Women and Gender in International Economic History

• Department of History
• The Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre

A workshop co-organised by ECOINT and EURECON with Maylis Avaro (University of Pennsylvania), Aude Foucoin (EUI), Johanna Gautier Morin (EUI), Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol (EUI), Myriam Piguet (Université de Genève).

International economic history and gender studies rarely go hand in hand. The discriminations that turn sites of economic power into majority-male worlds are often replicated in their histories, doubly excluding women and non-binary people by naturalizing their absence or invisibilizing their presence. Obscuring their presence and contributions in this way prevents international historians from critically engaging with the persistence of gendered power not only in the sites that we study, but also in the norms and narratives of our discipline.

This workshop will address the gendered methodological issues that international economic historians face when studying male-dominated spaces. Presentations will focus on international and supranational organizations as sites of production of knowledge and norms, around questions such as: Who were the women and non-binary people working in these spaces, and how can we uncover their work? What is lost when maleness is assumed? How is the hierarchy of economic priorities created, and what extent is this hierarchy linked to the social identities of the international experts behind it? How and where are economic norms gendered, and by whom? How can masculinity studies and feminist theories enrich our writing of international history? Can we connect the outcomes of policy discussions with the gendered nature of the spaces where such discussions take place?

Photo credit: UN Photo/Teddy Chen