Women in the Social Sciences

For this year’s International Women’s Day (8th March 2025), I will use this platform to highlight the work of some of the remarkable women in the social sciences. Their work has not only transformed the way we look at politics and economics, but their ideas have also created tangible impact in the lives of people everywhere, from transforming the way we approach the problems of poverty and social power asymmetries to bringing new political ideas to the fore. It was a rather difficult undertaking considering the innumerable amazing women in politics and economics. Here, I will share my top seven favourite women social scientists whose work has had a substantial impact on my intellectual growth. In the end, I also include a larger list and some of my favourite papers on women from the disciplines of politics and economics.

My top seven favourite women in the social sciences (politics and economics) in no particular order:

• Elinor Ostrom was the first political scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and the first woman to win that prize. She won the prize in 2009 for her ‘‘analysis of economic governance, especially the commons’’ and demonstrated, contrary to widely-held beliefs, how common property, such as forests or grazing pastures, could be successfully managed by the people who use of it rather than by government or private companies.

• Claudia Goldin is an economic historian and labour economist and the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In 2023, she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and the first woman to win that prize solo. Her research has helped us arrive at a better understanding of women’s labour market outcomes and showed us how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have altered over time in the United States.

• Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist who is also the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. In 2007, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, one of the most prestigious prizes in political science, for her unique contribution to the discipline. She was awarded the prize for her “visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence." One of my favourite works of her is her book States and Social Revolutions (1979) which is an authoritative text on revolutions.

• Esther Duflo is a French-American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Co-Founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2019, Duflo along with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences, becoming the second woman to win that prize. Through their remarkable research, Duflo and her colleagues helped us arrive at the best possible way to find answers about how to fight global poverty. Instead of tackling the problem of poverty head-first, they focused their attention on relatively small, manageable and specific problems that led to poverty and tried to identify their best possible solutions through field experiments, which they conducted in many low-and middle income countries over the period of more than two decades.. They significantly contributed to the Randomised Controlled Trials’ (RCTs) revolution in development economics, as they conducted RCTs on various issues, for example, on finding ways to improve child health or educational outcomes.

• Rohini Pande is an Indian-American economist who is currently the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She was awarded the 2018 Carolyn Bell Shaw Award from the American Economic Association for her efforts to promote the success of women in the economics profession. Her research has had pivotal impact on policy in South Asia and across the globe and explores ‘how institutions tend to shape power relations and patterns of economic, political, and environmental advantage in low- and middle-income countries’. She looks at how we can better design institutions so that they empower those groups that have been historically disadvantaged, the role played by public policy in equipping poor and disadvantaged groups with political and economic power and the role played by notions of economic justice and human rights in legitimising and enabling such change. In India, Pande is working in collaboration with Indian state governments and endeavours to encourage gender-inclusive rural development and digital policies.

• Pippa Norris is a British-American political scientist who specialises in comparative politics. She is the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, Vice President of the World Values Survey, and founding Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. She has now taught at Harvard for more than three decades and is the second most cited political scientist in the world. Her research looks at election and public opinion, political communications, democracy and gender politics in a comparative perspective in countries around the world. Amongst many of her accolades is the Johan Skytte Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in political science, awarded jointly with Professor Ronald Inglehart for 'contributing innovative ideas about the relevance and roots of political culture in a global context'. In 2024, she was elected as the International Fellow of the British Academy “in recognition of scholarly distinction in the humanities and social sciences.” I personally read and really enjoyed her book Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and the Rise of Authoritarian-Populism (with Ronald Inglehart, Cambridge University Press, 2019).

• Oriana Bandiera is an Italian development economist and the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. She is also a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society and CEPR amongst other organisations and a recipient of the Yrjö Jahnsson Award in 2019, which is awarded annually to the best European economists under the age of 45. Bandiera specialises in development economics, labour economics and organisational economics. She is also one of the most cited economists in the world, ranking (on 38th position globally) within the top 10% female economists by research output as of January 2025. Her research focuses on organisations and labour markets, how they tend to influence the process of development, and how they are themselves influenced by it. I personally found her paper "Why do people stay poor?"  (co-authors: Clare Balboni, Robin Burgess, Maitreesh Ghatak and Anton Heil) (2021) very insightful as she exploits a large-scale, randomised asset transfer and panel data on households over a large period of time to test between two views on poverty: one relating to differences in fundamentals such as ability, motivation or talent, and the other, the poverty traps view i.e differences in opportunities which arise from differences in wealth.

  Sources:

  https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/

  https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/goldin/facts/

  https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/theda-skocpol

  https://economics.yale.edu/people/rohini-pande

  https://www.pippanorris.com

  https://www.orianabandiera.net

  A list of some other remarkable women thinkers in politics, philosophy and economics (again in no particular order and not exhaustive):

• Anna Schwartz

• Joan Robinson

• Janet Yellen

• Deirdre McCloskey

• Millicent Fawcett

• Edith Abbott

• Dambisa Moyo

• Mary Paley Marshall

• Christina Romer

• Carmen M. Reinhart

• Janet Currie

• Anne Case

• Nava Ashraf

• Mariana Mazzucato

• Susan Athey

• Sabina Alkire

• Lisa D. Cook

• Olivia Mitchell

• Nancy Birdsall

• Gita Gopinath

• Mary Wollstonecraft

• Harriet Taylor Mill

• Martha Nussbaum

• Judith Butler

• Donatella Della Porta

• Saskia Sassen

• Liesbet Hooghe

• Tanja A. Börzel

• Susan Rose-Ackerman

• Sara B. Hobolt

• Vivien A. Schmidt

• Lea Ypi

• Danielle Allen

• Jennifer Hochschild

• Katharine Baldwin

• Jennifer Gandhi

• Amaney A. Jamal

• Nadia Urbinati

• Catherine Boone

• Sarah Brierley

• Pavithra Suryanarayan

Bonus: Some of my favourite papers on women (from politics and economics):

• Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

• The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

• Strength in Numbers: How Women's Groups Close India's Political Gender Gap

• Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India

• Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development

• Women’s Representation in Parliament: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

• Gender Quotas and Women’s Political Leadership

• The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect: Why Do Congresswomen Outperform Congressmen?

• Women’s Representation and Public Spending

• Cultural Barriers to Women’s Leadership: A Worldwide Comparison

• Why Have Women Become Left-Wing? The Political Gender Gap and the Decline in Marriage

• Breaking the Barriers: Positive Discrimination Policies for Women, in “Has Liberalism Failed Women: Parity, Quotas and Political Representation”
  The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

• Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias?

• Why are Some Women Politically Active? The Household, Public Space, and Political Participation in India

• Why Women Don't Run: Explaining Women's Underrepresentation in America's Political Institutions

• Barriers for women in economics: A review of recent findings

• 50 Years of Breakthroughs and Barriers: Women in Economics, Policy, and Leadership