Pathbreaker for women in economics helped lead deregulation of US airlines
Elizabeth Bailey once reported for a meeting at Bell Laboratories, where she was chief of economic research in the 1970s, when a male executive directed her to take notes in the back of the room. He had assumed she was a stenographer.
As a member of corporate boards, she was often the only woman at the table. And in academia, where she spent nearly three decades of her career, she lamented what for many years was the scarcity of female professors in economics departments.
Bailey, who has died aged 83, was widely credited with opening opportunities for women in her field.
In 1972, she became the first woman to receive a PhD in economics from
Princeton
University. Five years later,
President Jimmy
Carter appointed her the first female member of the Civil Aeronautics Board, where she helped provide the intellectual framework for the deregulation of the airline industry.
Later, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Bailey became the first woman to serve as dean of a Top 10 graduate business school. ‘‘She certainly showed how women can succeed in economics and set an example for other women to follow,’’ said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor at the University of Michigan.
But if ‘‘firsts’’ such as hers were considered notable, Bailey insisted it was ‘‘society’s fluke’’ and no reflection on the abilities of the women who achieved them. A degree of equality would be attained, she seemed to say, when a woman in roles like hers was no longer remarkable.
Bailey served as dean of Carnegie Mellon’s graduate school of industrial administration from 1983 to 1990. She later joined the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was chair of the department of business and public policy before her retirement in 2010.
Subjects she specialised in included regulation and deregulation – fields, Stevenson noted, that even today tend to attract fewer women than other areas of economic study – and she was perhaps bestknown for her work on the Civil Aeronautics Board. Carter named her to one of two Republican slots in 1977, and President Ronald Reagan named her vice-chair in 1981.
Bailey was a forceful supporter of deregulation and set out, as she put it, to ‘‘free the airline industry from the tentacles of restrictive government’’. ‘‘I think we should rely more on market forces to determine the price and variety of air services,’’ she told the New York Times upon her appointment to the panel.
‘‘There are a lot of people who have never had enough money to go to Europe. The idea of offering lower fares and special services is really appealing. I only wish I’d been at the board [sooner].’’
As dean at Carnegie Mellon, Bailey emphasised the importance of information technology in business, requiring students to use PCs and encouraging sometimes-reluctant professors to adopt an internal computer network to improve communication. The school also established a US$15 million international management institute and a centre for entrepreneurship under her leadership.
Bailey joined the Wharton School in 1991. ‘‘Among women,’’ she told the Christian Science Monitor, ‘‘there’s too much of a tendency to hope that they get noticed. Women need to learn to take their careers in their own hands. True merit doesn’t always shine out – it has to be brought to the boss’s attention.’’
Elizabeth Ellery Raymond, one of five daughters, was born in New York City. Her father was a professor of medieval history, and her mother had been a professor too.
Bailey received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Radcliffe College in 1960, then joined Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. She first worked as a computer programmer and technical aide, later telling a Princeton publication that ‘‘you were teased into knowing that there was some really interesting work right around the corner that you could do, if only you weren’t a woman’’.
While working at Bell Laboratories, she earned a masters in mathematics, and later her PhD from Princeton. After earning her doctorate, she advanced at Bell Laboratories to become head of the economics research group. ‘‘It was not easy for the Bell Labs management,’’ Bailey once told an interviewer of the American Economic Association of the early years in her career, ‘‘to accept the prospect of a female computer programming employee publicly theorising about regulated firms like AT&T engaging in inefficient economic behaviour due to regulatory distorted incentives.’’
In addition to pursuing her education and career, Bailey acted as an advocate for her elder son, James Lawrence Bailey, who had learning disabilities. Working with other parents and educators, she helped start a school in New Jersey that catered to children with his challenges.
Bailey’s marriage to James Bailey ended in divorce. Their son James died in 2018. Survivors include another son, four sisters and two grandchildren.
Bailey received honours including the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award, given annually by the American Economic Association to a person ‘‘who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession’’. She was a past chair of the National Bureau of Economic Research and was a 1997 inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In a field sometimes derided as the ‘‘dismal science’’, Bailey brought an infectious enthusiasm for economics and the ability of economists to shape society.
‘‘I know lots of people who went to work for the government and found they were bored. I never had that experience,’’ she told Forbes in 1983, reflecting on her time on the Civil Aeronautics Board. ‘‘In fact, I never had as much fun professionally as I did in deregulating the airlines. Every time I step on to a [discount] flight I get to reap some of the benefits of my work in Washington.’’ – Washington Post
‘‘Women need to learn to take their careers in their own hands. True merit
doesn’t always shine out – it has to be brought to the boss’s attention.’’