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  5. Diversity and Inclusion in the Economics Profession: Progress and Pitfalls
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Diversity and Inclusion in the Economics Profession: Progress and Pitfalls

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 5, 2024 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)

Convention Center, 221D
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Stephanie Aaronson, Federal Reserve Board

The Unintended Consequences of #MeToo: Evidence from Research Collaborations & The Evolution of Sexual Harassment Policies Around #MeToo

Marina Gertsberg
,
University of Melbourne

Abstract

How did #MeToo alter the cost of collaboration between women and men? I show junior female academics start fewer projects after #MeToo. A decrease in collaborations with new male co-authors at the same institution largely explains the decline in projects. The decline in collaborations is concentrated in universities where both sexual harassment policies are more ambiguous (i.e., broader), and the number of public incidents (salience of sexual harassment accusations) is high. This is consistent with men managing a higher perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations as a potential explanation for the decrease in collaborations. Overall, #MeToo appears to bring unintended consequences that impact the career opportunities of junior women.

I also examine how universities adapted the specificity of their sexual harassment policies post #MeToo. My findings reveal that universities made their policies more specific after #MeToo. This shift was more pronounced in private universities, particularly those with publicized cases or leaders from male-dominated academic fields. Notably, increased policy clarity correlated with the recruitment of more junior female faculty, especially in environments with predominantly male senior faculty.

Impact versus Inclusion in the Economics Profession: Insights from the AEA Papers and Proceedings

Cynthia Bansak
,
St Lawrence University
Wendy Dunn
,
Federal Reserve Board
Ellen Meade
,
Duke University
Martha A. Starr
,
American Economic Association

Abstract

In this paper, we compare author and article information for two prominent research outlets, the AER and what was formerly its P&P issue. Compared with regular-issue articles, we find that P&P articles have a greater gender diversity of authors, more women from U.S. academic institutions outside the top 15, and a broader coverage of research fields and topics. Changes in publication approach in what we call the “P&P expansion period” brought about further broadening in representation, and this result was achieved without any decrease in the relative impact of P&P articles.

The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence from Academia

Anna Stansbury
,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kyra Rodriguez
,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

It is well-documented that women and racial and ethnic minorities face disproportionate barriers to academic advancement. However, socioeconomic status (“SES”) is often overlooked. Little is known about whether or how academic careers differ by socioeconomic background. Recent work by Morgan et al (2022) documents how tenure-track academia in the US is starkly less socioeconomically diverse than the US population. Schultz and Stansbury (2022) further find disciplinary differences, wherein Economics, Mathematics, and Computer Science PhDs in the US have smaller shares of first-generation college students (no parent with a bachelor’s degree) than other disciplines. Our paper builds upon this limited literature to systematically document key stylized facts at important points in academia’s tenure-track pathway, from the undergraduate level to tenure. We use the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates and Survey of Doctorate Recipients to trace individuals from their undergraduate degree, throughout their careers, and across a rich set of career outcomes. We find that academic careers are characterized by two phenomena for lower-SES doctorates: the leaky pipeline and the slippery ladder. The leaky pipeline metaphor, borrowed from the literature on gender in academia, illustrates that at each step of the academic career after the PhD, people from lower SES backgrounds are more likely to leave academia. The slippery ladder metaphor is used to describe our finding that at each step in the academic career, people from lower SES backgrounds who stay in academia are in lower ranked institutions. Both phenomena are present even conditional on fixed effects for academic field and prior institutions, illustrating that SES plays a role not just on entry to an undergraduate or PhD program but throughout the academic career trajectory. We further examine these phenomena by field and compare and combine our SES results with gender and race. Finally, we explore several possible mechanisms.

Citations and Racial Inequality in Economic Research

Marlène Koffi
,
University of Toronto
Roland Pongou
,
University of Ottawa
Leonard Wantchekon
,
Princeton University

Abstract

While the literature on gender inequalities in academic research, particularly in economics, has experienced a significant boom in recent years, there is much less information on racial equality. This article contributes to this nascent literature by investigating racial differences in citations in economics and their determinants. The data originates from the publication records and bibliometric data from more than 200 economic journals. We use algorithmic procedures combined with manually collected data to identify the race of authors and subsequently infer the racial composition of a team. We find that, on average, a team with at least one non-white author experiences a negative citation premium of around 15%. There are, however, substantial heterogeneities among authors depending on the race categories, subfields of economics, papers' methodological setup, and the origin of citations. We document that the racial gap is much more pronounced among blacks, with values exceeding 30%. However, a significant fraction of this gap is explained by variations in the journal of publication. We then restrict ourselves to high-impact journals and still observe a racial gap of 8% for Hispanics, 12% for Asians, and 17% for Blacks. Further, the gap is worst when the authors of the citing article are more prestigious and subsists in subfields where racial minorities are better represented. Next, we analyze the citation networks to observe the influence and level of connections of articles. While we find that articles with racial minorities have fewer direct connections and are less connected to highly connected articles, there is surprisingly no difference when using the Katz centrality measure. In other words, those articles could have been cited but were excluded from the network. Finally, we analyze the effects of localization and specialization in certain subfields and then conclude by discussing our results and the policy implications of our study.

Discussant(s)
Cynthia Bansak
,
St Lawrence University
Kasey Buckles
,
Notre Dame University
Julia Coronado
,
MacroPolicy Perspectives and University of Texas-Austin
David Wilcox
,
Peterson Institute
JEL Classifications
  • A1 - General Economics
  • J7 - Labor Discrimination