Gendered labour produces finance: Navigating profits and care as intermediaries of finance

Financial actors often characterize finance as standardized and depersonalized. This narrative of standardized finance is commonly incorporated in critical finance scholarship which highlights the circulation of homogenous market devices in the production of depersonalized credit relations. However, such a narrative ends up obscuring the everyday practices and personalized labour that produce finance. My ethnographic research with microfinance branch staff in West Bengal shows that finance is produced by intermediaries’ labour. Moreover, this labour is gendered as intermediaries extend affective labour and women workers in particular perform social reproductive labour to ensure that financial services can be rendered standardized. This adds to feminist scholarship by demonstrating how gendered labour is not only domestic but is performed in places of work and is directly capitalized to generate financial returns. Finance workers negotiate financial requirements for profit maximization with affective, personalized ties with clients to generate trust. Women workers doubly negotiate their professional roles and unpaid social reproductive work which is essential for standardizing financial services. As finance workers navigate gendered, moral and financial economies, their everyday labour challenges theoretical distinctions between finance and labour and, productive and non-productive forms of labour. This highlights how standardization of finance operates alongside gendered labour to expand financial reach to underbanked populations.