to add new alternatives. If alternatives are added, another decision problem is shaped. Choosing an alternative in a model is different from choosing which are the alternatives belonging to the model. I called the first function decision maker, the second modeller. This principle concerns the modelling task, which consists in abstracting from agent’s concrete situation17. The choice problem I am considering is a formal one: this means that the relevant elements to solve it belong to the definition of the problem.

4. Principle of neutrality: the rationality in solving a decision problem is independent from the content of preferences expressed by the agent. All preferences, aside from their political, aestethical, ethical, or whatever content-dependent character, are equivalent. Rationality is not content-dependent, and formal properties of consistency will define it, having identified firstly the behaviour that is clearly irrational.

16Bossert and Suzumura (2010) quote the words of the economist Lionel Robbins, in An Essay on Nature and Signiﬁcance of Economic Science, in expressing the pivotal im- portance of the assumption of a purposive behaviour: “There is sense in which the word rationality can be used which renders it legitimate to argue that at least some rationality is assumed before human behaviour has an economic aspect - the sense, namely, in which it is equivalent to ’purposive’. [...] [I]t is arguable that if behaviour is not conceived as purposive, then the conception of the means-end relationships which economics studies has no meaning. So if there were no purposive action, it could be argued that there were no economic phenomena”.

17Hosni (2012).

16 2.4 A comment on preference and models

Before going on, a remark on the revealed preference. Looking at the mathematical definition of revealed preference, the slogan quoted above ’nothing other than behaviour’ seems true. Nevertheless, I am going to argue that the slogan is not exactly true. Besides its formal definition, revealed preference has also an interpretation. The symbol between a and b in a b is called ’preference relation’ rather than, for example, ’seize relation’, and this means that it has a specific interpretation. To have a good model for rational choice indeed means having both mathematical formulas and interpretations. Rubinstein, speaking of economic models, writes: “an economic model differs substantially from a purely mathematical model in that it is a combination of a mathematical model and its interpretation. The names of the mathematical objects are an integral part of an economic model. When math- ematicians use terms such as “field” or “ring” which are in every- day use, it is only for the sake of convenience. When they name a collection of sets a “filter”, they are doing so in an associative manner; in principle, they could call it “ice cream cone”.”18. So, the interpretation of the formal relation between two mathematical points as the preference relation between alternatives, is essential to the model. So, considering the interpretation for , it comes up that the formal notion of revealed preference refers to the the intuitive meaning of preference, which consists in a psychological attitude. In other words, the definition of revealed preference says that if the agent chooses an alternative she has a positive psychological attitude toward it, in any way the positive attitude is expressed. Sen early emphasized that revealed preference has a psychological dimension, and wrote that: “faith in the axioms of revealed preference arises [...] not from empirical verification, but from the intuitive reasonableness of these axioms interpreted precisely in terms of preference. [...] The whole framework of revealed preference analysis of behaviour is steeped with implicit ideas about preference and psychology. I would, therefore, argue that the claim of explaining ”behaviour without reference to anything other than behaviour” is pure rhetoric, and if the theory of revealed preference makes sense it

18Rubinstein (2006).

17 does so not because no psychological assumption are used but because the psychological assumptions used are sensibly chosen”19. So, revealed preference makes some psychological assumptions, even if they are weak: in calling the relation over alternatives, which is revealed by the choice, ’preference’, the theory claims that it is at least always possible - if not actual -, that the agent’s preferences are revealed through the choice. Even if agents often reach a compromise between different reasons, however their purposive character can be expressed by the preference revealed by the choice. Hausman (2007) calls this sense of preference “all-things-considered rankings”, that consist in agent’s “overall evaluation of the objects over which preferences are defined. This evaluation implies a ranking of these objects with respect to everything that matters to the agent: desirability, social norms, moral principles, habits - everything relevant to evaluation”20. Hausman emphasizes that preference, unlike desires, implies a comparison between two alternatives, and also a reference to agent’s beliefs and evaluations. According to him, revealed preference links objects of choice to beliefs and evaluation, though the relationship among them remains very general and rough. Psychological considerations are compatible with normative formal models. Those are built to formalize choices in abstract and idealized context21, rather than to describe real choices. To have normative models I am considering here, there are three steps: firstly, to look at intuitive decision problems, secondly to build a formal model for those problems, and thirdly, to compare the formalized problem with its intuitive form. Whether the sets of axioms and principles that constitute the formal model are good, has not an univocal answer, but it depends on the applications the theorist has in mind: the theorist might aim at formalizing the most general class of problems, assuming that agents have complete knowledge of what is going on; at formalizing specific form of problems where agents have some specific concerns; at formalizing problems in which agents are acquiring information and can revise their preferences, etc. So, as Kreps writes, about the correctness of axioms “this largely depends on the application that you have in mind. [...] No one that I know of would seriously maintain that individuals do conform exactly to the sorts of axiomatic systems that will be studied here. [...] At best then, individual behavior

19Sen (1973). 20Hausman (2007). 21For the terms ’abstraction’ and ’idealization’, the reference is Hosni (2012).

18 approximates the axiomatic based behavior that we shall study. Why then does it make sense to study the behavior of systems (economies, organizations) where the actors are presumed to satisfy exactly the axiom systems? The answer must be: because if their behavior is approximately what is modeled, then the model will tell us something about how their behaviors interact or in- tertwine in the system. This, the reader will surely note, takes a somewhat large leap of faith”22.

So, according to Kreps, the theorist has on the one hand models and on the other hand concrete situations. Between them, a relation of approximation holds, and because it is not a well defined relation, Kreps speaks of a ’leap of faith’. My aim is to argue that the amount of faith can be reduced if more models for different kinds of problems, and I will show this for gendered choices. In doing so, the degree of abstraction for each class of problems would be reduced and finer-grained models could be compared to real situation. The trouble point about abstraction indeed is that it makes possible to have general models, but often these models turn out to be too general to correspond to real problems. Different models for classes of problems would still treat abstract problems, but in a less general way. About predictions, they could furnish more refined predictions, and more context-dependent reasons.

2.5 A debate on consistency

According to what established so far, how an agent should behave in order to choose rationally? She should just avoid to choose inconsistently: since (according to the principle of neutrality) rational is everything that is not irrational, the rationality and the consistency of choice coincide.

2.5.1 Sen’s critique Sen refers to the deﬁnition of rationality as the consistency of choice as the thesis of the internal consistency of choice. Quoting his words, consistency properties, such as the independence of irrelevant alternatives, “are internal to the choice function in the sense that they require correspondence between diﬀerent parts of a choice function, without invoking anything outside choice (such as motivation, objectives, and substantive principles)”23.

22Kreps (1988). 23Sen (1993).

19 Sen has argued that there is something deeply misleading in this conception of rationality - even something false. His critique, which is developed through a wide range of paper in different periods24, addresses to the very core of the theory of revealed preferences. Indeed, since Sen claims that “the point is [...] that there is no ’internal’ way [...] of determining whether a particular behaviour pattern is or is not consistent”25, it follows that the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives is not enough to ensure the sought consistency of choice. Sen’s strategy to falsify the thesis of internal consistency is to present some cases in which agents’ choices violate the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternative, showing that they have inconsistent choices, which are nevertheless reasonable. The cases presented, thus, would be “counter-examples”26 for the thesis of internal consistency of choice27. Example 12 (Epistemic value of the menu) An man meets an acquiai- tance after long time. He is offered by the acquaintance to have a tea togheter. The agent then refrains from going to home directly and kindly accepts the tea. But, when the acquaintance widens the options and offers him also to take cocaine together, the agent regrets his previous choice and decides to go home directly28.

Example 13 (External norm) A person sits at a dinner table and has to choose a fruit from a basket. Unfortunately the fruit basket is very poor and contains only one apple. The agent decides then to behave decently, taking nothing. But, as soon as another apple is added to the fruit basket, he immediately picks up the old apple and starts eating it with relish29.

Example 14 (Expressive choice) A University lecturer uses to spend four hours a week to discuss with his research students about their problems. Sud- denly, the head of the department imposes the rule that the lecturers must devote not less than one hour a week to discussions with their students. The lectur then, feeling bitter about that, begins to spend exactly one hour per week with his students30. 24Sen (1973),(1977),(1993), (1997), (2002), (2007). 25Sen (1993). 26Sen (1997). 27The list of cases includes, in addition to Sen’s examples, also other examples which inhabit the literature. The quadripartition is slightly diﬀerent form Sen’s classiﬁcation; see chapter 4 for discussion. 28Sen (1993). 29Sen (1993). 30Bhattacharyya, Pattanaik and Xu (2010).

20 Example 15 (Reason based) A European student has to decide where to go for his Master. His offers come from Princeton University and London School of Economics. He would really like to study at an American Univer- sity, and so chooses Princeton. But, as he realizes that a place at Chicago University is become available, he falls in doubt and finally opts for remain- ing in Europe, and going to London31. According to Sen, agents’ choices violate the axiom of irrelevant alternative: the adding of a new alternative changes the preference relation between two already ranked alternatives. Nevertheless, agents’ behaviours seem reasonable to the observer, and the reason is that something external to the choice is taken into account by him. According to Sen, “the basic difficulty arises from the implicit presumption underlying that approach that acts of choice are, on their own, like statements which can contradict, or be consistent with, each other. That diagnosis is deeply problematic. Statements A and non-A are contradictory in a way that choosing x from {x, y} and y from {x, y, z} cannot be. If the latter pair of choices were to entail respectively the statement (1) x is a better alternative than y, and (2) y is a better alternative than x, then there would indeed be a contradiction here (assuming that the content of “being better than” requires asymmetry). But those choices do not, in themselves, entail any such statements. Given some ideas as to what the person is trying to do (this is an external correspondence), we might be able to “interpret” these actions as implied statements. But we cannot do that without invoking such an external reference”32. Thus, only inside a context which is furnished by the menu, agent’s actions are intelligible: considering, for example, that taking the last apple in a basket is considered an indecent behaviour and thinking that the agent observes decency norms, her behaviour is intelligible. Cases above show not only that every alternative means something different according to the context it is located (menus), but also that human actions, which are ’expressive’ and ’meaningful’, mean differently according to menus - and this, for the very reason that human beings are social. “I would argue - say indeed Sen - that the philosophy of the revealed preference approach essentially underestimates the fact

31Rubinstein (2010). 32Sen (1993).

21 that man is a social animal and his choices are not rigidly bound to his own preferences only. [...] An act of choice for this social animal is, in a fundamental sense, always a social act”33.

2.5.2 Binmore’s reply According to Binmore’s reply, Sen’s critique relies on the confusion on what concerns the normative and the descriptive level. The alleged violation of independence springs from the erroneous model shaped for the problem. For example, let’s remind the case of the epistemic value of the menu above, and let’s t =tea, h =home and c =cocaine, M the set of menus. The problem can be formalized as follows: let X = {t, h, c}, and A, B ∈ M are defined as A = {t, h} and B = {t, h, c}. Since A ⊆ B, according to the axiom of irrelevant alternatives, if C {A} = t then h 6= C {B}. But in the case C {A} = t and h = C {B}, so the axiom is violated and the choice is inconsistent. The intuitive reasonableness of the final choice is due to the fact that the adding of the new alternative (cocaine) meaningfully enriches the old alternative with new information. Since the information is not at all irrelevant, the agent doesn’t violate the independence axiom. He rather tackles with another alternative, and so, for the principle of exhaustiveness, with another problem. “The reason that she violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives without our finding her behavior unreasonable is that snorting cocaine isn’t an irrelevant alternative for her. The fact that cocaine is on the menu changes her beliefs about the kind of person she is likely to meet if she accepts the invitation. If we want to apply the theory of revealed preference to her behavior, we must therefore find a way to formulate her decision problem in which no such hidden relationships link the actions available in her feasible set A with either her beliefs concerning the states in the set B or the consequences in the set C”34. Basically, since ’having a tea’ and ’having a tea with a cocaine addict’ are two different alternatives, the agent doesn’t violate the axiom. To build a normative model and to assess its empirical adequacy are two different tasks. Agent’s rationality, even if it is assessed on the basis of a model, is independent from the ability of the modeller. Also, intensionality phenomena

33Sen (1973). 34Binmore(2009).

22 about the the agent’s perception of the problem, don’t aﬀect the modeller’s task. Kalai, Rubinstein and Spiegler describe the economic modeller’s work in the following way:

“The economist’s standard way of explaining35 choice behavior is by seeking an ordering, whose maximization is consistent with the behavior. [...] Imagine that you receive information on the choices made by a decision maker (DM) from all subsets of some set X. You know nothing about the context of these choices. You look for an explanation for the DM’s behavior. You would probably look first for a single rationale explaining the behavior. Specifically, you would seek for a rationalizing ordering - that is a linear ordering on X, such that for every choice set A ⊆ X, the DM’s choice from A is the best element in A according to the ordering. [...] The “Independence of Irrelevant Alternative” axiom - which requires that the chosen element from a set also be chosen from every subset that contains it - is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such explanation”36.

Sen denies the role of independence axiom as they stated it, and he points out that something external to the choice is always necessary to interpret the problem. But that’s the point: an economic model, unlike a mathematical one, requires always an interpretation. The quoted passage assumes that the decision problem has already been defined, i.e. that the general situation has been already interpreted and that it has already been established which are the alternatives involved. So, if the external element Sen refers to can be brought back to the choice about how to describe the problem, then he says something true, but quite obvious, and, since the task to define the alternative concerns the modeller, his argument doesn’t undermine the definition of rationality as consistency.

35As it is clear by the context, here the ’explanation’ of a given object consists in presenting the object under a theory which is consistent with it. 36Kalai, Rubinstein, Spiegler (2001).

23 Chapter 3

Gender issues

In the following chapter, I will introduce a point on the current feminist agenda. Firstly, I will deﬁne some tools to tackle gender phenomena (3.1): the category of gender itself and gendered groups. Secondly, the problem of the advancement of women will be presented (3.2), both as a statistical phenomenon concerning the percentage of women in the top positions, and as a phenomenon rooted in individual psychology, through adaptive preferences, stereotype threat and gender schema, that are diﬀerent ways to refer to choices out of self-censorship. Finally, I will refer to a debate inside feminism about the individual choice, particularly when it leads to disadvantageous consequences for women (3.3). I will conclude that the way in which the problem is generally outlined is misleading.

3.1 Framework

3.1.1 Up to the third wave Nowadays a lively debate is going on about feminism, which takes place not only inside the academia, but also, and mainly, outside it - on newspapers, blogs, associations, popular books, conferences, etc. A pivotal point is at stake: whether to consider feminism something still alive or belonging to the past. The one party claims that we are now in a post-feminist age, the other party claims that feminist issues are still relevant as feminist. However, whatever the answer is, it is clear by the debate itself that the complete history of feminism has not already be written. More, since to decide when and why a feminist analysis is required is in itself a feminist issue, not only the writing of the history of feminism is still in progress, but also the very history of feminism continues its course. Any deﬁnition

24 of feminism is then partial and useless. So, if it couldn’t be a standard to decide what belongs to to the feminist debate and what does not. Feminism has not an epistemological standard of its own, but the general standards of good arguments. Everyone who argues about women and men as social actors offers arguments that animate the feminist debate - although not every argument in the feminist debate is a good argument. Feminists have never had a shared view: if the goal of equality has been generally accepted as the goal, the means to achieve it, its concrete meaning and the reasons upon which it must be taken as a goal have been controversial. This is the reasons why scholars often speak about ’feminisms’, rather than ’feminism’. Nevertheless, despite the diversity, it is common to describe the impact of feminism with the metaphor of waves1. Roughly, by ’first wave feminism’ people refer to the period from the beginning of the century to the First World War; by ’second wave feminism’ people refer to sixties, seventies and early eighties feminism. The commonly told story2 continues saying that second wave feminism has suffered a crisis due to the discovery of the difference in the very inside of the women movement. As Haslanger, Tuana, O’Connor (2012) put it: “Feminism waned between the two world wars, to be revived in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as Second Wave feminism. In this second wave, feminists pushed beyond the early quest for political rights to fight for greater equality across the board, e.g., in education, the workplace, and at home. More recent transfor- mations of feminism have resulted in a Third Wave. Third Wave feminists often critique Second Wave feminism for its lack of attention to the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and emphasize identity as a site of gender struggle”3 Indeed, second wave women, who were the object and the subject of the feminist discourse, and who spoke on behalf of all women, were actually white, middle-class and heterosexual, representing thus a very partial perspective of all women. In the eighties, critiques coming from black feminism4 em-

1For example, Cavarero and Restaino (2002), Haslanger, Tuana and O’Connor (2012). However, the metaphor of waves, even if it is widely spread, is also criticize for its stressing only on the uniformity and obscuring the diﬀerences inside the feminist movements, and for underestimating what happened between two waves concerning the history of women. See for example Nicholson (2010). 2Fraser (2007), for criticism about the told story. 3Haslanger, Tuana, O’Connor (2012). 4See for example bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman?(1981).

25 phasized the fact that being woman is an heterogeneous experience, whose diversity was obfuscated by using only one term for ’woman’. Indeed, not only gender, but also class, race and sexuality were considered important variables to be used in order to understand what being a woman means. So, second wave feminism has been experiencing a crisis concerning its own identity: indeed, if the uniformity of the category of women is attacked, also the legitimacy that the category of woman used to give to feminist analysis is undermined, and, as stated above, the question about the actuality of feminism arose. Since the beginning of the nineties to nowadays, feminism has been experiencing this crisis. Terms like backlash against feminism, post- feminism5, statements like ’I am not a feminist, but’6 began to be widely used in the public debate, reflecting a sort of obsolescence of the word ’feminism’. In the current galaxy about feminism, however, beside these terms, it is also common to find out the label ’third wave feminism’. This clearly refers itself back to the feminist tradition of the so called second wave, ac- cepting then its legacy, but also emphasizes that it brings something new to this tradition7. What is new is basically twofold: the generation of people involved, namely young people who deal with an economic and social world which is very different from the scenario of the second wave, and, as a consequence, the themes treated. Questions like the pay gap, the glass ceiling and the effective commitment with the equality of opportunities took a relevant place in the feminist agenda, which is indeed multiplied. For that reason, the third wave word is various as never before, encompassing differing, perhaps sometimes incompatible, positions, from the so called american riot grrrls to academic teams researching on specific themes.

3.1.2 Gender, among others The term ’gender’ became largely spread in second wave feminism instead of ’sex’. Indeed ’sex’ were primarily used to refer to some biological

5See Heywood and Drake (1997), particularly introduction and chapter three, Jean Nedeau’s post, http://news.change.org/stories/ is-feminism-dead-an-overview-of-post-feminism, or Jeanne Goudreau’s article http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2011/12/13/ afraid-of-post-feminism-means-feminist-today-gloria-steinem-jane-fonda-ursula-burns/ 3/. 6Kim McGann’s post http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2011/10/ im-not-a-feminist-but.html, or Chloe Angyal’s post on the Guardian http: //www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/07/feminist-f-word-young-women. 7The birth of the third wave feminism is generally dated from Rebecca Walker’s article on Ms 1992, “Becoming the Third Wave”.

26 feature (genitals, chromosomes, etc.) whose possession by a baby determines its belonging to the category of either males or females. On the contrary ’gender’ was used to emphasize that being woman or being man is a fact concerning more the socialization than the biological constitution. Despite the fact that both terms extensionally were used to refer to the same class of individuals (women and men), ’gender’ was preferred for two reasons: ﬁrstly, because it emphasizes that the feminist criticism is addressed to the way women are socialized, which is something not determined by their biological constitution; secondly, because it considers the class of women always in relation to the class of men8. Gender is intrinsically an interpersonal category, and analysing one of the two genders means to compare and contrast both of them. So conceived, though it focuses on the social dynamics, the category of gender refers to the women - i.e. the class, which is supposed to be homogeneous, and composed of biologically female individuals.

Sex and gender From the eighties, the definition above fell under a twofold criticism: both the sex as a biological fact and the homogeneity of women’s condition were considered false premises. About the first, indeed the distinction between sex and gender turned out to be more controversial than it seemed: biological researches on intersexed people 9, Foucault’s studies on sexuality, and contributions from the queer theory have highlighted that the bipar- tition (and the tri or quadripartition as well) of sexes is already a social product: individuals’ sex in itself is not necessarily univocally defined, or defined for ever. Bodies and their sexual characters are largely a social product, due to the gender division of labour, education, gendered dress, nutrition, etc. and gender is the result of performing many acts. Since the ’ontological legitimacy’, i.e. the power of referring to something real, of the category of gender was given by the objective existence of biological facts, these critiques, denying the separate existence of biological facts, undermine the legitimacy itself of the use of the category of gender. Here I will neglect this critique, because in order to pursue my purpose - analysing gendered choices - it is enough that gender is thought by the majority of social actors as having a somehow objective biological base, and that social actors act according to this belief. For my analysis, whether their belief is true or not, does not really matter. So, I will assume gender as a relational

8Oakley (2002), Ruspini (2009), Mikkola (2011). 9Chodorow (1978), and recently the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling.

27 and social category, built around some biological facts. These, however, are a matter of degree, and the way we look at them and the meaning we give to them are a consequence of social construction10: “enduring or extensive patterns among social relations are what social theory calls ’structures’. In this sense, gender must be understood as a social structure. It is not an expression of bi- ology, nor a fixed dichotomy in human life or character. It is a pattern in our social arrangements, and in every day activities or practices which those arrangements govern. Gender is a social structure but of a particular kind. Gender involves a specific relationship with bodies. This is recognized in the commonsense definition of gender as an expression of natural differences, the bodily difference of male from female. What is wrong with this formula is not the attention to bodies, nor the concern with sexual reproduction, but the idea that cultural patterns simply ’express’ bodily difference.”11

Gender, race, class, nationality, etc. The second criticism made to the use of gender as homogeneous category is more interesting for my purpose. It concerns the primacy of gender over other categories, which second wave feminism is supposed to be committed with. ’Gender’ is taken as an apt category to analyse the reality because the reality itself, through the socialization of social actors along gender prescriptions, is structured along the gender axe. Think for example of the reality of family and the division of labour that the second wave feminism faced: this was definitely influenced by gender roles, indeed men occupied extra-domestic roles, and women domestic roles, accustoming themselves in finding in the family their realization. Second wave feminism12 denounced this situation and encouraged women to look for jobs away from home, breaking the division of labour along the gender axe. But things change if other axes are considered. Think for example of women in poor families, who are compelled to work for the sake of family; or, of the fact that the majority of poor women is composed of Afro-American women. These facts highlighted how white feminism used to take the condition of white, middle- class, heterosexual women as the condition representative of all women:

10Haslanger (1995) calls this a ’weakly pragmatically construction’, namely a distinction whose use is partially determined by social factors. 11Connell (2002). 12An example is Betty Fridan’ The Feminine Mystique’(1963).

28 “dominant Western feminist thought has taken the experiences of white middle-class women to be representative of, indeed normative for, the experiences of all women. [...] The real problem has been how feminist theory has confused the condition of one group of women with the condition of all.”13 As the proposal of working outside the household to emancipate oneself from a subordinated role clearly shows, it was common in the second-wave thought to assume gender as the most important category to analyse the structure of reality. In doing so, class, race, etc, were neglected and the particular condition of black women, working-class women, etc. were neglected as well. There are indeed many axes along which people are socialized, and in choosing ’gender’ as the privileged one, second wave feminism has assumed it as if gender referred to an homogeneous group14. In doing so, two assumptions are made: from the ontological point of view, that gender identity can be separated by other forms of identity, for example, racial or religious identity; from the epistemological point of view, that this separation does make sense in itself, aside from other distinctions. Both these assumptions turn out to be problematic: women are socialized in their being women in different ways, and other identities are not simply added beside the gender one15. Being a woman means many things in relations to different categories, and it is not the case that there is more affinity among women compared to men, than among black people compared to white people. Quite the contrary, it happens that in many cases, a working-class woman is closer to a working-class man, than to an upper-class woman. As a consequence, to say simply that women are gendered, in order to distinguish them from men, is an empty tautology: the combination with other factors produces different meaning of ’being woman’. Ignoring this leads to misleading results. Continuing the example above, even if it might be true that the subordination of women in upper-class fifties families demanded that women started to work to be overcome, the idea that women subordination might be resolved with extradomestic work is false when applied to those women for which working is necessary. In this case, working far from home, still maintaining domestic activities can, for example, increase their subordination16.

13Spelman (1988). 14Spelman (1988), Williams (2000), Damaske (2011). 15See Spelman’s criticism to ’additive analysis’, in “Woman the one the many”, in Spelman (1988). 16Okin (1989), Fraser (1997).

29 This critique, stating that other categories such as class, race, age, religion, sexuality, nationality, disability, etc. must be considered, feeds gender scepticism17, namely the scepticism about the use of gender as an analytical category. Indeed, granted that gender is insufficient, how can the right number of categories be established? Reality is structured along many axes, and none of them seems in itself more important than others. But once individuals are considered through so many categories, and once it has been agreed that all individuals belong to many groups, such categories seem irrelevant to provide a good analysis: finally, what matters seems to be only the individual situation, aside from many many categories which an individual might be referred to. Since every category has a different meaning depending on each other (so being woman is different for white women and black women, for black middle-class women and black working-class women, for black heterosexual working-class women and black homosexual working- class women, and so on), then, it can be argued, only people in their being different individuals remain. The more the analysis is accurate (adding spec- ifications), the less the use of identity categories seems analitycally fruitful, because the less it refers to a trans-individual condition that is equally ex- perienced by a group. This conclusion, that leads to give up with social categories, however, is quite undesirable: to consider the society as a sum of separate individuals is a weak solution under at least three aspects: firstly, it disregards all the similarities and the common processes that have been pointed out in much feminist research; secondly, it produces a partial knowledge, since, even if not all women always act out of their being women, in some circumstances this character is the most important to explain an action; thirdly, it is politically insufficient:

“in a culture that is in fact constructed by gender duality, however, one cannot be simply ’human’. This is no more possible than we can ’just be people’ in a racist culture. one cannot be gender-neutral in this culture”18.

3.1.3 Gendered groups Up to now, it is clear that gender does not correspond to any group of people which is stable, or homogeneous. It has been pointed out that gender is desirable as an eﬀective category of social and political analysis, though it

17Bordo (1993), Lawson (2007). 18Bordo (1993).

30 has in itself no special legitimacy, that many other categories may lack. Cri- tiques to some uses of gender have also helped in identifying two questions that must be answered to. So, the ﬁrst question is ontological: what kind of relation is held between gender and individuals that belong to a gender? This question has two sides: the sex-gender one (which is less interesting here) and the manifold members one. The former focuses on what those people grouped into the same gender share; while the latter focuses instead on the analysis of the kind of group that gender establishes, and its relation with other groups, established by race, class, etc. The second question is epistemological: if gender, like other categories, furnishes a partial analysis, what kind of knowledge does it provide? Feminist attempts to analyse gendered groups19 have generally focused on the process of groups formation: which social norms, in many ﬁelds (education, beauty norms, labour, parental relationships, etc.), have led to the formation of gender as a distinctive group? Here I intend to look at groups avoiding their genealogical process. I will look at groups as far as they are already formed and as far as groups norms are already in force. This is because I am more interested in phenomena about people acting out of group membership, and in understanding what maintain the membership alive in people behaviour.

Aggregates Think, for example, of the statement: “women earn less than men”, which can be uttered in the context of pay gap discussion, after statistical analysis20. This statement selects two groups along the gender line, women and men, and compares them with relation to their salaries. But what do the terms ’men’ and ’women’ refer to? The first hypothesis is that they are aggregates of people which individually are classified either as a man or as a woman. If the sentence is true, all or most of people belonging to the aggregate ’woman’ earns less than all or the majority of people belonging to the aggregate ’men’. And, that all or most of the woman earn less than man is a necessary and sufficient condition to make the statement true. Since “an aggregate is any classifications of person according to any number of attributes”21, Real Madrid’s fans, people with blue eyes, obese people,

19I am using the term ’group’ provisionally with no technical meaning. 20See for example http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/ gender-pay-gap/situation-europe/index_en.htm. 21Young (1990), chap. 2.

31 etc. constitute aggregates. Nevertheless, the category of gender works in different ways from people with blue eyes. Comparing (1)’women earn less than men’ and (2)’people with blue eyes earn less than others’, it seems that ’people with blue eyes’ is a more random feature than ’women’ and ’men’ with respect to the fact of earning. In the statement (3)’people with blue eyes withstand contact lenses less easily than people with dark eyes’, the aggregate people with blue eyes makes more sense than in (2). This is explained by the fact that having blue eyes is a physical matter with no or few social meaning. Since earing is primarily a social experience, while withstanding contact lenses is primarily a physical experience, having blue eyes is more suitable with the physical predicate. So, it can be said that gender has a social meaning that having blue eyes lacks, and this explains why they should have different characterization. Yet, it can be objected that everything has a social meaning and the difference in social meaning between having blue eyes and gender is only quantitative: also having blue eyes has a social meaning, indeed every Prince Charming’s description encompasses blue eyes, which have become something socially desirable. This objection is easy to reject just thinking, for example, of a blue and cross-eyed person: falling out of the stereotype, blue eyes as such loose their social meaning at all. Eyes have a trivial social meaning, which is easily cancelled adding new feature. On the contrary, substantially being woman or man has a social meaning, which is modi- fied, but not cancelled, adding new features, i.e. rich woman, black man, working-class woman, etc. So, compared for example with ’blue eyes’, the category of gender has a substantial social meaning. One may further wonder if gender works like ’being obese’. Leaving aside not well defined cases, ’being obese’ works like ’being woman’ (or ’being man’), as far as it refers to a physical character which has a deep social meaning. Indeed, being obese is generally associated to a negative social meaning that feeds a form of discrimination22, and also the society is generally structured thinking of not obese people as ideal types (just think for example that some airlines make obese passengers buy two seats). Weight classifications have in common with gender classifications that an agent might act out of them, in reaction to others’ discrimination: e.g. an obese man might avoid to wear swimsuit because he feels ashamed about possible (or simply imagined) others’ reactions, or a woman might avoid to engage in a high-demanding job, in reaction to gender norms about mothering. However weight and gender

22According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ’sizeism’ is the prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a persons size.

32 classification are different under a relevant respect. Leaving aside serious and clinical problems, being obese is something one can deal with both individually and directly: if one wishes to quit being considered obese, and to avoid the social and unhealthy consequences of this fact, he can decide to go on a diet. Being obese can also be dealt indirectly, as a by product, when for example obesity is linked to other problems like ignorance or poverty. About gender, one cannot escape alone from his/her gender, stopping being man or woman: there is not way out of gender distinction, for most of the people. Further, a more complex social structure corresponds to gender, not only a form of discrimination: it is more pervasive and more changing. It is also relational: focusing on what women do makes sense only comparing it with what men do. In the case of weight, distinctions are not so clear and wide. So, compared for example with ’obese people’, the category of gender has a substantial social meaning which corresponds to a deep social structure, from which a woman, or a men, cannot escape ’tackling their gender’. Up to now, comparing gender both with primarily physical categories and physical categories with a social meaning, it results that gender groups are different from aggregation: they refer to a deep structured society that associates with the acknowledgement of gender a net of functions inside the social activities, e.g. the traditional division of labour. More, when statements like (1)’women earn less than men’ are uttered, the groups women and men are involved not only as statististical generalization, but also as a feature meaningfully linked to the reason of the difference in earning: women earn less in some way because of their being women. To (1) be true, it is necessary that all or the most of women earn less then men, but it is not sufficient. There is indeed an implicit reference to the reason of this difference in earning, linked to their being men and women.

Collective agency However, despite the acknowledgement of the similar social role played by gender distinctions, being woman or man is diﬀerent from being a teacher, or from being a member of the Democrat Party or of the Council of Ministers or of the jury. These are, or are strictly linked to, associations23, namely to a group where people decide to become members. In these cases, there are some formal and informal expectations on agents. More, the group one belongs to has an internal structure with an head and decisional procedures:

23The term associations for this kind of groups derives from Young (1990), but the following considerations apply also to what List and Pettit (2011) call ’group agency’.

33 it does then make sense to say that the jury, as a group, has some beliefs about a candidate, the desire to announce the winner and an eﬀective power to make its desire real. More, as far as one belongs to the group, she agrees with such rules and she belongs to something which goes beyond individuals desires and beliefs24: that a single member of the jury does not agree with the jury’s ﬁnal judgement is irrelevant to the judgement of the jury. One can also quite easily leave the group, if something she strongly opposes happens. On the contrary, as far as you are a woman or a man, you are subjected to social expectations which are largely informal, and leaving the group, or avoiding to fall under either group, is for most of the people impossible. In most of the cases, indeed, people do not choose a gender, but they act out of the norms of the gender they think they belong to - what is culturally held as appropriate for men and women to do25. More, gender does not identify groups having a decisional structure, and for that reason to say ’women’s belief’, or ’men’s desire’ is quite odd.

Open groups What is clear is that gendered groups are neither mere aggregates nor agency groups. They select people who simultaneously belong to other groups, and in deﬁning people identity they can be relevant or irrelevant according to the context of choice (for agents) or inquiry (for researchers). They are open groups because people might get in or out, and there are not sharp boundaries establishing who counts as a man or woman. These groups stay alive as more than aggregates thanks to the common knowledge about people’s gendered roles. Members of groups indeed know, explicitly or implicitly, norms about gender. Further, they know that other members know, explicitly or implicitly, norms about gender; further, they know that other members know, explicitly or implicitly, that they know about norms of gender. This common knowledge manifests itself in expectations based on gender roles and social sanctions (shame, exclusion, scolding, etc.) if expectations are not fulﬁled. People tend to adapt to their gender roles either because of their belief that the role is right, or because of their belief that there is not alternative available, or because of avoiding sanctions, because of habit, or just because of convenience. Beliefs about expectations, roles and sanctions constitute a class not necessarily coherent of social prescriptive statements beside the gendered groups: statements about what a person should do, or not do, according to her/his gender. If the gendered group is

24List and Pettit (2011). 25Haveman and Beresford (2012).

34 salient in some actions, then also prescriptive beliefs are made salient, by acknowledging the membership to a gender group. The gendered groups are visible only considering a large number of people, and they don’t exist aside from actual people belonging to the group: they are composed by the very individual actions - unlike the Italian Par- liament, that exists regardless of its members. Nevertheless, the existence of gendered groups can also affect individuals actions, when people change their behaviour because it is not coherent with a norm - unlike people with blue eyes, who are not affected by what people with blue eyes do. Gen- dered groups do not form agencies: indeed, they lack shared beliefs and desires, decisional structures and effective power to affect the reality. As Young wrote, “while [...] membership delimits and constrains an individual’s possible actions, it does not define the person’s identity in the sense of forming his or her individual purposes, projects, and sense of self in relation to others”26. Gendered groups also lack a shared goal to pursue. Yet, they form such groups that might become agency, if something happens, or fails to happen27: as I said before, they share a common knowledge, so they share some beliefs, and potentially they might also shared some desires - at least, as far as they concern gender issues28. Historically, it is happened that agency groups have been formed on the base of gender, although the number of individuals members was smaller then the number of individuals belonging to the gender group. What is peculiar of open groups is that they concern the background where individual identity takes place29. The background formed by gender, which is just one among many, is sometimes highlighted, sometimes darkened, sometimes it is more salient, sometimes is unimportant. Up to now, I have tackled the ontological question about gender. But since it has been stated that a gender characterization is neither exhaustive - class,

26Young (1994). 27Young (1994). 28Phenomena like adaptive preferences (see further), when they concern systematically gender groups, show that there is a kind of partial structure of preferences that gendered group might share. It is worth to note, however, that when adaptive preferences are linked to gender issues, also factors like nationality, class, race and religion are relevant to be considered. 29As Young (1990) wrote: “A social group is a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or ways of life. Members of a group have a specific affinity with one other because of their similar experience or way of life, which prompts them to associate with one another [...]. Groups are an expression of social relations, a group exists only in relation to at least one other group. Group identification arises, that is, in the encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in their way of life and forms of association”.

35 nationality, etc. must be considered too - nor always crucial - imposing for example some certain behaviour to those belonging to a gender - also the epistemological question now can be answered: gender as a category of analysis furnishes a kind of knowledge that is the more likely the more empirical evidence supports it. Gender does never determines a pattern, because other categories, potentially countless, are equally important to analyse individual behaviour. Knowledge based on gender characterization (like on race, class, etc.) is partial in a double sense: it must be integrated with other analyses and an exhaustive analysis is in itself impossible, through such categories. Their use in social sciences, then, responds to pragmatical demands: according to the (partial) interest of the researcher, one or another category might be highlighted, even if the result is partial. An example of this come up thinking of an Italian social phenomenon: the large number of women carers coming from Eastern Europe. A social scientist might analyse the complex phenomenon choosing to highlight distinct axes: either for carers women or for Italian women, she can focus on the gender line, or on the class line, or on the nationality line, etc. In this sense, such categories are relevant to point out speciﬁc phenomena, even if, taken individually, present the situation under a partial description.

3.1.4 Drawing some premises From what I have said so far, in order to justify and use gender as an analytical category, as I intend to do here, two premises are important:

1. Political premise: there are unjust inequalities on the gender axe, and injustice should be addressed. This is a conclusion from:

(a) factual premise: there are systematic inequalities along the gender line, (b) anti-reductivist premise: because gender is not merely a descriptive category, but also a prescriptive category, and because there is no justiﬁcation for these inequalities, (c) political conclusion: then these inequalities are unjust.

2. Epistemological premise: only assuming gender as a category of analysis these inequalities become visible as unjust. This latter is strictly linked to the ontological understanding of gendered groups as something that brings together the individual and

36 the collective dimension, being more than the aggregate of individual behaviours and less than an intentional group.

3.2 The advancement of women

In the previous section I have drawn a theoretical framework to understand in which sense a social phenomenon is a gendered phenomenon. Now I will introduce an empirical social gendered phenomenon, whose solution is also a issue in the feminist agenda: the advancement of women. Such advancement concerns the positions women held in work, in appar- ently egalitarian environment and without any explicit obstacle. To refer to the diﬃculties women face in advancing it is often used the term glass ceiling:

“the term [...] has become a popular way of referring to the scarcity of women at the top levels of organizations. The phrase suggests that invisible factors [...] keep women from rising to the top. It also assume that hidden inﬂuences are unlikely simply to disappear over time [...]. Finally the term suggests that women’s job performance is at least the equal of their male peers.”30

’Glass ceiling’ presents the diﬃcult advancement of women as something composed by factors that it is possible to detect, and that must be addressed. Yet it is only a metaphor that does not furnish any explanations of why such an obstacle to women’s advancement exists, and what it consists in. Another sociological term used is vertical occupational sex segregation31.

“Occupational sex segregation is a property of a total given labour force[, namely it is] the tendency for men and women to be employed in diﬀerent occupations from each other across all the occupation under analysis[, and] is an assessment as to how far the concentrations of men and women diﬀer from the ’unseg- regated’ labour force. [...It] has two components[: the vertical occupational sex segregation (VOSS)] is the inequality dimension of overall segregation. [...It] requires the introduction of some ordinal scale. Whitin the setting of labour force, the most obvious value we can attribute to ’inequality’ is pay. VOSS then, refers to the disproportionate distribution of men and women

30Valian (1999). 31Browne (2006). See also Haveman and Beresford (2012).

37 across occupations, which, when on a hierarchical (vertical) scale indicative of pay levels, will reveal quantitative inequalities between the sexes in employment. It is a statistical measurement of the correlation between the orderings of occupations by sex and by pay. [On the contrary, horizontal occupational segregation] is a dimension that simply indicated diﬀerences [...] that does not comprise pay inequalities”32.

3.2.1 A collective phenomenon: statistics To describe the glass ceiling phenomenon, a place and a profession must be identified. Having them, it is possible to control the concentration of women and men in the lower and higher positions, and to compare them with the total concentration of men and women in that occupation in that place. Here I will present an example of glass ceiling, which refers to the presence of women in Academia, particularly in the philosophical field, in UK Universities33. A Report from the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy UK34 provides data gathered from 38 UK philosophy departments during the period 2008-2011. Data show that, at the undergraduate level, the course in philosophy is equally undertaken by man and women, unlike for example matemathics or English studies: the percentage of women undergraduate students is 46%. Then, after the graduation, the percentage of men and women occupied in philosophy grad- ually begins to differ. The percentage of women as Master students, both Research and Taught, largely drops at 37%; while at PhD level, women represent only 31% of students. After the PhD level, women belonging to the temporary staff (casual teaching, temporary lecturer/teaching fellow, temporary research staff) are 28%, while women belonging to the permanent staff (lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor) are just 24%. Particularly, the percentage of women who reach the professor position is only 19%. So, the more people go up with their career in philosophy, the more women and men’s routes differ - and women’s one seems slower. ’Philosopher at University’, pretending that is a profession from the undergraduate level, is not a horizontally segregated profession: many men as women begin it; how-

32Browne (2006). 33For other statistics, see Valian (1999), who describes woman presence in American Academia, and Browne (2006), who describes vertical occupational sex segregation in the BBC. See also a recent article on the Guardian, Curt Rice, 24/05/2012: Why women leave academia and why universities should be worried, Guardian, ttp://www.guardian. co.uk/igher-education-network/blog/2012/may/24/why-women-leave-academia 34“Women in Philosophy in the UK”, September 2011.

38 ever, it presents the vertical occupational sex segregation: women struggle to reach the top.

3.2.2 A suffered and acted phenomenon Above I said that gender is a category that brings together a collective and an individual dimension. Therefore, as a gendered phenomenon, the advancement in professions has both a collective and an individual aspect. These aspects can be analysed differently, but in fact are deeply linked: indeed, on the one hand the overall percentage of women in professions is the result of individual women’s achievements; on the other hand what prevents women from advancing in greater achievement is commonly suffered by all of them. A full understanding of the phenomenon requires to highlight both the aspects and to see it both as a suffered and as an acted phenomenon: indeed, avoiding to see the individual dimension, the phenomenon is easily reduced to a net of constraints passively imposed to women; avoiding to see the collective dimension, instead, the systematic character of women under- valuation, which makes a simple inequality matter a justice matter, remains undiscovered. As a consequence of this double structure, also the proposed explanatory causes must cover both the individual choices made by women in pursuing their career, and the collective constraints, either those explicit, such as the law and rules, and those implicit, such as norms. Many attempts of explanations have been proposed by social scientists. Jude Browne35 schematically divides them into three kinds: psychological and pycho-physiological dualis- tic theories, which look for differences among men and women to explain the different results of their different behaviours; theories of patriarchy, which refer to the patriarchal project to favour men and to thwart women; theories of human capital and preferences, which draw women positions in the labour market as an advantageous consequences of women preferences and division of labour. To these causal theories, it can be also added the analysis of Browne herself, which is a dissonance theory, highlighting the gap between practical allowed alternatives and individual preferences. It is out of my aim and competence to analyse the causes of the social phenomenon36, but I want just to stress that it is possible to approach it

35Browne (2006). 36The (not only feminist) literature about position of women in economy is huge. See for example Babcock and Laschever (2003), Becker (1992), Browne (2006), Crompton (2007), Damaske (2011), Folbre (1993), Fraser (1996), Hakim (2007), Nussbaum (2000), Okin (1989), Valian (1999), Williams (2001).

39 in different ways: from an analysis of legislation, through interviews about women’s satisfaction, to psychological experiments, etc. However, since the phenomenon is complex and, as I said before, has a double structure, every theory pointing out a single cause gains in clarity while loosing in completeness, and so it is partial. My concern about women advancement is a philosophical one: it is hard to think that individual women choose those alternatives that, under an overall perspective, lead to their inferior position at work, in the same way as a person chooses to eat either an apple or a strawberry. Assuming that the desire to pursue the academic career is equally spread among men and women, it is hard to think that women simply and voluntarily refuse to pursue it. Something happens and prevents women, acknowledging them as women - or women acknowledging themselves as women - to pursue their goals. As gendered phenomena, indeed, it is more plausible to think that individuals choose occupations both as individuals and as members of a gendered group - women or men. So, my philosophical concern looking at this kind of choices is to seek features that can be helpful to enrich the account furnished by the rational choice theory for individual choices in normative context. This differs from seeking what really happens in women’s choices affecting their advancement in career, which is instead object of a descriptive concern. I will focus on individual women’s choices under the perspective of normative rationality, using psychological phenomena, when they can enlighten phenomena of rationality. Individuals, who make individual choices realizing their preferences, as far as possible, are endowed with some beliefs: they have the belief that society is gendered and the belief that they belong to a gender group. This means that implicit and explicit norms about gender are in force: something is allowed on a gender basis, something is commonly held appropriate according to gender, and something is commonly held better made by women or men. Explicit norms constitute the law: for example, in UK the laws regulating maternal and paternal leaves give more weeks to mothers (twenty-six) than to fathers (two)37. These explicit norms, which are informed by a previous understanding of gender roles, contribute to enforce gender norms: in families mothers have more benefits than fathers in doing care work, and that incentivizes women to be primary carers at home and men breadwinners. In fact, explicit norms are not separated by implicit norms, indeed the formers are often informed by the latters, and reinforce them. However, they must be analytically distinguished from each other because they differently affect

37Browne (2006).

40 the individual choice. Indeed, choosing in a context where explicit norms (like rules about maternal leaves) push people into gender roles (like mothers as ﬁrst care givers) is like choosing in a context where the alternative that an agent might prefer misses (i.e. it is legally not allowed for fathers to stay at home for a long period, and mothers at work). This may be unjust, or hard, but, analitycally is the same kind of choice as people who try to realize their desire according to the alternatives available (i.e. it is like an agent who wants to eat apples, where apples are not available - even if, perhaps, they should be available for other reasons)38. I am not interested in this kind of scenario, although it represents one relevant source of inequality, and also a source of potential changing through explicit political intervention. I am more interested in implicit norms, that make an alternative formally available, in fact no as available as others, for agents. The question is whether in this scenario there are some phenomena that is worth to account for in deﬁning normative rationality. Implicit social norms encode what is held to be appropriate for men or women. People don’t need to be necessary aware of the norm, while they conform to them. According to Bicchieri (2005), who furnishes a rational reconstruction of what a social norm is, the conditions for a social norm to be in force are: 1. contingency: the agent knows that a rule R exists and applies to situation of type S;

2. conditional preference: the agent prefers to R in situation of type S, on the condition that

(a) empirical expectations: the agent believes that a sufficiently large subset of the population conforms to R in situations of type S; and either (b) normative expectations: the agent believes that a sufficiently large subset of population expects the agent conform to R in situations of type S; or (c) normative expectations with sanctions: the agent believes that a sufficiently large subset of population expects the agent conform

38What is worth for options which are absent, it is also worth for options which are unacceptable or clearly bad, because explicit norms are in force against them. For example, in the English legislation, paternal leaves are much less paid than maternal leaves: this makes the alternative of father staying at home clearly unacceptable, unless the mother would earn for both parents, see Browne (2006).

41 to R in situations of type S and may sanction behaviour.

It is not necessary then that people truly hold the content of the norm to be true, but only that the majority think that the majority of people approves the norm.

3.2.3 An individual phenomenon: experiments In the following section I will report some psychological phenomena that concern women when the implicit knowledge of gender norms is trigged. It is worth to remark that it is not at all the case that whenever a choice has to be made by an agent, the agent acts as a man or as a woman. Many choices are made only out of personal attitudes. However statistics show some choices, which constitute gendered phenomena, are made by agents as man or woman. Individual reactions (adaptive preferences, stereotype threat and gender schemas) and other people’s attitude (schemas) are considered. However, as the phenomenon of not asking shows, external and internal mechanisms interact each other in a sort of gender-aﬀected dialogue.

Adaptive preferences ’Adaptive preferences’ is the name given to those preferences an agent expresses in response to her set of feasible options. The exemplary case is sour grapes39: the fox, realizing that the alternative of eating grapes was unavailable, changed his preference toward the grapes. Forming adaptive preferences is a phenomenon that often concerns groups of people whose alternatives are narrowed, and it may be detected through a comparison either with preferences expressed before the narrowing of alternatives, or with preferences expressed by other groups’ members. Nussbaum (2000) and Sen (1999) have emphasized that many women in developing countries adapt their preferences to hardly bearable conditions. However, also in developed countries the phenomenon of the adaptive preference is largely spread - and it is spread on a gender basis. There are for example experiments which show how women’s preferences, especially social preferences, are more context-sensitive than men’s preferences40, and also theories that rely on this diversity. Think for example of the preference theory formulated by Hakim (2007): she gathers data from British women and British men about their life-style preferences, precisely about their attitude toward

39In the recent literature, Jon Elster (1985) was the ﬁrst speaking of adaptive preferences and what he had in mind was exactly the case of the fox with sour grapes. 40Croson and Gneezy (2009).

42 work and family balance. What results is that men and women substan- tively differ: the majority of women prefers to combine work and family (Hakim calls them adaptive women, which is different from the adaptation I am considering here), while the majority of men prefers to succeed in working. However, considered the obstacles to the advancement of women in reaching very successful job positions, being work centered is for women a less available alternative than it is for men. Similarly, for men who find themselves be the only worker in the family, being home-centered is a less feasible alternative than it is for women. So, although this is not Hakim’s conclusion, when life-style preferences are analysed highlighting the gender category and women and men’s choices are compared, it comes up that they are adaptive to contextual constraints. Even if the phenomenon of adaptation is intuitively familiar, yet analytical accounts differ for it. Three issues are at stake: what exactly adaptive preferences are, whether they represent a problem for rationality, and whether they represent a problem for justice. About the definition, adaptive preference can be referred both to a change in preference after having realized that the chosen alternative was unfeasible, and to the formation of the preference itself. If it is easier to identify an adaptive preference comparing it with the preference previously held; nevertheless it is more difficult to identify when a preference has been formed adaptively and there is no narrowing of the set of alternatives: indeed, assuming that adaptive preference are all those preferences held having considered the set of available alternatives41, it seems that either all preferences are adaptive, or a further specified definition is needed to distinguish those preferences which are adaptive. Considering all preferences as adaptive, except those preferences made ignoring everything about the alternative (but in most cases we know something about them), is undesirable because it doesn’t make sense of the intuitive difference in preference formation between adaptation and realistic choice. It is then possible to specify the definition and call adaptive those preferences that explicitly downgrade unfeasible and upgrade feasible alternatives42. A case concerns for example gender roles:

“Consider Yvonne, who is raised in a family with traditional gender roles. Yvonne learns from her mother how to bake, prepare meals, and keep the house clean while the males in the family spend their time engaged in traditional male tasks of lawn mowing, car repair, and home maintenance. Although she never

41Levey (2005). 42Bruckner (2009).

43 considers the matter, it is clear that Yvonne has no option but to help her mother with the traditional female chores because engaging in the traditional male activities is not within her feasible set. As a result of the exclusion of certain activities from her feasible set and her resulting lack of experience with these activities, she comes to prefer the activities within her feasible set.”43

However, it remains problematic to establish when such downgrade of unfeasible options happens and to distinguish adaptation from ignoring the availability of some alternatives. Another issue is the rationality of adaptive preferences. Many authors point out that is often rational to hold adaptive preferences, but they differ in the standard of rationality. Elster (1985) for example considers as irrational those preferences due to a causal process occurring non-consciously, like sour grapes, and as rational the intentional adaptation typical for example of character planning. Bruckner (2009) instead considers as rational those adaptive preferences endorsed upon reflection, aside from the causal mechanism that has brought them about. A different issue is the political meaning of adaptive preferences. Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) use the phenomenon of adaptation as the main objection to the idea that the well-being consists in the satisfaction of subjective preferences. The problem is whether it is possible to consider something as unjust, in the case that it is adaptively preferred by the agent. The answer depends on what is considered as the problematic point in adaptive preferences: their being adaptive, their being preference toward unjust things, their being ill-formed, etc. In the case of adaptive preferences concerning gender groups as a consequence of gender norms, a guide to the answer might be their systematic and unequal distribution in gender groups. So, if adaptive preferences are a consequence of a social norm, the conformity to the social norm is not in itself a problem, but the gendered way in which the conformity expresses itself, and the concrete issue involved (for example economic power), make it a problem. As Levey puts it:

“What is wrong with gendered preferences seems to lie in their distribution. Wanting to be a nurse rather than a doctor, or preferring to forgo a good income in order to spend more time with ones kids are not intrinsically problematic preferences. However, the distribution pattern of these preferences does seem problem-

43Bruckner (2009).

44 atic, as does the diﬀerence in men and womens socioeconomic prospects that arise from choices based on these preferences.”44

Both the rationality and the justice issue about adaptive preferences still lack a complete account, and it is worth to note that they can be treated, as they generally are, separately: a choice which is a consequence of an adaptive preference can be still rational, although unjust.

Stereotype threat and gender schema Experimental data gathered initially by the American social psychologist Clause Steele support the idea of the existence of a stereotype threat. This is defined as “the experience of being in a situation where one faces judgments based on societal stereotype about one’s group”45. Experiments focus on the effect and reaction to societal devaluation expressed by stereotypes in ability performances, like math tests. In a study at the University of Michigan, Steele and his colleagues46 analysed two groups of students, with a mathematical test: the first one was told that generally no gender difference come up, and the result of the first group performance was that women and men equally performed. The second one was told that generally a gender difference was recorded, and the result of the second group performance was that men clearly outperformed women. They concluded that the existence of a negative stereotype toward a group (like that women are less capable than men in hard matemathics) makes that those belonging to the group underperform when the stereotype is activated - for example saying that a kind of test has so far shown differences in result among men and women, or merely stressing on group membership. The point is that under- performances concern also people who do not embrace the stereotype: this means that a stereotype, even when is considered false, generates anxiety affecting performances:

“when a stereotype about one’s group indicts an important ability, one’s performance in situations where that ability can be judged comes under an extra pressure - that of possibly being judged by or self-fulﬁlling the stereotype - and this extra pressure may interfere with performance”47.

44Levey (2005). 45Spencer, Steele and Quinn (1999). 46Spencer, Steele and Quinn (1999). 47Spencer, Steele and Quinn (1999).

45 In daily life, there are many ways to make a person’s group membership notable: from the colours used, to dress code, etc. Also ’tokenism’ might be a feature to highlight group memberships, and experiments have shown that the proportion of women and men in a group can negatively affect women’s performance, when they are underrepresented48. However, it is not uncontroversial that the existence of the stereotype threat is sufficient to explain the difference in performance among different groups outside of experimental conditions: what is enough here, yet, is that a link between activating a stereotype and performance has been found. If researches about stereotype threat concern negative beliefs about group members, the work of the psychologist Virginia Valian widens the affection of shared beliefs also to neutral beliefs about gender. Indeed she calls ’gender schema’

“[gender schema] a set of implicit, or noncounscious, hypothesis about sex diﬀerences [which] plays a central role in shaping man’s and women’s professional lives. These hypotheses [...] aﬀect our expectations of men and women, our evaluations of their work, and their performance as professionals. Both men and women hold the same gender schemas and begin acquiring them in early childhood.”

So, gender schemas are largely shared unconscious beliefs, not necessarily forming a coherent set and not necessarily articulated at the same depth, which are used as useful hypotheses to look at the reality. They are similar to stereotypes, but unlike them, they haven’t the bad connotation which instead stereotypes usually have. That men are taller than women, for example, is not a negative fact, but an average fact that constitutes the schema of both men and women. Experiments49 point out how schemas aﬀect beliefs, for example in assessing men and women height: showing photos of men and women of the same height, participants to the experiment judge men taller than women. According to Valian (1998), gender schemas are psychological devices, similar to role schemas, helpful to form expectations, to make sense of exceptions, to explain success and failures. However, what is peculiar to a gender schema unlike a role schema (father schema, teacher schema, etc.) is the oversimpliﬁcation: gender schemas polarize traditional supposed masculine and feminine traits, making them contradictory, rather than compatible. Valian uses gender schemas and the accumulation of dis-

48Inzlicht and Ben-Zeev (2000). 49Valian (1998).

46 advantage that schemas create to explain the glass ceiling phenomenon in a egalitarian environment.

Not asking Babcock and Laschever (2003) focus on the phenomenon of avoiding negotiation, and argue that is a gendered phenomenon: women are less likely to start a process of negotiation50, or less likely to recognize it when it is already in progress. They call ’not asking’ a phenomenon which includes low expectations, low self-evaluation, low goals, sense of gratitude and in- adequacy, fear to ask, the influence of stereotypes, etc., whose causes are identified in a process of self-censorship due to education and gender norms. Even if women and men involved are rarely aware of the gender differences, the cost of avoiding negotiation is high for women because of the accumulation of disadvantage and because it changes also the attitude of the people women fail to ask, in proposing activities to men or women. ’Not asking’ is a general name to refer to many phenomena that can be analysed differently and that might have different causes. What it points out is that the disadvantageous result for women is the consequence of a many-voices process that brings about actions and reactions: attitudes for asking deriving from social education, reactions in proposing, affection on self-consideration and feeling of entitlement for asking.

3.3 A debate on choice

A issue that feeds the current feminist debate concerns women’s choices. The problem is that many women’s free choices, i.e. choices made without coercion and recognized by women themselves as personal choices, contribute to women’s disadvantage. Choice feminism is “the idea that feminism should simply give women choices and not pass judgement on what they choose [...] feminism requires not a particular set of choices, but rather acting with a feminist consciousness”51. The typical argument is that, since nowadays there is the opportunity for women to work, if a woman freely decides to stay at home, her choice is the result of her preferences, and there is no feminist issue at stake - on the contrary, her choice is feminist as far as she has a ’feminist consciousness’. In the public debate about the choice, often, it is not clear what ’having a feminist consciousness’ means, but it is

50See also Croson and Gneezy (2009). 51Snyder-Hall (2010).

47 something generally invoked to justify, and therefore make unproblematic, stereotypically feminine choices52. The point here is that there is a tension between the individual freedom to achieve what a person wants and what is her narrow interest to pursue, and choices that can affect in a positive or negative way women, aside from the agent’s intention. In other words, if all women are free to choose to stay at home, it is hard to claim that this collective choice would empower women, in a society that values extradomestic work much more than domestic work. Some choices, though out of individual freedom, are definitely positive or negative for gender equality. More, having many choices does not mean to have good choices, as feminist economists often point out53. The structure of systematic disadvantage for women not only shapes feasible options, but also affects women’s desires themselves54. It is easy to see how the thesis of the free choice is simplistic, comparing for example gender choices and race choices: “breast enlargement surgery for white women is framed within a discourse of post-feminism consumer choice, but eyelid reshaping surgery for Korean women, leg lengthening surgery for Chinese women, or skin whiten- ing for women of African origin are all understood as racialized practices, related to white western norms of physical beauty”55. Out of the choice debate, it is possible to detect two opposite theses: 1. “women choices are always unproblematic as far as they are freely

52Here it is an example of such debate on newspapers: “Today’s girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects. This is not terrible news. In fact, to me, this is the ultimate feminist ideal, which Levy [the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs] would realize if she stopped shouting at MTV for a moment and thought about it. She proclaims that boob jobs and crop tops “don’t bring us any closer to the fundamental feminist project of allowing every woman to be her own, specific self”. But what if a woman’s “own, specific self” is a thong-wearing, Playboy-T-shirted specific self who thinks lap-dancing is a laugh and likes getting wolf-whistled at by builders? What if a woman spends hours in the gym to create a body she is proud of? Is that a waste of time, time she should have spent in a university library? No.”, from the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/mar/23/comment.gender. On another side, Natasha Walter writes “it has to be a woman’s own choice if she makes a personal decision to buy into any aspect of what might be seen as stereotypically feminine behaviour [...] I am just sure as I ever was that we do not need to subscribe to some dour and politically correct version of feminism in order to move towards greater equality. We should be looking for true choice in a society characterized by equality and freedom. Instead right now a rhetoric of choice is masking very real pressures on this generation of women. We are currently living in a world where those aspects of feminine behaviour that could be freely chosen are often turning into a cage for young women, from Living Dolls. 53Folbre (1994), but also Mollar-Okin (1989), Fraser (1996). 54See previous section. 55Gill (2007).

48 wanted”. The weakness is that it confuses ’legitimate’ with ’unproblematic’. Although they are free, some women’s choices are problematic for at least two reasons: choices are not only tied to agent’s preferences, but also to the context where the preferences can be satisfied and formed. This is composed by many constraints, such as rules, norms, and assets, and the agent’s position in the structure of constraints is defined by chosen and given groups she belongs to.56. Further, there are some consequences of individual choices which are socially undesirable under a more general sight. Even assuming that individual choices are free, they might collectively create a situation of inferiority for a specific social group, like women. In this case, political concerns of social justice arise, making problematic the individual choices.

2. “women’s choices are coerced by external constraints, mostly social norms, therefore every individual choice that may create a socially undesirable eﬀect for equality, has to be considered not a genuine choice”.

The weakness is that it confuses ’affection’ with ’coercion’57. Almost all individual choices are externally affected; feminist criticism pointed out that many choices are affected along a gender line. However, the affection through the gender line is neither determination, nor the unique form of affection. Indeed individual choice is the result of many, even contrasting, forms of affections coming from society and personal experience. The hardness of the choice does not make it a coerced choice. Hard choices, which mediate gender, class, personal demands, are often fully acknowledged by women. More, even recognizing that some choices are particularly unequally affected, no consequence about political intervention in individual decisions follows.

From what is said about gender groups, there are many reasons to enrich the analysis of choice: indeed, between the individual and the satisfaction of her preferences, there are social groups, that mediate both how preferences are formed and how they can be satisfied. However, these groups and the pressure they exerted on individuals are definitely constituted by individuals themselves and their choices. The reciprocal affection groups-individual creates a circle and the theses above consider only one half of it. Therefore,

56Folbre (1994). 57See for example Chambers (2008), Nussbaum (2000) and Cudd (1994) that propose political account developing their version of the thesis 2.

49 the theses above should be considered as demands, that have to be taken together into an account of gendered choice.

50 Chapter 4

Gendered choices

In the following chapter I will analyse Sen’s argument against the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives in the light of some results from gender studies (4.1). I will introduce a gendered version of the “epistemic value of the menu” argument (4.2) and I will claim that it cannot be reduced to other examples (4.3). I will argue that an extended version of revealed preference can be thought in relation to the specific kind of problems concerning gendered choices (4.4). I will finally consider two current accounts to extend revealed preference, but I will claim that they don’t fit the gendered case (4.5).

4.1 Something external to the choice

In the first chapter, I mentioned Sen’s critique to the internal consistency of choice. There, I considered an interpretation of the external element that, according to Sen, is required in order to define the rationality of a choice: the external element was just the interpretation of the situation that the modeller gives in choosing the model and the descriptions for the alternatives. Nevertheless, this interpretation, as already discussed, does not undermine the definition of rationality as consistency, because it doesn’t concern the decision maker, namely who chooses among alternatives. On the contrary, choosing the model is an higher level function, that I called the modeller. Therefore, a decision maker’s choice is normatively rational if and only if it is consistent, aside from the interpretation furnished by the modeller. In the second chapter, I presented a debate inside feminism about women’s choices that are both freely chosen and yet disadvantageous on a large scale for the women themselves. Both the thesis that holds that since such choices

51 are free, so they are unproblematic, and the thesis that holds that since they lead to women’s disadvantage are then coerced, are inadequate. Yet, they express two requests that has to be taken into account: recognizing constraints to individual choices, even through agents’ preferences, and recognizing an active role for agents in mediating several demands. Particularly, it comes out that, even if the concepts of preference and choice are important to tackle some women’s choices, yet they are insuﬃcient. This leads to go beyond revealed preference, whose tools are only preferences and choice functions. In this chapter I will argue that those choices in which gender is a relevant variable require the adding of new features to rational choice account, and that rational choice approach can be a useful tool for tackling some feminist issues.

4.2 Reasonable Inconsistency

4.2.1 A new example The tale below reports a typical gender problem: it can indeed be considered as a case of glass ceiling and an individual choice which is part of the statistics about women advancement. I will present it informally and formally, discussing then why it appears very reasonable, despite the fact that according to the deﬁnition of rationality, it shows an irrational choice.

• Example 16 Think of a scenario where three people are wondering about their future plans. They are two women, Laure and Anne, and a man, Luc, all of them University students. They are completing their PhD and so far all of them had a brilliant career. Considering their great results, they have quite the same opportunities to continue to work in academia. Discussing about their preferences, Anne tells them that she would like to pursue University career, to work hard and travel a lot, having a job both demanding and challenging. Also Luc expresses the same ambition. Both of them indeed have already received a job offer from a local firm, but they are so much fond in their research field, that they prefer to look for a job which would allow them to continue researching. Laure, instead, claims that she desires to form a family and to rise her children full time. She would be glad to stop working then and to become a housewife. In response, also Anne and Luc say that they desire a family, but also working and cultivate their interests, aside from the family. However, Luc is confident he

52 can well combine his family life and his career in Academia, being a good father and husband and a good researcher. Anne on the contrary starts to think that, after all, also the job in the local firm is not too bad for her, and that probably is the best alternative, among stay at home and working in academia. • The set of alternatives A is composed of ’academic career’ (a), ’local firm’ (f), and ’care work’ (c). M1 = {a, f} and M2 = {a, f, c}. Let’s consider the choice function of the agent Ann, n: Cn (M1) = a and Cn (M2) = f. The choice function of the agent Luc, l, is instead: Cl (M1) = a and Cl (M2) = a As formalized above, Ann’s choice function violates the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives. In Ann’s decision problem, indeed, the added alternative in the menu M2, namely c, despite its irrelevance (it is not the chosen one), affects the preference relation between a and f. As stated in chapter 1, rationality is defined as the maximization of the utility function. Cn cannot be represented with an utility function, u : A → [0, 1]. Yet, the point is that Ann’s choice seems perfectly reasonable: what happens is that, recognizing her membership to female gender, she downgrades her professional aspirations and tends toward an alternative that makes easier for her to combine family and work. More specifically, in recognizing her membership, it happens that a knowledge about social norms concerning gender is triggered, and, because of those social norms, some alternatives become more desirable than others. In Ann’s tale, pursuing a high level career in academia is seen as a less feasible alternative for a woman than for a man; while the care work is seen as a more feasible alternative for her, than for a man. As reported in the previous chapter, the conditions for a norm to be in force for an agent i are i) the knowledge of the norm by the agent and ii) the agent’s preference to conform to the norm, under the conditions that the agent believes ii.a) that others will confirm to the norm and ii.b) that others expect that the agent herself will conform to the norm (and perhaps sanction her, if she fails to confirm). The norm in question could be that women should be primarily care-givers and men bread-winners. Let’s think that Ann satisfies both conditions: Ann’s knowledge of the norm is triggered, and she is willing to conform to the norm under the conditions above, either because she agrees that the norm is appropriate, or because she values that the cost of not conforming is greater then the reward, for herself or maybe for her future family. Some feminist papers analyse the reasons that push women in desiring to conform to norms. Cudd (1994) for example points out that for

53 a family that anticipates future scenarios in deciding the division of labour among partners, choosing to conform to social gender norms, in a society that on average pays more male labour, is advantageous. Also Browne and Stears (2005) present cases in which agents who have preferences differing from those prescribed by gender norms are more likely to make an effort to satisfy them. In Ann’s case, for example, her preference to dismiss the role of first care-giver could be difficult to maintain if women have the right to take more days off for maternal reason, than men for paternal reason1. So, there are many reasons that may lead a woman to be willing to conform to norms. The question then is which are the normative conditions of rationality when an agent prefers to conform (or at least not to oppose) to norms about her group-membership (and the conditions above hold). However, in considering cases like a woman member of a family who should choose about her job, one can think of her decision problem in two ways. The first way consists in regarding her choices as depending on others’ choices, and others’ choices as depending on hers. Others are for example the partner in choosing his job, the employer in offering a contract, politicians in making the law, public structures in furnishing services, etc. This way of looking at the problem is strategic. Here, I am considering such choices individually, namely taking others’ choices as given.

4.2.2 Old examples Leaving aside what specifically concerns Ann’s example and the empirical reasons of the agents, I will take the new tale as an example, like those in the first chapter (see section 1.5). At a first sight, all seem to undermine the definition of rationality as consistency, because they show inconsistent choice functions, which are yet intuitively reasonable. However, as Binmore emphasizes, the inconsistency appears only when the examples are informally considered, but disappears if they are formalized with an appropriate model, with an appropriate description. Below, I will represent them, repeating the division already done.

Epistemic value of menu The example might be formalized in two ways.

1. The inconsistency in the example of epistemic value of the menu comes up with the following model: agent’s choice menus are M1 =

1Williams (2001), Browne (2006).

54 {tea, home} and M2 = {tea, home, cocaine}, and his choice function is C(M1) = tea and C(M2) = home. 2. Yet, considering diﬀerent descriptions for the alternatives, agent’s choice turns out to be consistent. Considering M1 = {tea1, home} and M2 = {tea2, home, cocaine}, agent’s choice function is: C(M1) = tea1 and C(M2) = home, when the preferred alternative, tea1 namely having tea with an old friend, is no more available, and cocaine and tea2, namely having tea with a drug addict, are added up.

This example shows a menu-dependent information2, indeed the agent ac- quires a relevant information about friend only thanks to the new alternative: he is a cocaine addict. This information creates a new alternative, namely having a tea with a cocaine addict, excluding an old alternative, namely having tea with an old friend. In the model these alternatives are different, thus, although agent’s choice objects are different, his preferences have not changed: the alternative that he preferred before is simply no more available, and can not be chosen. Therefore agent’s behaviour is consistent. The point is that choosing among alternatives (decision maker) and choosing which alternatives are available (modeller) might have different conditions for rationality3.

External norm Also the positional choice example might be formalized in two ways.

1. The ﬁrst menu is M1 = {apple1, nothing}, and the agent’s choice is C(M1) = nothing. The second menu is richer in an element, M2 = {apple1, nothing, apple2}. Agent’s choice function, being C(M2) = apple1, is thus inconsistent.

2. Redescribing the alternatives, the ﬁrst menu is M1 = {apple0, nothing}, where apple0 is the last apple; the agent, for decency reasons, chooses nothing: C(M1) = nothing. The second menu is instead diﬀerent for two elements: M2 = {apple1, apple2, nothing}, and the agent chooses the apple, C(M2) = apple1. In this case, the example shows a menu-dependent criterion4: the agent has all the relevant information that makes clear to him to which situation the 2Bhattacharyya, Pattanaik, and Xu (2011). 3Hosni (2012). 4Bhattacharyya, Pattanaik, and Xu (2011).

55 norm ’do not take the last fruit’ applies. The norm, to which he adheres, explains his preferences, which however do not change: he prefers an apple among other fruits to nothing, and nothing to the last apple. The menu then furnishes the criterion for his preferences: indeed only knowing if there are other fruits allows to understand which is the preference suitable for the menu.

Expressive choice Two possible ways to formalize the example of expressive choice follows. 1. The agent faces a first menu of hours to devote to students which is M1 = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...70}, taking 70 hours as the maximum. He chooses to spend four hours, namely C(M1) = 4. The second menu, however, is narrower because the alternative to spend no hours at all has been made no more available: M1 = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...70}, and the choice function is C(M2) = 1, being so inconsistent. 2. The agent’s behaviour turns out to be rational if the alternatives of the second menu are described in relation to the mandatory minimum, like plus one hour to the mandatory hour, plus two hours to the mandatory hour, and so on: so, M1 = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...70} and M2 = {minimum, +1, +2, +3, +4, +5, +6, ... + 69}. Agent’s choices are C(M1) = 4 and C(M2) = minimum Imposing a restriction on the menu of choice generates a reaction aside from the availability of the choice that the agent would make without restriction. This is because the alternatives are different: choosing to spend four hours freely and in a relationship based on trust is different from choosing four hours in a suspicious relationship. Considering the description of the alternatives, the agent leads a rational protest against the restriction. Also in this case, like the epistemic value of the menu, there is a menu-dependent information: the agent has concerns that are not captured by the descriptions initially furnished, namely the trust.

Reason based Also the reason based example has two diﬀerent formalization, as follows.

1. The menu of choice is initially M1 = {LSE, P rinceton}, and agent’s choice is C(M1) = P rinceton. When the menu is widened to contain also another alternative, namely M2 = {LSE, P rinceton, Chicago}, agent’s choice function becomes inconsistent: C(M2) = LSE

56 2. Changing the descriptions of the alternatives into new ones, the choice is consistent: M1 = {Europe, USA}, and C(M1) = USA, M2 = {Europe, USA1,USA2}, where USA1 and USA2, unlike USA, mean also hard decision (or, maybe, spending time to gather enough information). When the criterion employed to choose detects a unique alternative, the decision is usually easier that when it detects more alternatives, as it happens in this example. Avoiding too hard decisions is the reason used by the agent, but it was not relevant when all the alternatives in the menu would have been easy choices: in this case another reason has been employed. This case is closer to the menu-dependent criterion: use the one criterion when there are at least two preferred alternatives and use the other criterion when there is just one preferred alternative. Indeed agent’s preferences are not changed: easy decision and America is preferred to easy decision and Europe, which is in turn preferred to hard decision and America.

4.3 Gendered epistemic value of the menu

4.3.1 Inappropriateness of redescription My claim is that the new tale constitutes a new example, called the gendered epistemic value of the menu (GEVM) which is remarkably diﬀerent from others. I also argue that recognizing this peculiarity undermines Bin- more’s redescriptive solution. Let’s compare the gender case with others. 1. Like the epistemic value of the menu, also the gendered epistemic value of the menu involves an information brought along by the new alternative. But, if the epistemic value of the menu example involves a speciﬁc information (to be a cocaine addict) previously ignored at all, GEVM instead refers to a generic information (knowledge about gender norms), which was already known: the new alternative indeed triggers a social knowledge, which is then made relevant. It happens that an alternative generally linked to women’s role sets up a group membership function, which is paired to a class not necessarily coherent of social prescriptive statements. The information is more indirect and complex in GEVM than in the simpler epistemic value case, because it does not concern the alternatives directly, but the agent’s position toward the alternatives, in relation to degrees of suitability: some alternatives suit better than others. Moreover, the information

57 has a prescriptive form: you should do something according to the norm. 2. Both the positional choice and the GEVM refer to a norm: a decency norm the former and a gender norm the latter. But for the decency norm, it is sufficient the agent’s adherence as individual: she individually decides to be polite and to endorse the norm that prescribe to avoid the last fruit, and she chooses aside from others’ choices. The gender norm on the contrary is considered only as far as the agent recognizes her membership, and to do that, others’ choices are important: in the example, Laure’s choice (and so the alternative that her choice reveals to be available for Ann too) and others’ expectations (as described in the conditions for a norm to be in force) are relevant. The norm so is not individually endorsed, but endorsed by the agent as woman. The decent agent prefers to take nothing instead of the last apple because of the norm she endorses, and indeed she chooses nothing. In the revealed preferences account, the reason of the preference is omitted, but with the appropriate description of the alternatives the model makes the choice clear all the same. On the contrary, the gendered agent would prefer the academic career, but she recognizes herself as a woman, and because of the norm, chooses the local firm. Omitting the reason of the choice, the revealed preference theorist is forced to say that the agent prefers the local firm - but this is in a relevant sense false5. Moreover, another difference between the two norms is that the one says what one should not do (do not eat the last fruit) - this means that every other action is allowed -, the other says what one should do - this means that all other actions are not allowed. It is also evident that there are many ways to endorse the first norm (all except one), and just one to endorse the second (the prescribed one). Nevertheless, as Ann’s choice shows, there are many ways to be influenced by the second norm, without completely endorsing it. 3. Also in the GEVM the agent’s choice is expressive: it indeed expresses that she recognizes the norm and that she is not indifferent to it. Yet, expressing this is not the main goal of the choice. Indeed Ann is choosing her future career, while the lecturer is declaring his ill feeling. 4. Just as the student chooses having as reason to avoid difficult decisions, so Ann chooses on the basis of gender prescriptions - yet, not only on

5Taken the preference in the all-things-considered interpretation (Hausman (2007)) to say that Ann prefers the local ﬁrm is true, but it appears also inadequate.

58 those. She is primarily trying to fulﬁl her aspirations, and her being woman is not the only reason of her choice. This is not a casual feature of Ann’s case, but is typical of GEVM, since gender norms are just seldom completely endorsed: they inﬂuence people’s choices, rather than determine them.

As a result of the above comparison, GEVM has something in common with all the other examples, but it can not be assimilated to any of them. The solution of redescribing the alternatives more approprietly is then not appli- cable for it as for them. Precisely, Binmore’s strategy is in principle appli- cable and indeed the alternatives can be described divided into two menus as follows: M1 = {academy, firm} and M2 = {academyg, firmg, care}, where academyg and firmg are diﬀerent from academy and firm because are linked to gender norms. Nevertheless, in fact the redescription is vague and leads to ask where the gender norm comes from and if it was present even before, what is exactly the gender norm, and what does it mean that the agent chooses (and prefers) the ﬁrm when it is linked to gender norms. Redescribing the alternatives turns out an inadequate strategy to tackle the inconsistent choice, because it makes the scenario poor and too abstract for the problem informally set.

4.3.2 Psychological explanation Here I will present an attempt of psychological explanation that refers to agent’s preferences, which is different from revealed preference. I suggest to distinguish internal preferences from external preferences: Ann’s preferences toward the academic career is internal, while the preferences triggered by the gender norm is external. Such distinction concerns the source where preferences come from, in the context of a specific decision problem, rather than aside from it. For example, also Ann’s preference toward the academic career might have had an external source, if she was pushed toward it by her parents when she was a child. But in that specific decision problem, it is an internal preference. Moreover, it is not a distinction between ’genuine’ and ’artificial’ preferences, namely between agent’s own preferences and preference affected by someone or something else: indeed, internal preferences can be artificial if one, for example, one has been brainwashed, or external preferences can be genuine if a nun endorses every rule of her order faithfully6. The idea is that the first revealed preference for the academic career is internal, and the second revealed preference for the local firm is derived from

6Chambers (2008).

59 other preferences. Precisely, the alternative to stay at home, since it is linked to the gender norm, carries into the decision problem an external preference which is prescriptive for the agent: what is stereotypically feminine (e.g. to stay at home) should be preferred to the alternative that is furthest from the gender role (e.g. a high demanding career like the academic one). Be- cause of transitivity, from the internal and external preference, it results a preference to which the agent strongly opposes, namely that stay at home is preferred even to working at the local firm. The internal preference of the agent is instead the local firm. Now, since the academic career is directly against the norm, and since the agent finds herself with inconsistent preferences, she is willing to dismiss the preference toward the academic career to keep the preference toward the local firm. This process describes the self-censorship the agent establishes toward the ’extreme preference’ and the adaptive preference she finally holds.

1. Being c =academic career, f =local ﬁrm and h =care-work. Revealed preferences:

(a) C({c, f}) = c ⇒ c f (b) C({c, f, h}) = f ⇒ h f and h c

2. Let . be the symbol for preferences, diﬀerent from revealed preferences. Internal/external preferences:

(a) c . f; internal (b) h . c; external (c) h . f; from transitivity, external and internal (d) f . h; internal (e) f . c; to avoid the inconsistency, adaptive preference.

4.4 Revealed preference theory and gendered choices

4.4.1 Back to Sen Analysing Ann’s choice in revealed preference model, with the suitable redescription that avoids inconsistency, seems too poor in relation to the intuitive understanding of what happens. Even at the normative level, it is desirable for the theory of rationality to furnish a richer account. Neverthe- less, including in a model many kinds of preferences and many entities that can not be empirically controlled is a disadvantage for the theory. However,

60 as I have previously discussed, the claim that the revealed preference model is thoroughly without psychological assumptions is false. If revealed preference had nothing to do with preferences as usually intended, the descriptive, predictive and normative claims of the theory would not find a reasonable justification. As Sen noted, the theory of revealed preference makes psychological assumptions, but these are very thin. The problem is that the notion of rationality that follows in some cases is too narrow and defines some behaviour as irrational, when they are on the contrary reasonable, like in GEVM. In the first chapter I presented Sen’s critique to the internal consistency of choice, but it turned out to be quite weak against Binmore’s redescription proposal. Yet, now, Sen’s critique seems to address a slightly different object, although linked: the revealed preference rather than the consistency. The consistency concerns the choice, which most of the time can be re- describe. In an early paper indeed Sen discussed the revealed preference theory as the demand of the theory to reduce any motivational sphere aspects to preferences. Sen (1977) argues that there are other kinds of actions, like the action from commitment, that can not be accounted for with the revealed preference model:

“If you are consistent, then no matter whether you are a single- minded egoist or a raving altruist or a class conscious militant, you will appear to be maximizing your own utility. [...] This approach of definitional egoism [...] involves nothing other than internal consistency. [...] [The] theory has too little structure. A person is given one preference ordering [...] that is supposed to reflect his interests, represent his welfare, summarise his idea of what should be done, and describe his actual choice and behaviour. Can one preference ordering do all these things? A person thus described may be “rational” in the limited sense of revealing no inconsistencies in his choice bevaiour, but if he has no use for these distinction between quite different concepts, he must be a bit fool. The purely economic men is indeed close to being a social moron”7.

This second interpretation of Sen’s critique to the consistency emphasizes how much reductive of agents’ motivations and reasons the revealed preference is. Yet a distinction, which is not entirely clear in Sen’s words, should be made: is he claiming that empirical agents should distinguish diﬀerent

7Sen (1977).

61 kinds of preferences or that theorists with descriptive concerns should do that, or that theorists with normative concerns should do that? A real agent having just an ordering of preference may seems quite fool, but an idealized agent that in a normative model has just one preference ordering is thin, rather that fool. What GEVM shows is that using a thin model sometimes is problematic, because the redescriptive strategy, that is made possible by the thin character of the revealed preference notion, turns out to be poor and misleading for the understanding of what is going on. So, to tackle complex choices, like gendered choices, and to furnish an ad- equate normative model for them, there is no compelling reason for reject- ing the revealed preference theory. On the contrary, the path that can be followed is to lower the abstraction of the problem (e.g. adding a group- membership element) and to enrich the model with additional structures. In this way the theory could account for more reﬁned phenomena, like the self-censorship and the adaptive preferences. Following Hausman’s interpretation, “Sen has shown - though in other terminology - [that] the task of understanding how agents construct their preferences cannot reasonably be left out of economics”8, and from the normative theory of rationality too.

4.4.2 Diﬀerent kinds of problems and diﬀerent kinds of questions The revealed preference model involves only the choices and the preferences expressed through the choice, neglecting the origin of the preferences, the motives and the reasons that may lead an agent to express the one preference instead of the other. For some kinds of problems this is inadequate: in order to have a consistent choice function in Ann’s case, for example, the choice problem should be redescribed in such a way that it would fail to grasp the problem intuitively set. Therefore, the revealed preference theory, simply as it is, is too general for tackling some kinds of problems. A solution is then to group problems into classes (e.g. self-censorship out of group membership), and to look additional structures for each class. The criterion for building classes of problem depends upon the aim of the theorist and on what she wants to highlight. If the person who models have concerns about gender justice, it will be useful to point out choices from self-censorship. But why should gender concerns matter in individual choice? The idea is that individual decisions that involve the agent’s membership to social groups, do not come only from individual preferences. Thus, merging for

8Hausman (2007).

62 example Ann’s aspiration with gender norms in the notion of all-considered- preference9, is particularly inappropriate, unlike the other cases of violation of independence (see section 3.3.1). There is indeed an interpersonal dimension of the choice that reflects the agent’s self-position among other agents. This dimension has been highlighted in social decisions for example by Peter (2003). She argues that in analysing collective decisions, the kind of relationship that people whose preferences are considered hold (sib- lings, strangers, how they were brought up in their attitude’s toward others’ preferences, etc.), should be taken into account. Sen (1989) claims that in cooperative conflicts, like those happening in families, interpersonal factors should be considered. These are the perception of contribution in achievement and the perception of personal interests that agents have, and the breakdown, namely the state agents would find themselves, in the case co- operation among them failed. Such interpersonal dimension is still present also in the individual decision. Agents are situated in different positions in relation to each others, which are often established by social groups membership. Because of social groups affect individual choices, and in turn groups as social actors are possible only through individual choices (see section 2.1.3), when an interpersonal dimension is present, there are not only issues of individual instrumental rationality, but also issue of justice. Indeed, if it is possible to claim that in purely individual choices, namely in choices that concern only one individual and that do not affect others’ at all, the question about justice doesn’t arise. But, when one’s choices affect directly or indirectly others, justice issues immediately turn up. So, through group membership, justice concerns are present also in individual free choices: since individual choice create social groups, which affect individual choices, individual choices affect others’ individual choices. If theorists are interested in gender justice, then having models that point out the gendered feature of choice is helpful. For instance, refined models can be an analytical tool for political initiatives against gender inequality in specific choice situations. Some ideas are that one may think of triggering other kinds of identifications, instead of the gender one; or, of associating a social disadvantage to some group identifications.

Justice and rationality There are two questions that arise considering the picture above: “is Ann’s choice rational?” and, “is Ann’s choice just?”. The ﬁrst question is about rationality. From an individual point of view, her

9See chapter one, Hausman (2007).

63 choice is like a compromise between her initial aspirations and the gender norm that she endorses (since the definition of the norm includes a conditional desire to conform). In this sense, her choice is rational. It is like choosing the second biggest slice of cake to follow the norm to not take the biggest slice. But, considering the interpersonal dimension, however, it is clear that gender norm cases require a different treatment. Since the link between her choice and the social outcome that is disadvantageous for women is not causal but through the membership to gender groups10, her choice is rational only if the gendered outcome that results is preferred by the agent: if Ann has gender equality concerns, her choice is not rational. The second question is about justice. Ann’s choice is problematic from the point of view of justice. The norm by which it is affected represents a form of inequality which is systematically disadvantageous for women, and which is not justify by any acceptable reasons. It does not represent a neutral division of labour, but a division of labour that benefits a group and damages another group. Ann’s choice is not likely to favour gender equality. Many criteria have been discussed in feminist papers, but the systematic disadvantage and the lack of justificatory reasons are quite widespread criteria11.

4.5 Other accounts

Up to now I have considered only intuitions, but which are the normative conditions for these kinds of choices? Below I consider two recent diﬀerent proposals and I will make some comments about their suitability to account cases like GEVM.

4.5.1 Bossert and Suzumura on external norms Bossert and Suzumura (2011) present a formalization for the choice affected by external norms. They deﬁne a set N, interpreted as the set of all pairs (S, w) of a feasible set of alternatives S and an element w of S. So, if (S, w) ∈ N the choice of w from S is prevented by the external norm. Having the set N, they deﬁne a norm-conditional choice function as a choice function C, such that the choice function on the set of alternatives S is a subset of the set S, except that element that, paired with S, is forbidden by the norm: C(S) ⊆ S\{z ∈ S|(S, z) ∈ N}.

10A diﬀerent case is Laure’s choice: it is disadvantageous for women as a group, but it seems it is out of individual preference. 11See Chambers (2008).

64 In presenting this approach, they refer back to the positional choice example from Sen (1993). Using that case, ({apple, nothing} , apple) belongs to the set N of norms, and so apple cannot be chosen, but ({apple, banana, nothing} , apple) do not belong to the set of norm and then apple can be chosen. This approach highlights that the applicability of a norm depends on the menu of choice. Yet it is restricted only to those norms that explicitly pro- hibit an alternative (or a set of alternatives). The GEVM instead involves a norm that shows a favoured alternative, though letting all alternatives available. The agent downgrades the alternative that is furthest from the favoured one, but the favoured one is not automatically chosen. More, this account does not distinguish among different norms: every norm is defined by the specific pair of the set of alternative and the alternative prohibited, without any other information that could help to detect when the same norm affects the choices in different menus. For example, as the pair ({apple, nothing} , apple) belongs to N, so the pair ({banana, nothing} , banana) does. If an agent held the norm that he would not buy any newspaper in case of monopoly of information, even if the only newspaper available is the one that he would bought in presence of others, also the pair ({T heMarsT ribune, nothing} , MarsT ribune) would belong to N for the agent. How can these cases be combined as instances of the same norm, or distinguished, as instances of two different norms? However, their analysis doesn’t suit the gendered epistemic value of the menu. Indeed, while the external norm is directly endorsed by the agent and rules out an alternative, the gendered norm is only conditionally followed by the agent, and points out the most suitable alternative, downgrading the others.

4.5.2 Dietrich and List on reason-based choices Another account comes from Dietrich and List (forthcoming a,b) and it focuses on reason-based choices. They intend to challenge the traditional presupposition in the rational choice that preferences are ﬁxed, or that their change is only due to new information. Indeed they argue for a reason-based preference formation and for recognizing that an important feature of rational choice is its responsiveness to certain reasons. To do so, they introduce the concept of motivating reasons, which is “a proposition that is motivationally relevant for the agent’s preferences toward the objects of which it is true: it may aﬀect those preferences”. R12 is the set

12They use M, but I call it R to distinguish it from menus.

65 of motivating reasons for the agent’s preference in a psychological state. Agents’ preferences are defined in relation to a motivational state: R. “A full model of an agent thus requires the ascription of an entire family of preference orders R to the agent, one for each motivational state”. The stable relation is the relation of weighing between the combination of properties in R, rather then between the preferences, so, in any motivational state, the agent prefers the alternative x to another alternative y if and only if the weighing relation ranks the combination of motivating reasons true of x above the combination of motivating reasons true of y. Formally: x R y ⇔ {P ∈ R : xsatisfiesP } ≥ {P ∈ M : ysatisfiesP }. In any motivational state, the agent prefers an alternative x to an alternative y if and only if the weighing relation ranks the combination of motivating reasons true of x above the combination of motivating reasons true of y. As they write, “a single weighing relation over property combinations suffices to induce the agent’s entire family of preference orders across different motivational states”. I don’t want to deepen their account, but only to analyse if it could be a good outline for the gender epistemic value of the menu. The all-things- considered preferences can change because a new reason is added to M. In the GEVM it is possible to think that the alternatives academic career c and local firm f in the menu M = {c, f} are ordered in the motivational state that focuses on the personal gratification of the job. The alternatives in the menu with the care-work, h, M1 = {c, f, h} are on the contrary ranked out of the motivational state including gender norms and the personal gratification. In the first choice the academic career is ranked as first, in the second choice the local firm, which merges both gender norms and personal gratification, is ranked first. However, referring the change in preferences to the change in motivating reason may seem to throw back the problem of changing preferences: one might ask why there is a new motivating reason. Formally, Dietrich and List consider the motivational salience as a primitive notion, and substan- tively a psychological issue. Yet, although avoiding the explanation of some psychological mechanism, something more can be said. In the GEVM, for example, the new motivation is brought into the agent’s set of motivating reason by a new alternative: being a housewife13. Group-membership social

13This possibility is expressly admitted by Dietrich and List, who write: “We obtain a more sophisticated, and perhaps more realistic, picture of an agent’s choice dispositions by allowing the set of (motivating or normative) reasons to depend on which alternative are available. In other words, diﬀerent set of available alternatives may endogenously activate diﬀerent set of (motivating or normative) reasons”, in forthcoming b.

66 norms becomes a reason not randomly, but only if there is in the menu an alternative that fits the norm, or describes the stereotypical role. Moreover, this kind of reason is different from others, like, for example, ’being environ- mentalist’, or ’being fast’. Indeed it affects the relevance of other reasons, since the norm ’women should be fist care-giver’ means that women’s first concern should be devoted to family, children, elders, etc. The gendered reason works changing the motivational salience of other reasons (in the example, personal gratification becomes so less important). Group-membership reasons are relevant only if the agents recognize their membership - gender, race, nationality, etc. - and distinguish themselves from others - men from women, white people from black people, American people from English people, etc. The self-position among others generates a similar effect to having a role (though without having a team): when a person is holding the role of teacher, for example, has some behaviours that fails to have when has no role at all, or has another role (a father, a friend, a son, etc.). Like in the norm case, there are some alternatives that are prohibited to a teacher (beating a child) that are not prohibited to a parent instead. But also, like the gender case, there are some alternatives that are considered as best suited, even if departing from them is allowed (a good teacher is suppose to be fond in his field, but teaching without enthusiasm is allowed by the role rules). If choice functions from agent’s reasons are allowed, then the idea of revealed preference, namely that it is possible to avoid considering motives, would be undermined. Reason-based choices would avoid referring to change in preferences as a primitive notion: the motivation affects the preferences formation, and the preferences generate a choice function over alternatives. Yet, recognizing that also the set of feasible alternatives triggers some reasons instead of others, it is possible also to claim that the alternatives select some preferences instead of others. Some choices that are inconsistent in the revealed preference account, like Ann’s choice, turn out to be rational considering the reason linked to the menu available. So conceived, the inconsistency would reveal the underlying motivating reasons.

67 Chapter 5

Conclusion

In my thesis I lay the foundations for a gendered rational choice theory. While most of the time those, academics working on rational choice and those academics working on gender issues ignore each other, I argue that to make them talk to each other is fruitful, and to do that I present a particular choice situation that is relevant for both rationality and gender issues. I call it gendered epistemic value of the menu, because it is a gendered version of the epistemic value of the menu that Sen (1993) introduced. I thus reach a ﬁrst general result, namely that rationality theorists and gender theorists have something in common to speak about. To do so, initially I consider the epistemic value of the menu as a critique to the deﬁnition of rationality as consistency (chapter 1), and then some gendered phenomena (chapter 2).

In the first chapter, I introduce the definition of rationality as consistency, I consider a critique of it and I show that it is misplaced. In detail, I present the revealed preference theory, that employs preference ordering and choice functions over alternatives. The idea is that, for an agent, to choose rationally is to choose in such a way to maximize her desires. It is formalized in two steps: the first is from preference to choice, the second is from choice to preference. From preference to choice, it has been shown that if the preference relation is an ordering relation (i.e. asymmetrical, complete and transitive), then it is possible to define a choice function that selects the optimal alternative, namely agent’s preferred alternative. From choice to preference, if the choice function fulfils the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives, then the preference relation is an ordering. The definition of revealed preference is x y ⇔ x = S ({x, y}). Revealed preference is a formal notion: the preference is revealed as far as it is directly expressed by

68 the choice, and the choice reveals the preference as far as it directly makes the preference evident. Then, the representation theorem states that an ordering relation can be represented by a function, called utility function, that matches every alternative with a real number. To choose rationally is to maximize the utility function and the only condition that the choice function has to fulfil is the independence axiom, which defines a consistent choice. The consistency condition for the choice function is criticized by Sen (1993), who presents some examples of choices that violate the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives, seeming though intuitively reasonable choices. I group Sen’s style examples into four kinds: external norms, epistemic value of the menu, reason based and expressive choice. I show that, for each example, in the models where the choices turn out to be inconsistent, there were some elements not taken into consideration, but still relevant for the decision maker. Binmore (2009) then replies to Sen’s critique argu- ing that since the new alternative is relevant, the axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives is not really violated here. The seemingly violated consistency can be restored redescribing the alternatives in such a way to include the relevant elements into the model. I note that to distinguish between choosing the model and choosing an alternative in the model it is helpful in understanding these examples. They are two different functions: I call the former the modeller and the latter the decision maker and I stress that they might have different conditions of rationality. In revealed preference context, the problem considered is fully abstract: alternatives are univocally described and the agent must just select one of them. So, new information on alternatives leads to another model for another problem. In abstract problems, the violation of the independence axiom is not due to the agent’s inconsistent choice function, but it is due to the inappropriateness of the model. In Sen’s example therefore there is no need to depart from revealed preference: indeed, since the redescriptions of the alternatives are suitable to grasp the problem as we intuitively understand it, we can continue to consider it abstractly.

In the second chapter, I frame the category of gender with some theoretical considerations and some empirical data. I then consider a political issue, concerning individual free choices. In detail, I deﬁne an open group, as a social group of people which stay together as a group not randomly, as a mere aggregate, but through the common knowledge of norms and roles that members share. Agents generally belong to several open groups, and the common knowledge about them may be relevant or irrelevant depending

69 on the choice situation. The category of gender selects open groups, and it is useful in detecting those phenomena that have gender features. I present one of those phenomena: the slow advancement of women, that refers to the difficulties that women face in reaching high level positions in labour. This is a gendered phenomenon which displays a collective side and an individual side. Collectively, statistics (in particular I refer to the Women in Philosophy in the UK Report) show that the number of women decreases as the level of the job increases. The gap between the women’s presence at the higher and lower levels represents an inequality that is disadvantageous for women. I reject arguments that employ biological differences as reasons for social phenomena, and I call this disadvantageous inequality a form of injustice, because there is no reason that can justify it. On the individual side, I report some psychological phenomena such as adaptive preferences, stereotype threat and gender schema. They are gendered phenomena, as far as they concern men and women because of their gender. All of them present some alternatives that the agent considers less desirable because she is a woman (or he is a man), and for this trait, they can be labelled as self-censorship phenomena. Psychological and sociological results provide reasons for adopting gender as a category of analysis, in order to highlight the interpersonal dimension that links individual choices to collective outcomes (like the gender gap in high positions). Nevertheless, these results make a class of individual choices problematic from the perspective of justice. This class is composed of individual free choices that are disadvantageous for women as a group. In fact, there is a general agreement on calling a form of disadvantageous inequality that systematically concerns women and that is unjustified a form of injustice. But there is not such agreement on individual choices that constitute that inequality. Both the argument that focuses on the individual choice, and the argument that focuses on collective outcome are partial. The first one indeed neglects the interpersonal dimension highlighted by the gendered group, the second one neglects the individual choice. So, I note that in order to tackle this problem, having a tool that highlights the interpersonal dimension of the individual choice.

The third chapter stems from the conclusion of previous chapters. I indeed argue that there is a class of problems for which the redescription strategy leads to a model that is far from the intuitive understanding of the choice situation. This class of problems is composed of gendered choices, and if, in modelling the problem, we relax abstraction, considering also the gender variable, we can have a tool that highlights the interpersonal relation

70 between individual choices and collective outcomes. Consider the following examples: 1. A woman has to choose her future career. Her alternatives are working in a local ﬁrm and working in academia. The latter job is more rewarding and more demanding than the former, and she knows she can deal with it. Nevertheless, thinking about it, she chooses to work in the local ﬁrm.

2. A man has to choose his future career. His alternatives are working in a local firm and working in academia. He prefers to work in academia, because he finds it rewarding and challenging. When a friend of him suggests that he has also the alternative to become a professional gui- tarist, the man changes his mind and chooses the local firm, to have thus more spare time. On the one side, the first example presents an individual free choice that, on a large scale, brings about a negative result for the advancement of women. Since the woman freely chooses the less prestigious alternative, there isn’t any element to solve the feminist debate about the genuinity of her choice. On the other side, the second example presents an inconsistent choice function that has been called epistemic value of the menu. Because the man does not consider having spare time since the new alternative reminds it to him, there isn’t any element to solve the rational choice theorists debate about the inconsistent choice function. But, consider now another example: 3. A woman and a man have to choose their future careers. Their alternatives are working in a local firm and working in academia. Both of them consider the latter job more rewarding and more demanding than the former, but they know they can deal with it. So, they choose the academia. When a friend of them suggests that there is also the alternative to become a full time parent, the woman, unlike the man, changes her mind and chooses the local firm. I call this latter example gendered epistemic value of the menu, because it is a gendered phenomenon which shows a case of violation of independence. On the one hand, in relation to the debate about the genuinity of choice, the comparison with a man’s choice and the inconsistent choice function make evident for the woman the presence of a self-censorship phenomenon. On the other hand, in relation to the debate about independence, the example shows a case in which redescribing the alternatives makes the problem too abstract for the intuitive understanding. So, the main result of my thesis

71 is that gendered epistemic value of the menu stands for a class of problems that exhibits some elements that, granted the social research on gender, is interesting to consider in shaping abstract models. To consider the gender elements means to relax abstraction of the problem, and therefore to depart from the revealed preference context. The reason to do that lies in the amount of sociological and psychological research that makes evident that the redescribed problem would not consider relevant factors that, if we have gender concerns, it is desirable to consider. In the revealed preference account, the gendered epistemic value of the menu registers an inconsistent choice, and we can not amend it by redescribing the alternatives, without a loss in understanding. I argue that this is not a reason to abandon the revealed preference approach, but to extend it with additional structures. The reason why the revealed preference approach, as I presented it, is un- satisfactory for the gender class of problems lies in the theorist’s interest, rather than in something wrong in the revealed preference or in the problems modelled. Indeed, if the theorist has gendered concerns, to highlight the gender variable is desirable. Research presented in the second chapter discloses the fact that treating some problems abstracting from gender considerations represents a loss in understanding. So, as I show that speaking of gendered choice does makes sense in rationality context, the next question to be answered is which are the normative conditions for rationality for such gendered choices.

From this result, there are many points that can be further developed. In my thesis I emphasize the interpersonal dimension between individual choices and collective outcomes through the gendered group membership: some choices are not only an individual issue, and for women having gender concerns, to choose those alternatives that have bad collective results for gender equality is not rational. Yet, how to formalize agent’s gendered group membership is still an open problem. Attempts to extend the theory of revealed preference in relation seeming inconsistent choices come from Bossert and Suzumura (2009) for the external norm example, and from Di- etrich and List (2012) for the reason based example. I argue that both these approaches do not suit the gendered epistemic value of the menu. Indeed, the external norm case involves a single and definite norm, which is person- ally endorsed by the agent and that excludes an alternative from the menu of choice. The gender norm, on the contrary, is an indefinite norm, just indirectly endorsed by the agent, that indicates the most suitable alternative and downgrades the others. This is more similar to the reason based case, nevertheless they still differ. Indeed the specific feature of the epis-

72 temic value of the menu is that gender, that represents the new reason, is triggered by the new alternative and is added to older reasons. It affects the weight that each older reason has. So, a model that can formalize gendered choices is still something that has to be found out. Another aspect that can be developed from here is the analysis of the gendered choice problem in strategic situations. Strategic situations are those in which individual choice depends on other agents’ choices. In my thesis I consider gendered choice and I point out that an interpersonal dimension exists. The analysis of such kind of choices can be deepened into the strategic dimension of gendered choices. Indeed it can be shown what is rational for an agent in an individual problem can be strategically related to others’ choices. In the account of social norms that I have considered, norms stay in force through the interactions and expectations of individuals. So, an individual choice can affect the norms themselves, for example disappointing others’ expectations. So, what is rational to choose in strategic case when one wants to strategically change the norms? Another issue that can be concerned is justice. An agent might desire to change a norm because she reckons it is an unjust norm. In strategic choices, injustice can be detected if, for example, a woman’s choice affected by a gender norm is disadvantageous for women and advantageous for men, as a group. In this case, gender works as a reason. Gendered epistemic value of the menu is a case in which gender, as reason, plays a negative role for the person who chooses, because it excludes some alternatives. Nevertheless, there are other choices made out of gender reason in a neutral, or positive sense. For example, behavioural norms in only-male shower rooms and in mixed shower room in a swimming pool are neutral from the perspective of justice. Similarly, in parties’ tendencies toward encouraging women to present themselves as candidates, the gendered reason does not play a negative role. When people act out of gender as a reason, an inequality is involved, because that reason states a difference between women and men, but not necessarily an injustice is at stake. So, gender is related to injustice through the concept inequality. However, to find out some criteria which detect when a form of inequality is also a form of injustice is still an open question. To do that, having models that make evident the role played by gender membership would be useful in clarifying the question about justice for gender cases. In what is generally called third wave feminism, gender as category is associated with other, such as class, nationality, sexuality, religious, race, etc. A further development of my thesis is the extension of gendered choice model to cases where other variables are involved.

73 In conclusion, in my thesis I formulate the problem of the epistemic value of the menu, I analyse it thoroughly and I pave the way for further research.

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