 Hello and welcome to a short talk on economics of sexist science. My name is Dr Hannah Bogarwy, I'm a lecturer in the Economics Department at SoEarth's School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. I'm going to begin this as a short talk with a statement of purpose of the econometric society who states that the society shall operate as a completely disinterested scientific organisation without political, social, financial or nationalistic bias. Its main object shall be to promote studies that aim at the unification of the theoretical quantitative and the empirical quantitative approach to economic problems, and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences. I want us to think a little bit about this and we don't have time today to go into detail in this short talk, but what feminist economists are concerned with is this particular understanding of what economics as a subject should be about. So what is feminist economics in contrast to this? Well, it is not a female economics or a feminine economics, whatever those might be, but instead it questions economics as a subject and it does so in a number of ways which I'm going to focus on the one in bold here, but I want to mention the others as well. The first thing that feminist economists do is they question the topics of mainstream economics. Many of you may be familiar with micro and macroeconomics topics that look at the firm and how the firm functions, how decisions are taken, profitability, productivity of the firm. They may also be interested at the individual, at the macro level we're interested in the macroeconomy. However, for feminist economists there are a number of areas and a number of topics which economists have not concerned themselves with, but are particularly important with outcomes for men and women, but also how decisions are taken, so how are relationships within families, for example, important for decision making at the level of the individual. Similarly, should we be interested in issues such as care, caring for children, caring for elderly, this is a big part of what we as human beings do with our lives, so should this be something that as economists we also concerned ourselves with. The other thing that feminist economists are concerned by are the methods and the models and the approaches used in economics. We saw in the previous quote from the econometrics society that increasing the economics is a subject that applies mathematical tools and techniques to answer questions. For many feminist economists we question that and we try to look at whether or not these particular approaches are the best way of understanding the problems that we face. I'm going to look at the third one today which is questioning economics as a subject, how it's taught, who teaches it, how and who conducts research in economics. The aim for feminist economists is to improve economics as a subject in general. As I mentioned, I'll talk again at the end about studying economics at SELUS and how you might become familiar with some of these other issues that I've mentioned. I've already mentioned that in order to answer this question whether we think economics is a sex of science we need to go beyond purely looking at the topic we're looking at today to look at the subject of study and the methods of study. In particular when we look at feminist theory for many of you who might have come across feminist theory in cultural studies, perhaps in political movements that have a particular feminist angle. So we see that in general there's a great deal of attention and interest in feminist theory. However not a huge amount has focused on economics and we can see that there needs to be a rectification of that and that's what we're attempting to do partially here. Interestingly what I'm going to look at now is actually how economics is studied and taught. So what we see is that economics is a field that's still very much dominated by men. So when we look at those that deem themselves to be economists, 25% of those are women despite some substantial increases at the time. And what we do start to see the same as in many other areas of life as you climb the ladder fewer women remain in business and in academia. And we don't have time to explore the reasons for this here but again if you come to study feminist economics this is something we're particularly concerned by. We look at some of the reasons. But let's look at the factors within economics itself. So I've here got some graphs from a study by Donna Ginter, a relatively recent study that looks at STEM fields. So these are science, technology, engineering and maths related fields to see how many women or what proportion of these women are involved in. So this is the percentage of bachelor's degrees, so BA and BSc degrees that are awarded to women in these fields. You see we've got for example the top line here is psychology and the very bottom line is engineering. So in engineering there the proportion of women in this field from the 1970s where this graph begins to today it's increased particularly in the late 70s but since then there's been a more steady increase and actually more recently a decline which is why. However the subject I want to focus on is obviously economics and that is the dark blue line in the middle of this group. And what you'll see is an interesting trend and this is again remembering this is about BA and BSc degrees in the UK and the US. And you see that there's been an increase, a sharp increase from 1970 where it was around 10% to around 30% by the mid 1980s. Since then it's reduced again over the 1990s and rising slightly again but very little progress has actually been made since the mid to late 1980s today in increasing the number of the proportion of women taking BSc degrees and we need to think a little bit about why that is and how we teach economics and why that may be one of the factors putting women off taking BSc degrees. But let's take this a little bit further and examine this issue around the ladder as well. Here I've got a graph on PhDs so Doctorates awarded to women again and you'll see across the board compared to the bachelor's degrees actually there's been much more steady progress so I'll just go back to show you again the real dramatic progress made in the 1970s and early 80s with the BA degrees versus a much more steady progress on the percentage and proportion of women in PhDs and Doctorates and again if we look at the blue line of economics this was below 5% in 1970 but today we're at a point where actually we're approaching the same proportion of women that hold PhDs and awarded PhDs in economics as those that are taking undergraduate BA degrees so clearly progress on the PhD front seems to be slightly better but now we're going to look at those that are awarded a tenured position so this means those that are awarded a full time permanent post within a faculty so those that are on track to going for a professorship for example so you'll see across the board here progress has been much much slower and if we look at the blue line of economics the dark blue line towards the bottom there you'll see again it was below 5% in 1973 and progress has been very very slow so that we're now still below 15% for economics academics so this has reflected very much in economics departments across the UK across Europe and across the US the fact that when you study economics many of those that are teaching you in departments tend to be male so it's so us we do things slightly differently and we are hopefully part of what may be some of the solutions and we can't explore these in detail because we haven't had time to explore the many many reasons that contribute to the picture we've just seen but I want to talk about two things that can be done one thing we want to clearly try and do is attract more women and girls to study economics at undergraduate level and how do we do that? well I would argue one way we can do that is to teach economics at university differently and to move away from the definition that the econometric society would have towards something where we do question the topics we question the methods and the approaches we use and I would like to think that at so us we make a contribution towards doing that we teach in a very pluralistic way we engage with heterodox theories and approaches and we have a course for example in gender economics as part of our undergraduate degree another part of this when we are talking about the ladder is we need to find ways that we ensure that women don't leave the profession particularly after having children and how do we do that? one way might be to ensure that there aren't penalties from women and men having career breaks so one way in which promotion is assessed in academia is through publications and I've included a short appendix to this presentation which tells you a bit about how publications have influenced the outcome that we saw with women in tenure track positions and a really interesting study that was done shows you, I'll just show you this quickly now basically University of Washington shows you that actually despite the growing number of women in academia and those that hold PhDs in terms of female authorship this is not reflected so you can go to that website to find out more about that so one thing is to try and ensure that these penalties for career breaks are overcome but also ensure that the work environment is conducive to family life and ensure that men and women can equally share in their caring responsibilities at home and I'd like to think again at so else we make a contribution towards that so if you were to come to study at so else and this is not just for an undergraduate or a postgraduate degree or participating in one of our summer schools where this summer have a summer school in feminist economics and development what will you find? Well our department is one of the leading pluralistic departments in the world which means we do engage with not just mainstream economic approaches but other ways of thinking about economic problems and solutions and policy our teaching is very much research led so you won't be surprised to hear that I myself am working in the area for my rights for my research we also have very strong links here with international institutions and international universities we have a number of academics that are coming from developing countries and from other countries in Europe we have links with institutions such as the United Nations Development Program the international labour organisation and universities in Asia in the Middle East you may also not be surprised to hear that unlike many other UK and US universities our economics department at SOAS has a very even 50-50 gender balance so here for a change you will be taught by men as well as women when you take your undergraduate and postgraduate degree and for those of you thinking about coming here for an undergraduate degree I can reassure you that 90% more than 90% of our students after six months of leaving here six months of graduating are either in a job or pursuing further study so I'm going to leave you with some pages for you to visit you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter visit our YouTube channel and see some other videos there and also visit our economics department website where you can find out more about the undergraduate courses and the postgraduate courses we offer for our Feminist Economics and Development summer school please visit the summer school site on the SOAS webpage and follow the links there to Feminist Economics and Development I hope you've enjoyed the talk and I hope to welcome you at SOAS one day soon