Ailsa McKay
Academic
1963 - 5th March 2014
Ailsa McKay was Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University. She gained her PhD from the University of Nottingham and a 1st class BA Hons form the University of Stirling.
She was a founding member of both the Scottish Women’s Budget Group and the European Gender Budget Network and was a member of International Association for Feminist Economics.
She was the Visiting Chair in Gender Studies at University Complutense, Madrid, a position she has held since 2006 and had been invited as an expert witness to give evidence during the budget scrutiny process to a number of Scottish Parliament Committees and in 2008 to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women of the Canadian Parliament.
Ailsa’s teaching and research interests were in the areas of the economics of the welfare state, the reform of current social security measures and the economics of gender inequalities. She is author of The Future of Social Security Policy: Women, Work and a Citizens Basic Income (Routledge, 2005) and she has written a number of articles focused on exploring how a basic income could promote greater gender equality.
More recently she contributed to a number of research projects examining the causes and consequences of gender based occupational segregation with particular reference to Modern Apprentices in Scotland and she has delivered short courses on feminist economic analysis in a variety of settings.
Ailsa was involved in a number of research projects including an international collaborative bid to challenge discrimination and promote governance reform within the HE sector an application to the ESRC to support further development of the Economic for Equality Programme and a European project to support and further develop the activities associated with the European Gender Budget Network
Ailsa was employed on a consultancy basis to work with HM Treasury, the Irish Government and the government of the Basque community to work on their respective pilot gender budget initiatives and she was contracted by UNIFEM and UNDP to provide specialist training on gender budgets. She also acted as special advisor to the Equal Opportunities Committee of the Scottish Parliament for the budget scrutiny period 2007/8 and 2008/09.
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