Transcript
Speaker: Economics is a profession that is notoriously male -dominated, and obviously that can have a big downside. For example, just recently the Australian Productivity Commission released a report about the culture among the economists there, and it was very ugly in parts. But there's also some good news. This year's Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to a woman.
Speaker: Well today we're going to meet someone at the peak of the profession of economics. She was determined to do something about the gender balance in her profession and we're going to find out all about that on Dr Rama. You're listening to Dr Rama with Steve Robson, bringing you the best of health, medicine and people.
Speaker: My guest today on Dr Rama is Senior Economist Dr Leonora Rees. Welcome to Dr Rama. Hi Steve, thank you very much for having me. Many of our listeners won't know a lot about your profession.
Speaker: This is a great question to start off with, Steve, because there is a misperception out there in the wider public about economics and exactly what economists do. Often it's confused with finance and business, and yes, economics does involve finance and money, but if I were to sum up
Speaker: what economics is about in one sentence. I would say economics is about studying how we make decisions to optimise our wellbeing. It's about human behaviour and studying the choices and decisions we make to maximise our wellbeing and our quality of life. So it's much broader than what many people think it is.
Speaker: And it applies across a range of context and issues. Leonora Economics has a reputation for being fearsomely difficult to master. And I've heard that the Reserve Bank not that long ago expressed concern over the gender balance among professional economists. And at the same time, I've seen data that suggests that the number of young women studying economics at high school is actually falling.
Speaker: Is economics a male -dominated discipline? And if so, why is that? It's an interesting question to reflect on when you are in the profession and to think back as a student, often we just assumed it was a male -dominated profession, maybe a bit like maths and science, and just accepted that. And as our career progresses, it becomes clearer that
Speaker: the gender imbalance in economics is also a reflection of wider, not just historical traditions, but wider cultural factors as well. So women at the moment make up around about one third of all economists in Australia, but they're underrepresented in terms of positions of leadership authority.
Speaker: often the public perception of economists, the economists we hear on the news, is really dominated by that perception of it being a male -dominated field. And the history behind economics is that it's often closely linked to the study of politics and government. So the political ideology really is a contest of
Speaker: of a battle of ideologies, not just an objective science. And so I think with that history, it's meant that women's voices have often been squeezed out where they have existed and dominant forces about
Speaker: Who do we perceive as leaders in society more generally has also shaped who do we turn to for wisdom and authority in economic decision making as well because a lot of what economics is about is about
Speaker: government decisions or business decisions, control over resourcing. Because we know more broadly in society when we think about leadership, who has authority, who has power, often it's associated with men. I think that's helped to explain why in the field of economics it's come to be dominated by male voices because a lot of what we study is that
Speaker: active decision -making and the allocation of resources. We hope it is changing over time as we try to expand and become more inclusive and to
Speaker: To make it clear that economics is not just about money and finance, but it is about human behavior, because what that taps into is a wider cohort of people who care about a broader range of topics. Economics can be applied to topics such as climate change and the environment.
Speaker: poverty and inequality. And so by making that more visible in wider public debate about economics, we hope that that will shift public perceptions but also attract a wider cohort of
Speaker: people, including more women and more gender diverse people. So I think partly the reason, coming back to your question, why is economics so male dominated? I think that narrow perception has really led to this continuation of this concentration of
Speaker: very male -dominated voices and we haven't really done enough to really expand that perception of what economics is about. It's interesting that you say this. My understanding and experience is that organizations with diverse leadership tend to be more successful. Am I correct there? Yes, there is a growing body of literature and research that points towards
Speaker: how teams, how companies, how environments can be more effective, performance outcomes can be improved when you have that diversity of viewpoints.
Speaker: informing the process. And really what that does, it guards against groupthink and people all coming from the same background and therefore perhaps being a bit short -sighted in their perspectives and not thinking outside of the box or not thinking
Speaker: more broadly about potential shortcomings to their approaches. So that is growing and often we refer to that as sort of the business case for diversity, how performance and outcomes can be enhanced when we have basically a more diverse range of perspectives, but it also adds layers of more robustness to how we go about our analysis. If you have
Speaker: differences of perspectives, that means that when we're analyzing data or we're
Speaker: Considering evidence, for example, we have to push harder to interrogate that data because we've got that internal process of really scrutinizing it and questioning it from within rather than all thinking the same way. And I think also if we apply that to economics, what we've seen is as there's been more diversity within economics, and particularly with more female voices,
Speaker: It's expanded the topics that are covered. It's expanded policymaking. For example, when we look at the COVID pandemic, it's meant that the experiences of women and carers and female concentrated industries got a lot more attention than they would have otherwise if we'd had that narrower range of
Speaker: perspectives and views. It expands, it broadens our horizons by having that diverse range of lived experiences informing the process. One of the manifestations we see of these diversity issues is a gender pay gap. It's certainly an issue in medicine, a big and important issue. Is a gender pay gap important and is there actually anything we can do about it?
Speaker: The gender pay gap is a signal of the range of factors that are at play that create different experiences, different opportunities for men and women right from the start, really, right from when they're deciding on their pathways in their careers, when they are deciding on
Speaker: who's taking the bulk of the caring and domestic chores at home. And so that pay gap is a reflection of this combination of factors. But it really is a reflection deep down of how we still have these gender stereotypes, these gender norms at play that steer
Speaker: choices. But then beyond that, it's also an indication of how bias is still in operation. So we still have this unexplained portion of the gender pay gap that can't be rationally explained by differences in experience or differences in education. There's still this remaining portion that really is more consistent with
Speaker: Women having to jump higher hurdles to reach the same outcomes as men and that perception that men perhaps are better suited to leadership or senior roles. That can taint those decision -making process when we decide who's best suited for a promotion or
Speaker: leadership role and it's interesting because women have achieved actually higher than men in terms of educational outcomes now and they have for quite a while so you can't put it down to say women are less ambitious about their careers no because they're actually investing very heavily in their educational qualifications. In medicine for example we know that the proportions of
Speaker: GPs are actually quite balanced when it comes to gender. But it's when we look at areas of speciality, surgery, and more specialized areas where those gaps arise. And what's particularly pertinent, I think, to the medical profession is one of the factors that's been identified as contributing to the gap is this notion that's been called greedy work.
Speaker: which means that if you are in a job or a profession that demands excessively long hours, like working overtime, staying back late, we see this in law as well, there's a payoff to that. There's this extra bonus or extra reward per hour of work, which means that if you have caring responsibilities or you're looking after your health or you have
Speaker: reasons that prevent you from being able to work those excessively long hours, which we know is proportionally more the case for women, that you are squeezed out of those
Speaker: greedy jobs and those higher returns for being available, being on call and being available for the overtime, the bonuses. So we see that in medicine, we see it in a few other professions where these in finance as well, where those gender pay gaps, especially once you factor in overtime and bonuses and all those extra extras, it really widens. And it's really this culture of
Speaker: companies or organizations and employers really putting a lot of weight and expectation on their employees to work excessively. We also know there's a risk there with burnout and fatigue and mental health, working excessive hours, which is a whole other issue.
Speaker: but it has a very strong gender passion. So that's one example of this, I guess we call it an implicit bias, which creeps into the dynamics of workplaces and it helps to explain, it's one of several factors that helps to explain why we still see the persistence of this gender paper. Rianora, something I've been incredibly impressed with is the Women in Economics Network, the WEN, the WIN. I'd really love to hear more about the WIN and its work.
Speaker: Thank you, Steve, for acknowledging the work of WEN, Women in Economics Network. Really, myself as an economist who studies gender inequality in the workforce, this was really an opportunity to look inwards to our own profession and self -reflect and say, well, here we are analyzing the rest of the workforce, the rest of the economy, but look at our own profession in economics. We know that it is
Speaker: unbalanced in terms of gender. We know that there is evidence of these inequities. Let's not just dwell on the problem, but let's
Speaker: take action and do something about it and learn from the research and the evidence on what works to close gender pay gaps and gender gaps in general and apply that to our own profession. So when came about it was in 2017 that we launched and it has really been a team effort where initially the idea came out of the Economic Society of Australia and a professor
Speaker: at University of Sydney, Professor Deborah Cobb -Clark approached the ESA and said, we've really got to do something here because we need to mobilise in a way, we need to ensure women aren't lagging behind, that these gaps are closed. And so they brought us together for an initial mentoring retreat and it's there where the idea for when came about. And it really, the essence of when is how do we
Speaker: How do we reassure women that you are not alone, that you have a network, that you have colleagues and allies and other people just like you, role models you can relate to? How do we inform and support women's progress throughout their careers?
Speaker: and we expand across academia as well as the public sector, the private sector, the education space. But also, coming back to some of your initial questions, how do we promote a culture that is inclusive and equitable and
Speaker: promote gender equality within economics, for example, the perception of economists more widely. So really, just a step forward, how do we modernize the economics profession and learn from the research? And one thing I just highlight there is as economists, we really did look at the research. So we know there are lots of ideas out there about how to close gender gaps, and sometimes they're great ideas that well in
Speaker: intended but they're not backed up by evaluations or research. And so as economists, we made sure we prioritise an evidence -based approach to putting into practice WEN's mission. The Women in Economics Network, your WEN has really been a major success. Would you be open to other professions coming to learn from you?
Speaker: Oh, absolutely, because this is a shared challenge. When we looked at the statistics for WEN's representation, for example, I mentioned that we had one third of economists, and then we have around about 40 % of people who hold an economics degree in Australia are female. And then we looked at how those percentages really taper off once you look at, say, professors in universities or higher ranks. And it's actually quite similar to STEM. So we see that this gender inequity is
Speaker: it prevails not just in economics but in medicine and science as well. So there's absolutely lessons that we can share across our fields and learn from each other. I think the takeaways for us for WEN is it really is about achieving a critical mass. We're aware that in the past, in previous decades,
Speaker: have been attempts to build something like WIN before and they really struggled to maintain viability over time because they just didn't have the numbers to be able to sustain that so I think we were fortunate that we have the technology now to just connect and amass a large number of people across all different states so we just build that critical mass and then then you've got a team to work collectively together so it can't just hinge on
Speaker: a few people, it is about a team. And I think it's also about changing perceptions that are for the better for the profession. So it's about bringing men and allies along with us on the journey. So it's not seen as a threat or a change to men, but it's also how do we, how do we basically improve our profession and, and for the next generation of young
Speaker: male students, for example, who are coming into economics, to make it normal for them to see a conference panel that is balanced, to turn on the news and see female economists talking with male economists, and for that just to be normal, not the exception. So I think we were playing the long game here to really think about whose perceptions do we want to change here, not just the women in the field,
Speaker: and not just the men in the field but that next generation of not just women but also that next generation of male students. I think they're often left out of the picture so that's why I highlight it here because I think often when we think about what do we need to do for gender equality we miss that particular
Speaker: cohort as well. So we did a range of initiatives that were really about that pipeline, but also encouraging more females into the profession, but also making sure we were looking after the women who were
Speaker: in the profession already. Sometimes a lot of the initiatives focus a lot on the attraction and outreach to schools which is super important and that can often mean that the women in the profession end up giving a lot of their time on a voluntary basis to help with that and it can take away from their experience as well. So we just want to make sure that we're looking after supporting, elevating, giving voice and recognition
Speaker: to the women who are in the profession. So really they're not doing anything wrong, it's just that they're not being recognised and elevated for their contributions, their capabilities, their achievements. Well Dr Reese, you seem to have one of the highest productivity levels of any economist in the country. I can't thank you enough for giving up your valuable time to chat with me on Dr Rama today. Thank you so much Steve for having me on, thank you.
Speaker: You've been listening to Dr Rama, a podcast produced on Ngunnawal country by the Australian Medical Association. All rights reserved.
