Brazilian breaks male bubble in economy and will teach at Yale

Raised on the outskirts of Olinda, Mayara Felix, 33, from Pernambuco, finished her doctorate in economics at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the United States in 2021, a feat that places her among the four Brazilians who obtained the title (PhD) in a of the best rated universities in the country.

In 2024, Felix will join another select club as he assumes the chair of assistant professor of economics and international relations at Yale, a university that also ranks among the best in the US in economics.

The position of the Brazilian is coveted: the position gives the professional the guarantee to remain in the institution for at least seven years, in addition to the guarantee of being able to claim tenure at the university.

Raised in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Olinda, Jardim Fragoso, Felix refutes the idea of ​​meritocracy. She says that she was able to advance in her studies because she had a great support network, among family and friends, in addition to having obtained scholarships throughout her life.

“Talent and effort are necessary, but not always enough. I didn’t have to work to help with the household expenses, so I could dedicate myself only to my studies. I consider myself privileged. Of course, we were poor, but the house was our own. PM, died in 1998 in a motorcycle accident, and left us a pension.”

She says that her paternal grandmother was illiterate, but made her 12 children study. The maternal grandmother was seven and worked as a maid. The maternal grandfather, in turn, sold jerked beef from a stall.

Despite the restrictions, Felix says the grandparents invested heavily in getting all of their children to go to college. “Today, I have a cousin who is a doctor, a justice official cousin, my sister is a justice analyst. So, we had this huge family support.”

Felix says that he got a scholarship at an English school, where he was an intern in 2006 and earned R$ 500. He got scholarships in military schools and in pre-university courses. She even attended a semester of law, but locked it up when she had the opportunity to attend college in the United States.

At Mount Holyoke College, she became interested in economics. The entire application process, including airfare, was paid for by an American program, she says. “The scholarship was given by the college itself, with a total cost per year of US$ 50,000. I paid only a few annual costs, working at the university itself: in the cafeteria and as a tour guide of the college.”

She also worked for three years (2011 to 2014) in a company as an economic consultant and between 2014 and 2015 she was a research assistant for the Nobel Prize in Economics 2021, Joshua Angrist.

“I like to de-romanticize my path. What I tell people is not to be ashamed to ask for scholarships, to talk to people, to know where to go. Conquests take time, but there is no merit in inventing the wheel. , it is necessary to be strategic.”​

In an environment dominated by white men, Felix says that being a woman and a foreigner weighs on the conquest of space. “The profession is practically for white men, in addition to being a very classy environment”, she says.

Felix says that he has had to intervene in conversations after hearing comments from male colleagues doubting the ability of women in the economic area.

“We still hear jokes like that. It’s a tiring situation because, despite being focused, I try to avoid that it affects me, I can’t just do my part [como a maioria deles faz]because we [mulheres] we need to prove all the time that we are capable”, he says.

In Brazil, Felix declares herself white, but in the US, according to her, she is seen as Latina. In seminars, for example, because she is the only woman or the only Latina in the room, she knows that what she or another colleague says can be interpreted as representative of an entire group.

“It can make you want to dodge, be afraid if you make a mistake, or ask something and seem like you don’t understand the subject. Many of the women I talk to suffer from it in academia, especially in certain male-dominated subjects. The same thing happens with male students. blacks or Hispanics,” he says.

Doctoral thesis

In 2021, Mayara Felix defended a doctoral thesis whose main article analyzed the effects of foreign trade liberalization in the 1990s on the Brazilian labor market.

It shows that openness has reduced wages and increased the concentration of labor markets that are more exposed to competition from imports, evidencing a high level of market power of firms over their workers.

The wage drop was due to the loss of income for the surviving firms that, with the opening, could no longer charge high prices. In short: loss for the worker, gain for the consumer.

“I was strategic in choosing the topic of my main article. I looked for a topic rich enough not only to fulfill the requirements of a successful article (important question, theoretical motivation, rich data, etc.) throughout the long research process.”

In addition to intellectual curiosity, she says that having experienced the opening of the 1990s from the perspective of the periphery made her want to understand whether or not the opening increased the market power of firms over their workers.

“The impression I had during my childhood was that companies really exploited their workers, especially the less educated: they didn’t pay what they owed, they treated them with disdain. Was my impression biased? It was representative for my parents as a whole. ? Has openness changed or perpetuated this? These and other questions keep me interested to this day in understanding how competitive the Brazilian labor market really is, and how we can increase this competitiveness. And this should be of interest to all social strata. competitiveness is bad for the economy as a whole, not just the workers directly affected.”