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Gender in the Economics Profession

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)

Hilton Riverside, Grand Salon D Sec 19 & 22
View Webcast
Hosted By: American Economic Association & Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession
  • Chair: Kasey Buckles, University of Notre Dame

Recruiting Economics Majors: The Impact of an Information Campaign Targeted at High School Counselors

Danila Serra
,
Texas A&M University
Melissa Gentry
,
Texas A&M University
Jonathan Meer
,
Texas A&M University

Abstract

High school guidance counselors play an important role in advising high school students on their study and career paths. However, the literature on their characteristics, attitudes and behaviors – including the information they have and share with students on different majors – is scarce. We evaluate the impact of an intervention aimed at informing high school guidance counselors about the field of economics, i.e., what it is, what kind of jobs and wages the major leads to, and what kind of students would do great with it. Our study population is a set of over 200 high schools in Texas that send a high number of students to Texas A&M University. We randomly selected half of the schools to receive an invitation to participate in an informational workshop held by the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University in early September 2019. About 20 percent of the invited schools sent a guidance counselor to the informational workshop. Our outcome variables are measures of students’ interest in the field of economics when applying to and enrolling at Texas A&M University, with a particular focus on women and under-represented minority students. We also report findings from an online survey of high school counselors (from the sampled high schools) that we conducted in Summer 2021 to investigate counselors’ characteristics, experiences and information sets.

Remote Talks: Changes to Economics Seminars During COVID-19

Marcus Biermann
,
Bielefeld University

Abstract

This paper analyzes the consequences of the change in the presentation mode of economics seminars triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The composition of seminar speakers changed significantly. The share of seminars held by women increased. The leading economists also gained shares. The geography of knowledge dissemination shifted significantly as the distance between host and speaker institutions increased on average by 32 percent. The growing inequality in presentations among speakers is correlated with an increase in inequality in terms of citations. The results imply that virtual presentations instead of traveling can decrease gender-specific inequality and increase inequality by productivity in the economics profession.

Gender and Tone in Recorded Economics Presentations: Audio Analysis with Machine Learning

Haoyu Sheng
,
Brown University
Amy Handlan
,
Brown University

Abstract

This paper develops a replicable and scalable method for analyzing tone in economics seminars to study the relationship between speaker gender, age, and tone in both static and dynamic settings. We train a deep convolutional neural network on public audio data from the computer science literature to impute labels for gender, age, and multiple tones, like happy, neutral, angry, and fearful. We apply our trained algorithm to a topically representative sample of presentations from the 2022 NBER Summer Institute. Overall, our results highlight systematic differences in presentation dynamics by gender, field, and format. We find that female economists are more likely to speak in a positive tone and are less likely to be spoken to in a positive tone, even by other women. We find that male economists are significantly more likely to sound angry or stern compared to female economists. Despite finding that female and male presenters receive a similar number of interruptions and questions, we find slightly longer interruptions for female presenters. Our trained algorithm can be applied to other economics presentation recordings for continued analysis of seminar dynamics.

Fully Promoted: The Determinants and Distribution of Full Professorship in the Economics Profession

Marieke Kleemans
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
Rebecca Thornton
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

While the share of female faculty in higher education across the world has been growing over time, women remain underrepresented, especially so in higher faculty ranks: 31% of Assistant Professors at Ph.D.-granting economics departments are women while only 14.5% of full professors (CSWEP 2020). Full professors from underrepresented groups may be especially important for departmental decision making, for example related to hiring, tenure and mentoring, and may serve as important role models to promote diversity. However, they may face additional obstacles that may prevent them being promoted to full professor. Indeed, 15 years after obtaining their PhD, 56 percent of men are full professors compared to only 29 percent of women (Bedard et al., 2021). In this paper, we study promotion from associate to full professor in the economics profession. We combine digitized CV data from all tenured and tenure-track economists at R1 universities in the United States with publication and citation data from Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) and Google Scholar. This allows us to construct an annual panel of employment and various productivity measures that we use to examine what predicts promotion to full professorship, the timing of promotion, and compare those determinants across gender and race, and over time. We furthermore study the distribution of full professors from underrepresented minorities across departments and how that has changed over time, and we study the characteristics of departments with a more diversity group of full professors.

Discussant(s)
Serena Canaan
,
Simon Fraser University
Alicia Modestino
,
Northeastern University
Joanna Lahey
,
Texas A&M University
Amanda Bayer
,
Swarthmore College
JEL Classifications
  • A1 - General Economics
  • A2 - Economic Education and Teaching of Economics