Take a breather from discussing Obama and his maybe-a-little-bit-unearned Nobel Peace Prize. Another Nobel Laureate made a big splash last week: Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.
Let’s be clear: Ostrom has not triumphed as a woman in mathematics or traditional economics. She comes from the land of political science; in that sense, she doesn’t challenge the most steadfast gender stereotypes in academia. It’s no surprise the first female Laureate in economics would come from a less mathematic field when women like Ostrom, in the tenured professor age-range, can still remember academic advisors rejecting them from trigonometry classes on the basis of gender.
“That was routine. They indicated that no woman needed trig or calculus or anything of this sort,” Ostrom told Michele Norris of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” “If you’re going to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, you didn’t need these things.”
She does show, however, that even if you systematically exclude and discourage women from joining your field, they will still find ways to be smarter than you. As a social scientist, Ostrom used field research — real life observation — to reach reasonable conclusions about resource preservation in a field where professionals often spin global paradigms out of detached mathematical models.
Shattering age-old assumptions about the “tragedy of the commons”— the idea that people take advantage and deplete resources faster when those resources are cooperatively owned — Ostrom observed that shared resources are often better protected when local stakeholders have a role in their management.
In a state known for perishable, though renewable resources (think trees and water), Ostrom’s reinterpretation of the commons has a lot of local applications. I heard about her victory first, not from the newspapers and scattered blogs that covered it, but from two environmental activists who gave a rousing speech for Oregon fisheries in front of my sociology class.
They were advocates for “Fair Fish,” a nationwide campaign to protect public
access to wild fish populations. The Obama administration currently supports a fishing quota system based on “catch history” that, according to the non-profit Food and Water Watch, actually encourages the quick depletion of fish stock by rewarding reckless, monopolizing corporations and running small fisheries out of business. Fair Fish instead advocates for a system that awards larger quotas to the fisheries and coastal communities that use more sustainable practices.
If Oregon’s fish-rich coast is a commons, they argue, it would be best managed in a way that preserved and included as many of the stakeholders as possible, from fisheries to local business owners to environmentalists. Ostrom’s award is a symbolic victory for Fair Fish advocates, as it lends international support to their perspective on environmental sustainability.
In a broader sense, both Ostrom’s theories and her Nobel victory emphasize the intelligence of diversity. If an academic discipline is a commons, economics is a commons long dominated by men in suits who assume that their objective numbers know what’s best for the rest of us. But we’re all stakeholders in this big number game, and it’s about time for a greater variety of players — women and political scientists, for starters — to get a word in edgewise.
