Economics has historically been considered a masculine field — a conception that still reveals itself in economics departments today. According to 2020 data from the American Economic Association, women represented roughly 25% of assistant professors and 13% of full professors in economics departments at the “top 20” schools.
Yet, while those numbers aren’t stellar, they are a vast improvement from the mid ’90s, when less than 5% of full economics professors were women. That’s in part thanks to academics like Dr. Joyce Jacobsen, the first female president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.
Dr. Joyce Jacobsen
“Professor Jacobsen,” states the CSWEP, “has excelled on all of these criteria.”
Hearing those words was an affirmation to Jacobsen, who says she had set out to have a well-balanced career in academia — and, by most accounts, she has.
As a professor at Wesleyan University, she received the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. As a mentor and adviser, she advised more senior honors theses per year than anyone else in Wesleyan’s Economics Department, wrote one recommendation letter. As a researcher, she has authored multiple papers and textbooks, including The Economics of Gender, which is now in its third edition and considered “a standard in the field” by the CSWEP. And, now, as a college president, she’s navigated the administrative challenges that come with a global pandemic.
Yet, even as a college president, Jacobsen remains an economist through and through, having just published Advanced Introduction to Feminist Economics in 2020. Looking back, she says it took just one introduction to an economics course as an undergraduate to hook her into the field.
