Yvette Cooper and Feminist Economics

Jim Naughtie: Yvette Cooper invited, and duly received, rightwing disdain last week, after the Labour leadership hopeful dared to suggest that possession of a pair of X chromosomes might have a bearing on how a leader would set about running UK plc, according to The Guardian. Her intervention shone a rare light on the obscure but important corner of academia that is feminist economics. When God created economics, however, he was very definitely a him. Tasked with introducing this unpromising breakfast-time topic on BBC radio, Jim Naughtie initially spluttered out these two words as if they sat together as oddly as, say, Yorkshire physics, or socialist chemistry. Nearly 300 years on from Adam Smith birth, male hegemony in the field was – until comparatively recently – challenged only by brilliant exceptions, such as Joan Robinson. But a pithy turn from Oxford University Professor Jane Humphries soon enlightened him and all but the most reactionary listeners that economics was, after all, a field in which there really is a case for a distinctive feminist slant. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.