Women and the local economy

Abstract

Local Economy has always been a political project as well as an academic journal. It grew out of Sam Aaronovitch’s lifetime involvement with the Left (Bruegel, 1999) and was reinforced with a focus on gender and equalities when Irene Bruegel took on the editorship from 1998–2001 (Newman, 2009). This Special Issue returns to the subject of gender, an important but often neglected issue in local economic development and takes the view that gender equality is a social justice issue and has significant implications for the way we conceive both the processes and outcomes of local economic development. The first Special Issue on gender and local economic development appeared in 2000 – 15(1). In her introduction to the issue, Breugel argued that gendering of policy is less about the division of a finite cake between men and women and more about the kind of cake that is being baked (Bruegel, 2000: 3).