How Economics Discovered Women
Speaker
Shelly Lundberg, Economics, 2021-2022 RecipientLocation
University Center, Corwin PavilionInfo
Interest in research on the economic role of women rose during the 1970s and 80s as large numbers of women entered the labor force (and the field of economics) and as economists continued to expand their analyses beyond formal markets and into the household and the family. Gender economics is now a substantial subfield, with new sources of data, from experiments to government administrative rosters, that give us an unprecedented ability to measure and compare the traits, behaviors, histories, and economic outcomes of men and women. At the same time, a conceptual evolution in economics is creating a more realistic economics of choice than the self-interested, independent, rational actor model of the past—based on the findings of behavioral economics that choices are not always rational, abundant evidence of social influences on behavior, and recognition of the role of culture and cultural constraints in the economy. Among the outcomes of this development has been a blurring of economics’ traditional separation of preferences and constraints and a greater openness to approaches emerging from other social sciences. Until recently, however, these innovations have had little influence on how we think about issues concerning gender and this has hampered our ability to understand important issues affecting both men and women—including the gender earnings gap, the educational underachievement of men, and declining fertility. The economic discovery of women has roughly coincided with my career in the field and in this talk, I’d like talk about what economics’ problem with gender is, where I think it comes from and some promising signs that we may be overcoming it.
BIO | Shelly Lundberg is Distinguished Professor of Economics and the Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received a B.A. in Economics from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington before coming to UCSB in 2011.
Lundberg’s research is focused in labor economics, demographic economics, and the economics of the family, including issues such as discrimination, inequality, family decision-making and the intra-household allocation of resources. She has studied decision-making by children, the effects of child gender on parental behavior, the location decisions of married couples, the impact of government-provided care for the elderly on the labor supply of adult children, the economic returns to psychosocial traits, and the gender gap in educational attainment. She is currently writing a book on gender economics, How Economics Discovered Women, for the University of California Press.
She is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, Fellow and past President of the Society of Labor Economists, a past President of the European Society of Population Economics and a Research Fellow at IZA. She has served the AEA in a number of positions, including as Chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and as Vice-President.
