Carolyn Shaw Bell

The economics profession lost one of its great mentors. From today's NY Times:

Carolyn Shaw Bell, an economist at Wellesley College who took her fight for equal opportunities for women in economics from the college into the national arena, died May 13 at her home in Arlington, Va. She was 85...

Dr. Bell started her work at Wellesley in 1950. By 1995, an article in The New York Times pointed to the "Wellesley effect," a disproportionately large number of graduates of Wellesley, a women's college, in executive suites and corporate boardrooms. It said the college's alumnae had long been overrepresented at Harvard Business School and said part of the reason was the dynamic teaching of Dr. Bell.

Dr. Bell carried her equality campaign to the American Economic Association, where she was a founder of the group's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. In 1998, the committee established the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award for the person who has most advanced women in the profession.

To read more about Bell, see the Winter 2005 and Fall 1993 editions of the CSWEP newsletter.