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