ADVANCE Leadership Award: CeMENT: Workshops for Female Untenured Faculty in Economics

American Economic Association, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

In 1971 the American Economic Association (AEA) created the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) with the goal of increasing the number and stature of women in economics. While CSWEP has recorded, and in some cases facilitated, many gains, there remains a significant difficulty in increasing the representation of women in the ranks of senior (tenured) faculty. A study by Ginther (2002) finds that, controlling for measured characteristics, gender differences in promotion rates are considerably larger in economics than in both the humanities and in the natural sciences. This suggests that women in economics have a particularly difficult time making the transition from untenured to tenured professor, compared both with men in economics and with women in other fields. This proposal is designed to aid in this transition and bring economics to parity with other sciences in this area. The proposal involves workshops at the national (ASSA) meetings and at regional economics association meetings that will be attended by selected junior faculty, and which will serve to connect them with senior and mid-career researchers and to each other. These workshops will offer resources, information, and networking opportunities to enhance careers and improve the chances of professional success, and will create and cement relationships between senior and junior faculty and between and among junior faculty as well. The proposal seeks to put in place an institutionalized process that will rely on the commitment of the AEA and CSWEP for its continued and ongoing success. The proposal's broader impacts stem from the impact on the economics profession that these workshops will have. The objective is to increase the tenure rate for women in economics to the rate we observe for men, and to bring economics to parity with other sciences in this regard. This improvement will benefit not just the participants in the proposed workshops, but the field as a whole. First, it will increase the perceived and actual promotion likelihoods for women, attracting more and better-qualified women to economics as a career. Second, it will increase the number of tenured female faculty in economics, who can then serve as mentors and role-models in their own right for future generations of junior women. This proposal's intellectual merit stems from the random assignment methodology proposed to allow us to evaluate the impacts of this program. While there has been some research on the importance of mentors, there has been little rigorous evaluation of these types of programs, and no evaluations that use random assignment. As in the medical domain of drug testing, random assignment is considered to be the "gold standard" for evaluation of an intervention's impacts. By establishing conclusively the impact of this program, it is anticipated that it will be perceived as a model on which similar interventions can be based, both in other fields and in economics for other underrepresented groups.