“If you compete with us, we shan't marry you” The (Mary Paley and) Alfred Marshall Lecture

Rohini Pande and Helena Roy

No 29481, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley Marshall are often described as the first academic economist couple. Both studied at Cambridge University, where Paley became one of the first women to take the Tripos exam and the first female lecturer in economics, with Marshall’s encouragement. But in later life, Marshall opposed granting Cambridge degrees to women and their participation in academic economics. This paper recounts Alfred Marshall’s use of gender norms, born out of a separate spheres ideology, to promote and ingrain women’s exclusion in academic economics and beyond. We demonstrate the persistence of this ideology and resultant norms, drawing parallels between gendered inequities in labor market outcomes for Cambridge graduates in the UK post-Industrial Revolution and those apparent in cross-country data today. We argue that the persistence of the norms produced by separate spheres ideologies is likely to reflect, at least in part, the rents associated with preferential access to better paid, high-skilled labor market opportunities. In doing so, we ask who benefits from gender norms, who enforces them, and suggest relevant policy work and areas for future research.

JEL-codes: B3 J16 J7 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-lab
Note: DAE LS POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Rohini Pande & Helena Roy, 2021. "“If You Compete with us, We Shan’T Marry You”: The (Mary Paley and) Alfred Marshall Lecture," Journal of the European Economic Association, vol 19(6), pages 2992-3024.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29481.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29481

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29481

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().