Barbara R. Bergmann was Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Maryland and at American University. She received her PhD from Harvard University and served as a senior staff member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Kennedy Administration. Other government experience includes service as Senior Economic Adviser with the Agency for International Development and as an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She has served on advisory committees to the Congressional Budget Office and the Bureau of the Census. Throughout the 1980s, she wrote a monthly column on economic affairs for the New York Times Sunday Business Section.
She served as President of the Eastern Economic Association, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, the American Association of University Professors and the International Association for Feminist Economics and as chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). Dr. Bergmann wrote on economic and social policy, with recent works on Social Security, child care, poverty, women’s place in the economy and the family, and labor market problems of women and African Americans. Recent books and articles include America’s Child Care Problem: The Way Out (with Suzanne Helburn, Palgrave, St. Martin’s Press, 2002); The Economic Emergence of Women(Palgrave, St. Martin’s Press, 2nd ed. 2005); Is Social Security Broke?: A Cartoon Guide to the Issues (cartoons by Jim Bush, University of Michigan Press, 2000); “The Only Ticket to Equality: Total Androgyny, Male Style,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (Spring 1998); In Defense of Affirmative Action (Basic Books, Inc., 1996), and Saving Our Children from Poverty: What the United States Can Learn From France (Russell Sage Foundation, 1996). She most recently authored two papers: “The Economic Consequences of the Decline of Marriage”(Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University, 2008) and “Long Leaves, Child Well-being, and Gender Equity (Politics & Society, 2008)