The Source of about Half of the Gap Between Judgements of Male and Female CVs in Economics at Promotion Time—A Conjecture
It would be good to have more women in economic research. The conference shown above is just one example of official concern about not having enough women in economics. There is some evidence that even given quantitatively similar CVs, by all the measures used by economists who study publishing in economics, women fare worse in tenure and other promotion decisions. Why might this be? Let me propose a mechanism in which everyone might try to judge as fairly as possible and still collectively judge in an unfair way.
Bean-counting does not do enough to adjust for the vastly different qualities of papers that appear in the same journal. So there is something valuable about having a promotion committee read the papers of someone up for promotion to see how impressive they are. One key factor in judging the importance of an economics paper is, and should be, a judgement about the importance of the question the paper addresses. However, men and women are on average interested in different questions, and so these two groups will differ systematically in their judgements about the importance of the questions are that are addressed by the one up for promotion. Men up for promotion are on average more likely to have chosen questions for their research that men judge as important, while women up for promotion are on average more likely to have chosen questions for their research that women judge as important. When those voting on a promotion are mostly male, this puts women at a disadvantage.
Note that when looking at promotion prospects for men and women, what matters is always how those voting on the promotion deal with marginal cases. So we are talking about folks up for promotion who are either going to barely get through or barely lose out. It is easy for a modest gap in judgements of the importance of research questions to make a difference in those cases.
Note that the gender gap in the judgement of the importance of various research questions has an effect beyond promotion meetings. A senior colleague is more likely to be motivated to give advice and other mentoring on a research project that seems to them to be an important question.
Note that this mechanism could operate without any direct sexism at all—everyone could be indifferent between a man and a woman working on the same topic and there would still be a problem. Abstractly, what is needed is to get to the result one would get to if an equal number of male and female economists were honestly judging how impressive a paper is. If there aren’t an equal number of male and female economists doing the judging, that won’t happen automatically.
I am of course taking the philosophical position that the research questions that women think are important matter just as much as the research questions that men think are important. That sounds uncontroversial, but think through what that means in terms of the specific types of research questions that are upgraded in importance when women’s judgements are given an equal weight to men’s judgements as if there were an equal number of men and women in economics. In terms of fields, questions in applied micro fields, broadly writ, would likely be upgraded. And I think Behavioral Economics questions would likely be upgraded. Abstract theory questions would likely be somewhat downgraded (but one should not exaggerate how much).