Carolyn Shaw Bell was the Katharine Coman professor in economics at Wellesley College known for her mentorship of her own students' careers, as well as mentorship of female economists more broadly, through the efforts of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, of which she was founding chair. The "Bell Award", given by the American Economic Association each year to economists who promote the success of women in the profession, is named for her.
Bell wrote two books on consumer economics, Consumer Choice in the American Economy and The Economics of the Ghetto, as well as numerous journal articles on human capital, income distribution and the economic data. In her role as the founding chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession for the American Economic Association she began surveys of women in the economics profession that continue to the present day.
Selected Works
Mentorship
Bell encouraged many of her Wellesley female students to pursue careers in economics and business, and to tell later students about their successes. Along with fellow economics professor Marshall Goldman, she started the "FEM files." These referred to "Former Economics Majors," with whom she kept in touch, and asked to describe their experiences to other alumnae of the department. Her encouragement, and the network of alumnae she mentored, helped Wellesley graduates succeed. The model she established sent a disproportionate number of Wellesley graduates into careers in economics and business. At least 58 of her students received doctorates in economics while she was a professor at Wellesley, and another 30 were enrolled in such programs at the time of her retirement.
After a group of graduate students, including Francine Blau and Heidi Hartmann, demanded to know why so few female economists were on the program for the American Economic Association Annual Meetings in 1971, Bell undertook a survey of all the employed female members of the AEA who had completed their graduate degrees at least ten years prior, to demonstrate to AEA president Kenneth Arrow the number of female economists willing and able to present papers at these meetings. Bell was then named chair of a new Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. Under her leadership CSWEP began surveying graduate programs in economics to find out the numbers of female graduate students and female faculty, to demonstrate the numbers of qualified women for positions in economics. The committee's pressure also led to changes in the job market for economists from networks of male professors to open hiring, including the publication of "Job Openings for Economists", a public listing of open positions in the field.
