School of Economics

Invites you to a

School seminar presented by

Shelly Lundberg

(University of California – Santa Barbara)

How Economics Discovered Women

Thursday 7 September 2023

11.00am – 12.30pm

Level 6 Seminar Room (650)

A02 Social Sciences Building

Camperdown Campus
The University of Sydney NSW 2006

Zoom: 899 2248 0186

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).  Gender economics is now a substantial subfield, with new sources of data, from experiments through administrative rosters, giving us an unprecedented ability to measure and compare the individual traits, behaviors, and histories of men and women. What has been less apparent is that recent advances in economics hold considerable promise for an improved understanding of complex issues concerning gender and gender inequalities, but have made little headway to date.  In particular, a more realistic economics of choice has been developing–based on the findings of behavioral economics, studies of social influences on patterns of behavior, and a recognition of the role of culture in the economy—and one of the outcomes has been to blur our traditional separation of preferences and constraints. In much applied work on gender, however, the possibility of a new conceptual framework has run into persistent habits of mind in economics that have prevented us from seeing beyond, for example, the discrimination vs. preferences dichotomy generally applied to gender differences.  I’ll be talking about part of a larger project on the development of gender economics, focusing on endogenous preference and their long history in economics and a rethinking of our concept of discrimination.

For further information contact: School seminar series coordinators
Alastair Fraser (alastair.fraser@sydney.edu.au) & Brendan Beare (brendan.beare@sydney.edu.au)

For all upcoming seminars in School of Economics see Our events and Calendar