Recently, my American Journal of Agricultural Economics co-editor Amy Ando tweeted the following:
I think this is a wonderful idea, and I thought I should follow suit by discussing my own DEI efforts. Here is my diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging statement as of November 11, 2021. This was written using the structure laid down here.
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Knowledge and Understanding
As an economist, I have seen first-hand what the lack of diversity does to a discipline. Economics has a sad reputation for being unwelcoming and often downright hostile to women and underrepresented minorities (URMs; see Parramore 2020, Rosalsky 2020, Wolfers 2017).[1] Diverse voices select out of economics as a consequence (Corban and Ryssdal 2020, Hughes 2021), which ultimately leads to a lack of intellectual diversity that is deleterious to the discipline. This phenomenon has been referred to as economics’ “leaky pipeline” problem (Buckles 2019), and beyond the lack of diversity, this clearly contributes to a gross absence of inclusivity and to diverse voices feeling like they do not belong in economics.
As an economist in the field of agricultural and resource economics (ARE), which for far too long has had little to no diversity given its historical focus on farm economics, I have been acutely aware of the field’s lack of diversity ever since I attended my first annual meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA, the field’s main professional association) as a graduate student in 2003. Although some progress has been made in ARE over the last decade in terms of gender equality (Offutt and McCluskey 2021, Segerson et al. 2021, Smith Evans and Bohman 2021, Unnevehr et al. 2021), the field remains singularly uniform along other dimensions. The AAEA only elected its second and third African-American Fellows in 2021, and although the percentage of PhDs awarded to Blacks is generally higher in ARE than that in economics, both the percent and the number of Blacks completing their PhD in ARE have decreased since 2000 (Moser, forthcoming). Overall, the field of ARE has a leaky pipeline problem that is no better than that of the broader discipline.
To me, this is unsurprising. From what I have observed, when programs of study in ARE manage to attract women and underrepresented minorities, there is equality without equity. That is, those students are often taught, advised, and mentored exactly like other students because faculty members often pay little to no attention to how different those students’ lived experiences differ from their own, and thus fail to adapt their teaching, advising, and mentoring to those students’ needs and to allow those students’ experiences and insights to inform their research. In the best-case scenario, when we manage to attract diverse voices, these individuals tend to get asked to perform professional service at a rate that is significantly higher than that of faculty from well-represented groups. This in turn takes time away from those same diverse voices’ core research and teaching responsibilities, which means they are less likely to receive tenure and be promoted, as tenure and promotion committees often tend to believe equality is the same as equity, and thus do not recognize this higher share of the burden of service when considering candidates for promotion.
If economics is to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, change has to come from the bottom up (i.e., from the discipline’s constituent fields), and there is much work to be done by everyone—faculty and students at all levels—in ARE if the field is to lead by example. In what follows, I explain some of the things I have done to foster such change and improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in ARE.
Track Record of Activities to Date
The goal of advancing DEIB should inform the three pillars—research, teaching, and service—of an academic’s professional life, and so I will discuss these in turn below.
A lot of my research over the years has looked at the constraints faced by women and URMs. For example, my PhD dissertation and the articles derived from it focused in large part on sharecropping in Madagascar, where landlords are often widows with land but little else, and who lease their plots out to descendants of former slaves to help the latter gain access to land (Bellemare 2009, 2012). I have also studied what explains the persistence of female genital mutilation in Africa (Bellemare et al. 2015). More recently, I have looked at whether participation in agricultural value chains was associated with improved food security conditions for smallholder households, especially for those households with female children (Bellemare and Novak 2017). In many cases, my research has focused on smallholder household in low- and middle-income countries, the members of which are among the world’s most vulnerable people given their low income, political disenfranchisement, and vulnerability to adverse shocks.
In terms of teaching, I won the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences’ 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate Faculty on the basis of my advising and mentoring of graduate students, especially women of color. Since then, I have continued on the same trajectory. Of the 21 PhD students and five MS students I have advised or co-advised, exactly half have been women, 18 have been persons of colors (including four Latinx and four Africans), at least one has been LGBTQIA, and ten have been from low- and middle-income countries. One of my job’s greatest rewards is seeing my advisees successfully go through their degree and take jobs where they get to use the skills they acquired in grad school.
My proudest accomplishments in terms of fostering DEIB in ARE, however, have been in service. The first is my co-founding (with my PhD student Jeff Bloem) of the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar (#OARES) in the spring of 2020. Two months into the COVID-19 lockdowns, I thought of launching that seminar series that would serve to (i) keep the members of the ARE community engaged in a research conversation and, more importantly, (ii) level the playing field and fostering DEIB in a field that is in dire need of it.
The #OARES has been successful beyond my wildest expectations. As of writing this document, #OARES has featured 57 speakers, 54 percent of whom were women, 44 percent of whom were nonwhite, and 84 percent of whom were pre-tenure or equivalent at non-academic institutions, with an average of 59 attendees. A linear regression of attendance on the gender of the speaker, an indicator variable for whether they are pre-tenure, an indicator for whether they are non-white, and a linear time trend shows that the only statistically significant correlate of attendance is time. In other words, seniority, gender, and race are not correlated with attendance. For me, this is evidence that the goal of fostering DEIB in ARE goes hand in hand with that of promoting high-quality research in the field. And indeed, two of the papers presented by junior women of color at #OARES have recently been published in top economics journals: one in the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the other in the Journal of the European Economic Association.
In that same spirit of leveling the playing field, when the global pandemic hit and we were thrown into lockdowns, I realized that I was immensely privileged to be able to afford in-home care for my child when our daycare closed, and I chose to leverage that privilege to write my forthcoming book titled Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School—But Didn’t (MIT Press, May 2022).
My goal with that book is to shed light on the “hidden curriculum” (Martin 1983) by articulating the unwritten and unspoken norms involved in writing papers, giving talks, navigating the peer-review process, finding funding, doing service, as well as advising and mentoring students in economics broadly defined. I believe that what differentiates top graduate programs from programs that are merely good or average is not the technical knowledge imparted in the classroom, but the interstitial knowledge that consists of the often unspoken cultural norms and mores of a discipline. This book, which also includes specific advice for women and URMs wherever applicable, is an effort at leveling the playing field for those who did not have the privilege of attending a top program.
I was chosen in 2019 to serve a four-year term as one of four co-editors of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the flagship journal of the AAEA. Prior to that, from 2015 to 2019, I had served as one of two co-editors of Food Policy, the top journal in agricultural economics and policy. At both journals, when it has been my turn to choose associate editors, I have advocated that we recruit women, URMs, people from outside the United States, as well as colleagues whose methodological approaches differed from mine as associate editors.
In the summer of 2020, my department head got in touch with me and asked whether I would be willing to mentor a TRIO McNair fellowship recipient,[2] a young man from St. Paul of Hmong background who had expressed an interest in doing research in ARE. Being a resident of St. Paul, where much of the Hmong population in the United States lives, I am familiar with the lack of opportunities faced by our Hmong neighbors.[3] Many Hmong families are struggling economically; a recent article on the Hmong notes that “[i]t’s been 45 years since thousands of Southeast Asian refugees settled in the United States, yet, as a group, they continue to face major socioeconomic challenges that have long been masked under the ‘model minority myth’” (Constante 2020). I wanted to help, so I immediately volunteered to serve as that young man’s mentor. That experience was eye-opening, as my mentee, who had joined the National Guard to help pay for college, was deployed in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd, and thus struggled to meet deadlines. Ultimately, he wrote an excellent research paper, and although my formal mentoring relationship with that student ended at the end of the summer of 2020, he enrolled in my undergraduate class the following semester, and I remain one of his mentors as I am currently guiding him through the application process for Master’s programs and acting as one of his recommenders.
References
Bellemare, M. F. (2009). “Sharecropping, Insecure Land Rights and Land Titling Policies: A Case Study of Lac Alaotra, Madagascar.” Development Policy Review, 27(1), 87-106.
Bellemare, Marc F. “Insecure Land Rights and Share Tenancy: Evidence from Madagascar.” Land Economics 88, no. 1 (2012): 155-180.
Bellemare, Marc F., and Lindsey Novak. “Contract farming and food security.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 99, no. 2 (2017): 357-378.
Bellemare, Marc F., Lindsey Novak, and Tara L. Steinmetz. “All in the family: Explaining the persistence of female genital cutting in West Africa.” Journal of Development Economics 116 (2015): 252-265.
Buckles, K. 2019. “Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Strategies for Making Economics Work for Women at Every Stage.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(1): 43–60.
Constante, A. 2020. “Largest U.S. refugee group struggling with poverty 45 years after resettlement,” NBC News, March 4, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/largest-u-s-refugee-group-struggling-poverty-45-years-after-n1150031 last accessed October 28, 2021.
Corban, A., and K. Ryssdal. 2020. “The Pipeline Problem for Black Women in Economics.” Marketplace. https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/01/the-pipeline-problem-for-black-women last accessed May 18, 2021.
Educational Opportunity Association. 2021. “TRIO Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program (McNair).” https://eoa.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=254413&module_id=227850 last accessed October 28, 2021.
Evans, Katherine Smith, and Mary Bohman. 2021. “Women agricultural economists in federal agencies: Making a difference.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy forthcoming.
Hughes, C. 2021. “Solving Economics’ Diversity Problem.” Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-18/women-economists-wanted-bank-of-england-ecb-and-fed-test-the-pipeline last accessed May 18, 2021.
Martin, J. 1983. “What Should We Do with a Hidden Curriculum When We Find One?” The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education, edited by H. Giroux, and D. Purpel, 122–139. Berkeley: McCutchan.
Moser, C.M. 2021. “Doctoral degrees awarded to Blacks in agricultural economics: 1999–2019.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy forthcoming.
Offutt, Susan, and Jill McCluskey. 2021. “How Women Saved Agricultural Economics.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy forthcoming.
Parramore, L. 2020. “What Happens When a Noted Female Economist Fights Toxic Culture in the Field?,” https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-happens-when-a-noted-female-economist-fights-toxic-culture-in-the-field last accessed May 18, 2021.
Rosalsky, G. 2020. “Economics Still Has A Diversity Problem.” Planet Money, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/01/07/793855832/economics-still-has last accessed May 18, 2021.
Segerson, Kathleen, Catherine L. Kling, and Nancy E. Bockstael. 2021. “Contributions of women at the intersection of agricultural economics and environmental and natural resource economics.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy forthcoming.
Unnevehr, Laurian, Julie Caswell, and Jean Kinsey. 2021. “How women in agricultural economics expanded the profession’s role in food safety and nutrition.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy forthcoming.
Wolfers, J. 2017. “Evidence of a Toxic Environment for Women in Economics.” New York Times, August 18, 2017.
Wu, A. H. 2020. “Gender Bias in Rumors Among Professionals: An Identity-based Interpretation.” Review of Economics and Statistics. 102(5): 867–880.
[1] See Wu (2020) for quantitative evidence on how an anonymous discussion board which focuses on the economics profession has fostered misogyny—among other kinds of prejudice—in the discipline.
[2] The TRIO McNair program “serves college students from low-income, first-generation and underrepresented backgrounds to prepare them for graduate school and have a desire to pursue a doctoral program and the professoriate” (Educational Opportunity Association 2021).
[3] The Hmong are an ethnic group from the mountainous areas of Southeast Asia. Because the Hmong people joined forces with the US government during the Vietnam War, the US government has helped relocate many Hmong families to the US after the war. Such relocations have come at the cost of those families losing their assets and their social networks.