I am a little hesitant to step into this minefield, both because I   
have not read Becker's article for years and because I am not an   
economist.  
  
But, really.  
  
Tony Brewer is of course correct:  no recent paper in any respectable   
journal could overtly identify rationality and masculinity.  
  
But look at the characteristics that are assigned to those   
("sex-unspecified") abstract agents.  Rationality as consistency, for   
instance.  My guess is that, in the way that judgements and arguments   
are made by people, rationality as consistency is more valued by men   
than women in modern western cultures.  Rationality as self-interest   
(maybe that is too old-fashioned or too political science-y) also   
strikes me as a male sense of rationality.  (Now, if you defined   
self-interest as alienation, then maybe you'd have a non-male   
definition of self-interest.)  The whole development of the atomised   
abstract individual pursuing his self-interest, which I trace back to   
Hobbes, for instance, displays its gendered nature in all its glory   
there, where individuals quest for power after power, like good men   
have done since Achilles.  (There was a great argument in psych along   
these lines two or three decades ago, when some man proposed a   
quasi-Kantian morality [of consistency with the categorical   
imperative] as the highest stage of moral development, and some woman   
came along and said, that sounds like an awfully gendered definition,   
can't you imagine that someone like Jesus or Buddha or Ghandi has a   
different, and higher, stage of moral development in which   
consistency and [Kantian] rationality take a back seat to a kind of   
intelligent intuitive imaginative insight.)  In short, I think you   
could take almost all the elements that go to make up the abstract   
agent in economics and show that they are connected to traditionally   
masculine characteristics or attributes, or to characteristics and   
attributes that are part of the development of modern public life.  
  
Or, to go back to the original instance (rather than talk in --   
typically masculine -- abstractions):  here is what was originally   
said about Becker's argument:  
  
If Becker's theory does not describe how families actually behave or   
make decisions, it at  
least ought to have a  meaningful resemblance to the family analyzed.   
For example, it  
makes assumptions about the family relationships, such as being led   
by the altruistic male  
head,  which can be construed as either wrong-headed or harmful in   
the conclusions it  
reaches. Some feminist economists worry that this assumption of   
altruism on the part of  
the male householder who meticulously follows self-interest in the   
market place, does not  
have logical inconsistency, particularly if you are going to use the   
same market-oriented  
tools to analyze behavior in the family, not even enriched by any   
insightful observations.  
They are also concerned about the policy implications of this benign   
picture of the  
household which contradicts women's inferior economic status.  
  
Now, don't you think it is just a little odd that the male head is   
altruistic?  Does Becker ever suggest that people are altruistic,   
except here (maybe he suggests the gov't is altruistic?  I'd doubt   
it.)  Doesn't this automatically raise the male, who is great enough   
to be able to be altruistic at home (no self-interest at home, just   
the good of the family) and meticulously self-interested in the   
market place, to a position of great intellectual and psychological   
fortitude?  (Is the female equally altruistic and self-interested,   
turned on and off according to circumstances?)   Doesn't making the   
male head altruistic automatically put any "rational" wife in a   
double-bind:  if she follows what her altruistic husband says, she   
cannot become an active rational actor in the market (or even a   
coherent subject and actor) because she follows what her husband   
says; and if she asserts her self-interest she is undercutting what   
the altruistic husband establishes as community.  So the woman is   
automatically screwed by Becker's "abstract" -- timeless -- analysis   
of the family.  And, of course, whereas Hobbes was decent enough to   
see power everywhere, Becker's agents are so abstracted that there is   
no power at work, at least not by the rational altruistic male, and   
of course no need for power by the little woman.  
  
At any rate, I think that the above sets of arguments would expand   
Roy's quite nice statement about a 'gendered account of rationality.'  
  
Peter G. Stillman