One reason women avoid the field of economics is the male chauvinist pig standing at its center, masquerading as the model of rationality. No sensible woman recognizes herself in Homo economicus, who always gets what he likes and likes what he gets.
ATHENS – Economics has an intractable “women problem.” High-school girls avoid it. Female undergraduates abandon it. And the problem runs deeper than the difficulty of attracting enough women to mathematics, science, and engineering. Even women who have reached the discipline’s summit, like Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, consider economists “a tribal clique” and their models defective.
ATHENS – Economics has an intractable “women problem.” High-school girls avoid it. Female undergraduates abandon it. And the problem runs deeper than the difficulty of attracting enough women to mathematics, science, and engineering. Even women who have reached the discipline’s summit, like Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, consider economists “a tribal clique” and their models defective.