1 / 9

DIVERSEcon

DIVERSEcon. A new student-led group aimed at increasing diversity in Economics at NU!. Alicia Sasser Modestino Associate Professor, Department of Economics Rachel Sederberg Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics Erica Smith B.A. Candidate, Department of Economics December 5, 2018.

omer
Download Presentation

DIVERSEcon

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. DIVERSEcon A new student-led group aimed at increasing diversity in Economics at NU! Alicia Sasser Modestino Associate Professor, Department of Economics Rachel Sederberg Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics Erica Smith B.A. Candidate, Department of Economics December 5, 2018 Northeastern University Department Of Economics

  2. What do you want your field of study to look like? We know that women and people of color are underrepresented in economics and have been for decades (Bayer and Rouse, 2016). We do not even know much about underrepresentation of sexual or gender minorities or people with disabilities because of a lack of data.

  3. What is happening to the economics pipeline? We also know that we are losing diverse scholars at every point in the pipeline. For example, in the process of undergraduate education, women leave the economics major at a higher rate than men (Avilova and Goldin, 2018), and at every further step (completing the PhD, getting tenure, and getting promoted to full professor), the gender imbalance widens (Lundberg, 2017).

  4. What does the research say? Sarsons (2016): Based on CVs of over 500 economists who were up for tenure between 1975 and 2014 in the top 30 PhD-granting universities, only 52% of women received tenure compared with 77% of men even though there was no statistically significant difference in the number of papers produced between the sexes. Women who solo-authored all of their papers had roughly the same chance of receiving tenure as men. Meanwhile, women who did more co-authoring with men had significantly lower chances of receiving tenure. Hengel (2017): Women in economics face longer turn-around times and more stringent writing requirements from journal reviewers Chen, Kim, and Liu (2016): Controlling for demographics and various doctoral program characteristics, women in the class of 2008 were 10 percentage points less likely to receive tenure, relative to their male peers, by 2016. Antecol, Bedard, and Stearns (2016): Athough family-friendly policies allow both male and female economists to pause the tenure clock when having children, women use the time mostly for childcare while men mostly use it for research—lowering the chances of a woman getting tenure by 22 percentage points. Wu (2017): Analyzed more than a million posts from an anonymous online message board frequented by many economists (Economics Job Market Rumors). Most frequently used words to describe male economists: adviser, textbook mathematician, Wharton, goals, greatest, Nobel, bully, burning and fought. Most frequently used words to describe female economists: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for “baby”), sexism, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, pregnant, pregnancy (Note: I took out the most offensive body part references that were in the top 10). And what about non-white or LGBTQ economists?

  5. Why is diversity in economics important? By deterring people of different gender, race, SES, and orientation from entering the field (Stevenson and Zlotnik, 2018), economics is no longer assured of attracting the best minds to the profession and instead is constraining intellectual development. This lack of diversity in economics likely affects public discourse on a range of issues: Lack of representation feeds back on itself: role models of the same identity can help encourage students to continue (Porter and Serra, 2017). “Women economists tend to focus on different topics than men. While men dominate macroeconomics, women are more visible among those studying labor markets, health and education. The only majority-female economics conference I’ve ever attended was on the economics of children, a field focused on schooling, family structure and child well-being. If there were more female economists, more attention would surely be paid to these issues.”

  6. How has the profession responded? New Actions: New Code of Conduct from the AEA https://www.aeaweb.org/comments/code-of-conduct/?token=E3QTN6KfaTA5bZGzi5QNeS!adyEs*and EconSpark https://www.aeaweb.org/forum/ AEA Climate Survey climatesurvey@aeapubs.org Existing Resources: CSWEP https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/committees/cswep AEA's Ad Hoc LGBTQ Economics Working Group https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/committees/aealgbtq

  7. How will we respond? Last summer, the economics department was awarded a DO IT! Mini Grant from the NU Office of Diversity and Inclusion to tackle issues of diversity within economics by: Establishing a new student group (https://cssh.northeastern.edu/economics/diversecon/) Bringing diverse speakers to campus Collecting data to track the pipeline of students at both the graduate and undergraduate level + =

  8. My Guests Today: Dr. Maria Luengo-Prada Senior Economist and Policy Advisor Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (Former NU professor!) Rachel Sederberg Ph.D. Candidate in Economics Northeastern University Co-founder, DIVERSEcon Erica Smith B.A. Candidate in Economics Northeastern University Co-founder, DIVERSEcon

  9. Thank You! Alicia Sasser Modestino Associate Professor a.modestino@northeastern.edu Follow me on twitter: @SasserModestino Northeastern University Department Of Economics

More Related