How economists view women
Victoria Bateman, a fellow at Cambridge University, argues that economics has not appreciated the economic role of women. For example:
- Economic theory prioritized what economists considered the “rational,” “masculine” realms of life opposed to the “soft,” “feminine” side, casting men as economic actors and women as unproductive dependents;
- Economists using the rational agent model tend to think of people making free choices and weighing every decision carefully, but this discounts the experience of women whose freedom and choices are restricted, driven into early marriages or facing unintended pregnancies, which make up nearly half the pregnancies in the world.
But she also points out the way markets can provide advantages to women, such as allowing them to escape repressive families and heavily gendered social expectations.
Let’s Get Real. Economists Have a Sex Problem
By: Lynn Parramore – Institute for New Economic Thinking
Women in economics
Alicia Sasser Modestino and her colleagues collected data from 467 seminars with 342 presenters across 20 of the top 30 economics departments. Of those, 118 were women, and 224 were men. They found that on average, women are asked between three and four more questions during presentations than their male counterparts, and are more likely to receive suggestions and clarifying questions, as well as hostile questions.
At last year’s American Economic Association meeting, Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, noted that oftentimes women will get questioned on the first slide from someone who says, ‘That is outright wrong.’ Whereas if it’s a man presenting, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s an interesting way of looking at things.’
Do women in economics face extra scrutiny?
By: Alicia Sasser Modestino – Northeastern University
Young women are not interested in economics!
My own nagging sense, based on a stream of anecdotes and personal experiences rather than hard evidence, is that the fundamental presentation of what the subject of economics is all about is, on average, less attractive to young women than to young men. I also think the way in which economics is first presented often doesn’t give much sense of the breadth and richness of the topics that economists actually study.
Women in Economics: The Early-Stage Problem
By: Timothy Taylor – Journal of Economic Perspectives
For women scientists: does blinded review work?
Kolev and al. find that despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores, which cannot be explained by ex-ante measures of applicant quality or applicants’ choice of topic. They also show that the gender score gap is fully mediated after controlling for text-based measures of proposals’ titles and descriptions, with female applicants tending to use narrow, topic-specific words that tend to receive lower reviewer scores. Importantly, the text-based measures that predict higher reviewer scores do not also predict higher ex-post innovative performance.
Is Blinded Review Enough?
Authors: Julian Kolev, Yuly Fuentes-Medel, Fiona Murray
From: Southern Methodist University, MIT
