Place and Space for Feminist Economists? The Development and Maintenance of Feminist Economics Graduate Training in the United States

Feminist economics has a long history of being marginalized within the economics discipline and continues to be peripheral to mainstream economics. This trend partially reflects the marginalization of women and women’s economic issues in the wider discipline itself. Inclusion of feminist approaches in graduate training disrupts current approaches to economics and trains future economists to take women’s economic issues more seriously, perhaps making the field more relevant and inviting to women broadly. This chapter collects and analyzes oral histories to understand how feminist economics has made its way into graduate-level economics programs in the United States. Namely, it examines questions of retention among self-identifying feminist economics faculty within several graduate-level economics departments. It also studies themes of broader institutionalization of feminist economics in the programs (e.g. course development, tensions between gender and feminist economics, relationships with gender studies departments). The oral history interviews revealed that key strategies for advancing feminist economics include building interdisciplinary communities, securing external funding, strengthening the pipeline through undergraduate engagement, supporting qualitative and feminist scholarship, and recruiting committed faculty and students. Embedding feminist economics in graduate programs is crucial to expanding its influence in higher education and public policy and can also help address the leaky pipeline.