In a study that the New York Times described as “pathbreaking,” University of California, Berkeley economist Alice Wu took a look at why women are so massively underrepresented in the Economics departments of prestigious universities around the country. To our complete ‘shock’, she found that it has a lot to do with the ‘fact’ that men are just a bunch of sexist assholes who create work environments that are openly hostile toward women.
So how did Wu arrive at this conclusion? Well, in her paper entitled “Gender Stereotyping in Academia: Evidence From Economics Job Market Rumors Forum,” she apparently analyzed roughly 1 million posts in an anonymous chat room frequented by econ grad students called econjobrumors.com to see which words are the best predictors of posts about women vs. men. You know, because people behave exactly the same in anonymous chat rooms as they do in real life.
Be that as it may, Wu found that posts related to women were most frequently commenting on their personal attributes with words like “hot”, “tits”, “bang” and “horny.”
That said, despite a lot of chatter about “homosexual” male economists, men in the profession were at least sometimes referenced for their professional accomplishments…and not just for their sexual preferences.
Here’s the list:
So what can we learn from Ms. Wu’s research? Luckily, the New York Times was able to interview a bunch of elitist economics professors from around the world to tell you exactly what to think.
David Card, an eminent economist at Berkeley who was Ms. Wu’s thesis adviser, told me that she had produced “a very disturbing report.”
In an email, David Romer, a leading macroeconomist at Berkeley, summarized the paper as depicting “a cesspool of misogyny.”
Janet Currie, a leading empirical economist at Princeton (where Ms. Wu works as her research assistant), told me the findings resonated because they’re “systematically quantifying something most female economists already know.” The analysis “speaks volumes about attitudes that persist in dark corners of the profession,” Professor Currie said.
Silvana Tenreyro, a professor at the London School of Economics and a former chairwoman of the European Economics Association’s women’s committee, told me that “every year a crisis or two arose” from rumors started on the forum, “with the typical target being a female student.”
That said, at least one economist, George Borjas of Harvard, expressed a view that maybe everyone just needs to calm down the constant outrage over every little anonymous chat room message.
Some economists say they find the discourse on econjobrumors.com to be a breath of fresh air. George Borjas, an economics professor at Harvard, wrote on his blog last summer that he found the forum “refreshing.”
Professor Borjas said: “There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …”
Clearly Borjas is a sexist and part of the problem. Presumably his days are numbered at Harvard.
Here is the full study published by Alice Wu:
via http://ift.tt/2w42gfn Tyler Durden