Second-wave feminism arrived late to economics. It initially permitted criticism of how Gary Becker positioned gendered inequalities in families as rational choices, not as injustices. Methodologies were heterogenous. ‘Equity’ approaches, like Barbara Bergmann’s, engaged statistical analysis and extended Becker-style rational choice theory to reposition gendered inequalities as effects of unfair decision constraints. ‘Critical’ approaches, like Nancy Folbre’s, focused on deficits in the valuation of women’s care, quantifying the full economic worth of care-work, with policies for provisioning in response to needs. Quickly, feminist economists recentred poverty, focusing on ‘lone motherhood’ in the US in its connection with race, and on empowering global South development consistent with justice for women and girls in poor families. Methods developed by Esther Duflo and the ‘poor economists’ included institutional descriptions of poverty traps, with randomised controlled trials studying how incentives affect family agency. However, local knowledge could not easily apply to larger regions. As for the US, just as Becker mobilised controversial 1970s sociobiology against women’s liberation to rationalise women’s specialisation in household labour as an effect of biological comparative advantage in bearing children, categories of binary gender and binary biological difference initially prevented feminist economists from studying injustices experienced by queer families.