Newly appointed Professor of Economics and incoming Director of the Economic Growth Center, Rohini Pande, is the recipient of the 2018 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. The award is given annually by the American Economic Association’s (AEA) Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) to recognize and honor an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession. Professor Pande accepted the award at the annual CSWEP business meeting and award ceremony on January 4, at the 2019 AEA Meeting in Atlanta.
In her acceptance speech, Professor Pande presented statistics that expose the bias that female economists face at the four phases their careers and recommended specific actions that groups like the AEA can take to remove barriers to women’s advancement. “We need to all acknowledge that using the talents of all of us to the full will make us a stronger and better profession and benefit all of us,” remarked Pande.
Watch Professor Pande’s acceptance speech here:
Video/AEA Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession(CSWEP)
Professor Pande is currently the Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, and the founder and co-director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is an accomplished development scholar and gifted academic leader, while taking an active role in mentoring undergraduates and graduate students, postdocs, and junior colleagues. Professor Pande often co-authors papers with mentees and encourages undergraduate women to pursue economics as a career. She also works with and advises junior faculty to support their scholarship and publications.
In scholarship, Professor Pande is one of the most influential development economists of her generation. Her work examines how institutions can be designed to empower historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she is best known for work on gender and economic development, conducting ground-breaking work on changing institutions to give women control over their own social and economic lives. Professor Pande also has a distinguished record of service to the profession and public service. She is the Area Chair for Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Bureau for Economic Analysis of Development. In addition, she is a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and an associate editor at many other journals.
Professor Pande continually seeks gender parity in economics and has taken deliberate steps to further this goal. She ensures that the concerns women academics have, and the barriers they may face, are given serious attention. At the Kennedy School and in the profession more generally, she has spearheaded measures to encourage inclusion of women and minorities in department life. For example, she shaped hiring practices so as to better identify and recruit underrepresented minorities and women for tenured positions and actively advocates for diversity in conferences or seminar speaker programs.
Professor Pande earned her doctorate in economics from the London School of Economics in 1999. Earlier in her career, she served as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Columbia University and as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She has also held visiting professor positions at Stanford, Pompeu Fabra, Berkeley, and MIT.
The Carolyn Shaw Bell Award was created in January 1998 as part of the 25th Anniversary celebration of the founding of CSWEP. Carolyn Shaw Bell, the Katharine Coman Chair Professor Emerita of Wellesley College, was the first Chair of CSWEP. (To read a short biography of Carolyn Shaw Bell, see our Winter 2005 Newsletter.) The Carolyn Shaw Bell Award (“Bell Award”) is given annually to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession, through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession, or mentoring others.