From climate adaptation to gender, Matt keeps stepping in it!
A friend of mine sent me a link to Matthew Kahn’s latest guest blog post on the Christian Science Monitor website; she sent it along with an “I believe in you” sort of note, because as Matthew was implicitly pointing out, I am not on the list of top economists to which he refers–while he is (as he explicitly points out). He ponders (emphasis added):
REPEC provides an objective measure of who is “Royalty” in the economics profession. The current list of the top 5% is here. I am ranked #681 out of 27,365 economists so that’s not bad (and my 3 books aren’t counted here). But, here is the interesting part. There are 52 women who rank in the top 1000 and 0 of them blog. Contrast that with the men. Consider the top 100 men. In this elite subset; at least 8 of them blog. Consider the men ranked between 101 and 200. At least, six of them blog. So, this isn’t very scientific but we see a 7% participation rate for excellent male economists and a 0% participation rate for excellent women. This differential looks statistically significant to me. I have searched for Nancy Folbre among the top 1369 economists (the 5% cutoff) and she is not counted in the elite subset.
Not being a female economist himself, Matthew then theorizes–as men love to do–about why we women aren’t as able to be both “excellent” economists and blogging economists.
I find it ironic that Matthew’s blog post would appear on the Christian Science Monitor site in the same area that my guest blog posts do, and that the photo that goes with the CSM post is of…an Asian woman! (Ok, a much younger Asian woman, but Asian nonetheless.) Huh! There’s a female economist blogger blogging right “next” to Matthew, right under his nose!
Oh, but I’m not an “excellent” female economist. ...
Keep reading ... and also check out what Jodi Beggs has to say.
Update: here is the comment I left at EDITM:
Some of my favorite bloggers are Jodi Beggs, Diane and Lynne Kiesling: http://knowledgeproblem.com/. Some (all?) of my least favorite are those in the RePEc rankings (but I like Matt's blog). I'm not sure why there should be any correlation between RePEc rankings, gender (other than the point made by Jodi above) and good economics blog posts. As evidence, see the Taylor, Mankiw, Thoma and Krugman interaction from today. Jeez.
*Joke!
