What? There's a gender problem in economics?
It is not difficult to find an all-male panel at the annual January mega-gathering of American economists. They are as common as PowerPoint presentations and pie charts. One such panel this year met to sleepily critique President Trump’s economic policies, but it was overshadowed by another panel, two ballrooms away, that jolted a profession that prides itself on cool rationality.
That panel on Friday was stocked with women, each of whom presented new research that revealed a systemic bias in economics and presaged a move by the field’s leaders to promise to address some of those issues.
Paper after paper presented at the American Economic Association panel showed a pattern of gender discrimination, beginning with barriers women face in choosing to study economics and extending through the life cycle of their careers, including securing job opportunities, writing research papers, gaining access to top publications and earning proper credit for published work. ...
Janet Currie, chairwoman of Princeton’s economics department, and Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard, pointed to a recent study that found that women get significantly less credit than men when they co-write papers with them, as reflected in the way the paper affects their chances of receiving tenure.
When the co-author is a man, “people don’t say anything about it, it’s just normal,” Ms. Currie said. “When it’s a woman, it’s: ‘Oh, everything she wrote is with co-authors. How do we know she’s any good?’”
She said the behavior, detailed in a paper by Heather Sarsons of Harvard, was related to a more widespread phenomenon. “There are lots of examples of when a woman says something, no one pays attention,” Ms. Currie said. “A man says the same thing, everyone says it’s great. It happens a lot.”
Sarah A. Jacobson, an environmental economist at Williams College, recounted an experience during graduate school that she said was indicative: A well-respected female economist delivering a talk at her department was repeatedly interrupted by male economists when trying to answer questions from the audience.
“In the middle of the seminar, a male economist I respect turned around — they’re in the audience — and they were explaining the answer for her, on her behalf,” Ms. Jacobson said.
“You see it all the time,” she added. “You occasionally see it if a male is presenting. You see it pretty often if a woman is presenting.”
What Sarah is trying to say is this: male economists, especially the older ones, tend to try to explain things for female economists, who they feel superior to simply because of their gender.
