Economics: Discipline Analysis. Women in the Curriculum Series.

This essay examines the ways in which economics, as a discipline, has been influenced by feminist scholarship in the field. It explains that feminist work in transforming economics began to gain ground only in the early 1990s, and that the impact of feminist or multicultural insights on the core research assumptions of the discipline has been minor. The essay notes that economics differs from most other social sciences in that it is built around a single, highly influential core paradigm. The mainstream of economics is built around the neoclassical model of human behavior which assumes that all activity is a result of rational, self-interested choices by autonomous individuals. Feminists have challenged all of the underpinnings of this model, along with traditional teaching and research methods. A less gender-biased discipline would use characteristics associated with both sides of the old dualistic thinking about gender (such as reason versus emotion and self-interested versus other-interested) to analyze the behavior of both men and women. The document includes an annotated bibliography and a list of related electronic resources. (MDM)