Esther Duflo: belief

Transcript context

…Obviously it hasn’t stopped you any, but do you worry that development economics in some ways puts women at a disadvantage because some emerging economies are especially dangerous for women? India, in particular, that may be the case. I think development economics is the most gender-balanced subfield of all of economics. In fact, if anything, there are more women and more powerful women in development than men. So whatever it is, it does not stop them. And there are many, many women working on India. Of course, you don’t do silly things. And the advantage of working, of having this infrastructure that I was talking about before, is that it makes it possible for people to always be in groups and to work in a context where they are safe. At the same time, they can get the experience of living in these environments. I think that makes people often very aware that gender rights, for example, is something to study very deeply. For example, one of my graduate students, Maddie McKelway, worked in rural Uttar Pradesh, one of the parts of India which has some of the most extreme gender inequity. And she conducted her project like a master with a little group of largely female research assistants and got everybody to go along with her. Last question — if you could institute a reform to increase opportunity for women in economics, what would you do?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.