if you close your eyes and imagined an
economist you’d probably think of a
slightly nerdy white man and and on
average you’d be right
historically economics has been a man’s
discipline so I went to Harvard
University blast autumn to visit the
faculty and their central staircase had
portraits of 30 40 of their emeritus
professors he’s kind of great minds in
economics not one woman so that’s a
historical issue but but it persists so
Shelly Lindbergh under the committee for
the status of women in the economics
profession they’ve documented how many
women there are today in in economics
and academic in academic economics and
in its senior ranks they found that in
the top ten academic economics
departments in the u.s. nine nine
percent of them were women at Cambridge
University where I learnt my econ 101
and where we are today
there are 11 full professors and one
woman in the economics faculty so Donna
ginza and Shulamite Khan have compared
economics to other subjects maybe this
is an academia thing turns out no
economics is actually has a much worse
gender imbalance problem than the social
sciences it’s comparable to maths
computer science physical sciences so if
there are so few women particularly in
the senior ranks of of academic
luckily this is economics this is
effectively a labor markets decision a
work decision and economists love
thinking about work decisions in fact
they’ve kind of got a simple framework
for thinking about how people make the
decision to become an academic economist
so put yourself in the mind of an
economist have this kind of simple
framework
and there are three things that could be
driving it so maybe it’s preferences
maybe women just don’t really like
economics maybe they’re put off by the
maths or maybe it’s ability maybe it’s
productivity in academic economics
basically what matters is how many
articles you churn out and in how good a
journal they’re in maybe women and men
publish at different rates in different
quality journals or maybe it’s prejudice
maybe it’s something to do with the fact
that women face constraints that men do
not maybe it’s discrimination now which
of these three is driving this really
matters it matters for whose problem
this is to solve if you think of
yourself from the perspective of someone
making hiring decisions or promotion
decisions then if women don’t want the
academic jobs or if they’re just not as
well qualified as the men who are
knocking on your door then maybe that’s
not their problem to solve and some
would argue that they shouldn’t be
trying to solve it alternatively if it’s
prejudice if women face constraints that
men do not then not only does that mean
that good researchers are being shut out
of academic economics it also means that
okay so before we go on I’m gonna give
you two warnings so the first warning is
about this very human tendency that we
have towards motivated reasoning so
imagine you’re you’re a woman and you
haven’t succeeded where a male colleague
has it’s much more comforting to think
that your own failings have occurred of
are because of the system than your own
personal shortcomings the second warning
that I’m going to give you is something
about the reality of academic economics
departments today so I wrote this big
piece on women and economics for the
Economist and after I did someone got in
touch with me about what life was like
in the 1980s and she told me about
George Stigler its Nobel laureate in
economics telling his class of graduate
students at the University of Chicago
that the day the faculty hired a woman
would be the day that he would leave
because of the deterioration in quality
that would signal about the department I
don’t think that kind of attitude is
anywhere near as widespread today and in
fact I think many people making hiring
decisions would be horrified to think
that they they treated men and women any
differently and that will means that
whatever the problem is if there is
discrimination if there is prejudice
then it’s going to be subtle it’s going
to be really hard to uncover and really
hard to fix ok so some answers I should
confess right now that I don’t have all
of the answers but you can think of
economists as detectives we can find
some clues as to what is going on here
so cue number one women drop out early
women are just over half of
undergraduates in the US and the UK but
there are third of the economics
undergraduates people are making women
are making this decision very early on
the other clue is that it’s really
difficult to explain the gender gap by
pointing to maths you can explain some
of it women are just much less likely to
you know do things like maths a-level
but you really can’t explain the whole
thing there’s this unexplained bit
there’s something about economics that
women just don’t seem to like so maybe
it’s is about preferences
maybe economics is so abstract women
don’t like that maybe there are social
norms about what an economist is that
are kind of nudging women away from away
from the subject so I always kind of
laugh when I think about this bit
because maybe this is one area where
actually economists need some help from
the sociologists to work out what’s
going on ok so that’s the first set of
clues but we need more clues
because women drop out early but then
they carry on dropping out after women
enter along this kind of academic job
track they drop out at higher rates than
men the the gender imbalance worsens as
you get more and more senior along the
academic track so when I went to Harvard
I met this economist called Heather
sarsens
now remember that framework that I just
told you about maybe its preferences
maybe its productivity or maybe it’s
prejudice now one place we could look
for clues is to compare men and women
who were equally productive and then see
if they face different chances of
success if there’s prejudice then an
identically productive woman should
succeed at the same rate as a man so
Heather at Harvard asked exactly that
question she tried to do that detective
work so she gathered Seavey’s of
economists from the top 30 American PhD
granting institutions and she looked to
see their chances of tenure six to eight
years after getting their first academic
position so when she did that she just
looked at the raw numbers
she found that men got tenure within
that time period at a rate of 75 percent
women at a rate of 52 percent it’s a big
gap but maybe they’re less productive
maybe we can explain this through
productivity so she compared that to how
many papers they had been producing and
she found what looks like a smoking gun
it looks like women need to publish more
papers to see the same chances of
getting promoted but as a problem
there’s a big problem which is that I
gave you this neat framework fine just
measure productivity and look at the
chances of success but in some cases
it’s really hard to measure productivity
so another twist of this tale is that in
academic economics you can publish
papers on your own or with other
people and when you collaborate when you
co-author the order of the author’s
isn’t given an order of who did the most
work it’s given an alphabetical order so
Heather found a funny thing when she
compared men and women who’d published
papers on their own one extra paper
published on your own was associated
with the same chances the same boost in
their chances of getting promoted for
men and women when men published papers
with other men they also saw a boost in
their chances of success but when women
published with other men they didn’t get
the same credit they didn’t get that
same bump in their chances of getting
promoted so the problem here is that
it’s impossible to prove definitively
that maybe women just weren’t putting in
as much effort as the men when they
collaborated you can’t kind of go back
and show 100% that that that’s not what
was happening because productivity it’s
just hard to measure the more likely
explanation for what’s going on is that
in the absence of full information
promoters when were their gut and their
gut told them that the woman had
contributed less but that problem of
productivity being hard to measure and
making it hard to prove that this is
bias is exactly the same problem that
opens up this avenue for this kind of
gut gut reaction this this kind of fuzzy
implicit bias to act okay so that’s one
big set of clues here this work by
Heather and the second set is by Erin
Hangul so I first met Erin when I was
here doing my masters at Cambridge she’s
now at the University of Liverpool and
she wanted to dig deeper into this idea
of productivity so I said just compare
productivity between men and women and
look at their chances of success but
what if the very measure of productivity
is somehow tilted against women so she
analyzed 9,000
article abstracts in economics and she
analyzed them to see how readable they
were and lo and behold she found that
ones written by women were clearer and
more readable than ones written by men
and that’s a gap that opened up as the
publication’s process went on women
weren’t getting any credit for their
clear rewriting and she looked at one
journal and found that it took women six
months longer for their for their papers
to go through the publication’s process
than men so this is alarming this is
consistent with the idea that women are
being set higher standards than men more
time editing your articles to make them
clearer is less time writing articles
what if that very measure of
okay so I’ve been asking the question
why are there so few women and economics
why there’s so few senior women in
economics and I think there are some
strong clues to suggest that at least
part of the reason is that women face
barriers that men do not but that’s not
actually the main message I want to
leave you with I think the the more
important message is that this is really
difficult it’s really difficult to
disentangle these different reasons for
gender imbalances you can use one
framework that seems very neat and
simple but that might be hiding the the
very messages that you need so
productivity can be hard to measure and
what if they’re very measures that
you’re using have the same bias in them
as the ones you’re trying to correct so
I think essentially we need to look for
some more clues and I hope we do because
it would be really great to have more
women and economics just like the ones
that I’m showing here on the screen thank you
economist you’d probably think of a
slightly nerdy white man and and on
average you’d be right
historically economics has been a man’s
discipline so I went to Harvard
University blast autumn to visit the
faculty and their central staircase had
portraits of 30 40 of their emeritus
professors he’s kind of great minds in
economics not one woman so that’s a
historical issue but but it persists so
Shelly Lindbergh under the committee for
the status of women in the economics
profession they’ve documented how many
women there are today in in economics
and academic in academic economics and
in its senior ranks they found that in
the top ten academic economics
departments in the u.s. nine nine
percent of them were women at Cambridge
University where I learnt my econ 101
and where we are today
there are 11 full professors and one
woman in the economics faculty so Donna
ginza and Shulamite Khan have compared
economics to other subjects maybe this
is an academia thing turns out no
economics is actually has a much worse
gender imbalance problem than the social
sciences it’s comparable to maths
computer science physical sciences so if
there are so few women particularly in
the senior ranks of of academic
luckily this is economics this is
effectively a labor markets decision a
work decision and economists love
thinking about work decisions in fact
they’ve kind of got a simple framework
for thinking about how people make the
decision to become an academic economist
so put yourself in the mind of an
economist have this kind of simple
framework
and there are three things that could be
driving it so maybe it’s preferences
maybe women just don’t really like
economics maybe they’re put off by the
maths or maybe it’s ability maybe it’s
productivity in academic economics
basically what matters is how many
articles you churn out and in how good a
journal they’re in maybe women and men
publish at different rates in different
quality journals or maybe it’s prejudice
maybe it’s something to do with the fact
that women face constraints that men do
not maybe it’s discrimination now which
of these three is driving this really
matters it matters for whose problem
this is to solve if you think of
yourself from the perspective of someone
making hiring decisions or promotion
decisions then if women don’t want the
academic jobs or if they’re just not as
well qualified as the men who are
knocking on your door then maybe that’s
not their problem to solve and some
would argue that they shouldn’t be
trying to solve it alternatively if it’s
prejudice if women face constraints that
men do not then not only does that mean
that good researchers are being shut out
of academic economics it also means that
okay so before we go on I’m gonna give
you two warnings so the first warning is
about this very human tendency that we
have towards motivated reasoning so
imagine you’re you’re a woman and you
haven’t succeeded where a male colleague
has it’s much more comforting to think
that your own failings have occurred of
are because of the system than your own
personal shortcomings the second warning
that I’m going to give you is something
about the reality of academic economics
departments today so I wrote this big
piece on women and economics for the
Economist and after I did someone got in
touch with me about what life was like
in the 1980s and she told me about
George Stigler its Nobel laureate in
economics telling his class of graduate
students at the University of Chicago
that the day the faculty hired a woman
would be the day that he would leave
because of the deterioration in quality
that would signal about the department I
don’t think that kind of attitude is
anywhere near as widespread today and in
fact I think many people making hiring
decisions would be horrified to think
that they they treated men and women any
differently and that will means that
whatever the problem is if there is
discrimination if there is prejudice
then it’s going to be subtle it’s going
to be really hard to uncover and really
hard to fix ok so some answers I should
confess right now that I don’t have all
of the answers but you can think of
economists as detectives we can find
some clues as to what is going on here
so cue number one women drop out early
women are just over half of
undergraduates in the US and the UK but
there are third of the economics
undergraduates people are making women
are making this decision very early on
the other clue is that it’s really
difficult to explain the gender gap by
pointing to maths you can explain some
of it women are just much less likely to
you know do things like maths a-level
but you really can’t explain the whole
thing there’s this unexplained bit
there’s something about economics that
women just don’t seem to like so maybe
it’s is about preferences
maybe economics is so abstract women
don’t like that maybe there are social
norms about what an economist is that
are kind of nudging women away from away
from the subject so I always kind of
laugh when I think about this bit
because maybe this is one area where
actually economists need some help from
the sociologists to work out what’s
going on ok so that’s the first set of
clues but we need more clues
because women drop out early but then
they carry on dropping out after women
enter along this kind of academic job
track they drop out at higher rates than
men the the gender imbalance worsens as
you get more and more senior along the
academic track so when I went to Harvard
I met this economist called Heather
sarsens
now remember that framework that I just
told you about maybe its preferences
maybe its productivity or maybe it’s
prejudice now one place we could look
for clues is to compare men and women
who were equally productive and then see
if they face different chances of
success if there’s prejudice then an
identically productive woman should
succeed at the same rate as a man so
Heather at Harvard asked exactly that
question she tried to do that detective
work so she gathered Seavey’s of
economists from the top 30 American PhD
granting institutions and she looked to
see their chances of tenure six to eight
years after getting their first academic
position so when she did that she just
looked at the raw numbers
she found that men got tenure within
that time period at a rate of 75 percent
women at a rate of 52 percent it’s a big
gap but maybe they’re less productive
maybe we can explain this through
productivity so she compared that to how
many papers they had been producing and
she found what looks like a smoking gun
it looks like women need to publish more
papers to see the same chances of
getting promoted but as a problem
there’s a big problem which is that I
gave you this neat framework fine just
measure productivity and look at the
chances of success but in some cases
it’s really hard to measure productivity
so another twist of this tale is that in
academic economics you can publish
papers on your own or with other
people and when you collaborate when you
co-author the order of the author’s
isn’t given an order of who did the most
work it’s given an alphabetical order so
Heather found a funny thing when she
compared men and women who’d published
papers on their own one extra paper
published on your own was associated
with the same chances the same boost in
their chances of getting promoted for
men and women when men published papers
with other men they also saw a boost in
their chances of success but when women
published with other men they didn’t get
the same credit they didn’t get that
same bump in their chances of getting
promoted so the problem here is that
it’s impossible to prove definitively
that maybe women just weren’t putting in
as much effort as the men when they
collaborated you can’t kind of go back
and show 100% that that that’s not what
was happening because productivity it’s
just hard to measure the more likely
explanation for what’s going on is that
in the absence of full information
promoters when were their gut and their
gut told them that the woman had
contributed less but that problem of
productivity being hard to measure and
making it hard to prove that this is
bias is exactly the same problem that
opens up this avenue for this kind of
gut gut reaction this this kind of fuzzy
implicit bias to act okay so that’s one
big set of clues here this work by
Heather and the second set is by Erin
Hangul so I first met Erin when I was
here doing my masters at Cambridge she’s
now at the University of Liverpool and
she wanted to dig deeper into this idea
of productivity so I said just compare
productivity between men and women and
look at their chances of success but
what if the very measure of productivity
is somehow tilted against women so she
analyzed 9,000
article abstracts in economics and she
analyzed them to see how readable they
were and lo and behold she found that
ones written by women were clearer and
more readable than ones written by men
and that’s a gap that opened up as the
publication’s process went on women
weren’t getting any credit for their
clear rewriting and she looked at one
journal and found that it took women six
months longer for their for their papers
to go through the publication’s process
than men so this is alarming this is
consistent with the idea that women are
being set higher standards than men more
time editing your articles to make them
clearer is less time writing articles
what if that very measure of
okay so I’ve been asking the question
why are there so few women and economics
why there’s so few senior women in
economics and I think there are some
strong clues to suggest that at least
part of the reason is that women face
barriers that men do not but that’s not
actually the main message I want to
leave you with I think the the more
important message is that this is really
difficult it’s really difficult to
disentangle these different reasons for
gender imbalances you can use one
framework that seems very neat and
simple but that might be hiding the the
very messages that you need so
productivity can be hard to measure and
what if they’re very measures that
you’re using have the same bias in them
as the ones you’re trying to correct so
I think essentially we need to look for
some more clues and I hope we do because
it would be really great to have more
women and economics just like the ones
that I’m showing here on the screen thank you
Please follow and like us: