Where Are The Women?
No, that’s not the line from Blazing Saddles. Rather, that’s Christine Bowers asking, over at the PSD World Bank blog, where are all the women blogging on economics? That women might have more interesting things to do than blog on economics is probably not a good response to a blog post on economics written by a woman.
Instead, I’d rather use something from our EQSQ personality tests to explain why economics seems to be a male dominated profession. As only a fraction of any group actually blogs, this might explain the paucity. As regular readers know, the results of our EQSQ personality tests are that some 17% of women have the male type brain, a similar number of men the female. We also know that certain jobs draw more heavily on those skills and aptitudes common to the female brain type (nursing for example, requiring empathy) and others on the male brain talents (programming, requiring systemizing ability). Before anyone starts to get upset about sexist terminology, Simon Baron Cohen’s work is not about reinforcing stereotypes: it’s about attempting to understand them and then further show why they are a decidedly incomplete view of the world.
Now, if we found that a subject like economics draws heavily upon those male brain talents then we would expect there to be more male economists than female. This is in the absence of any direct discrimination, or of social disapproval or any other such factor: purely upon the prevalence of the brain type (which I’m sure still happen, although much less than they did). So, can we say that economics draws on certain male brain type talents? Chris Dillow certainly thinks so, when he describes economic modeals as being like maps: spatial recognition being one of those male brain talents in our definition. When we asked a female economist, Lynne Kiesling, about her map reading skills we were not surprised to find that they were above average: above average for men, not just for women.
So, something of an answer for Ms. Bowers then. Very few people blog seriously anyway. There are many fewer female economists than male economists as those who are good at the profession are the male brain types. Thus there aren’t that many serious female economics bloggers.
Although here are two very good ones: Lynne Kiesling and Virginia Postrel (who is, if you want to blame someone, responsible at least in part for my own dive into blogging).
December 19th, 2006 at 8:19 am
One reason for the shortfall of women in economics might be the difficulty of getting a degree in the field. Colleges all over the country have retention problems with women in the sciences and economics. As a female engineer, I also know what it’s like to study in a field dominated by men. In talking with a female engineering professor (the only one in my school’s department) about the retention problem, she said one of the most common reasons why women drop out is because they have higher standards for themselves than male students. In other words, a female student with a B average is more likely to think engineering isn’t her forte than a male student with a B average. I imagine the same could be true for women in economics. Is self-confidence linked to emotional intelligence? If so, is it an inverse relationship? I think it would be interesting to do a study that compares self-confidence levels to the results of an eq test. My point is that there are many other obstacles besides the lack of male-brain talents that discourage women from becoming economists.
Tim responds: I agree absolutely that there are other reasons why there are problems in certain fields with the number of women getting college degrees. We still have a socialization problem, whereby we still think that some careers are \’male\’ and so on, rather than looking at the specific talents of the individual. Within departments and college degree programs there could still be further problems. Yet even if all of those more direct discriminations went away we\’d still see an imbalance in the numbers of men and women in certain professions. Our whole site and conversation is based on that idea of course.
I would add that one of the two female economists that I correspond with rather agrees with this analysis, that here is something \’male brain\’ about advanced economics.