Margaret de Vries receives Carolyn Shaw Bell award

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On January 3, retired IMF economist and historian Margaret Garritsen de Vries received the 2002 Carolyn Shaw Bell award from the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). The award honors an individual who has advanced the status of women in economics through example, achievement, or mentoring.

As a child in Detroit,Michigan, during the Great Depression, de Vries personally witnessed the devastating effects of unemployment, which sparked her interest in economics.

The first member of her family to finish high school, de Vries won a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she obtained a B.A. with honors in economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1946, she received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shortly after Nobel prize winner Paul A. Samuelson founded the economics department there.

Joining the IMF in July 1946, de Vries was one of the institution's first staff members. Her female colleagues were few in number, and her early mentors, notably Edward Bernstein and Irving Friedman, were men. She represented the IMF on negotiating missions to...