{"id":1325,"date":"2017-10-02T08:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=1325"},"modified":"2017-10-02T08:00:31","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T12:00:31","slug":"attitudes-women-economics-new-research-rising-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/attitudes-women-economics-new-research-rising-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Attitudes about Women in Economics: New Research by a Rising Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tAn important new study of online conversations among economists<\/a> by Alice H. Wu quantifies \u201coutright hostility toward women in parts of the economics profession,\u201d reports Justin Wolfers of the New York Times<\/em>. 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.\nWolfers 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.\nHow did she do it? Wolfers explains that Wu used technology to research computerized archives by mining \u201cmore than a million posts from an anonymous online message board frequented by many economists . . . [including] economics faculty members and graduate students.\u201d 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 \u201cmost uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.\u201d 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 \u201cno similarly singular or hostile theme.\u201d Many words associated with discussions about men are positive, such as goals, greatest, and Nobel.\nWolfers goes on to note that Janet Currie, a leading economist at Princeton, said Wu\u2019s findings resonated because they\u2019re \u201csystematically quantifying something most female economists already know.\u201d She went on to tell Wolfers that this analysis \u201cspeaks volumes about attitudes that persist in the dark corners of the profession.\u201d These attitudes can create a subtle but hostile work environment for women.\nThank 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.\n \nPhoto courtesy of Business Forward<\/a> for a Creative Commons photo with the Share-Alike 2.0 license.]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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