Bridging the Gap: Addressing Gender Disparities in Economics
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At the heart of economics is a belief in the virtues of open competition as a way of using the resources you have in the most efficient way you can. Thanks to the power of that insight, economists routinely tell politicians how to run public policy and business people how to run their firms. Yet when it comes to its own house, academic economics could do more to observe the standards it applies to the rest of the world. It recruits too few women. Also, many women economists say they are treated unfairly and that their talents are not fully realized. As a result, economics has fewer good ideas than it should and suffers from a skewed viewpoint. It is time for the dismal science to improve its dismal record on gender.
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For decades, relatively few women have participated in science, technology, engineering and maths. Economics belongs in this list. In the United States women make up only one in seven full professors and one in three doctoral candidates. There has been too little improvement in the past 20 years. A survey by the American Economics Association (AEA) shows that many women who do become academic economists are treated badly. Only 20% of women who answered the poll said that they are satisfied with the professional climate, compared with 40% of men. Some 48% of females said they have faced discrimination at work because of their sex, compared with 3% of male respondents.
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To deal with its gender shortfall, economics needs two tools that it often uses to analyse and solve problems elsewhere: its ability to crunch data and its capacity to experiment. Take data first. The AEA study is commendable, but only a fifth of its 45,000 present and past members replied to its poll. More work is needed to establish why women are discouraged from becoming economists, or drop out, or are denied promotion. More benchmarking is needed against other professions where women thrive. Better data are needed to capture how work by female economists is discriminated against. There is some evidence, for example, that they are held to higher standards than men in peer reviews and that they are given less credit for their co-writing than men. And economics needs to study how a lack of women skews its scholarly priorities, creating an intellectual opportunity cost. For instance, do economists obsess more about labour-market conditions for men than for women?
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The other priority is for economists to experiment with new ideas, as the AEA is recommending. For a discipline that values dynamism, academic economics is often conservative, sticking with teaching methods, hiring procedures and social conventions that have been around for decades. The survey reveals myriad subtle ways in which those who responded feel uncomfortable. For example 46% of women have not asked a question or presented an idea at conferences for fear of being treated unfairly, compared with 18% of men. Innovation is overdue. Seminars could be organised to ensure that all speakers get a fair chance. Job interviews need not typically happen in hotel rooms, a practice that men regard as harmless but which makes some women uncomfortable. The way that authors’ names are presented on papers could ensure that it is clear who has done the intellectual heavy lifting.
