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NY Times, Jan. 11 2018
Wielding Data, Women Force a Reckoning Over Bias in the Economics Field
By JIM TANKERSLEY and NOAM SCHEIBER
PHILADELPHIA — It is not difficult to find an all-male panel at the
annual January mega-gathering of American economists. They are as common
as PowerPoint presentations and pie charts. One such panel this year met
to sleepily critique President Trump’s economic policies, but it was
overshadowed by another panel, two ballrooms away, that jolted a
profession that prides itself on cool rationality.
That panel on Friday was stocked with women, each of whom presented new
research that revealed a systemic bias in economics and presaged a move
by the field’s leaders to promise to address some of those issues.
Paper after paper presented at the American Economic Association panel
showed a pattern of gender discrimination, beginning with barriers women
face in choosing to study economics and extending through the life cycle
of their careers, including securing job opportunities, writing research
papers, gaining access to top publications and earning proper credit for
published work.
Economics departments have gradually increased their share of female
faculty members over the past 20 years. But only one in five
tenure-track economics professors is a woman, according to the American
Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics
Profession.
In many parts of the profession, gender progress stagnated over the last
decade. About one in three new economics doctoral students was a woman
in 2016, and fewer than one in three assistant professors were women. In
both of those cases, the share of women was essentially unchanged from 2006.
A Shrinking Pipeline of Women in Economics Departments
A 2016 survey of 126 economics departments with doctoral programs found
that while the female share of doctoral students and faculty has
increased significantly since the 1970s, the representation of women
drops at each step on the track to full, tenured professor.
The focus on gender bias in economics began simmering in August, when
Alice Wu, an economist from the University of California, Berkeley,
detailed in a research paper how the website Economics Job Market
Rumors, a much-read, anonymous job-rumor forum and message board for
economists, had become a hotbed of harassment, with female economists
frequently described in often sexual and crude terms.
The bias creeps into the most popular introductory economics textbooks,
which refer to men four times as often as they do women. Ninety percent
of the economists cited in those textbooks are men, Betsey Stevenson, a
University of Michigan economist, told the panel on gender issues in
economics, based on a paper she is about to complete. When women are
mentioned in textbook examples, they are more likely to be shopping or
cleaning than running a company or making public policy.
Missing From Economics Textbooks: Women
An analysis presented at a January gathering of economists found that
men make up the vast majority of people mentioned in economics
textbooks, even dominating references to business leaders and policy makers.
The reckoning in economics comes amid a larger national examination of
bias and abuse toward women in the work force, across industries
including entertainment, manufacturing and journalism. But the existence
of bias in the field of economics is rattling a profession that, at its
core, functions through objective interpretation and extrapolation of
data, statistics and evidence.
Leaders of the American Economic Association announced on Friday night
that they would begin to address bias concerns more seriously, by
setting up an alternative to the online jobs site and drafting a code of
conduct for economists. But many economists said that those steps were
late, and that they left much work to be done to ensure fairness for
women in the field, where the rate of entry for women lags that of math,
engineering and other hard sciences.
“The time had come for the organization to make a more proactive
statement,” said Peter L. Rousseau, the chairman of the economics
department at Vanderbilt University and the association’s
secretary-treasurer. He cast the decision as responding to evidence in a
way that was natural for the profession. “Economists, I think, are just
very objective in their view of the world,” he said.
In interviews during and after the conference, prominent women in
economics described how their profession throws barriers in their
professional paths, and they criticized the male-dominated leadership in
the field
