When reading controversial topics in economics (and I suspect in other fields) it is common to have the uncomfortable feeling that if you know what the authors argued in a previous article, you will also know what they argue in the current article. One interpretation of this model is that the authors have biases that influence their results. If you think this may be a problem, one way to push back is to use “adversarial collaboration”, which means that authors who have already found different results agree to publish an article together – and not in a pro- and-con of disagreements, but in fact to write the document in such a way that they all agree with it.
Stephen J. Ceci, Shulamit Kahn and Wendy M. Williams take on the challenge by “Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Areas of Academic Science: A Contradictory Collaboration” (Psychological Science in the Public Interest, uploaded April 26, 2023). In this area of research, earlier work by Ceci and Williams tends to find little evidence of gender bias in academia, while Kahn has published a number of studies suggesting bias in economics, in particular. Here is an overview of their process:
This article represents more than 4.5 years of effort by its three authors. By the time readers finish it, some may assume that the authors agreed on the nature and prevalence of gender bias from the start. However, this is definitely not the case. Rather, we are collegiate opponents who, during the 4.5 years we worked on this article, continually challenged, edited or deleted texts we disagreed with, and often pushed the article in different directions. Although the three of us exchanged hundreds of emails and participated in numerous Zoom sessions, Kahn never met Ceci and Williams in person.
Here are the highlights of their findings from the abstract:
We have synthesized the vast and contradictory scientific literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media, which influence many people’s views on sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as a pervasive factor limiting the progress of women in office. -track academy. …We assessed empirical evidence of gender bias in six key tenure-track academy contexts: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching notes, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) letters of recommendation. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh domain, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We have focused on those specific areas, in which sexism has most often been presumed to be pervasive, as they represent important types of assessment, and the large body of research in these areas provides enough quantitative data for a comprehensive analysis. . Contrary to pervasive claims of sexism in these fields appearing in top journals and the media, our results show that female tenure-tracks are at parity with male tenure-tracks in three areas (grant funding, journal acceptances and letters of recommendation) and have an advantage over men in a fourth area (hiring). For teachers’ grades and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although the wage gap between men and women has been much smaller than is often claimed, it
were nonetheless of concern.
But what if I am less interested in the overall picture of the academic as a whole than in my specific field of economics. The study is broadly focused, but on the occasions it singles out the economy, it’s usually because the economy looks worse when it comes to gender bias.
For example, one way to examine biases in tenure-track hiring is to compare the proportion of women earning a doctorate in a given field to the proportion of women who are hired as assistant professors in that field and the proportion women who become full professors. in this domain. In many of the fields they study, the share of women who become full professors is greater than the share of women who have earned a doctorate in the field. The economy is an exception:
Thus, these cohort analyzes offer little support for the claim of widespread gender discrimination in hiring leading to tenure in the GEMP. [the authors’ acronym for the mathematics-intensive fields of geoscience, engineering, economics, mathematics, computer science, and physical science]even before 2000. The economy is an exception…[T]he percentage of women among tenure-track assistant professors (within 7 years of obtaining their doctorate) was similar to the percentage of women among doctorate-only graduates until 2004; for the next eight doctoral cohorts, however, the percentage of female assistant professors stagnated, despite growth in the number of women with doctoral degrees.
Here is a description of another hiring study, in which the economics were different:
Williams and Ceci (2015) studied a stratified national sample of 872 professors from two GEMP fields (engineering and economics) and two LPS fields (biology and psychology) to determine preferences for equally qualified men and women with exceptional degrees. …[I]in the main authors’ experiment (N = 363), teachers expressed a significant preference
to hire women. This pro-feminine preference was similar across fields, institution types, gender, and faculty rank. The only group in which the preference did not appear was male economists, who showed no gender preference.“No preference” is obviously not a bad thing. But it brings out the economy. Some evidence has been interpreted as arguing that women in economics need higher quality research to publish their papers. This evidence is not based on a lower rate of acceptance of research by women in academic journals, but on the subsequent pattern of citations of this work.
Card et al. (2020) argued that although there is no gender difference in acceptance rates [at economic journals] in their study, even after controlling for factors such as numbers
past publications, this may not guarantee that the quality of articles accepted by men and women is similar. Instead, they argued that only subsequent citations of accepted papers signaled quality. By analyzing the citations, Card et al. found that in economics, accepted female papers had higher subsequent citations, and from this they concluded that there is a bias against women, despite the absence of gender differences in the rates of ‘acceptance. There could indeed be some gender bias in the evaluation of economics publications, especially since there is evidence from another study showing that the quality of writing in articles published in economics by women was higher than for articles written by men, while the time until women’s articles were finally accepted was longer, suggesting a bias (Hengel, 2022).But this type of evidence is a little slippery. As the essay points out, if research published by women is more often cited as evidence of bias in economics, does that mean that if research by women was cited less often (as is the case in other fields and journals), would this prove that the research by women was of lower quality? There are a variety of forms of bias that could have an effect here: journal reviewer bias about what gets published, reader bias about what they choose to study, and prospective author bias about what they choose to study. to quote. It is also possible that women in economics tend to favor quality over quantity in their research choices. Unraveling these possibilities will not be easy.
Other research suggests that men have an overall productivity advantage in economics. The authors describe another study this way:
In the social sciences, besides psychology, two fields are opposed. Political science had a large female advantage in annualized publications and a 3.3 ppt female advantage in total impact (Huang et al., 2020). … In contrast, Huang et al. found that in economics, men had a 28% early-career productivity advantage and a 50% mid-career productivity advantage. This et al. found that the productivity gap among economists increased from 1990 to 1995 to 2005 to 2008 (from 22% to 52%), a worrying trend.
A few years ago, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, where I work as an editor, published a symposium of three articles on the situation of women in economics. To me, the papers are prima facie evidence that economics has problems in this area — even if some of its problems, such as gender bias in student evaluations of teachers — seem to be shared across the board.
But I also think that part of the contentious relationship between gender and economics starts much earlier than university hiring. If you go back to high school AP exams, the standard pattern is that women are more likely to take exams and do well. The economy is an exception. Men are more likely to take the Micro and Macro AP, and also to score higher. In undergraduate programs, about a third of economics students are women — a percentage that hasn’t changed much in recent decades — even though women make up the majority of students. In thinking about the pipeline of future economics teachers, it might be helpful to think about the reasons for these past gender differences.