Posted on 31 May 2008 by Allison
Feminist economist extraordinaire Susan Feiner is finally blogging. According to her bio, the professor of women’s studies and economics at the University of Southern Maine is apparently “now writing almost exclusively for a wider pubic audience.”
The site is relatively new, but she’s already made several convincing points about the value of this little sub-discipline. [...]
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Posted on 31 May 2008 by Allison
File this under things that will become more important as the population ages. I’ve been reading through a paper from the most recent issue of Feminist Economics about informal carers in the UK (gated). Carmichael et al define an informal carer as someone who “look[s] after relatives or friends who need extra support because [...]
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Posted on 29 May 2008 by Allison
Kathy G. posts from Chicago about “politics, economics, feminism, labor, culture, ideas.” She’s more likely than I to cover American politics, and as a PhD student her analysis is a bit more sophisticated than mine. Worth checking out if you’re interested in any of the above.
Kathy also guest posts at Crooked Timber. Check out [...]
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Posted on 29 May 2008 by Allison
Things have been quiet around here for the last few days, partly because I’ve been working on a little project. If you check the top of your screen, you’ll notice a new navigation tab titled Course Outlines.
Whenever I pick up a new academic interest, I poke around the internet looking for syllabi to guide [...]
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Posted on 25 May 2008 by Allison
A few evolutionary psychologists have gone off the rails of late - one of my favourite bloggers has taken to calling them “evo-psychos.” So I got a giggle out of this send-up of bad evolutionary psychology and the gullible reporters who breathlessly relay it: “Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says.”
We shouldn’t let [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: books, evolutionary economics, fun | 1 Comment »
Posted on 25 May 2008 by Allison
If you happen to be in Vancouver early this November, Antigone Magazine is hosting The 2008 Vancouver Women’s Economic Security Summit. It’s not an exclusively academic conference, and I gather they’re looking for people to help with planning and organizing sessions. I can’t find any internet presence for the summit, but here is part [...]
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Posted on 23 May 2008 by Allison
I’m taking an economic history course focused on Karl Polanyi, especially The Great Transformation. Last class, my professor implied that it was a dense, tough text, so I had myself steeled for an evening of endurance reading. It turns out that Polanyi is a joy - this man has a sense of rhythm. This is [...]
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Posted on 22 May 2008 by Allison
The feminist blogosphere is positively gleeful this morning over the release of a report debunking the “boys’ crisis” in education. The Washington Post has published a decent breakdown of Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education, published by the American Association of University Women, but the executive summary and full report [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: class, education, race | 3 Comments »
Posted on 21 May 2008 by Allison
Nancy Folbre, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writes Care Talk, a blog about the economics of care. She describes it better than I could:
I aim to provide resources for students, journalists, and any readers interested in learning more about the “care sector” – that part of our economy devoted to [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: child care, other blogs | 1 Comment »
Posted on 21 May 2008 by Allison
Marginal Revolution pointed me towards this lengthy Guardian feature on Iceland, which has topped the UNDP’s Human Development Index ranking.
Iceland’s economy defies the conventional wisdom - they maintain a generous social welfare state with relatively low tax rates and only 1 per cent unemployment. It probably doesn’t hurt that Iceland has no armed forces. [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: gender gap, child care, paternity leave, Iceland | 5 Comments »
Posted on 19 May 2008 by Allison
This blows my mind. It’s from the Interesting Statistics page over at Women Don’t Ask, which I posted about a few days ago.
Women own about 40 percent of all businesses in the U.S. but receive only 2.3 percent of the available equity capital needed for growth. Male-owned companies receive the other 97.7. percent.
I would [...]
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Posted on 19 May 2008 by Allison
As you might have gathered already, I think bloggers restrict ourselves unnecessarily by only linking to recent material. Most good sites and articles aren’t obsolete within a couple weeks.
Jason Kottke pointed me towards this NYT Magazine article from 2003, about Amy Smith, an inventor who teaches at MIT and develops cheap, low-tech solutions for [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: development, women in the workplace | 1 Comment »
Posted on 16 May 2008 by Allison
What is this strange graphic, you ask? It’s our familiar globe, morphed to represent the world’s population as it is distributed between countries. That’s why India is so large, while Canada barely exists. This creative projection is from Worldmapper, my new favourite website.
Freakonomics posted about Worldmapper a couple years back, but I get the [...]
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Posted on 16 May 2008 by Allison
Commenting on this post, “v” has made a good point about one source of the gender wage gap:
Some say it happens at the negotiation stage. Men are more likely to ask for raises or higher salaries when hired or changing jobs. This trait is attributed mostly to gender and could drive the results.
As it [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: WAM 2008, women in the workplace, gender gap | 1 Comment »
Posted on 15 May 2008 by Allison
This has nothing to do with economics or feminism, but you might enjoy it anyway. My internet video column is up over at The Tyee. It’s about ultra high speed photography, and I think I’ve found some exceptionally cool videos this month. Here’s one to pull you in:
And with that, I’m off to read me [...]
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