With deep sadness and regret, we have to report that our much loved colleague and friend, Dr Anita Ratcliffe, has recently died. Anita joined the Department of Economics as a lecturer in 2011. She contributed a great deal to the department and to the discipline more widely, especially in terms of helping to address the image problem of economics. As the department’s Widening Participation Academic Lead, Anita led on activities which focused on challenging the stereotype that economics is all about ‘money’ or ‘the economy’. She introduced a range of initiatives to showcase the wide remit of the discipline and to encourage students from different backgrounds to study economics. In October 2023, Anita ran the department’s first diversity in economics event to celebrate the diversity of our student body.
In order to develop a more inclusive curriculum, Anita introduced a final year undergraduate module on the Economics of Race and Gender. Students enjoyed Anita’s research-led teaching where she focused on developing student knowledge and understanding of statistical techniques applied to detecting and measuring the extent of discrimination in the labour market, the theories used to explain why discrimination arises, as well as policy solutions. As an active member of the department’s EDI committee and Athena Swan Self-assessment Team, she played a key role in the department successfully being awarded an Athena Swan bronze award in March 2024. This academic year, she led the University of Sheffield’s contributions to the Royal Economic Society funded Discover Economics mission to increase the diversity of economics students. She arranged talks in local schools delivered by our students to 15-17 year olds to help them with making choices about what post 16 qualifications to take. She was nominated by the Department for the University of Sheffield Education Awards 2024 in the category of Inclusivity, Diversity and Community in Education.
Anita established an international reputation for highly rigorous research in policy-relevant areas. Specifically, she made important research contributions in the area of wellbeing, the impact of terrorism on individual outcomes and the role of ethnic identity in shaping individual outcomes. She was recently awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship on “Analysing the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.” She was a popular PhD supervisor, who devoted significant time to commenting on and improving the quality of her students’ research.
We will greatly miss Anita’s contributions to life in the Department and the Faculty of Social Sciences. Above all, we will miss Anita’s friendship – she would often frequent the departmental social space and she would always ask how you were. We will miss her accounts of her latest recycling and upcycling projects as well as which is the best dark chocolate. The department will not be the same without her.
Sarah Brown
Head of Department of Economics