‘Hotter,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘feminazi’: How some economists discuss their female colleagues
Women economists are hardly surprised
Adapted from a story by Elizabeth Winkler for The Washington Post.
In 1970, the economics department at the University of California, Berkeley, hired three newly-minted economics PhDs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two — both men — were hired as assistant professors. But a woman, Myra Strober, was hired as a lecturer, a position of inferior pay and status and no possibility of tenure. When she asked the department chairman why she was denied an assistant professorship, he put her off with excuses.
She kept pressing him until he gave a frank answer: She had two young children; the department couldn’t possibly put her on the tenure track.
So Strober took another offer. In 1972 she became the first woman economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
“They didn’t know what to make of me,” she said. “It was like trying to run a race with one of your legs tied behind you.”
The faculty retreat, which had been held every year at a men’s club, had to be moved. When she came up for tenure six years later, she was denied. “They told me I hadn’t hit a home run and that my work wasn’t seminal,” she explained. “Two male metaphors in one sentence.”
The field is behind even male-heavy STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in gender equity. “The pipeline into economics departments has stalled for at least a decade, probably more,” said Shelly Lundberg, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and chair of the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.
Only about a third of new PhD students are women — a number that has barely budged in 20 years.
“Economists are much more likely to believe that if there aren’t many women in the field, it must be because they’re not very interested or not very productive.”
New research shows that there are other forces at play.
Measuring sexist attitudes and hostility toward women is difficult. But for her senior thesis in economics at the University of California, Berkeley (fittingly, the same university that rejected Strober), Alice Wu found a way.
Wu, who will begin doctoral studies at Harvard University next year, mined over a million posts on the anonymous online message board, Economics Job Market Rumors, to analyze how economists talk about women in the profession. The website, a popular forum for graduate students and faculty members to gossip about jobs and hiring, offers a window into conversations that are otherwise almost impossible to document.
Wu set up her computer to identify the gender of the person being discussed — for instance by looking for terms like “she,” “her,” “his,” “himself,” and so forth. Using machine-learning tools, she then uncovered the terms most associated with posts about women versus posts about men.
This is what she found:
Wu also moved beyond individual words to analyze broader themes in the discussions. She found that discussions of men are more likely to be academic, focused on economics and professional advice. Meanwhile discussions of women are more likely to involve personal information (such as family, marriage) or physical appearance (including: beautiful, fat).
Women economists are hardly surprised. The paper reflects what they have known and experienced for years but struggled to prove in a meaningful way.
What is dispiriting for many, however, is that attitudes haven’t changed even among younger generations. The website is frequented mostly by graduate students and recent PhDs who are on the job market.
Women economists who study gender issues, such as occupational segregation or the economics of child care, can have a particularly tough time.
Some women have tried to create new spaces to pursue this work. Diana Strassmann, founder of the Journal of Feminist Economics, says she created the publication because she saw scholars who challenged the orthodox boundaries of economics losing their jobs.
The profession is searching for ways to address its gender imbalance. “This weeding out of women isn’t good for the kind of economic work that gets done or how people think about economic policy,” said Levenstein. In 2015 the AEA instituted mentoring programs aimed at helping young women in the field navigate the ropes.
“What we need is more awareness and institutional leadership,” said Lundberg. “I don’t think economics has more bad actors than any other field, but we do have a lack of pushback. There’s too much comfort with women’s underrepresentation.”
