Marjorie McElroy on a long academic career and navigating the economics profession as a woman

Marjorie McElroy, Professor of Economics at Duke University, joins the podcast to discuss her long and varied academic career, her research on the economics of marriage and the family, and, especially, the challenges and gender discrimination she faced as, at the time, one of the few female economists pursuing a traditionally male-dominated profession. 

In this episode, McElroy and Ashenfelter discuss:

•  McElroy’s background growing up in the small town of Neffs, Pennsylvania. “[It was] …one of those little shoestring villages in Pennsylvania with a church, general store, farm equipment place, et cetera, a bank, and a bunch of houses on two streets…”
• McElroy’s early interest in pursuing an academic career and how that led her to Rutgers and Penn State as an undergraduate. She then pursued an Economics PhD at Northwestern University, did a brief stint at Bell Labs, and then, ultimately, landed a position at Duke University.
• McElroy’s dissertation research in understanding expenditure patterns in rural households of South Vietnam in particular and underdeveloped countries in general using data compiled during the Vietnam War. 
•  McElroy’s thoughts on navigating her way through an academic career that began as one of the few female undergraduates in her classes at Rutgers.  “I was the only girl in a class of 350 engineers who were all men, and the instructor had never had a female in his class before, and he had all kinds of jokes that were not welcomed by me.”  
• McElroy’s views on the current state of women in the economics profession and how that has changed over the years. “I think what's happened is there's bias against women, but it's sort of going underground. It used to be you could just talk about it if you didn't like women….You wouldn't hear anything like that today, but I think we're all sort of subtly biased against ‘the other,’ and I don't know how you would measure that.”
• McElroy’s recollections of H. Gregg Lewis, who was a principal member of the monetarist, free-market-oriented Chicago school of economics and was famous for his contributions in the study of labor economics.

Marjorie McElroy earned her Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University in 1969. She specializes in the subjects of labor, demand systems, and financial economics, and is best known for her foundational work on bargaining models of household decisions. She served as chair of the Economics Department at Duke, chair of the American Economic Association’s (AEA) Committee on the Status of Women (CSWEP), and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced as Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section) celebrates its 100th anniversary—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.