Carolyn Shaw Bell

She took a job as an assistant to John Kenneth Galbraith at the federal Office of Price Administration, responsible for price controls during World War II, after graduating from Mount Holyoke College. She took at job at Wellesley College after receiving her doctorate at the London School of Economics.[3] Bell retired from teaching in 1989, due to hearing loss, but continued writing columns for The Boston Globe[4] until the year 2000.[5]

Bell wrote two books on consumer economics, Consumer Choice in the American Economy (1967) and The Economics of the Ghetto (1970), as well as numerous journal articles on human capital, income distribution and the economic data.[1] 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.[3]

• Bell, Carolyn Shaw (1967). Consumer Choice in the American Economy. New York: Random House. OCLC 174518.
• Bell, Carolyn Shaw (1975). Alternatives for social change : the future status of women. OCLC Number:56604386. OCLC 56604386.
• Bell, Carolyn Shaw (1972). Age, sex, marriage, and jobs. Massachusetts: Wellesley College Dept of Economics. OCLC 38826140.
• Bell, Carolyn Shaw (1974). Economics, sex, and gender : an attempt to explain, to social scientists and others how economics deals with women. Massachusetts: Wellesley College Dept of Economics. OCLC 660194756.
• Bell, Carolyn Shaw (1979). Minimum Wage and Personal Income. Massachusetts: Department of Economics, Wellesley College. OCLC 713120075.

Bell encouraged many of her Wellesley female students to pursue careers in economics and business, and to tell later students about their successes.[6] 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.[3] Her encouragement, and the network of alumnae she mentored, helped Wellesley graduates succeed.[2] The model she established sent a disproportionate number of Wellesley graduates into careers in economics and business.[6] 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.[3]

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.[7] Bell was then named chair of a new Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). Under her leadership CSWEP began surveying graduate programs in economics to find out the numbers of female graduate students and female faculty,[3] 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.[7]