Ricerc@Sapienza

An increasing number of studies, mainly focused on the Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly on North America, found that women, despite the discrimination they faced, significantly contributed to economics. Some historians (Forget 2011) developed statistical analyses of the frequency and topics of women's contributions, especially in journal articles and in PhD theses. Others, Kirsten (2002) and Dimand et al. (2000), collected bibliographies and selections of writings by women economists who were important, either because they made a substantive contribution to the field or because they were historically the first woman in a particular country to contribute to the discipline.
The project aims both at shedding light on the contributions by Italian women economists from the recent past (1940s) and at highlighting how an appropriate consideration for women's contribution can help clarifying some passages in the development of economic thought in Italy. In order to deny the Baumol's (1995) idea that a few women were contributing to the economic literature, we propose a gender analysis of authors of Italian economic journals and academic production from the '40s.
The activities to be undertaken within the project are divided into two main strands that aims at:
(i) filling the substantial ignorance about who were the women pioneers in the economics profession in Italy;
(ii) identifying gender differences in the academic economic production and trends in the segregation of women authors by subject areas in the main Italian economic journals from the 1940s to nowadays.
Among women economists internationally identified as determinant in the evolution of the economic thought (Dimand et al. 2000) only two are Italian: Vera Cao Pinna and Costanza Costantino. This project will provide evidence to infer that there were not just two women economists in Italy's recent past.