Dr. Friederike Beier (she/they) is a political scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the division for Gender & Diversity at the Otto-Suhr-Institute for Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin. Their research focuses on gender, care and social reproduction in global governance, theories and politics of time and feminist state theories. They are a co-editor of ‘femina politica – a german journal for feminist political science’and publish books on the theories and struggles of social reproduction and materialist queer feminism.

Gendered Boundary-making by Numbers in the History of International Organisations 

Abstract: This contribution shows how the history of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN) is entangled with gendered boundary-making by numbers. It theorises quantification as a boundary-making technique in which definitions and classifications draw boundaries with major gendered effects. I trace boundary-making in terms of economic activity in establishing the first definition of ‘gainful occupation’ by the League in 1938 and the construction of the production boundary by the UN in 1947. Whereas various governments have included housework in their census definitions in the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century, International Organisations have universally excluded unpaid and reproductive forms of labour.

The definitions by the League and the UN in the first half of the 20^thcentury constructed a boundary between wage labour as productive and care and housework as reproductive. This boundary-making is highly gendered because mostly feminized unpaid care and housework was from there on excluded from international definitions, which consolidated the gendered division of labour. Women, who performed the largest amount of unpaid care and domestic work, were defined and classified as dependents and not as economically active. These definitions of occupation and economic activity were then used for the measurement of the labour force in national censuses. Feminist scholars have later criticised the exclusion of women’s work from international labour definitions and international accounting, such as in the International System of National Accounts (SNA).

This contribution traces androcentric and Eurocentric international measurement systems back to the emergence of boundary-making by International Organisations in their quantification of labour and the economy. The historical research on the emergence of such quantification techniques is significant for understanding the inscribed knowledge of boundary-making mechanisms and their gendered exclusions. I argue that quantification is an interesting case of boundary-making because it creates exclusions based on definitions and classifications, which are disguised as technical and statistical procedures and are rarely debated and contested politically.