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This should probably be given a new thread title, 
 
[See http://www.eh.net/lists/archives/hes/oct-2003/0103.php] 
 
but the problem of "missing women" in the history of economics is an interesting one.  A
serious question to raise is the extent to which this is still a problem in economics
today. My sense is that it is much less so, at least in the area of publication.  There
certainly are no constraints against husband-wife teams publishing today that I am aware
of.
 
However, this does not mean that there does not continue to be gender discrimination at
higher levels regarding recognition or crediting of women economists. One matter that has
been pointed out to me recently is that there are very few women serving as editors or
coeditors of economics journals (they are better represented among associate editors, but
even there the numbers look disproportionately and inordinately low).
 
The other obvious area is in receiving Nobel Prizes.  OK, one can argue that somehow very
few have made contributions at that level yet, although I hear several names of possible
candidates bandied about here and there.  The one clear omission was the late Joan
Robinson (honoring the centennial of the birth of whom a conference was just held at the
University of Vermont last weekend).  I remember hearing a very prominent economist on an
elevator at the 1974 AEA meetings saying that they would give it to her for her _Economics
of Imperfect Competition_ and that she would then refuse it out of pique and protest.
They never did, although from what I hear this was not so much a matter of gender
discrimination as from fear of her increasingly fierce and combative heterodoxy and of
what she might say in an acceptance speech.  An outrage in any case, nevertheless, that
particular omission.
 
Barkley Rosser 
 
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