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New issue of Econ Journal Watch
It is here, and I'll cover the contents once I've had a chance to read them. Here is a symposium on why so few women in economics?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 5, 2008 at 07:48 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
women and economics-part self-
selection and part ability
differentials.
Posted by: sa at May 5, 2008 10:55:05 AM
From the article:
> In 2006, five women, or six percent, were full professors in economics...
...
>At that time this proportion was around 8-10
percent. From a gender equality perspective, we should thus have had about *three
more women* full professors at Swedish universities today.
The authors of this article consist of about two female economists who don't understand statistical significance. I'll conclude from this that all female economists don't understand statistics. If a sample size of 5 is reasonable to draw conclusions from, then so is a sample size of 2, right?
Posted by: mathgeek at May 5, 2008 11:12:46 AM
Is it normal for a journal to publish not one comment but two consecutive rounds of comments on the same original paper? Both the smoking comment and the casino/crime comment went through two rounds of commenting, and the casino/crime comment actually notes that Grinols and Mustard had been told the commenter would only have one chance to write one comment. Is Econ Journal Watch just desperate for submissions, or is this actually a debate, and less of a comment. I say because if you read both the articles written as responses, the authors seemed annoyed that they were having to respond a second time to the comments, and claim that their original comment had addressed most/all of the second comments' points.
On a different note, the Marlow piece was an interesting piece of history and autobiography, as well as for pointing out the tendency for researchers to jump to government intervention from pointing out market failure, without considering the costs of both private accommodation of the externality and government solutions. Whether he's right that smoking ban advocates have tended toward this is a different matter, but I think that is very common and easy to do. There are enough caveats to the Coase theorem to make it an easy route towards government intervention, and I respected his call towards thorough empirical work done on relative costs of different regimes.
Posted by: jason voorhees at May 5, 2008 11:52:47 AM
I believe that Barbie [the doll from Mattel] has this covered with: "Math is hard".
Posted by: Dave Barnes at May 5, 2008 1:14:42 PM
Didn't Larry Summers cover this issue ?
Posted by: EconGeek at May 5, 2008 6:18:08 PM
Why so few women as full professors in anything? The standard academic career track doesn't allow time off for childbearing. You have to work work work until you achieve tenure. I've read the average age of receiving tenure is 40, which is too late for babies for most women.
I wouldn't be surprised if this effect was more pronounced in more competitive fields.
Posted by: Jacqueline at May 5, 2008 9:44:28 PM
Why so few women in economics? they, like me, are cowed by the awe inspiring resume of Susan Athey:
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/
She makes me think that I'm wasting my life even when I'm working hard, let along when I'm commenting on blogs.
Posted by: Adam Hyland at May 6, 2008 2:55:18 PM
Adam (just above), I wonder if women are cowed and men are bullied. Sorry, couldn't resist the wordplay.
Posted by: John Chilton at May 6, 2008 4:46:39 PM
John: Priceless. color me bullied. :)
Posted by: Adam Hyland at May 6, 2008 9:51:36 PM
Perhaps this would be the time to hear from women who got tenure by their mid-30's at a top-10 department (in any technical field), had 3 kids, and are still on their first marriage.
Of course, such women probably don't have reading blogs as part of their daily routine.
Posted by: ZBicyclist at May 6, 2008 9:59:24 PM
Do you think the "work your butt off to get tenure" model just dropped from the sky? It wasn't always like that. It's a sifting mechanism to keep the "wrong" people out of the academy. You know, those wrong people who want to have kids and are expected to look after them.
A lot of tenured female profs that I can think of off the top of my head are married to other academics.
Posted by: dug at May 8, 2008 2:43:08 AM
