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[[Category:Heather Boushey]]
[[Category:Discrimination]]
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{{DES | des = "Standard economic theory tells us that firms [that discriminate] will be driven out by market competition... If men cannot overcome their sexism toward women when discussing the qualifications of female economists, then how can they assume that any job market -- or any market -- is free of discriminatory bias?" | show=}}
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Last summer, Alice Wu, then an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, finished her study on the way people talk on the popular economics job-hunting web site called Economics Job Market Rumors. This web site is where economists and economists-to-be anonymously discuss, debate, and dissect who’s hiring, who’s applying, and what visitors to the site think of the people on both sides of these transactions. Wu scraped the site’s data and conducted a textual analysis, parsing out the words that this online community used when discussing men and women candidates. Among the top 20 words associated with women candidates were “hotter,” “tits,” “anal,” “marrying,” “pregnant,” “gorgeous,” “horny,” and “crush.” In stark contrast, online discussions about male candidates tended to focus predominantly on the content of their work (“adviser,” “pricing,” “mathematician”).

One could dismiss this hostility toward women as the bad behavior of a small group of anonymous trolls, but it aligns with the fact that there are far fewer women in economics than men. As female economists move up the career ladder, they have fewer and fewer women peers. Only about 32 percent of new economics Ph.D.s are women. Women make up just under a third of assistant professors in economics, but their numbers drop to 25 percent among associate professors and about 13 percent among full professors. And to be clear, it’s not about the math. Women account for more than 40 percent of undergraduate math majors. It is important to note that gender is not the only problem facing the profession: The percentage of nonwhite undergraduate economics students is about 15 percent, and this number declines considerably as careers advance.

This lack of diversity is well-known. The University of Michigan’s Justin Wolfers wrote about Wu’s study in his New York Times column, and Olivier Blanchard, the former economic counselor and director of the research department at the International Monetary Fund, wrote a letter urging the web site to be “more aggressive in removing those posts (quoting from the site’s declaration) ‘that are too critical of someone’s personal life,’ or reflect ‘racism, homophobia, and sexism.’” At this year’s annual economics conference, a number of scholars presented papers examining why there are so few women in economics and what we can do about it. A recent working paper by the University of North Carolina’s Anusha Chari and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham of the New York Federal Reserve even found that the overall share of women participating in a prestigious annual economics conference hasn’t improved in over 15 years.

But the profession has been slow to deliver real fixes. One reason for this may be that economists are predisposed to believe discrimination is nonsensical. Standard economic theory tells us that firms—and people—who favor one group over another irrespective of their productivity will be driven out by market competition. On this principle, companies that harbor men who sexually harass the women they work with should be less successful than those in which workers feel safe and valued. Those who don’t see women as equals but as sexual objects should, the thinking goes, find themselves at a disadvantage. Markets can—and will—deliver the most optimal outcomes if we just let them work. Allow professionals to compete, and the most talented people will simply rise to the top.

Marion Fourcade, a Berkeley sociologist who studies economists, points out that U.S. economists tend to be “more favorable to economic ideas based on free trade and market competition” than their British, French, or German peers. The economics job market in the United States is emblematic of this market-oriented preference. Job advertisements go up in the early fall; candidates are screened at the annual economics meeting the first weekend in January; and by early spring, Economics Job Market Rumors is abuzz with discussions. Everybody knows who’s on top and who’s not.

If men cannot overcome their sexism toward female economists, then how can they assume that any job market—or any market—is free of discriminatory bias?
Because the process is so market-driven, the question that economists need to ask is whether gender and racial bias in the profession indicates something more troubling about economics itself. If men cannot overcome their sexism toward women when discussing the qualifications of female economists, then how can they assume that any job market—or any market—is free of discriminatory bias? If the market for economists isn’t efficient, what market is? Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse tackled this issue in their 2016 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. They argue that “the social science discipline of economics will be strengthened if it is built on a broader segment of the population,” and outline steps the profession could take to address the problem. Some of these are simple, such as changing the way we teach undergraduate economics, and some will require more work, such as providing better early career support and breaking down implicit bias in the profession.

Economists need to heed Bayer and Rouse’s call for action. For any profession—but particularly for an academic discipline that describes itself as scientific—to reject its own core findings is stupid at best, deeply hypocritical at worst. This is the profession that established the fact that labor-market discrimination contributes to lower productivity, lower economic growth, and lower wage growth. Of all people, economists cannot fail to address discrimination in our own ranks.
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