Last updated on April 17, 2018
(Note: This post has a lot of inside baseball about the agricultural and applied economics profession. If you tend to read this blog for the econometrics post, it is safe to skip this post and wait for the next installment of ‘Metrics Monday, which will hopefully be posted next week.)
After my last post, in which I announced that I was running for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s (AAEA) Board of Directors, a colleague sent me the following on Twitter, via direct message:
I was interested also to hear your thoughts on all of the gender issues that have been swirling in the economics field and how you think they are similar/contrast with what we have in AAEA world. You didn’t bring these challenges to the field up at all in your blog post. Do you know if these trends are similar/different? Given how big an issue this has been over the last year, I think it would be good for people to hear your thoughts on it as a potential member of the AAEA board.
Good question. Let me answer the easier question first: I didn’t bring this up in my previous post because that post reproduced my answers to the questions posed by the AAEA for the election, and we had a set limit on how long our answers could be. Given that limit, I gave the answers I gave given that I felt they played up to my comparative advantage.
We know the economics profession has a gender problem, as was brilliantly documented by Alice Wu in her senior thesis at Berkeley last year on the basis of her analysis of the posts on the Economics Job Market Rumors website.
On that basis, I wanted to see what gender representation was like in agricultural and applied economics departments versus economics departments, so I spent my Sunday afternoon counting the number of women and men in the top 15 universities in this list, in both their economics and their agricultural and applied economics department, and I regressed the proportion of women on faculty on an agricultural and applied economics (AAE) dummy.
The results I present below (i) omit IFPRI, ERS, and INRA, since they are non-academic institutions, (ii) they omit Iowa State given that it has only an economics department, which includes agricultural and applied economics within it, (iii) they omit extension faculty, as far as I could distinguish them, (iv) they omit OSU economics because too many faculty members don’t have a picture on the website and have names which do not allow me to determine their gender, (v) they most likely contain a decent bit of classical measurement error, and (v) they focus only on tenure-track faculty–one sneaky way some departments try to make it look as though they have more women on faculty is by listing their lecturers along with their regular faculty.
The news is not good, and it is no better for AAE departments than it is for econ departments. On average, the proportion of women on faculty at all the departments I retain for analysis is 0.22. If I regress the proportion of women on faculty on the AAE dummy, the coefficient is equal to 0.028 and is not statistically significant. If I include school fixed effects, the coefficient drops to 0.014, and it is also not significant. These findings remain statistically insignificant whether I cluster standard errors by school or not. So on the basis of my n = 19 empiricism, agricultural and applied economics departments fare no better than their econ counterparts. Looking at the proportion of women on faculty in my data, the closest to parity is the AAE department at Ohio State, with women making up 0.37 of the regular faculty. But that’s still 13 percentage points away from parity!
Here is one potential solutions (bearing in mind that there is no simple, one-and-done solution to this problem): We need to hire more women in tenure-track positions, and in order to get there, we need to admit more women into PhD programs, which will hopefully translate into more women electing to go for tenure-track jobs. This in turn will induce more young women to select into doing graduate studies in (agricultural and applied) economics and, hopefully, help attain parity in the medium term.
What do I bring to the table? For starters, in an interesting bit of synchronicity, a few days before the AAEA email announcing this year’s ballot went out, I received an email telling me that I had won the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences’ (CFANS) Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate Faculty for 2017-2018, and according to the statement of nomination, an important part of the basis for my winning that award has been my mentoring of young women through our doctoral program: In spring 2017, I graduated my first three PhD students; all three are women, all three ended up in tenure-track positions, and I have coauthored with all three. So while I cannot claim to know what it’s like to be a woman in this profession, I have seen what it’s like for my advisees.
I have also had several conversations with female colleagues about this; time and again, I have been struck by the fact that there are distinct gender-based issues. Just the language used to rate professors, for instance, tends to be heavily gendered.
Given the foregoing, should I get elected the Board of Directors, I would work directly with my colleagues on the AAEA’s Committee on Women in Agricultural Economics to bring their concerns to the Board.
And it’s not just women who are seriously underrepresented in AAE departments. I don’t need to run a regression to know that minorities are seriously underrepresented at most (if not all) AAE departments. This is also something the profession needs to collectively address, and it also begins with encouraging good minority undergraduates to attend our graduate programs. What I have personally done here is to encourage minority candidates to attend the AEA’s summer program, which aims to increase diversity in the economics profession. It might be time for the AAEA to consider starting a program like that of its own.
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Another colleague said on Twitter “I’d like to hear from you about your plans for addressing sexual harassment and assault within our profession, as a member of the Exec Board.”
My view is simple: Both sexual harassment and assault are unacceptable. They have no place not just in our professional association, and they have no place anywhere. As a profession, we need to come up with a clear statement that states exactly that, which leaves no room for ambiguity, and which makes it clear that the AAEA will not tolerate either–or any other form of bullying.
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All of the foregoing seem like tasks the AAEA should definitely take on, no matter who ends up on the Board of Directors.