Barbara Bergmann has passed away at age 87

Barbara Bergmann, a pioneer in the study of gender in the economy who herself overcame barriers to women in the world of academic economics, died on April 5 at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 87.

…Ms. Bergmann was an emeritus professor at both American University and the University of Maryland, and she continued to research, publish and consult until very recently.

The rest of the NYT obituary is here.  When Bergmann went to Harvard for her doctorate in the 1950s, women took exams separately from men.  She feared that automation would decimate the jobs held by women (it seems the opposite has been true, but kudos to her for considering the issue), and she once wrote this:

“Will high-status people be willing to type their own documents in the future?” she asked. “Though the stigma runs deep, the spreading use of the computer for tasks other than word processing may succeed in removing the stain from the activity of typing on the job.”

Here is a 2014 segment on why Bergmann did not favor a guaranteed annual income.  Here is Bergmann on scholar.google.com.  Here is her Wikipedia entry, she also was an early proponent of computer-simulated economies.