Prue Hyman

Of course, those who identify as transgender men and women deserve full human rights, but not at the expense of the rights of women to safe spaces for example. Statistics by sex on the gender pay gap and violence against women and children would be made meaningless if self-claimed gender replaced sex as the classifying variable. The right to free speech on all these areas is critical – shutting down our positions is very dangerous

Prue is a lesbian feminist activist and in her working life was a feminist economics academic at Victoria University of Wellington. Her areas of research spanned feminist economic theory, labour force participation, earnings, industrial relations, income maintenance, housing, the position of older women, and international issues, as well as lesbian issues.

She has worked for and been a consultant to the NZ Ministry of Women’s Affairs, helped organise the New Zealand Women’s Studies Association, and been on the Board of the International Association for Feminist Economics. In recent years, Prue has been active in Equal Pay legal cases and the Living Wage movement.

Impatient to achieve positive changes, her retired status allows her to be more trenchant on the shameful errors committed by orthodox neoclassical economics. This includes the undervaluation of women’s paid and unpaid work as a key aspect of the power system which orthodox economics supports.

Her nightmare is for women to be in 50% of the top positions, with nothing changing for low paid women.