New Approaches to Ending Harassment in Economics and Science

Exciting breakthroughs are happening in both policy initiatives and research findings that may lead to real changes in access to opportunity for women and minorities in the fields of economics and science. Starting with the field of economics, Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley of the New York Times report that Ben Bernanke, the current president of the American Economic Association (AEA), has acknowledged that “unfortunately, [the field of economics has] a reputation for hostility toward women and minorities.” This acknowledgment is a big deal because leaders at the highest levels will have to be the ones to make and implement real change. Janet Yellen, next year’s president of the AEA, agrees that change is needed. Casselman and Tankersley note that economics has had a diversity problem for a long time:

  • Only about a third of economics doctorates went to women, and the gender gap is wider at senior levels.
  • Racial and ethnic minorities are also underrepresented.
  • Barely 10 percent of tenured finance professors and 16 percent of tenure-track faculty are women in an AEA branch in Atlanta.

Casselman and Tankersley note in another article that a recent survey jolted Bernanke and the AEA into taking action. The authors report that a far-reaching survey conducted by the AEA involving 9,000 current and past members, both women and men, found an alarming rate of discrimination and harassment:

  • Half of the women reported being treated unfairly because of their sex compared to 3 percent of men.
  • Half of the women avoided speaking at a conference to guard against harassment or “disrespectful treatment.”
  • Hundreds of female economists say they have been stalked, touched inappropriately, or sexually assaulted. Overall, one in five reported being subjected to unwanted sexual advances.

As a result of this survey, the AEA has appointed an ombudsman empowered to investigate and establish professional consequences for those found to violate a new antiharassment code. This structural change is significant because until now, women and men in economics experiencing harassment and discrimination had nowhere to go to report it except to their own institutions, which have a vested interest in protecting those in powerful positions. Professional sanctions, including the loss of prestigious awards, will be made public if misbehavior is established—an important step in holding powerful people accountable.

The AEA survey also found high levels of alienation among black economists who have long felt their ideas are dismissed. Gay and lesbian economists were also far more likely to report discrimination and disrespect than their straight colleagues.

Other recent research by Alice Wu and, separately, Heather Sarsons found that women in economics face a toxic culture of discrimination in hiring, publications, and promotion. Sarsons’s research specifically found that women get less credit for work they do with male colleagues.

Switching now to the field of science, Amy Harmon writes that in 2018, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), France Córdova, decided that “enough is enough” after she kept learning of yet another male scientist whose work she supported with public funds had sexually harassed a student, staff member, or colleague. Córdova, a woman who controls a $5 billion research budget, put in place a new sexual harassment policy that makes structural changes that could increase the number of female scientists in senior faculty positions. Specifically, institutions that accept an NSF grant must now go through this process:

  • They must notify the NSF of any finding related to harassment by the leading scientist working on the grant.
  • In case they do not report it, individuals may now report harassment directly to the NSF, which may conduct its own investigation; this is crucial if real accountability is to occur.

Both individuals and institutions face the possibility of losing coveted funds if sexual harassment is not reported, responded to with appropriate consequences, or stopped.

The fact that Córdova’s new policy was put in place by a woman in this #MeToo moment is not an accident. Córdova, 71, reports being sexually harassed herself as a graduate student by a professor. As Córdova and a few other senior female scientists have listened to stories from younger scientists in the context of the #MeToo movement and reviewed recent research on gender discrimination in science, they came to realize that the problem they thought would be a thing of the past is still widespread. Recent studies document that gender bias in science favors male scientists in hiring, salary, start-up funds for laboratories, credit for authorships, letters of recommendation, and invitations to speak at universities and on conference panels (a.k.a. “manels”).

Harmon says that a major report on harassment in science, published in 2018, offers a new term, “gender harassment,” defined as “verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status.” Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins, notes that gender harassment may explain as much or more than sexual harassment when it comes to what drives women out of the field. She states, “We’ve been talking about the ‘leaky pipeline’ for years, and this may turn out to be the big gushing hole” that drains women and minorities from the field.

In summary, new sexual harassment policies in economics and science that include multiple reporting channels, professional consequences, and transparency for bad behavior may finally result in change. New research and the #MeToo movement is increasing awareness and motivation to bring about change.

 

Photo courtesy of Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash.

What Gender Bias Looks Like

Gender bias can be subtle and difficult to understand. At the beginning of my women’s leadership programs, many women cannot see it and eventually discover that it is so much a part of their daily lives, they have become numb to it. The following are some recently published examples of gender bias from the media, finance and biopharma, economics, and Wall Street that silence women’s voices and create barriers to women’s participation in shaping our world. News Media: Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times write that women are underrepresented in news coverage by a ratio of three-to-one. Being quoted or cited in news articles helps determine who is considered to be an authority on a topic. Taub and Fisher note that the social machinery that equates expertise with maleness is complex and creates a vicious cycle that shuts women out. For example, news organizations use online searches to find experts to quote or cite. Because women are underrepresented in news coverage, their names do not come up as often in searches and they continue to be excluded. Finance and Biopharma: Rebecca Robbins and Meghana Keshavan of STAT share an example of gender bias at a large annual healthcare conference sponsored by J.P. Morgan: men represented 94 percent of the 540 people making high-profile presentations to biotech executives and investors. Let’s be clear—these events are where careers are made and enhanced by the opportunity for visibility. And women are not visible. This lack of representation of women on panels and in speaking slots at professional conferences is a trend that has been recently reported in several fields. Economics: Justin Wolfers of the New York Times writes about the scarcity of women and women’s voices in the field of economics and the implications for all of us. He notes that “because economics has an outsized influence on public policy . . . [and] many debates are likely to be dominated by men for years to come,” there are so few women in economics. Wolfers cites surveys that show stark differences in opinion between women and men economists: women economists, by large margins, favor policies that promote income equality, big government and government regulation, mandatory employer-provided health insurance, and labor policies that promote environmental quality over economic growth. Women economists tend to focus on different topics than men, and as Wolfers writes, “If there were more female economists, more attention would surely be paid to these issues.” The number of women studying economics has stalled, and women are a minority in every level of training and rank in economics. Wolfers notes that a host of careful studies has identified barriers that discourage and drive women out of the field, such as being held to a higher standard for publishing or not being given tenure credit for publishing with men, while men get credit for publishing with women. Jim Tankersley and Noam Scheiber of the New York Times, also writing about women in economics, share new research on patterns of gender discrimination in the field. One study on the most popular introductory economics textbooks found that the textbooks refer to men four times more than to women and that 90 percent of the economists cited in the texts are men. This new research also notes that the bias against African American women in economics is especially pronounced—only fifty-two black women earned doctorates in the field between 2006 and 2015. Black women are incredibly invisible. Wall Street: A new lawsuit against the investment firm run by Steven A. Cohen, Point72, is reported by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times. The woman bringing the suit explains, “The company is a testosterone-fueled ‘boys club’ in which men comment on women’s bodies, belittle their abilities, exclude women from meetings, and pay them less than male peers.” Further evidence of gender bias is offered: women are fewer than 3 percent of managing directors and, of the 125 portfolio managers, only one is a woman. When women’s voices and perspectives are missing from the classroom, research, business, and government, we all lose. Let’s keep the pressure on for change.   Photo courtesy of businessforward (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>

Attitudes about Women in Economics: New Research by a Rising Star

An important new study of online conversations among economists by Alice H. Wu quantifies “outright hostility toward women in parts of the economics profession,” reports Justin Wolfers of the New York Times. Wu reported the findings from her award-winning senior thesis research paper at the University of California, Berkeley. Her paper is prompting urgent conversations among leading economists around the country. Wolfers notes that, while the underrepresentation of women in the economics departments of top universities is well known, claims about workplace culture as the culprit have been hard to measure. People are guarded about publicly revealing their attitudes toward female economists. Wu developed new uses of technology to reveal hidden misogyny. How did she do it? Wolfers explains that Wu used technology to research computerized archives by mining “more than a million posts from an anonymous online message board frequented by many economists . . . [including] economics faculty members and graduate students.” She adopted machine learning techniques on her computer to identify whether the subject of each post was a man or a woman. She then applied machine learning techniques to identify the terms “most uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.” The words pertaining to women included hotter, sexy, sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, etc. You get the idea. Wolfers notes that the terms most associated with discussions of men reveal “no similarly singular or hostile theme.” Many words associated with discussions about men are positive, such as goals, greatest, and Nobel. Wolfers goes on to note that Janet Currie, a leading economist at Princeton, said Wu’s findings resonated because they’re “systematically quantifying something most female economists already know.” She went on to tell Wolfers that this analysis “speaks volumes about attitudes that persist in the dark corners of the profession.” These attitudes can create a subtle but hostile work environment for women. Thank you, Alice H. Wu, for shining a light into the dark corners and opening a pathway to change. We need more young female economists like you to join the field.   Photo courtesy of Business Forward for a Creative Commons photo with the Share-Alike 2.0 license.]]>

The Gender Wage Gap at Home and Abroad: Are We Making Progress? Why Does It Matter?

I am encouraged about the wealth of new research on the gender wage gap. There seem to be new studies published every few days on this important topic. What’s encouraging is that the spotlight is finally on this previously invisible problem. What’s not encouraging is that progress in closing the gender wage gap in the United States seems to be stalled. A recent article by Eric Morath in the Wall Street Journal reports that “the gender pay gap is widening again because men’s earnings are growing this year at twice the rate of women’s.”  Consequently, the earnings of full-time female workers in the United State dropped to 81.1 cents for every dollar a man earned in the third quarter of 2015 from 83.5 cents during the same period in 2014. This issue of a gender pay gap is not just an issue of fairness. A recent report published in The Economist cites McKinsey research showing that the world economy would be $28.4 trillion (or 26 percent) richer if more women participated in the workforce and were paid equitably. The GDP in the United States would rise by 5 percent with increased gender parity in the workforce, along with other benefits for men and organizations that I have written about in a previous article. Let’s keep the spotlight on the gender pay gap both at home and abroad. It is only by being aware of it and insisting on transparency that governments and organizations will be forced to focus on equalizing access and pay for women.   Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>