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NY Times, Jan. 10, 2019
Female Economists Push Their Field Toward a #MeToo Reckoning
By Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley
ATLANTA — The economics profession is facing a mounting crisis of sexual
harassment, discrimination and bullying that women in the field say has
pushed many of them to the sidelines — or out of the field entirely.
Those issues took center stage at the American Economic Association’s
annual meeting, the largest gathering of the profession, last weekend in
Atlanta. Spurred by substantiated allegations of harassment against one
of the most prominent young economists in the country, top women in the
field shared stories of their own struggles with discrimination.
Graduate students and junior professors demanded immediate steps by the
A.E.A. to help victims of harassment and discipline economists who
violate the group’s newly adopted code of conduct.
Leading male economists offered an unprecedented acknowledgment of
harassment and discrimination in the field. “Economics certainly has a
problem,” Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who took
over as A.E.A. president this year, said during a panel discussion. The
profession has, “unfortunately, a reputation for hostility toward women
and minorities,” he said.
Janet L. Yellen, who was the first chairwoman of the Fed and will head
the A.E.A. next year, said that addressing the issue “should be the
highest priority” for economists in the years to come.
During a panel discussion on gender issues, Ms. Yellen was one of
several women who shared stories of discrimination and bullying. Her
fellow panelists described a list of “known” male predators in academic
departments who have never been punished for behavior that included
repeatedly making unwanted sexual advances toward junior colleagues.
One of the panelists, Susan Athey, a Stanford economist, said she had
bought “khakis and loafers” to fit in with the men in the lunchroom of
her first economics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. She did so even though the department was the “most
supportive environment” she has encountered in her career.
“I spent all my time hoping that no one would remember I was female,”
said Ms. Athey, a past winner of a prestigious award for young
economists. “I didn’t want to remind people that I’m a sexual being.”
Economics has long struggled with diversity. Only about a third of
economics doctorates go to women, and the gender gap is wider at senior
levels of the profession. Racial and ethnic minorities — particularly
African-Americans and Latinos — are even more underrepresented. And
notably, the gender gap in economics is wider than in other social
sciences and, at least by some measures, traditionally male-dominated
fields such as science and math.
Certain subfields, like finance, have a particularly poor record of
advancing women. A branch of the American Finance Association presented
survey results in Atlanta that show barely 10 percent of tenured finance
professors, and 16 percent of tenure-track faculty, are women. In
economics as a whole, women accounted for about 23 percent of tenured
and tenure-track faculty in 2015.
Stories of harassment and discrimination, long shared in private
conversations and email chains, began to be aired more publicly last
year with allegations that Roland G. Fryer, a prominent Harvard
economist, had harassed and bullied women in his university-affiliated
research lab. The New York Times reported last month that a Harvard
investigation had substantiated some of those claims while other
investigations are continuing.
The economics association last year approved its first code of
professional conduct, which calls for “equal opportunity and fair
treatment for all economists” regardless of sex, race or other
characteristics. The association also created a standing committee to
address diversity, and is surveying its members about harassment and
discrimination.
But many economists, particularly younger ones, pushed leaders here for
more aggressive action. Hundreds of graduate students and research
assistants have signed an open letter calling for more explicit codes of
conduct, stronger enforcement and better systems for reporting abuses,
among other reforms.
“We shouldn’t have to rely on whisper networks to protect us from abuse
and inappropriate behavior,” they wrote. “And we don’t have the power to
discipline our supervisors, or even our peers. You do. Please, listen to
us.”
Some of that frustration bubbled over in the A.E.A.’s formal business
meeting Friday evening, a usually dry affair in which members hear
reports on the association’s finances and similar matters.
“There’s just a ton of anger and resentment around how the profession
has been,” Elisabeth Perlman, 34, an economist with the Census Bureau,
said at the meeting. She added that the profession must also address the
misconduct that was allowed to go unchecked for decades.
Meeting attendees also expressed frustration with what they said was the
association’s response to the allegations against Mr. Fryer, who had
been due to join the A.E.A.’s executive committee this month. After the
Times article was published, the association issued a two-sentence
announcement that Mr. Fryer had resigned, but made no other public
statement.
“The silence from the executive committee has really been deafening,”
Jennifer Doleac, a professor at Texas A&M, said at Friday’s business
meeting. “A lot of the profession is really waiting to hear from you,
and for some semblance of leadership about the direction of the
profession and what will be tolerated and what won’t be.”
Olivier Blanchard, the association’s departing president, said for the
first time Friday that the executive committee had asked Mr. Fryer to
resign. He called that request “the best way out” because the
association had no formal procedure to remove an elected officer. The
committee, Mr. Blanchard said, is now working to develop such rules.
Some members of the executive committee wanted to go further and
establish procedures to punish or expel members for violations of the
code of conduct. There are currently no such penalties.
Other members seemed more skeptical of that idea when it was raised in a
closed-door session last Thursday, according to several people who were
there. Mr. Blanchard cut off discussion, saying he was hungry and it was
time for lunch, these people said. The committee will take up the issue
again in April.
Mr. Blanchard, a former chief economist at the International Monetary
Fund, did not dispute that account. “The job of the person in charge of
the meeting is to make sure that all issues on the agenda are taken up
and discussed,” he wrote in an email on Wednesday, adding a
parenthetical: “and yes, that people, including me, have time to eat.”
He also said that he was “happy” that the profession was taking women’s
concerns seriously, and that “I think the A.E.A. is playing a strong
role” on the issue.
Lisa D. Cook, a Michigan State University economist who is one of the
most prominent black women in the field, credited younger women with
forcing the A.E.A. to move more quickly.
“I told them they have more power than they know,” Ms. Cook said of
graduate students and other young people pushing for change. “This is
the possible beginnings of a sea change.”
Many male economists long dismissed claims of bias and discrimination,
arguing that gender disparities must reflect differences in preference
or ability. They pointed to theories that predict that, in the
simplified world of economic models, discrimination on the basis of
characteristics like gender and race would disappear because of competition.
In recent years, however, a growing body of research has found evidence
of discrimination at virtually every stage of the profession, from
undergraduate enrollment to tenure decisions. Erin Hengel, a University
of Liverpool economist, has found that women are held to higher
standards of writing and research than their male colleagues. Alice Wu,
then an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, made
waves two years ago with a paper documenting rampant misogyny and
hostility toward women on a popular online forum for graduate students.
One provocatively titled paper presented in Atlanta asked “Does
Economics Make You Sexist?” It found that undergraduate students in
Chile exhibited more implicit and explicit gender bias after studying
economics. The effect was particularly strong among male students — and
weaker in departments with more female faculty members.
Shelly Lundberg, a University of California, Santa Barbara, economist
who has long pushed the field to include more women, said that each
study had faced “an unusual level of scrutiny and skepticism,” but that
taken together, they were hard to dismiss.
“The realization that this is real, that there is bias, is starting to
sink in,” Ms. Lundberg said. “I really think this may have been the
breakthrough.”
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