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Why It Matters That Male and Female Economists See the Economy Differently
In a significant new study published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Canadian economist Mohsen Javdani reveals that gender shapes views on power, equality, and inclusion in ways politics alone can’t explain.
Sep 14, 2025
Men and women might check the same box on election day, but they see the economy through different lenses. Just ask professional economists.
That’s the striking implication of a new study by Mohsen Javdani, associate professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, who surveyed over 2,400 economists across 19 countries. His research reveals that gender shapes how they understand economic issues in ways politics alone can’t explain—and warrants attention from policymakers and campaigns alike.
Javdani wasn’t just chasing numbers; he was looking for patterns in what economists believe and focus on. What he found: Women in the field (still underrepresented) are more likely to challenge traditional theories, promote equality and social justice, and push for a more inclusive economics. They tend to lean further left than their male colleagues, who are more often centrists or right leaning.
Probably no surprise there.
But here’s the twist: Even when the men and women shared the same political beliefs, they still interpreted economics differently. Right-leaning female economists, for example, were more likely than their male peers to question orthodox ideas and emphasize equality and inclusion. Javdani’s data suggests that as economists shift right politically, men abandon progressive views more quickly than women do.
Simply put, political labels often try to explain it all, but they miss a big piece: Gender is at work behind the scenes.
If right-leaning women are more receptive to progressive economic ideas than their male counterparts, then campaigns that speak directly to these women could unlock a powerful, untapped base for fairness and inclusion.
So, just pack the room with more women and expect the conversation to shift? Not so fast.
Javdani points to earlier research by Giulia Zacchia and others, showing that numbers alone don’t cut it, especially if the loudest voices still echo the same old male-dominated, market-centered dogma. Without structural changes and real efforts to open the field to new ideas, the issues women tend to bring to the table, like labor protections, inequality, and a more hands-on role for government, keep getting sidelined. New faces, same soundtrack. Female economists are out there pushing for redistribution, calling out bias, and demanding better, but if no one’s listening, the system stays stuck.
This isn’t just academic—what’s at stake is a real understanding of how the economy hits women, what they contribute, and why their labor keeps getting undervalued.
Javdani’s study breaks new ground by showing how politics can blur—but never erase—the gender gap in economic thinking. As he writes:
While moving rightward on the political spectrum is consistently associated with weaker support for progressive and equity-oriented positions, the decline is less steep among women. In several cases—particularly among right- and far-right-leaning economists—women remained more supportive of positions emphasizing inequality, structural disadvantage, and concern about corporate power.
For anyone trying to grasp how voters think about the economy, this research is very suggestive.
Javdani study samples only economists, but it is difficult to believe that the differences he documents do not extend far more broadly, and that if we want to understand economic opinions at the ballot box, we have to look beyond party lines and pay attention to gender.
A recent NBC News poll, for example, shows a wide gap between conservative young male voters and their liberal female counterparts on issues like financial independence, debt, and home ownership. And a new Gallup survey reveals meaningful differences in how male and female respondents view capitalism and socialism—with men viewing capitalism more positively than women, and the reverse for socialism.
But significantly, there are also large gaps among men and women in the same political categories. A March 2025 Pew analysis found Republican women were more than twice as likely as Republican men to see employer bias as a major cause of the gender wage gap (43% vs. 18%). Meanwhile, polling by Navigator Research shows American women are consistently more pessimistic about the economy than men, across race, income, and party lines. This stems from how women experience the economy day-to-day—focusing on costs like groceries, rent, and healthcare rather than abstract numbers like GDP or the stock market.
As a result, women tend to strongly support policies that directly ease these burdens, from paid family leave and the Child Tax Credit to cracking down on corporate price gouging.
Yet much economic messaging still treats the economy as gender-neutral—a costly oversight for anyone hoping to connect with voters. Javdani’s research points to a missed opportunity: If right-leaning women are more receptive to progressive economic ideas than their male counterparts, then campaigns that speak directly to these women could unlock a powerful, untapped base for fairness and inclusion.
Talking about economics like gender doesn’t matter is like playing checkers in a chess game. When you meet people where they actually are, not where your ideological playbook says they should be, you stop talking past each other, and start building something real, like an economy that works for everybody.
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The Killing of Charlie Kirk: Violent Speech and a Violent End
Charlie Kirk expanded hatred, marketed the vile speech of old racisms in new wineskins, and further jeopardized the lives and security of others.
Sep 11, 2025
There are so many words and cliches condemning the killing of Charles James Kirk and none of the refrains are unique. "We need to dial back our discourse," "We need to be tolerant of different opinions," and "There is no room in American politics for political violence."
Are people blind to the realities that have been swirling all around us? The language has been violent. The discord has been great. There has been a consistent invitation to dine at the table of heated racist discussion posing as legitimate political speech. The killing of Charlie Kirk fits within this arena of speech that is racist and hate-filled but is designed to pose as rational and logical political speech.
In his rhetoric and so-called debate style this 31-year-old evangelical firebrand of the right has stated that Black pilots were incompetent, gays should be stoned, ironically he was opposed to gun control, abortion, LGBTQ rights, criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr., promoted Christian nationalism, advanced Covid-19 misinformation, made false claims of electoral fraud in 2020, and is a proponent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This Chicago-born suburbanite brought all of the racial innuendo to political speech and rhetorically violated the safety and security of Blacks, people of-color, the LGBTQIA community, perverted the history of race and racism in America, attempted to legitimize the nation as a white bastion of civilization and Christianity, and in general perfected the use of racial and hateful language and molded it into a form of acceptable and legitimate political debate and viewpoint.
But the legitimate debate aspect was far from legitimate historical benign speech, nor was it nonviolent in character. In fact, it touched all of the refrains of the vile language of the past that resulted far too many times in lynchings and other forms of racial violence and upheaval.
Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized "the radical left" for castigating the hate language of Kirk.
Don't get me wrong, I am sorry for the death and killing of Charlie Kirk. I have stood over many coffins of people I did not agree with and said words of comfort to the families during my 40-plus years of ministry. In doing so I have looked at a person's life to find something to say about their character, worthiness, and contributions they have made in their lifetime. Sometimes the task is easier than at other times.
As I look at the life of Kirk, he was a husband, a father, and what else I do not know. He had friends, I am sure. He played a significant role in his connection with community that was personal and also collective. But the problem I would have in affirming this life at an end-of-life ceremony is that he evidently did not care in his living about the security and comfort of others. He did not show empathy. Whether he believed what he espoused, or it was simply a marketing ploy for influence and money I don't know, and no one will ever know for sure. But Charlie Kirk expanded hatred, marketed the vile speech of old racisms in new wineskins, and further jeopardized the lives and security of others.
The right wing is working hard to make a political martyr of him. US President Donald Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-mast ahead of any remembrance of 9-11. Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized "the radical left" for castigating the hate language of Kirk. If we are going to be truthful in this moment, the hate that Kirk put out came back on him, and the violent political language that continues to fly in this country will continue to manifest itself in ways where we will continually be praying for victims and their families.
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How Immigrant Fiction Can Reshape American Realities
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Aug 20, 2025
Immigrants have been reshaping America since the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or perhaps earlier than that fateful day in 1620, if you count Viking excursions dating back to 1021 and Spaniards landing in Florida in 1513. After the subjugation and genocide of the continent’s Indigenous people, and the establishment of the United States, wave after wave of newcomers from all over the globe, forced and unforced, have helped build what so many call “a nation of immigrants.”
Despite those facts, immigration has always been a topic of debate and a lightning rod for racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, a tool of political manipulation that appeals to people’s worst instincts and fears. Since the political rise of Donald Trump and his descent down that golden escalator in 2015, the debate on immigration and the US-Mexico border has shifted considerably to the right, after decades of centering on moderate concepts calling for comprehensive immigration reform and enhanced border security.
In the 2024 election cycle, both parties have skewed further in the same direction, narrowing the debate and placing immigrants and their advocates in an ever-tightening corner, with Republicans calling for mass deportations and Democrats supporting limits to asylum for refugees and backing away from providing public services (such as health and education) to undocumented immigrants and their children.
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Humanity, New Visions, and Hope
We are all human beings. To me, that’s what any good book reminds us of at its core. Authentic immigrant stories chronicle the desperation, urgency, and desire for safety and progress that drive immigrants to America’s shores in the first place. Immigrant and multicultural literature explore the process of becoming American, the rifts between immigrant generations and those born and raised here, and the sacrifices and rewards experienced by families and communities through acculturation, assimilation, and simply the act of living in a country full of promise yet also torn apart by a legacy of racism and discrimination. But, no matter where the readers and the writers come from, when one walks in the shoes of another, one gains empathy. In this way, immigrant literature builds bridges that foster unity in our shared humanity and multigenerational American experience.
Before embarking on my own journey as a writer of literary fiction steeped in the immigrant experience, some of the books that most deeply touched me were likewise immigrant or multicultural narratives. Even though they may not have been specifically about the Latino perspective, I saw myself and my family reflected in their characters’ struggles and dreams. At an early age, that experience as a reader opened my mind to cultures other than my own.
I did not get to New York City until I was a college student in New England, but I felt like I’d been there as a child making Jewish friends in the tenements of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I never spent a night in Harlem, but I could feel the dust on the floorboards and the tension between father and son in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. I’d never seen a ghost, but I saw myself and began to recognize my own voice as a writer in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
When we see each other as more the same than “other” and “different,” we see that artificial constructs—such as borders and citizenship and legal documents providing permission for human beings to live in peace on various patches of the Earth’s soil drawn on maps by men who waged and won wars decades or centuries past—are just that: artificial, man-made, and by their very nature should be malleable. To connect and lift each other up, we must work toward more togetherness and less division.
Immigrant fiction is a laboratory for the creation of new visions for where we could go as a nation, as a continent, as a people united rather than divided. Just like science fiction has laid out blueprints for many of the high-tech devices and inventions that are now either fixtures in our daily lives or soon to revolutionize the way we live, immigrant fiction can help us imagine, envision, and thus create a new reality.
In my novel, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez, I imagine a world where a multigenerational utopia is built on a city that straddles both sides of the Rio Grande, a place where not just the borders between nations fade away but also those between life and death. In a manuscript I’m currently working on, I envision an America where someday there will be no borders at all. The walls and fences will be pulled down. The coils of razor wire will be retired. The militarized forces will be deployed elsewhere, far from the fertile farmlands of the Rio Grande Valley, far from the vast and perilous Chihuahuan Desert. The river will gleam with promise and flow in tranquility as it snakes its way like a shimmering serpent toward the Gulf of Mexico. Bridges will be built. And people will move safely back and forth, north and south, along with trade and commerce. When this happens, cultural harmony will rise, economies will boom, and illegal narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking will become ancient history.
Imagine that. Instead of masses huddled along fences and politicians saber rattling and fearmongering, countries will work together to solve the hemispheric problems that they cannot solve alone. Stronger than ever, fueled by access to opportunity and more affordable labor, the combined Americas will be able to compete with the surging global powerhouses of China and India.
For that to happen, we must stop seeing the border as a problem and seize it as an opportunity. We need stories that inspire hope in us, faith that we can see past each other’s differences and find the common ground that binds us together: a love of family and freedom; a desire for each generation to do better than the one that came before; a respect for our fellow human beings regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin, or the language their mother whispered into their ears as newborn babies cradled in their arms.
We all have hearts that ache for love, minds that crave understanding, souls that yearn to be seen. This human connection—cognizant of the pain we all bear as living, bleeding beings but fiercely determined to cling to an optimistic view of the future we can share—drives the narrative arc of my new novel, The Border Between Us. It is the story of an immigrant family, of a young American raised on the border and kept afloat by the love of family and irrepressible buoyancy of the American dream. And many people who have read it have told me how they were touched by it in varied ways.
People didn’t focus so much on the border or the immigrant aspects when they shared their reactions. They mention seeing their own lives reflected in the novel: the strains of complex parent-child relationships, the balancing act between pursuing one’s own aspirations while living up to family responsibilities and obligations, the grief and hardship of losing loved ones before their time. When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
Listen to me, America. I’m from the border, born and raised. I love the border. And, I believe the borders should be erased. Anyone supporting the proposed mass deportations (as well as the racial and ethnic profiling and vast detentions these would entail) should read Farewell to Manzanar, chronicling the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. They should also do some research on the inhumane Operation Wetback, through which over 1 million Mexican migrant workers were deported in the 1950s. These are cautionary tales from our not-so-distant past.
We can be more than we are today as a nation and as a people. For that to happen, we must avoid the errors of the past, stop limiting ourselves, and expand our horizons. Until then, pick up some immigrant or multicultural fiction, learn from history, and imagine the possibilities. Someday, we can turn honest memories and empathetic visions into a new and more welcoming reality.
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