Fifteen years after the Global Financial Crisis: Recessions and Business Cycles in the History of Economic Thought

Do feminist economists form a unified community? A history of IAFFE presidents cognitive interactions and trajectories

Gomez Betancourt Rebeca , Université Lyon 2
Orozco Espinel Camila , Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Rebours Anthony , LED/EA, Université Paris 8

This article studies the history of feminist economics. It analyzes the intellectual and professional trajectories of 27 women who structured the field through their academic contributions and administrative responsibilities in the International Association for Feminist Economists (IAFFE). Our actors are the twenty-seven presidents of the IAFFE between 1992 and 2022 . Our corpus of analysis comprises different types of materials. First, their academic trajectories (CVs gathering and systematizing information relative to the university where they received their Ph.D., their dissertation topic, their advisers’ name, specialty, and the list of their academic and non-academic affiliations). Second, we study the landmark books and collective works in which feminist economists presented and assembled their research, creating and defining the sub-discipline. Third, using Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, we identify a list of 871 papers produced by these authors over the period 1966-2015 (four time-windows of ten years). The thousands of references these publications contain allow us to measure the intellectual proximity of our key authors quantitatively as expressed through their publication behavior. Section 1 describes their professional trajectory, research subjects, focus areas, and methods. Section 2 studies their academic contributions and measures the impact of feminist economics outside their field by identifying the type and discipline of the journals where the group published their work. Finally, section 3 pays attention to the way these authors cite each other and the scholars they mention most often over the different periods we explore. This article will answer questions about: how they form a community? How did they interact? How were their trajectories? The idea is to go beyond the presentation of their individual trajectories and look for the trends that connect these women as a group.

Area: Eshet Conference

Keywords: feminist economics, recent history of economics, bibliometrics, IAFFE