Susan Feiner, PhD – 2019
Susan F. Feiner earned her PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981, when women earned only 10% of economics PhDs. Discovery of racial and sexual biases in textbooks prompted her study of race and gender in economics, particularly the perpetration of racist and sexist ideas. In 1986 she persuaded four Nobel Laureates—Kenneth Arrow (Stanford), Paul Samuelson (MIT), Amartya Sen (Harvard) and Robert Solow (MIT)—to help her launch “The Committee for Race and Gender Balance in the Economics Curriculum.” The National Science Foundation funded several of her projects aimed at diversifying the economics pipeline. She was a founding editor of the journal Feminist Economics, and helped organize the first and only feminist organization in the field, The International Association for Feminist Economics. Susan has written numerous books and articles, in addition to serving as a public intellectual; her works are widely read and reprinted. She was a professor of Economics and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine for 23 years; she retired in 2018.