by From Caroline Freund When I was an undergraduate studying economics in the 1980s, I got an early lesson in how men view women in the workforce. I was writing a thesis about the well-known phenomenon of women being paid less than men for the same jobs. One of my professors challenged the basic premise that bias was a possible reason for the wage gap. If women really did get paid less for the same work, he argued, a smart company would hire all women and undercut its competitors. No female professor would have made such a zealous claim. But I was never taught by a female economics professor. It is no surprise since economics has traditionally been the social science with the lowest share of women. Even today, less than 15 percent of full professors in economics at universities
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from Caroline Freund
When I was an undergraduate studying economics in the 1980s, I got an early lesson in how men view women in the workforce. I was writing a thesis about the well-known phenomenon of women being paid less than men for the same jobs. One of my professors challenged the basic premise that bias was a possible reason for the wage gap. If women really did get paid less for the same work, he argued, a smart company would hire all women and undercut its competitors.
No female professor would have made such a zealous claim. But I was never taught by a female economics professor. It is no surprise since economics has traditionally been the social science with the lowest share of women. Even today, less than 15 percent of full professors in economics at universities are women.
A remarkable new paper by a female student at Berkeley showed this summer that the problem in economics is so deep that it borders on misogyny. The study explores the terms used most frequently in posts about women and men from an online forum designed to share job information among economics graduate students. Posts about women include words like “hotter”, “lesbian”, “bb”, and “tits”. In contrast, posts about men are more neutral, using terms like “advisor” or “Wharton,” the name of a leading business school.
While the website is known to be crude, and represents only a tiny fraction of economists, it is raising awareness about the treatment of women in economics. Women rarely glimpse such direct hostility—the more common and related manifestation is being excluded from the meetings and social gatherings, where research partnerships are made and promotions are decided. read more