Women in economics

Interesting:

Today, women in economics face a Catch-22, where speaking up can easily make them look like a shrew, while not speaking up robs them of legitimate power. There may be some loopholes in this Catch-22, but women starting out in economics need to be shown the ropes. And with so few senior female professors in economics, who can show a female graduate student how to promote herself gracefully, and break into predominantly male conversations without raising hackles? Somehow, that question needs to be answered. As more women push these boundaries, things will become easier. It may become possible to open up new ways of communicating and asserting power that allow women to be themselves and still have others listen to them carefully and respectfully.

If men are allowed to be jerks without suffering serious consequences, while women aren’t, then even well-behaved men have a threat-point that women are denied. One of the most primal reasons to treat someone nicely is the fear of a mistreated person’s anger or revenge. That doesn’t work well for women, because getting angry either makes them look like a harridan, or look overly emotional—both of which carry a big penalty in lost status.

It is easy to confirm that men are allowed to be jerks in ways that women aren’t—by flipping genders when someone does something out of line:

What would you think of a particular man’s bad behavior if a woman you know did it?

What would you think of a particular woman’s bad behavior if a man you know did it?

We don’t think the answer here is to change the culture so that women can be jerks, too, but to move toward holding everyone, both men and women, to account for bad behavior. For many men, it will be a revelation to be called out on the ways in which they demean others. Some may not even realize all the ways they routinely put others down—especially those in vulnerable positions who dare not strike back. But if you talk to a few women who spend time in economics departments, you will hear the stories.

Equal pay for equal work

Besides the threat point of men behaving badly, there is another threat point that gives men an advantage over women—one that gets men more than equal pay for equal work. It is typical in academia that a tenured professor who receives a competing job offer and can credibly threaten to leave gets a big raise. By comparison, professors who seem unlikely to jump ship end up underpaid. But given gender inequality on the home front (and the male-female wage differential for spouses), it is a lot more credible that a male professor can convince his wife to move to another city than that a female professor can convince her husband to move. This difference in ability to threaten to leave because of a spouse’s willingness to move is just one of the many ways that different levels of career support from spouses affects women in academia. The only thoroughgoing remedy for this inequity will come from greater gender equality throughout society.

(The situation is different when both wife and husband are academics, especially when they are both in the same discipline. Joint hiring decisions come up so often and go down so many different ways that no one should read any particular case into what we say. In general, because the couple forms a bargaining unit, some of the advantages men have in academia accrue to the wife in the husband-wife power couple. Women hired only because of their spouses—when they should have been hired in their own right—make academic departments look less sexist on paper than they really are. And when a woman who shouldn’t have been hired in her own right is hired in order to attract her spouse, it can be demoralizing to other women trying to make their way in academia on their own. Unfortunately, we don’t see any easy solution for the issues created by joint hiring decisions. But at a minimum they shouldn’t be allowed to distract economists from deeper issues of gender inequality.)

One final step that would make economics less forbidding for women is for each economist to become open to a wider range of scientific approaches and topics. Statistically, men and women are not drawn to the same fields within economics. And even within a field, women are drawn to a different balance between immediate real-world relevance and theoretical elegance. It is natural for each economist (and for each academic in general) to construct a narrative for why his or her approach to economics is the best. But since men in senior ranks in economics are more numerous than women, the narratives that men construct for why their individual approaches to economics are better usually win out in hiring and promotion decisions over the narratives that women construct for why their individual approaches are better.

This imbalance disadvantages junior women, whose individual approaches will on average have fewer champions. Here, the solution, difficult as it is, is for economists to appreciate the boost to scientific progress from having many different approaches and topics well represented—and for the subjective opinions of those who don’t appreciate the value of a wide range of approaches to be discounted. In particular, putting a premium on balancing theory with real-world understanding and policy action will not only make economics a stronger force for good in the world, it will help women take their rightful place in economics.