Pioneering Women
Honoring the lives and careers of the women who helped build EGC and Yale Economics – and demanded greater equality in the profession.
"Economics is not a man's field"
In honor of the Economic Growth Center’s 60th anniversary during the 2020/21 academic year, we are telling the stories, not only of well-known faculty who helped build EGC’s name and the field of development economics, but also members of the EGC community whose contributions have been overlooked, including women and international visiting scholars.
Below, you can read the stories of some of the pioneering women who helped found EGC, made inroads in Yale Economics as students and faculty, and pushed for equality in academia.
As a graduate student, Heidi Hartmann demanded an end to sexism at Yale. She has gone on to found a feminist think tank and conduct economic research that has informed policy decisions by Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, as well as states across the US.
The University of Massachusetts professor emerita and former EGC postdoc looks back on her Texas roots and her pioneering career focused on gender, inequality, and care work.
In the 1970s, Birdsall arrived at EGC as an untraditional economics student. Driven by a commitment to independent, policy-based research, she would go on to change how rich countries and the powerful institutions they control approach global development.
