Jan 20 JDN 2458504

I mentioned in my previous post that the economics profession is currently coming to a reckoning with its own sexist biases. Today I’d like to get back to that in more detail.

I think I should include some kind of trigger warning here, because some of this sexism is pretty extreme. In particular, there are going to be references to anal sex, which certainly isn’t something I was expecting to find. I won’t quote anything highly explicit—but I assure you, it exists.

There is reason to believe that these biases are not as bad as they once were. If you compare the cohorts of new economics PhDs to those of the past, or to the professors who have been tenured for many years, the pattern is quite clear: The longer back you look, the fewer women (and racial minorities, and LGBT people) you see.

In part because of the #MeToo movement (which, I really would like to say, has done an excellent job of picking legitimate targets and not publicly shaming the wrong people, unlike almost every other attempt at public shaming via social media), the economics profession is also coming to terms with a related matter, which could be both cause and consequence of these gender disparities: Sexual harassment by economists of their students and junior faculty.

It wasn’t until last year that the AEA officially adopted a Code of Professional Conduct mandating equality of opportunity for women (and minorities, and LGBT people). Of course, sexual harassment has been illegal much longer than that—but it’s probably the most under-reported and under-prosecuted crime in existence. Last year’s AEA conference was the first to include panels specifically on gender and discrimination in economics, and this year’s conference had more.

Grad students have been a big part of this push; hundreds of econ grad students signed an open letter demanding that universities implement reporting and disciplinary systems to deal with sexual harassment in economics (one of the signatories is friend of mine from UCI, though strangely I don’t remember hearing about it, or I would have signed it too).

One of the most prominent economists accused of repeated sexual harassment unfortunately happens to be the youngest Black person ever to get tenured at Harvard. This would seem to create some tension between gender equality and racial equality. But of course this tension is illusory: There are plenty of other brilliant Black economists they could have hired who aren’t serial sexual harassers.

It’s still dicey for grad students and junior faculty to talk about these things, because of the very real power that senior faculty have over us as committees for dissertations, hiring, and tenure. Some economists who wrote papers about sexism in the profession have chosen to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

Part of how this issue has finally gotten so much attention is by concerned economists actually showing it using the methods of social science. One of the most striking studies was a data analysis of the word usage on econjobrumors.com, a job discussion board for PhD grads and junior faculty in economics. (More detail on that study here and also here.)

I’ve bolded the terms that are sexual or suggest bias. I’ve italicized the terms that suggest something involving romantic or family relationships. I’ve underlined the terms actually relevant for economics.
These were the terms most commonly associated with women:

hotter, lesbian, bb, sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute.

These were the terms most commonly associated with men:

juicy, keys, adviser, bully, prepare, fought, wharton, austrian, fieckers, homo, genes, e7ee, mathematician, advisor, burning, pricing, fully, band, kfc, nobel, cat, amusing, greatest, textbook, goals, irritate, roof, pointing, episode, and tries.

I imagine the two lists more or less speak for themselves. I’m particularly shocked by the high prevalence of the word “anal”—the sixth-most common word used in threads involving women.

Who goes to an economics job forum and starts talking about anal sex?

I actually did a search on “anal” to see what sort of things were being discussed: This thread is apparently someone trying to decide where he should work based on “Girls of which country are easiest to get?”, so basically sex tourism as job market planning. Here’s another asking (perhaps legitimately) about the appropriate social norm for splitting vacation costs with a girlfriend, and someone down the thread recommends that in exchange for paying, he should expect her to provide him with anal sex. This one starts with a man lamenting that his girlfriend dumped him on his birthday (that’s a dick move by the way), but somehow veers off into a discussion of whether anal sex is overrated. And this one is just off the bat about frequency of sexual encounters.
So yeah, I’m really not surprised that there aren’t a lot of women on these so-called “job discussion boards”.

The only bias-related word associated with men was “homo”—so it’s actually a homophobic bias, itself indicative of sexism and a profession dominated by cisgender straight White men. I’m not entirely sure that “juicy” was intended to be sexualized (one could also speak of “juicy ideas”), but I’ll assume it was just to conservatively estimate the gender disparity.

Also of special note are “fieckers” and “e7ee”, which refer to specific users, who, despite being presumably economists, caused a great deal of damage to the discussion boards. “fieckers” was an idiosyncratic word that one user used in a variety of sexist and homophobic troll posts, while “e7ee” is the hexadecimal code for one of the former moderators, who apparently uilaterally deleted and moved threads in order to tilt the entire discussion board toward right-wing laissez-faire economics.

Of course, that one discussion board isn’t representative of the entire profession. As anyone who has ever visited 4chan knows, discussion boards can be some of the darkest places on the Internet.

Clearer evidence of discrimination where it counts can be found in citation studies, which have found that papers published by women in top economics journals are more highly cited than papers published by men in the same journals.

What does that mean? Well, it’s the same reason that female stock brokers outperform male brokers and firms with more female executives are more profitable. Women are held to a higher standard than men, so in order to simply get in, women have to be more competent and produce higher-quality output.

Admittedly, citation count is far from a perfect measure of research quality (and for that matter profit is far from a perfect measure of a well-run corporation). But this is very clear evidence of actual discrimination. Not innate differences in preferences, not differences in talent—actual discrimination. It’s less clear where and how the discrimination is happening. Are journals simply not accepting good papers if they see female authors? (This is possible, because most top journals in economics don’t use double-blind peer review anymore—for quite flimsy reasons, in my opinion). Are there not enough mentors for women in academia? Are women moving to more accepting fields before they even enter grad school? Are they being pushed out by harassment as grad students? Likely all of these are part of the story.

There’s reason to think that economic ideology has contributed to this problem. If you think of the world in neoclassical laissez-faire terms, where markets are perfect and always lead to the best outcome, then you are likely to be blind to bias and discrimination, because a perfect market would obviously eliminate such things. This is why the recognition of bias has largely come from empirical studies of labor markets, and to a lesser extent from experiments and more left-wing theorists. If you assert that markets are perfectly efficient, labor economists are likely to laugh in your face, while a surprising number of macro theorists will nod and ask you to continue.

Interestingly, recent field experiments on bias in hiring of new faculty did not find any bias against women in economics (and found biases toward women in several other fields). Of course, that doesn’t mean there never was such bias; but perhaps we’ve actually managed to remove it. So that’s one major avenue of discrimination we maybe finally have under control. Only several dozen left to go?