The Public Policy Impact of Economics

Heidi Hartmann (left), founder of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, is interviewed by Maria Hasenstab for the Women in Economics Podcast Series from the St. Louis Fed.

 

Economics can be viewed as part of the social and policy sciences and as a great way to help people, said Heidi Hartmann.

The field’s potential to impact public policy is one of the reasons the founder, president emerita and senior research economist of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research got into economics, she said.

“Economics does provide a very powerful tool for changing public policy,” Hartmann said during an Oct. 4 Women in Economics Podcast Series interview with the St. Louis Fed.

Among other roles, Hartmann is a distinguished economist and resident at the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics at American University and a research fellow at the St. Louis Fed’s Institute for Economic Equity. She specializes in labor economics and public policy, focusing on equity of opportunity and outcomes.

Hartmann has done work related to the concept of comparable worth, or equal pay for jobs of equal value, which she said began to gain ground in the late 1970s. For example, people might question why secretaries whose roles are equal to truck drivers in terms of skills and responsibility make less than truck drivers, she said.

An influence on her decision to study economics was her experience growing up with a working single mother who was Hartmann and her brother’s sole financial support.

“It just seemed clear that men were doing better. The average man could support a wife at home and more kids at that time in the ’50s, the period I remember,” Hartmann said. “And so I always had that in the back of my mind, and I think that really led me to major in economics.”

For over three decades, Hartmann led the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which was founded as a “policy think tank that can do original research like is done in academia, and also can bring academic research to the policy process,” not just in Washington, D.C., but around the country at the state level, she said.

Media exposure also is “a great way to have an impact on public policy,” Hartmann said. The institute didn’t lobby, but provided information, and she found that media coverage of research gave institute members credibility. If they went around to congressional offices with a report, staffers would say,

“Oh, I saw this in The New York Times,” she said.

Getting that coverage sometimes meant highlighting a new aspect of an old problem—women don’t make as much as men. One year, Hartmann said, she was looking at wage data and realized that women working in the state with the top wages for women of all the states and the District of Columbia earned less than the average for men in the state with the lowest men’s wages.

“That’s really pretty bad. And I think that kind of shows a comparable worth problem, right?” Hartmann said. “Because it can’t possibly be all about their being in the same jobs and being paid that little. It’s not. It’s that men and women are in different jobs.”

Hartmann said that when she started studying wage gaps, women were earning about 60% of what men earned. Now it’s up to over 83%, depending on the data series, she noted.

A transcript of the podcast episode is available at Women in Economics: Heidi Hartmann.