Must-Read: Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem

Must-Read: Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem: “The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups… https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.4.221

…This underrepresentation… is present at the undergraduate level, continues into the ranks of the academy, and is barely improving over time. It likely hampers the discipline, constraining the range of issues addressed and limiting our collective ability to understand familiar issues from new and innovative perspectives…. We… offer an overview of… research on the reasons for the underrepresentation…. We argue that implicit attitudes and institutional practices may be contributing to the underrepresentation of women and minorities at all stages of the pipeline, calling for new types of research and initiatives to attack the problem. We then review evidence on how diversity affects productivity and propose remedial interventions as well as findings on effectiveness…