Congratulations, Esther Duflo. The world needs more female economists | Jill Priluck

The long history of bias, discrimination and underestimation of women in the field of economics is why Duflo's prize is a such a great step forward

This week, MIT's Esther Duflo became the second female economist to win a Nobel prize. She and her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, also of MIT, and Michael Kremer of Harvard University, shared the award "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

In Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, Duflo and Banerjee studied the poor not as "cartoon characters" but as human beings "in all their complexity and richness". In 2003, they founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT to study poverty.

Related: Economics Nobel prize won by academics for tackling poverty

Jill Priluck's reporting and analysis has appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, Reuters and elsewhere