Ongoing Activities

As part of our mission, CWEC/CFEC organizes professional development sessions and a luncheon at the annual CEA meetings.

Every two years, we award the Early Career Research Award and Sylvia Ostry Award. Follow the links in the menu bar on the left for more information.

We also:

1. maintain a web page for publication of news of activities, opportunities (including job opportunities) and resources of interest to women economists.
2. advise and offer recommendations to the CEA on matters relating to the status of women in economics in Canada.
3. continuously consider and explore new ways to facilitate and promote the goal of gender equity in the Canadian economics profession.
4. pursue and maintain active connections to sister organizations within Canada and internationally.
5. hold an International Women's Day virtual lecture. Check out this year's event on March 4th: IWD lecture poster.pdf

Dr. Ulrike Malmendier, CWEC/CFEC's IWD Speaker on March 4th 2026 presented

"Human Finance: Incorporating Insights from the Life Sciences on Life Experiences and Other Determinants of Decision-Making"

Abstract: Behavioral economics has improved the psychological realism of theoretical models and empirical predictions in economics by allowing for biased beliefs, non-standard preferences, and cognitive limitations. Yet, humans are typically still assumed to invariably follow the same (biased or unbiased) model of belief updating and maximize (perfectly or imperfectly) the same set of preferences throughout their lives. I show that, in a wide range of decision-making realms, we obtain significantly better predictions if we account for humans to be shaped by their prior life-time experiences and by stress and emotions. I argue that, in order to move from the idealized homo œconomicus to modeling a true human (homo), economic theory and empirics need to account for both their minds and bodies to be shaped by past lived experience. To do so, I leverage data from a custom survey about inflation expectations, recall, and inflation narratives, combined with retrospective information on features of people's lived inflation experiences (such as their stress level and their perceived control over the effects of inflation) to show how concepts from biology, neuropsychiatry, and medicine offer novel testable implications that can guide our model of human decision-making.

Slides of Ulrike's talk