FH Gruen Public Lecture

Can and should anything be done to change the unequal representation of women in positions of economic power in advanced societies?

This lecture will review evidence suggesting that differences in talents and competences between men and women cannot explain why women are so under-represented in positions of economic power in advanced economies. It will look at new statistical and experimental evidence suggesting that recruitment to positions of power tends to overlook talented women. Overcoming this will require radical changes in the way in which both domestic and working lives are organised, but these are changes from which both men and women stand to benefit. The lecture will discuss whether and how these changes are a matter for public policy, as opposed to informed action by individuals, firms and civil society.

Professor Paul Seabright teaches Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, is Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) and is a member of the Institut d’Economie Industrielle. After undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where he was a Fellow of All Souls College, he taught at the University of Cambridge where he was a Fellow of Churchill College. Professor Seabright is a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, a Council Member of the European Economic Association and a member of the Scientific Council for the think-tank BRUEGEL. He is the author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (2nd edition, Princeton 2010) and The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present (Princeton, 2011).

Enquiries: Research School of Economics on 6125 3582