Women in Econ Léman in the podcast "Unbiased - Making Numbers Speak"

Last week I had the absolute pleasure of talking with my good friend and former colleague Quentin Gallea (University of Zurich), on his podcast/youtube channel Unbiased - making numbers speak, an initiative to make scientific research more approachable. We talked about everything from my decision to pursue a PhD in economics, to jumping from international organizations to academia, to gender and discrimination in economics.

In this episode of the podcast, I was the spokesperson for Women in Econ Léman, representing myself and co-founders Laura Nowzohour (the Graduate Institute) and Federica Braccioli (the University of Geneva). Quentin's interview style made it super easy to talk about everything. Check out the episode here. Below are some guiding points for the talk.

Most academic economists are white men.

Apart from our previous blog posts, you can find another brief overview of the issue of discrimination in economics in Shelly Lundberg and Jenna Stearns's article. Jennifer Doleac and Elizabeth Pancotti provide an intersectional view of academic economists: "20.6% of tenure track faculty in economics departments are women; 9.0% of full-time faculty (tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track) are under-represented minorities (URMs). Focusing on the newest additions to the profession, 32.1% of new economics Ph.D.s were awarded to women, and 7.3% were awarded to URM students."

Most seminar speakers are white men.

While 76% of presenters in seminars are white men and 22% are white women, only 1% are men from a URM and 1% are women from a URM. For more details, click here.

Women are not publishing in top journals.

The Women in Econ Index finds that "of the [top] 100 authors [in economics], five are women."

And we know that it's just getting worse during COVID.

Lockdown policies reacting to COVID-19 resulted in a so-called "she-cession", where women have been more strongly affected by unemployment than men. This has been significantly worse for women from URMs than for white women.

See the following resources for black workers and for latinx workers in the US. For an academic overview of the intersectional effects of COVID-19, see Gezici, A., Ozay, O. An Intersectional Analysis of COVID-19 Unemployment. J Econ Race Policy 3, 270–281 (2020).

Finally, women academics are also not publishing as much on COVID-related topics as men in academia (see this article by Noriko Amano-Patiño, Elisa Faraglia, Chryssi Giannitsarou, Zeina Hasna). These CEPR resources for gender during COVID are also good for more information.