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Episode #121: Erin Hengel and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
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On this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m joined by two guests to talk about gender discrimination in the field of economics. Erin Hengel is an assistant professor of Economics at the University of Liverpool. She evaluates bankruptcy vis-à-vis recent...
The post Episode #121: Erin Hengel and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Gender Discrimination in Economics
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we are going to talk about gender discrimination in the field of economics. This is something that's come up over the last few months in the field with some very exciting research from people all around the world, actually.
00:00:27
Speaker
And in the American Economics Association annual conference in early January, there was a session on gender discrimination that got a lot of attention both in and outside of the field. And that panel, that session focused on discrimination as it extends to the life cycle of female economists' career, all the way from initially choosing to study economics, securing a job, searching for a job,
00:00:52
Speaker
writing research papers, gaining access to top publications, the entire life cycle
Meet the Guests: Aaron Hangle and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
00:00:56
Speaker
of it. And so to help me talk about some of these issues and maybe even talk about some possible solutions, I'm very excited to have two folks with me, Aaron Hangle, who is at the University of Liverpool, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Aaron, Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us.
00:01:14
Speaker
Very excited to have you both on the show. I want to start by having maybe each of you just introduce yourselves briefly and then we can maybe we'll have Aaron talk about the AA session and then we can dive into some of these issues and the research that you've done.
Aaron's Journey into Gender Discrimination Research
00:01:29
Speaker
So, Aaron, can you just talk a little bit about your background and how you got interested in this research of gender discrimination and then Paul, maybe you can talk a little bit about yourself as well. Yeah. So, well, actually, I was doing my PhD
00:01:43
Speaker
So I am a lecturer in UK as an assistant professor at the University of Liverpool and I finished my PhD about a year and a half ago. And it was actually during my PhD where I got interested in this. And before that I was actually working in micro theory, but I was teaching an asset pricing course or class. So it was a classes for the actual course. And I happened to have noticed that if you look at the front row of students when you're giving a lecture and if you really nail an explanation,
00:02:12
Speaker
that front row is going to line up. You can almost see the fact that they understand. Anyway, so that's, if you're giving a lecture, you want that, it's positive. And I had always kind of trained myself to look for that, because then I know I'm explaining something well. And I happen to have been watching somebody else's lecture on a topic that I knew, and he was definitely doing a better job than I could have done.
00:02:32
Speaker
But I didn't think he was really nailing the explanations, right? But I still saw that front row just really light up in a way that they wouldn't do for me, I felt, if I hadn't nailed my explanation. So that just kind of made me think, wow, do I have to be clearer than other people? And so that was when I started, it was just like, huh, I wonder if I could test this. How do I test this? And that's what led to the paper.
00:02:56
Speaker
Well, that's great. That's a great story, great inspiration for why we do research in general, and especially on this issue.
Paul's Insights on Gender Representation in Seminars
00:03:04
Speaker
Paul, can you talk a little bit about your background and where you are and the work that you do there at the Fed? Yeah. So similarly, my main focus is on consumer finance. So I've been at the New York Fed for almost three years now. And most of my work is in finance and consumer finance and applied econometrics. But sort of kind of the anecdote in a similar way to Aaron that led me to this was,
00:03:24
Speaker
I am in charge of inviting seminar speakers for my function and research. And one of the things that's sort of notable is trying to think of a group of individuals to invite who are sort of salient, that individuals, that people in my group want to invite to bring in. And so I wanted to make sure that we made an effort to try and bring in a diverse group of speakers, not necessarily just drawing from the same people that I knew every time or that people in my function knew every time.
00:03:53
Speaker
what sort of prompted me to start working on the thing that I'm working on, which was focusing on basically what gender representation looked like at an economics
Analyzing Gender Representation at MBER Conference
00:04:03
Speaker
conference. So basically in terms of who the speakers were who were on the program, basically what ended up happening was as I went to the MBER, which is the national conference, sort of similar to the American Economics Association, but kind of a more of a inside club that's held in Cambridge. It's a sort of a national Bureau of Economic Research, which
00:04:23
Speaker
They host an annual conference every year that people have to submit to. And they had all this data on who got in and who didn't. And I went to the finance sessions, which are the ones that I know. And I looked to see how many women were in the 2016 session. And basically, there was one female author on all of the papers for 2016 in corporate finance, which would be the typical session we would invite from.
00:04:51
Speaker
said oh well that's that's not very many is that is that typical one right that's right so i i guess i asked a question to myself of oh is that typical the mbr how representative is this compared to something else and sort of my co-author a new shachari and i have said this is that one of the things about this and i think this is true for erin trying to do the data version of this as well is
00:05:15
Speaker
it's very easy anecdotally to have an opinion on this and what is sort of the data say in the similar vein. So we kind of pulled, this was kind of an exercise and we could scrape a lot of this data from the website and categorize all the individuals who were on these papers. And that's sort of how we got into doing this data exercise of trying to understand what the gender breakdown was of speakers at this conference.
00:05:38
Speaker
Right, right. So I want to turn to Aaron to talk about the AA session. So can you talk about your paper specifically, and then also maybe
00:05:49
Speaker
quick sort of overview of the session writ large. Was
Exploring 'Publishing While Female'
00:05:53
Speaker
it full? I mean, clearly, it garnered a lot of attention. Was it one of those sessions that was full? Was it a lot of conversation? Was it a lot of discussion? Did you get a lot of pushback? So I'm going to let you just talk a little bit about your paper and then about the session as a whole. OK, yeah. So I'll just talk about my paper if you feel free to interrupt me, though. But basically, so it was a session on gender and economics.
00:06:17
Speaker
which has gotten increasingly a bit more attention in economics. And so it was actually really nice that they had this devoted session to it, and it was well attended. Now, my paper is called Publishing While Female, and what it does is basically look at the readability of male and female offer papers. So effectively what I wanted to do was question whether women are held to higher standards.
00:06:41
Speaker
There is actually quite a bit of evidence that already exists that suggests that they in fact are. And a lot of this evidence, what it basically shows is that all things equal, women are considered less competent when they are compared to otherwise equally competent men. But I really wanted to look at this in the sense of academia in economics. So are women's papers then held to higher standards in their writing and academic peer review?
00:07:07
Speaker
So the thing is, this has actually been studied in the context of acceptance rates, but that is also one of the limitations of some of these prior studies. So they have shown basically that there is no real consistent evidence that women's papers are accepted less often than men's papers. But there is a lot more to peer review than simply looking at just that single indicator, which is acceptance rates.
00:07:30
Speaker
Most papers are accepted only after they've undergone major requested revisions, and this is precisely where I wanted to see if there was a potential gender bias. So I really wanted to see if women are going to have to jump through more hoops effectively
Peer Review Standards: A Gender Bias?
00:07:42
Speaker
to get published. For example, are they referees going to scrutinize more heavily the technical details in their female author papers, or perhaps they will ask for more robustness checks? Or, and this is what I specifically look at, do they require clear exposition in their text? Are they like my students? Do they only really line up
00:07:59
Speaker
when my explanations are clear. So if this is the case, then we should expect to see higher quality on whatever dimension it is these higher standards would be applied to. And that is a crux, effectively, of what I'm doing. Now, the reason I chose the clarity of text was for two reasons. It was something that I had actually experienced
00:08:24
Speaker
But also, it's something that is valued by journals. I think econometric mistakes are very clearly in their submission guidelines that papers need to be well-written and understood by people outside of the field. And second, writing clarity is actually a well-studied topic, and it is effectively a function of simple vocabulary and short sentences. So it's very quantifiable in that sense. And there are a lot of different indicators that exist in order to quantify this particular relationship. And I concentrate on five.
00:08:54
Speaker
Anyway, so I take these five readability measures as my measure of writing quality, and I attack them the question, are women's papers better written? And if so, is that true to peer review? And if so, is that because of discrimination? I attack that using a multi-step identification strategy effectively. So first I established that yes, and indeed there is a gender difference in readability after having four obvious contractors. I also find that
00:09:24
Speaker
by comparing draft papers to their final published version. So basically what I also do is I take draft versions, NBEO draft versions, in fact, and I compare them to the readability of the published version. And I establish effectively that a good portion of that difference is caused precisely while the papers are undergoing peer review. So the readability gap in the draft version of the paper is much smaller than it is in the final version of the paper. And given that NBEO papers
00:09:49
Speaker
So the majority, the vast majority effect of NVER papers are released as working papers after they've already undergone a significant amount of internal peer review within departments. If you look at econometric submission data, they are generally released as working papers at the exact same time that they're submitted to econometric.
00:10:11
Speaker
So assuming that once you submit a paper to the journal where it is eventually published, that you're not going to actually do any changes to that paper while it's under submission, unless it's something that's specifically asked for by a referee, then that effectively establishes that if we see a widening readability gap, that it is therefore caused by peer review. So does the fact that there's working papers out there with people's names attached on them, does it basically negate this idea of blind peer review altogether?
00:10:38
Speaker
Oh, right. Yes. Okay. So I'm going to put it now on the paper. It's coming soon in a new draft. Yeah, so it may have worked in the past. All right. Blind peer review may have worked in the past.
00:10:56
Speaker
I do actually find that the readability gap between the published papers and the MBER work papers reverses, but that's not statistically different from zero, that effect. And the sample of papers are subjected to double-blind review for the internet. However, the gap then re-emerges after the internet. Anyway, the sample sizes, however, for these papers are very small because the sample size of papers subjected to double-blind review before the internet is very small. So I hesitate really to make too many policy recommendations based on this finding.
00:11:25
Speaker
However, we now exist with the internet, right? So it's here. Yeah. Well, that's right. That's right. Yeah. And it's interesting. It's interesting also to think about, you know, the networks of researchers prior to the internet and, you know, who talked to whom about, you know, papers being, being submitted. But clearly the internet has made it easier to find, find those names.
00:11:44
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about the AEA session?
Reflections from the AEA Session
00:11:48
Speaker
And I'll link to that to the session so people can take a look at the papers. But can you talk not so much about the findings of each of the paper, but maybe the overall tone of the session? Well, yeah, it was very supportive. It was very unlike a typical economic seminar. So I don't know if it was really representative. It was not highly critical. That is true.
00:12:11
Speaker
Um, but it was also relatively, there were a lot of people there. Um, I think it was standing room only. Um, but it was a small room. So I don't want to know when you get standing room only, just do you hang your head on that?
00:12:28
Speaker
It definitely felt like, I mean, certainly for the AFA, the finance one that we were a part of, the people who were in the room felt like they were drinking the Kool-Aid or at least it was, I mean, Aaron, I don't know if this is what you meant, but it felt like these are the people who definitely thought this was an issue in economics and sort of were trying to support this kind of research as opposed to people who are coming in to say, oh no, this isn't a problem.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think that may, and that actually, I mean, that's positive, but it's also negative at the same time, because if that's the case, then, you know, pre-tune to the choir, is that what we need? Right, right. The people's minds you want to change may not have been there. So, Erin, your paper is about a single journal, Submissions to Econometrica. Paul, your paper was about the NBR Summer Institute, so a little more of a
00:13:16
Speaker
a specific conference and invite only. Can you just talk briefly about what you and your co-author found?
Persistent Gender Gaps in Conferences
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, so my co-author Anushcharya and I, most of what I guess what we did was we were trying to sort of fill a gap in terms of a data collection exercise. So we essentially were using this long panel, this conference has been going on for a long time, but the data that was available that we could sort of scrape from the internet was from 2001 to 2016.
00:13:41
Speaker
And essentially what we were trying to do was there's a lot of good data that's been done for a long time by this group called CSWEP, which is a sort of a subcommittee of the AEAs that tries to calculate statistics on the share of women in economics, but that's really representing the share of women who are faculty members. So it's looking at surveying departments to try and look at what are the share of faculty members who are women and other underrepresented minorities.
00:14:11
Speaker
And what we wanted to do was get a sense of, well, at conferences where we think, if we think of conferences as being important, which I think we do for a variety of reasons, what sort of does the breakdown of women look like at these conferences, especially a prestigious one like the MBR Summer Institute, which is sort of one of the more prestigious conferences to be able to get into. And the other benefit of it was that we could also look across topics. So typically,
00:14:38
Speaker
You know, not every person has a particular label attached to them. There's potentially stuff that's on their website, but it's not well categorized, consistent across time. And so one of the benefits of this conference is we could see across different types of groups. So this would be, you know, finance versus macro versus applied microeconomics. What is sort of the breakdown of gender representation look like across time and across these fields?
00:15:02
Speaker
What we end up showing is that there's really been very little change in the representation of women at these conferences. It's gone from about 19% to about 20% over this 16 year period. And there's sort of been this persistent gap across the field. So from finance has roughly been around 12%, whereas applied micro is something more like 25%. And that gap has sort of been persistent across this time series. Some of these facts
00:15:28
Speaker
were consistent i think with people's priors and some were potentially new facts that people didn't know but it was useful exercises to sort of not just be thinking about anecdotes but actually know what the numbers look like and then the second thing that we're able to do is we kind of wanted to ask the question of what's driving this difference in representation what is the benchmark we should be comparing it to.
00:15:47
Speaker
There's this point of, you know, you say, here's what the the breakdown looks like. Well, what should it necessarily be in terms of should it should it necessarily be 50 percent? 50 percent maybe is an ideal we should be striving towards. But even if if the fact that the share of faculty who are women is
00:16:03
Speaker
less than that, then potentially that would not necessarily vote. The question is, what is the right benchmark to be going for? And this is something economists have pushed us a lot on. But even when we compare this, what's interesting is that we look across a variety of benchmarks in terms of what does the share look like in the profession.
00:16:22
Speaker
One of the kind of neat facts that I think really highlights potentially one of the underlying issues with conferences and say something like the MBR Summer Institute is really one of the numbers that the share of women at the MBR tracks the most is one of these things called the
00:16:37
Speaker
the share of women who are MBR affiliates. So there are these things called, you can be a research associate, which basically means you're affiliated with the MBR, or you can be a faculty research fellow, which essentially means that you're part of the institution, it's kind of like being a member of this research organization.
00:16:55
Speaker
And that's something you have to be nominated for and voted on and that number tracks quite well. The share of women who were MBR members versus MBR at the MBR session, those move in the time series quite hand in hand relative to and much more so than the other reflections of female representation in the field. So this sort of it's suggestive that
00:17:17
Speaker
It's about being part of the club or at least knowing about it. You can't establish causality either way, but it's suggestive that it's consistent. And then the last thing we do is we look at applications. So we got the MBR to work with us and we were able to look at people who submitted papers to the conference and look at whether or not there were differences in acceptance rates.
00:17:37
Speaker
And what we find is it's pretty similar acceptance rates across men and women, except for maybe some slight differences in finance for women being accepted less. But for micro and macro, it looks almost identical, which to us suggested that potentially part of the reason why we would see an underrepresentation of women here is more about information or the sort of the
00:17:57
Speaker
the willingness of women to submit to these conferences rather than some inherent bias that there are men or somebody else who's sitting at the gate saying, you know, more men can get in than women, but rather something else about potentially women submitting, which I think I don't want to speak for your paper, Erin, but it's consistent with this idea that there's some sort of self-reinforcing bias potentially not encouraging women to submit enough, for example, or there not being enough information.
00:18:24
Speaker
So one of the things that always comes up when you have these discussions about gender discrimination or any sort of discrimination in, especially in academic fields, is about the pipeline.
Higher Academic Levels and Publishing Imbalance
00:18:32
Speaker
People moving from undergraduate to graduate to the profession. Aaron, I think we were talking earlier about these different blockages and these points. And Paul, you brought up this, what's the right goal or what's the right middle point? So
00:18:43
Speaker
What is that middle point? What should the ratio be either in publishing or in the profession? The numbers sort of shrink and shrink and shrink as you get – the balance sort of gets further and further off as you get further into the higher levels of the profession. So, Aaron, maybe you could talk a little bit about these – the real imbalance between the share of women who are academic economists versus the share of women who are publishing in some of these top journals.
00:19:08
Speaker
There's been a lot of people pointing out that women are underrepresented in economics. So I think it's as far as PhD students are concerned, it's about third. I think for professors, it goes down to about 15 percent.
00:19:22
Speaker
And between that are assistant and associate professors. So between those two, which is obviously less than 50%, and full professors, 15% is quite small. I would, however, mention that 15% is in fact the upper bound on women's representation in actual top journals. So the average ratio of female authors per paper is about 12.5%. If you look at, now there are 18.8%
00:19:51
Speaker
of papers published since 1990 that have at least one female author. But because a lot of these papers are in fact like, you know, one female author and two men, the actual ratio or average ratio is much smaller. And in fact, the profession does not do it, or at least they don't publish very many solo-authored female papers or papers that are 100% authored by women.
00:20:14
Speaker
So in fact, in 2015, the average ratio of female authors per paper barely broke 15%. So it's barely broke the percentage of women as full professors. And only 7.5% of papers were majority female authored, and just 4.5% of papers were written entirely by women. So you can see, as you go down towards a higher representation of women on individual papers, you have fewer and fewer papers as a percentage of the total, which are female authored.
00:20:44
Speaker
Given also other research that has shown that women don't get much credit unless they're co-authoring with other women or they're solo-authoring, the solution from that was that, okay, well, that's fine. Let's go. Women should therefore co-author with other women or they should solo-author paper. But those are such a tiny fraction of the actual papers that are published in any of these top journals that clearly it's not really a viable option.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's also adding this other barrier to publish a paper is like, oh, you have to go find, you know, you have to go find not just someone who's good at the good at their job, but also someone who, you know, meets this gender criteria, as opposed to just finding someone who's good, you're adding this this additional barrier.
00:21:24
Speaker
Women should get credit for co-authoring. But yeah, so I mean, the solution, however, it may not be just as simple as just finding another. I mean, I think that you're bringing it up and I think it's a thing that I have struggled with of how to convince.
00:21:40
Speaker
people who are potentially skeptical are trying to talk about this. And I think the things that Aaron brought up are the right ways to convince it is that, how do you say what the right number should be? So I've had someone say, this is a very economist-y way of saying it, but Aaron, I don't know if this is, but somebody basically saying like, well, maybe this sorting is just a taste-based sorting, right? If women just are less likely to enjoy being an economist or something else. And that's just sort of reflecting preferences.
00:22:07
Speaker
And it's like, this is a very hard hurdle for if people are saying this is reflecting the world as based off of people's preferences, why are you trying to make it 50%? And so this is always the question of like, what is the right benchmark that we should be doing? Yeah.
00:22:27
Speaker
I'm not saying it's a good argument, but yeah, I totally agree. It's saying like, why are we assuming it's? And moreover, it's also assuming that there aren't all these barriers that are making it so that this is one of the things I like about your paper and is this idea that there's this information, this self-reinforcing mechanism too, that makes it harder or less likely for potentially women to continue or pursue for certain reasons because we've created all these blockages or difficulties to publish or to continue in academia and
Systemic Barriers and Bias in Academia
00:22:55
Speaker
so forth. If you make it that much harder,
00:22:57
Speaker
sort of ex-ante, it would make a lot of sense that potentially there would be an under-representation because it really wouldn't be worth the trouble necessarily given how much harder it's going to be for women versus men. Yeah, I sometimes think I must have been the stupidest economist all my life. Why did I go into microfury, which has so very few female economists.
00:23:16
Speaker
right you could have gone into finance where there was where where paul found one person so i think micro theory might be what might be just as bad there aren't any micro theory in at the nbr summer institute this is why i said applied micro because aaron right this is like i'm sure aaron's experience is even worse than than finance sometimes so what are some of the
Efforts to Increase Diversity in Conferences
00:23:37
Speaker
things that we can do. There's different levels of things that we can do both as individuals, as conference organizers, as session organizers, as university or department chairs or university organizations. So what are the sort of things that you've both talked about and thought about and written about that are things that can try to address some of these imbalances in publishing or in hiring? Yeah. Yeah. Hiring is the one that I think a lot of people, especially we just finished a job market season and everyone has been worrying about or struggling with.
00:24:05
Speaker
I guess I can speak a little bit to Anusha Chary, my co-author, and I have talked a lot about it at the conference level, and maybe this is a useful opportunity to speak as a guy or a man on this. I do think that there's quite a bit that male economists should be making more of an effort to speak on this. I recently got asked to go to a conference.
00:24:26
Speaker
I was suggesting some speakers and there was somebody who got put on the panel and the reason I'm bringing this story up is that basically a friend of mine who's a man really did I think exactly what more guys need to do or more male economists need to do in this setting which is
00:24:41
Speaker
He was asked to be on a panel. It was a panel of potentially sort of four men on the topic where there's plenty of women who are good on this and to say, you know, he was like, look, I'm not going to be on a panel where it's all men. It's like his words are something like it's 2018 where like this is not acceptable to do this. Like we really need to diversify the speakers who are at this conference.
00:25:03
Speaker
And he put his foot down a little bit on this. And I don't love conflict, and it's not something I would enjoy doing. But the organizer wasn't doing explicitly, was very reasonable about it. And they ended up fixing, making sure to get this person on, the person who he recommended on, and so forth. And so I guess what I mean by this is that that's an example of, for example, a conference panel. That's a very specific example.
00:25:27
Speaker
There's an extent to which I think that the trade-off is, and I'm curious if Aaron comes from the perspective of a female economist, because I've talked to some colleagues who have different views on this, is that there's a line in which you want to walk of trying to encourage making sure that we improve the share of women and other underrepresented minorities at these conferences. At the same time, you do not do it with the attitude of, I'm trying to give handouts to people. So at the same time,
00:25:55
Speaker
I don't think any person wants to be told that they're getting to be sort of the token woman on the panel or anything else, or token person on the conference. And so I think what's useful about it, and this is maybe a very econ-y way of doing it, is what you want to do is ensure you have processes in place.
00:26:13
Speaker
for the submission or solicitation process in place to encourage a large number of potential candidates initially such that you don't have to enforce a quota exposed but rather you've done the work ex ante that if you get a random shock such that you get a bad draw like maybe no women or very few women on the conference or panel
00:26:36
Speaker
Expose you can at least say like we have this process in place usually does a very good job so then that i think that the people on the conference who are say women are underrepresented minorities don't feel like they're being sort of catered to or behold into that i'm not being i'm being kind of a cuz i don't think i have.
00:26:52
Speaker
I think it's solicitation and encouragement of submissions. So when you do call for papers, there are ways to encourage a broader scope of who submits and how to encourage people to submit. I think conference organizers, for example, can make a point of soliciting submissions from people. They don't have to say, I'm going to put your paper on, but they can make an effort to reach out to a larger group of individuals. That would be, I think, a very good start. And this very
00:27:16
Speaker
I think relatively low cost, to be totally frank. It's just that the organizers have to do the work. Aaron, I don't know if that you, it's like personal experience or if you have thoughts on that. I think it's important. I have been soliciting out a lot, but a couple of times I've been saluting, you know, people have asked me and there were things I didn't know about. So I didn't, I didn't know to apply and I was happy to do it. And I think a lot of people, you know, if you don't have a lot of women,
00:27:44
Speaker
I think the owners should really be on the organizers to try to figure out who might be a good presenter in certain situations and try to reach out to them. I think that they will have a lot of success if they do that. Because anytime I've been solicited, which isn't a huge amount of time, in fact it's very small, but I've always said yes.
00:28:02
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I think that's right. Well, I mean, it's interesting. The conference does seem to be sort of a low-hanging fruit, because it doesn't all come from conferences, obviously.
Conferences: Networking and Opportunities
00:28:11
Speaker
But there's an obviously there's a pipeline or there's a mechanism whereby you presented a panel, you make connections, you make networks, you improve the paper, the paper gets submitted to potentially even a better journal. All of that sort of snowballs. And maybe the conferences are, Paul, as you mentioned, it's an easy, low-cost way to sort of help along this process.
00:28:32
Speaker
But there's also barriers, as we all know, there's barriers, there's choke points at all these other areas. But I wanted to actually ask Paul, do you worry about backlash? Well, the reason I asked you about the backlash part was there was a period in which I was feeling, I don't know what the word is, I was sort of, I think I had the same sentiment of you of like trying to encourage
00:28:53
Speaker
I don't know, like being more open on these things that I asked I think people online about the idea of signing your reviews. And I got a lot of pushback on the idea. It's a pretty insider group set of people is that you can really piss off a lot of people and people that can be kind of like hold grudges or be
00:29:14
Speaker
vindictive and you might not know otherwise and maybe people you wouldn't expect and I you know it's you'd be I feel like I'm a relatively laid-back person and I'm still surprised that I hold my prejudice about things that I feel like I was slighted on and maybe you know it's a very it's a surprisingly personal feel like yeah it's surprisingly personal I guess is the thing that I've taken away from it and this is consistent with why I think
00:29:41
Speaker
conferences are important or these other opportunities. Like, it's great. Like, for example, I got to meet Erin in person because I was presenting on these things. And so she introduced herself with the AAs. And now it's like the sort of thing where conferences clearly are important. But at the same time, like it's a very, once you've met a person in person, you want to keep things professional. But at the same time, you spend so much time with these people that it feels more personal than professional at times. I think there's a real concern when you start going down the journalist.
00:30:09
Speaker
So there may be a sink or pool of referees at the very top. Um, at least if you're looking at the numbers. Okay. Um, I don't know. Maybe.
00:30:18
Speaker
only a very small fraction of them actually are able to referee them. But at least the numbers are a lot. So there are two possibilities, right? So maybe we could push more of the onus onto the editor and say, okay, well, the editor is then responsible for not sending. So if there is a particularly vindictive senior, then you shouldn't send it to a junior people whose publication career depends on that. Or alternatively, we change how we actually look at the referee process. So as a referee, instead of writing
00:30:47
Speaker
You know, you write a report that basically says, these are the changes I think need to be made in the paper. And this may be naive. I'm not, you know, it's just a suggestion. These are changes I think this paper would have to make in order for it to be published in this particular journal. But leaving any more information
00:31:06
Speaker
like on the actual decision out and that is leading it up to the editor. Got it. Well, so there are journals like JASA, for example, and I even have a paper with my advisor, which was sort of, it was a special case and this is why it was like this, but there are journals where what they do is they have the paper and then the response is published and then there's a rebuttal. And those are actually, I think some of the greatest papers to read because you get to see the context of how the paper was published at the time of the publication rather than the sort of ex post digestion.
00:31:35
Speaker
One of the most famous examples is Ken Arrow's paper about health insurance, about moral hazard. It's cool because you see it's a much more of a conversation there. I always thought that would be a wonderful thing if we had at least a little bit more of that in econ journals. I don't know if it's a feasible thing for what we do, but these aspects of having the response and a rejoinder published is a really nice aspect of it.
00:31:58
Speaker
And you also think, like, then the person who is actually writing the response gets credit for some of those ideas. Like, I know in actual referral reports that I've gotten, I think, oh, that's a really good idea. I should do that. And then I just copy my referee's idea, but he gets zero credit for it. Right. Except for a thank you to my anonymous referee. Right. Thank you to my anonymous referee.
00:32:19
Speaker
Who knows my name? Because like you said, Aaron, the blind review is not it's not blind anymore. Because you can do you can do a Google search and everybody's posting, even if it's not an nbr working paper, they're posting their own working paper on their own department website. Also, okay, so I one aspect, and this is maybe more societal as well, but it's related to your
00:32:42
Speaker
Concern Aaron has to do with this aspect of do people act differently when they're anonymous and the answer is almost certainly yes. And it's sort of related to Alice Wu's paper about the econ job market rumors, which is this aspect to which, you know, do we worry or think about the norms in which we engage in research and we engage as a profession are different.
00:33:00
Speaker
when things are anonymous. And I take the point that you're proposing, Erin, as being about maybe the aspect of anonymity now hurts us more than helps us. I mean, it's a trade-off, right? I think we think there are presumably our costs of not being anonymous anymore, but maybe the benefits outweigh the costs. And that's related to Alice's point is there's this reflection here of when you see this anonymous, you get kind of the worst aspects of what people act like online. Yeah. Yeah. And I know in Alice's paper,
Impact of Anonymous Platforms in Economics
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's a forum. So you've got job rumors, which is basically where economists go in Gotham. And a lot of people have said it is a forum that is to some extent representative also of our field because almost everybody at some point has been on that site and almost everybody at some point has posted something on that site. So I think, yeah, and some of those exchanges are
00:33:57
Speaker
very negative, and they really can hurt the person's career. Now, if you're doing something dodgy, of course, maybe that deserves to happen. I don't know, but the point is, at least there's the added incentive from the anonymity of the person making the claims that, yeah, makes it also possible that the comments that they are making are not actually valid. And that they in fact are doing that to prove their own career or perhaps because of the victim or whatever. Yeah.
00:34:25
Speaker
Right. It's a, obviously a complex topic. It's something I'm hoping that we'll see a lot more research about. Paul, you mentioned the CSWEP group, the Committee for Science and Women in the Economics Professionals.
Call for Introspective Research and Awareness
00:34:40
Speaker
It's always, I never quite remember, Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Professionals. Status.
00:34:46
Speaker
Right. So we only have those sessions, but I feel like the research on the actual discrimination or imbalance about women in the field of economics, it's more of an introspective research strain, is going to grow over time. And I think that's only good to have these discussions. So we've talked for
00:35:03
Speaker
Let me just because this is something I got yelled at about so I will say this as a mea culpa and then I'll let you finish I'm sorry is that what there has been actually quite a bit of good research on this topic I will say that what has happened now is I think there is more demand on the part of economists to read this I had a lot of
00:35:20
Speaker
comments, which was a useful feedback. And I take it I'm taking it to heart, which is that there has been quite a number of good papers that have sort of been talking and trying to think about this, but they just haven't been publishing as well, or they're potentially not as much interest. And now I think there's a lot more. So sorry, I'll let you finish your thought. I had actually had an economist say to me not too long ago, there's no evidence of gender discrimination. And I'm like, what?
00:35:49
Speaker
But yeah, he was obviously thinking in the sense that I don't think there is a lot of evidence of gender discrimination coming specifically from the economics field. But there is a lot of evidence more generally, and there is still evidence, and definitely in economics as well, but it's not huge. It's not published as frequently. People start, especially in economics, start realizing that there is, in fact, a lot of research out there. And like Paul said, they read it.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah, well I will. I'll post a bunch of those papers will find them first and and post a bunch of those papers to to the show notes so people can take a look. And in all fields I think it's important to have that introspection and in this time and in 2018 now where
00:36:33
Speaker
This is happening in lots of different fields. This is a time to have more of these conversations. So Aaron, Paul, I want to thank you both for coming on the show. This has been a really interesting conversation. I don't think we solved anything, but we have some good ideas. So I want to thank you both for coming on the show. It's been really interesting. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. Feel free to chime in on the show notes or on Twitter. So until next time, this has been the Policy This podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:37:03
Speaker
you