Morning Must-Read: Miles Kimball: How Big Is Economics’s Sexism Problem? This Article’s Co-Author Is Anonymous Because of It

There can be no doubt the gender disparity upon entering PhD programs and the much greater gendered disparity later on in careers indicates collective sociological dysfunction at an extraordinarily great level. We have only 1/3 as many senior women in our profession as men–which means, given that our senior jobs don’t come with heavy gendered requirements or advantages, that 1/4 of the brains that ought to be filling those jobs are not, and 1/4 of the brains that are filling those jobs ought to be doing something else…

…is the fact that one of us felt the need to remain anonymous…. Many male economists underestimate the headwinds women face in economics… at every stage of a woman’s career… many forces both large and small that add up to a huge overall damper on the number of women who make it to the higher ranks…. And even when women do reach these higher levels—despite the difficulty of getting their work published in male-dominated journals and in getting promoted even when they do get their work published—their wages remain lower…. Sendhil Mullainathan argues that discrimination often operates at an unconscious level…. Here are a few of the issues women in economics face that their male colleagues might not be aware of:

New female economics PhD’s have to worry about what to wear… skirt too short vs. too long… nasty misogyny of many threads on http://econjobrumors.com. Students don’t give female professors the same respect as they do male professors…. Female assistant professors have to worry about whether they dare take advantage of tenure clock extensions to have a child, while male assistant professors have no worries about taking advantage of the tenure clock extensions they get when their wives have a child. For the men, it is a simple strategic choice; for the women, it is reminder to their colleagues that (with rare exceptions) they bear the heaviest burden of taking care of a young child… often inundated by students needing more “emotional” mentoring… get[ting] mistaken at social events for an economist’s spouse… how to deal with disrespectful comments or ‘jokes’ made by their senior colleagues. Fostering awareness of issues like these, and a hundred others… is one of the biggest things that can be done…. Greater gender equality in economics could also be fostered by a better power balance… male economists should find it hard or impossible to exert illegitimate, sexist power over their female colleagues. If this sounds obvious, it’s much harder than it seems. Today, women in economics face a Catch-22, where speaking up can easily make them look like a shrew, while not speaking up robs them of legitimate power…”