Volume 22, Issue 1 (2007) Special Issue: Women

In 1990, the New England Journal of Public Policy published a special issue on Women. The subject was women & economic empowerment. The authors found that while women had made significant gains during the 1970s and 1980s in many spheres relating to the workplace, true equity with respect to their male peers was still elusive, and gender bias, despite remedial legislation, continued to be the acceptable norm.

Seventeen years on, another group of women, under the direction of guest editor Sherry H. Penney, herself a contributor to the 1990 journal, looks anew at some of these issues and expands the horizons of their inquiry to other fields where women have struggled to get access. The authors find that despite many gains (female students outnumber men at the undergraduate level and in many graduate and professional areas), bias is still deeply embedded in our socio/economic/political ethos, despite there being some very visible "firsts" - first Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi; and first female president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust; and first female Democratic Party frontrunner for president, Hillary Clinton - there are still barriers that need to be razed, and old problems of inequality, whether questions of equal payor access to tenure, that need to be addressed.