Saturday 29 January 2022

Where are we at with the gender gap in economics?

I'm been running a bit of a theme in posts over the last week (see here, and here, and here, and here) on the gender gap in economics. It's also something I have written a lot about in the past (see the links at the bottom of this post). The gender gap in economics has been a problem that has been highlighted for many years. So, it is worth asking, after so many years of trying to address the gap, where are we at?

Two articles in the 2021 issue of AEA Papers and Proceedings give us some answer to that question. The first article is this one by Kelly Bedard (University of California, Santa Barbara), Maxine Lee (San Francisco State University), and Heather Royer (University of California, Santa Barbara). They construct a panel dataset of the:

...salaries for all tenure-track faculty in economics departments at public institutions in the United States ranked in the top 50 by the 2017 US News & World Report rankings... The final sample includes 254 women and 1,102 men.

So, really Bedard et al. are looking at the gender pay gap in economics, rather than the gender gap in employment at the extensive margin (which is what most research has been focused on). They find that:

Among economists with nine or fewer years of experience since earning a PhD, we estimate a 4.5 percent salary gender gap using the baseline model. When the model includes controls for the PhD institution and field of specialization, the gap decreases to 2.8 percent. Then, the gap becomes negligible once we include either the institution’s ranking or institution fixed effects.

In other words, the pay gap between male and female economists within nine years of their PhD is entirely explained by where they completed their PhD, their field of specialisation, and at which institution they are employed. However, we can't necessarily take that to mean that the gender gap is not important, because field of specialisation differs strongly between genders (as I noted here), and male economists tend to go into fields where job prospects and pay are higher.

Also, the pay gap is more apparent among economists who are more senior:

The patterns are similar among economists with 10–19 years of experience. The gender pay gap in the first two specifications ranges between 9 and 9.5 percent, and the gap shrinks to 4.3 percent when the model includes the ranking of the current institution...

Lastly, the current institution’s rank does little to change the gender gap among economists with more than 20 years of experience. The gender gap fluctuates between 10.6 and 12.5 percent in this group.

Bedard et al. also include some longitudinal analysis, following cohorts from five years, and eleven years, after their PhD, and show that female economists appear to be less likely to gain tenure, and less likely to be promoted to full Professor. However, I didn't find those analyses as persuasive as they would be if they looked at the changes over time. So, the best we can say is that, among recent PhD graduates, there is no gender pay gap between individuals in the same field of economics, and the situation appears to have improved from earlier cohorts (especially when you factor in the likelihood of survivorship bias in the data on older cohorts).

The second article, by Donna Ginther (University of Kansas) and Shulamit Kahn (Boston University), takes a broader view and asks, "have we made progress?". Using data from Academic Analytics for all faculty who received PhDs from 2005 to 2011 and are employed by one of over 300 academic institutions in the US, they look at rates of promotion to associate professor. Their dataset includes nearly 800 assistant professors, and follows them through until 2018. Based on Cox proportional hazards models, Ginther and Kahn find that in their sample:

...women were 18.5 percent (p < 0.03) less likely to be promoted to associate professor.

However, they also find that:

Adding productivity measures to the model... somewhat narrows female disadvantage in tenure receipt to 15 percent and lowers its significance (p = 0.08).

So, there is a small and barely statistically significantly lower rate of female economists being promoted to associate professor. However, Ginther and Kahn then look at the difference between research-intensive institutions and others, and find that:

The gender tenure gap was small and insignificant in very high research activity institutions. However, in less research-intensive universities, it was huge, with women’s rate of receiving tenure (with all controls) 46 percent lower than men’s (p = 0.055).

So the negative effect on female economists' promotion to associate professor is concentrated in less research-intensive universities. Female economists in the most research-intensive universities appear not to be disadvantaged to a significant degree. Those results make the positive effects of mentoring on female economists at lower-ranked institutions (see here) even more important to pay attention to, and even more important to follow up on.

My take on these two papers is that they illustrate that things are improving, albeit slowly. The most recent cohorts of female economists appear to be less disadvantaged than older cohorts were, although this change has happened more quickly at higher-ranked institutions and is less apparent at lower-ranked and less research-intensive institutions. As a discipline, we can do better.

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