International Association for Feminist Economics and its Rice University-based journal to receive $1.5 million from SIDA
Grant will increase international outreach of Feminist Economics journal

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

The International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and its Rice University-based journal, Feminist Economics, will receive $1.5 million over the next three years from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) to promote feminist economic research and to educate policymakers, economists and other scholars about feminist points of view on economic issues.

The grant will support annual conferences, workshops and other core activities of IAFFE and Feminist Economics, the association’s official journal.

	DIANA STRASSMANN

“SIDA’s funding will help expand the influence of feminist economic scholarship and will also help counter the exclusion of women’s voices in economic policymaking,” said Diana Strassmann, a Rice economist who is founder and editor of Feminist Economics.

Special issues of the journal are published yearly and serve to catalyze work in key areas. Past special issues have focused on “Globalization,” “Lone Mothers,” SIDA-funded “Gender and Aging,” “Gender, China and the World Trade Organization” and “AIDS, Sexuality and Economic Development.” This past summer, the research on China was translated and published in that country as a book to train up-and-coming Chinese economists, and in October, Routledge published a book version of the China special issue in English.

Strassmann and a team of international scholars participated in a workshop last year at the United Nations, where they presented Feminist Economics’ latest research findings on gender and economic inequality, development and growth to U.N. officials and policymakers. Topics ranged from gender wage gaps in the U.S. to trade reform in Mexico and social accounting in Kenya. With the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Strassmann had convened the workshop to facilitate discussion among feminist economists around the globe who submitted research for publication in this July’s Feminist Economics special issue on “Inequality, Development and Growth.”

The next two special issues will focus on the gendered effects of public policies, especially social, labor, macroeconomic and fiscal policies on time use, poverty and unpaid work. The funding from SIDA will support future special issues of Feminist Economics by building the research capacity of scholars from developing countries, increasing outreach in those countries and enabling three mentoring special-issue workshops.

With that support, Feminist Economics can mentor authors from the “global south” prior to and during every stage of article submission. The journal will subsidize subscription costs for about 70 academic and research institutions, policymakers and women’s advocacy groups in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The journal will also be able to host special-issue workshops where contributors and mentored scholars will make their ideas and research more accessible to an international audience.

“Special-issue workshops give visibility to important new work and can provide professional training to scholars who have had more limited training and exposure to the norms of international journals,” said Strassmann, professor in the practice in humanities at Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality.

In addition to the direct support for Feminist Economics, the SIDA grant will fund IAFFE conferences and workshops, which aid in the development of articles for the journal.

The grant will support IAFFE annual conferences and pre-conference training workshops to provide researchers, policymakers and community activists throughout the world with a forum to share their work and experiences and to exchange ideas on policy and crucial gender concerns. The IAFFE annual conference attracts about 300 scholars from all over the world, including from developing and transition countries. With the support of SIDA, IAFFE will continue to support travel to the 2010-2012 annual conferences for 45 researchers from developing and transition economies and fund eight advanced graduate students and researchers currently based in countries that lack resources to send them.

“Through its support of IAFFE, SIDA will further support Feminist Economics by bringing in a wider group of scholars to feminist economic debates,” Strassmann said. “That has the potential to enhance the rigor of economic thinking and to lead to policies that are more responsive to the needs of people throughout the world.”

For more information, visit the IAFFE at http://www.iaffe.org/, Feminist Economics at http://www.feministeconomics.org/ and SIDA at http://www.sida.se/English/.