Seminar: Teaching and Doing Research on Macroeconomics with a Gender Perspective

The gathering in Montevideo, organized by ECLAC, UNDP and UDELAR, featured a keynote lecture by Professor Özlem Onaran of the University of Greenwich (United Kingdom).

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On March 19-20, 2024, the Office of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Uruguay organized an international seminar and discussion on gender and macroeconomics, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Economics Department of the University of the Republic (UDELAR) of Uruguay, and the Young Scholars Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (YSI-INET).

The event, which took place at UDELAR's School of Economic Sciences, featured a keynote lecture by the distinguished Professor Özlem Onaran of the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom, Director of the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre and Co-Director of that university's Institute of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability. Professor Onaran has a long and prestigious academic career and has served as a consultant to numerous international organizations and civil society agencies, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Foundation of European Progressive Studies, the Vienna Chamber of Labour, the Austrian Science Foundation, and the Hans Boeckler Foundation.

The seminar's central aim was to establish a dialogue with the university's professors and students based on the role that gender issues have in macroeconomics, both in the design of theoretical models as well as in policy design. In addition to presenting advances in the theoretical field, Professor Onaran discussed various outcomes and policy simulations obtained on the basis of those models and with the support of distinct macroeconomic databases. These simulations indicate that a policy geared towards strengthening gender equality and the childhood care system could significantly improve the performance of various macroeconomic indicators, such as formal employment, income distribution, the efficiency of fiscal policy and aggregate productivity.

At the seminar, participants noted that traditional macroeconomic models, which are often presented as being gender neutral, do not take into account the way in which gender roles, norms and power relations configure economic processes. In contrast, structuralist models with a gender perspective incorporate and model gender inequalities in areas such as labor markets, unpaid work (both domestic and care work) and access to resources and to decision-making power. They also allow for considering how macroeconomic policies, including fiscal and monetary policies, can have different impacts on men and women.

The discussion included a meeting with broad participation by UDELAR's economics professors. There, the participants discussed how courses on macroeconomics could more fully incorporate the importance of gender inequality into teaching - an aspect that is addressed very little in the textbooks currently available, but which has been gradually acquiring more relevance.

This meeting with the professors constituted a frank and enriching dialogue, which served to reinforce UDELAR's preexisting interest in offering a broader and more pluralistic view upon teaching macroeconomics, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. In addition, there was a significant contingent of young researchers and professors who traveled from elsewhere in Uruguay to attend the workshop. In that regard, the support of YSI-INET and the synergy between the various institutions that organized this event was critical.