Evelyn Forget says: <I wonder if one aspect of a "feminist critique" of economics ought not to be a tremendous reluctance to indulge in "pure theory". Pat Gunning asks: "Eric, when the economist says that, other things equal and given the definitions of the terms, a rise in demand will lead to a rise in price, I wonder which value is being introduced or disguised." Real world example: the demand for nurses has increased tremendously in my province over the last several years. At the same time, the typical nurse is working fewer hours at less than full-time wages. Nursing graduates are leaving the province because (despite the documented scarcity) they can't find full-time jobs at what they consider a competitive wage. Why aren't full-time jobs being created? Any economist can understand it: New grads are a minority in the profession. The nursing union has been able to exploit the scarcity by demanding part-time (lower waged) jobs that the majority of its members prefer because, by combining part-time jobs, they can attain a flexibility in hours worked that full-time jobs don't allow. That is, they choose to take part of their wage in increased leisure. There is nothing here inconsistent with either rationality or economic theory. I think, though, that gender might be relevant. When asked why they prefer lower waged part-time jobs, nurses typically cite the difficulty of accessing affordable daycare for shift work, working shifts while being a single mom, and, generally, their difficulty meeting what they consider an inflexible demand for household labour. This seems to me gendered, and (while it's clearly a policy matter) it turns out that perfectly rational women sometimes make different decisions than equally rational men. (That is, neither the objective nor the constraints on the utility function are gender-blind). If we ignore the gendered division of labour (both in the market and in the household) economists simply reinforce the view held by other social scientists of the (ir)relevance of our theory.> The theoretical part of this posting is the use of the theory of demand and of the effect of barriers to entry on market structure. Coupled with knowledge gained from market studies, it is used to explain the historical structure of a particular market. It is no proof of the irrelevance of theory; instead, it shows that theory alone cannot explain the structure of particular labor markets. You need to know something about the participants for that explanation. Sam Bostaph