Pioneering Women: Economic Growth Center and Yale Economics

Women made lasting contributions to Economics at Yale in the 1960s and early 1970s, despite facing systemic biases. They helped launch the Economic Growth Center (EGC), entered tenure-track positions within the Economics Department, expanded the frontier of computing and data science, and pushed the American Economics Association to establish the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1971.

A virtual panel on September 26, 2020 recognized the contributions of three women – Mariam Chamberlain, Mary Reynolds, and Nancy Ruggles – PhDs who were instrumental in founding EGC. All three were let go due to biased rules, but went on to brilliant careers outside Yale. Against this backdrop, the panel will discuss efforts to overcome gender bias in academia, then and now.

This event launched the celebration of EGC’s 60th anniversary, and commemorated the 50th anniversary of coeducation in Yale College and 150th anniversary of women students at Yale.

Panelists:

Mary Ann Baily is a Fellow and former employee (2000 to 2009) of The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. As a PhD in development economics (MIT ‘74), she was an EGC faculty member from 1973 to 1979. After Yale, she became a health economist working on issues in the ethics and economics of health policy at a presidential commission, George Washington University, and the Hastings Center.

Marsha Goldfarb is Professor Emerita of Economics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She was the first female faculty member, both for EGC and Yale.

Heidi Hartmann '72 M. Phil, ’74 PhD is President Emerita and Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a scientific research organization she founded in 1987. As part of a group of women from Yale and the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), she demanded the American Economics Association address gender discrimination in the field through the creation of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession in 1971.

Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center.

Lisa Qian '20 is an economics graduate and former intern at EGC who researched the lives and careers of Yale’s pioneering women in Economics.

Patricia Ruggles '74 is a Senior Fellow with the Economics, Labor and Population Studies department at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. She earned her economics degree as a member of Yale’s second fully co-ed undergraduate class, then her PhD from Harvard.

Anne Skinner ’63 MS, ’65 PhD is a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, Emerita at Williams College.