Money and gender: An interdisciplinary online symposium.
University of London, December 2025.

Colleagues are organising an interdisciplinary symposium on money and gender to be held in early December this year.

This symposium explores the entanglement of gender and money. Money might appear to be a neutral economic instrument that transcends cultural difference, but this project explores money as it relates to social reality in culturally dense and gendered ways, especially when value comes to be embodied and contested.

The cultural character of money is manifest in what its discourse borrows from other contexts, such as the natural, affective and social worlds, in talking, for example, of growth, depressions, credit, and trust. High finance has arguably been defined in order to create exclusion and promote colonial, classed and gendered privilege and values. Forms of discrimination associated with the sector range from the blatantly misogynistic to systematic but ‘unconscious’ biases. Such values reverberate in the everyday uses and meanings of money.

You are invited to look at this topic in the light of recent developments (such as crypto-currencies) and in longer-term perspectives. As anthropologists have pointed out, women have themselves been a medium of exchange, whether in kinship systems or in the kind of marriage market Jane Austen’s novels represent. In market societies most people exchange labour for money, but certain kinds of labour, such as child-bearing, are sometimes considered to be at risk of being tainted by payment. How far do financial discourses reflect a longstanding anxiety to curb what Rousseau called the ‘disorder of women’?

 

We seek contributions from scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, literature, history, geography, politics, anthropology, philosophy, performing arts, film, media, law, and cultural studies. Possible topics include:

 

– the representation of debt, obligation, and money;

– the role of money in political theory;

– the cultural, affective, and psychological dimensions of money;

– money as a cultural artefact bound to identity, hierarchy, and the reproduction of social order;

– gender and new financial technologies;

– high finance and gendered exclusion;

the metaphors and discourse of money;

– money and desire;

-the evolution of gendered regimes of value and money.

 

This online symposium will be held under the auspices of the University of London in early December 2025, with a view to the publication of selected papers as a collection of essays.