By now you may have read–see Tyler’s post or the WSJ coverage–about the survey of the American Economic Association that found that nearly 100 women economists have been sexually assaulted by another economist. I condemn the perpetrators, but I don’t see this statistic as a reason to condemn the entire economics profession or all of its male practitioners.
1. Can you easily find elsewhere a sub-population of similar size with fewer sexual assaults?
2. I haven’t looked at the study. Did they tabulate the number of male-female pairs of economists who are happily married? I bet that off the top of his head Tyler can think of at least 15 economist-economist marriages. In the entire economics profession, how many such pairs are there? 1,000? More?
3. Did they ask how many consensual relationships there were between economists? I’ll bet that it would be almost impossible to find a different sub-population of women with a higher ratio of consensual relationships to sexual assaults.
I don’t get invited to conferences. Should I feel sorry for women who are afraid to speak up at conferences for fear of “disrespectful treatment”?
The tiny, back-scratching cabal that largely controls academic economics is mostly male. But the fact that it is male is not the real scandal. The real scandal is that it is a tiny, back-scratching cabal.
I don’t know the time frame here and that seems relevant (people tend to be economists for a very long time), but I have noticed a few things from conferences:
1: Economists seem to drink a lot when they get together. Granted, I drink very little so my perspective of “a lot” might be off. Still, most conferences have an atmosphere of a class reunion where everyone is happy to see friends and celebrating. I suspect most people drink more over the course of the weekend than they usually do, given the poor attendance at morning sessions.
2: Economists are weird. As a group we don’t fit in super well with other people, if only because of how we think about human behavior. As a result, being around other economists is unusually pleasant.
3: Most conference attendees stay at the hotel hosting the conference, with the exception of the AEA meetings which are basically small cities unto themselves that span multiple hotels within an area. The hotels are also often very fancy vacation sorts of spots.
4: The ratio of female to male economists is higher at conferences than in day to day experience, and the average age tends towards the very young. (I believe this is because presenting at a conference is mostly a networking thing for young economists.)
Given these four observations, my initial thought is that 3 contributes to 1, due to the relatively low costs of extra drinking and the “yay on vacation from the nightmare of my research work” atmosphere. Numbers 2 and 4 combining yields many young people who feel unusually comfortable together being in an unusually good dating environment, compared to their daily lives. Young people who, particularly males but also females, are not exactly well skilled in interacting with the opposite sex, and have a disposition towards considering traditional norms and rules to be inefficient.
In other words, I find the numbers to be surprisingly low, given that conferences often combine elements that make people behave in less than professional ways, particularly the younger ones. I know a number of economists married to other economists, so my suspicion is that there is a lot of awkward nerd mating rituals happening at conferences. (Note: I am totally in the awkward nerd category, and can recognize my own. I was just married before I became an economist.)
As to disrespectful treatment, economists as a group can be a bit harsh, both in asking questions during sessions and answering them. On the other hand, think of all the journal articles you read and thought “This is really pretty shoddy work” then consider that conferences presentations are filled with the work that wasn’t good enough to get published. Again, seeing as how conference presentations seem to be mostly by young economists, one might expect an even higher percentage of bad research. Lots of negative feedback is to be expected. Especially from a bunch of people kind of hung over from the night before. In any case, from what I can tell economists have much higher standards for research than other related disciplines, and tearing into a questionable presentation is the standard where as other disciplines seem to let a lot slide. (I say this based on attending hiring interviews and presentations for other departments. I am not familiar with other fields’ conferences.)
That said, my impression is that females tend to get somewhat softer feedback than males, controlling for the topics they are studying. Men are much more comfortable ripping into another guy than into a female in general, it would seem. Seeing how men tear into each others’ ideas, I can understand why someone might not want to jump into that fray, even if it is just over ideas.
Wow, sorry for the wall of text. That looked a lot shorter when I typed it up in Word.
“The real scandal is that it is a tiny, back-scratching cabal.”
The Fems mostly want to be included in that tiny cabal.
But that means somebody else has to go (since attrition death is so slow, and not getting much faster.)
There is too much real sexual harassment — which should stop.
There is too much sexual suggestion that can be, and now too often is, interpreted as harassment. Being asked for a phone number or invited out is not harassment, even if the question is asked again.
At some point (third time asked?), it becomes rude — but even with more asks, it’s not yet actionable harassment.
However, if a person says they don’t want to be asked again, or that asking again will be taken as harassment, then more asking becomes harassment.
We don’t yet have new customary nor legal norms about what is real harassment.
It seems that there were no reported cases of rape — that’s fairly encouraging.