In her Old Mill office, Professor Elaine McCrate and student Gillian Perron work on hammering out final details of the UVM senior's honors thesis. When Perron asks for clarification of the concept "omitted variable bias," McCrate tells her to envision a drive through the neighborhoods of Burlington's New North End. Perron pictures the modest Capes and ranches that sprouted during the booming 1950s, then McCrate asks the student to steer her imagination to the more recent middle-class developments of Williston and South Burlington.

The exercise, this real estate tour in the mind's eye, begins to make concrete the abstraction of omitted variable bias — how omitting one variable (age) that is correlated with another (size) leads to biased estimates.

McCrate pauses a moment as Perron ponders the newer 'burbs of South Burlington. "You have huge houses," McCrate says. Knowing the size of a middle-class house, without any other information, helps inform about the age of a property, and ultimately influences its price. "This is by way of making the point that age and size are correlated, so you can't omit either one from the equation," McCrate stresses.

Perron gets it.

The give and take is a prime illustration of how McCrate, professor of economics and women's studies, works with students to make economic theory as real as the streets where they live. Her ability to reach out to students, both with academic lessons and advice on navigating the world after graduation, has earned McCrate the 2009 George V. Kidder Distinguished Faculty Award, presented by the university's alumni.

"She used a lot of real-world examples," recalls Annette Hines, '92. "She was very much a professor who was interested in what we were thinking. There was always time to discuss things and for questions." And yet, Hines adds, McCrate really shines with her work as an academic advisor and mentor. "That one-to one makes her the teacher that she is."

McCrate helped Hines see that she could achieve more than she had expected of herself, says the Boston-based lawyer. After entering UVM at age twenty-three, Hines would be the first person in her family to graduate from college. McCrate's teaching led her to switch majors from business to economics, as well as pursue law school and an MBA after her years at UVM. "I probably would still be working as a bank teller or as something else I thought I was destined for," Hines says. "Until I met her, I didn't know I could do it."

Economics of inequality

Among students, McCrate is known for her passionate interest in leveraging economics to explore issues surrounding women and minorities in the labor market. "She focused on social justice issues, so you yourself became empowered and had to act," recalls Jessica Banks '07, who is working for Teach for America and teaches sixth grade in an inner-city Atlanta school.

Economic social justice issues first began to grab McCrate's interest when she entered college in the 1970s. The daughter of a state highway patrolman and a school secretary, McCrate's decision to apply to just one school for college — secular, gargantuan Ohio State University — was something of a rebellion. After a small Catholic high school, the relative anonymity had its appeal, McCrate recalls. But, since she was considering not applying to college at all, her parents were just relieved she had enrolled.

On campus in Columbus, McCrate took a few economics classes and came head-to-head with the prevailing views of the time. "One professor gave back an exam and said that although the top four exam scores were earned by women, women weren't very good at economics," McCrate says. One textbook explained the term "external benefit," which is a benefit someone receives from another's investment, by relating it to men appreciating a beautiful woman who's spent money on expensive clothes and make-up.

That fueled McCrate's desire to prove women could excel in the male-dominated field. "I said, 'I'm going to stick around and make their lives miserable,'" she recalls with a smile.

McCrate's interest in social inequalities brought her to study women and minorities in the labor market. "Economics was a way to do that," she says from her office, a sunny space lined with books bearing titles such as We Can't Eat Prestige and Fighting Poverty.

McCrate came to UVM in 1985, quickly finding a home in a department where her senior faculty colleagues held no antiquated prejudices against the work of a female academic. Perhaps because of that, the economics department at UVM today is unusual in that more than half of the faculty is represented by women, compared with fifteen percent to twenty percent at a typical university economics department, McCrate notes.

So what's her goal for students taking her classes, which include "Women in the U.S. Economy" and "Labor-Management Relations"? Giving them the tools to evaluate the world and to get over their "fear and loathing" of math, McCrate says. And as an advisor, McCrate is now finding her students increasingly looking to her for guidance about how to navigate a labor market that she describes as the worst since 1982.

"During the semester she's given me a lot of ideas about where to apply," says Perron, who graduated in May and is looking to work in hospital administration before applying to graduate school. The labor-management relations class she took from McCrate her sophomore year, Perron adds, will likely stick with her for life.

McCrate's passion for social justice issues has just as enduring an influence on her students. "A lot of things we covered in her courses led me to what I'm doing now," Jessica Banks says. "Right away in freshman year, the issues she tackled and the life experience she brought into the classroom fostered what a lot of people ended up doing."