Women in Economics
Andrew Leigh points to this news story via his blog.
With the recent appointment of Professor Meng Xin to the Economics Program of the Research School of Social Sciences, the program now has 3 female full professors out of a total of seven full professors. The percentage female, at 43%, is thus substantially higher than in any other economics department in the country. Indeed, some large economics departments - including in the Go8 universities - have no female professors. This is a particularly startling statistic when you consider that the proportion of PhD students who are female in the US and in Europe is around 30% and has been for some time (see CSWEP for the US and the Royal Economic Society biennial reports). As a benchmark comparison, the percentage female full professors in the top 10 PhD-granting departments in the US is 8%.
Now we’ve looked at this before, gender differences in economics and asking is economics naturally a male thing?
Here’s how the argument goes for those who don’t want to click through. As our EQSQ personality tests (based upon the theories of Simon Baron Cohen) assume, there is a spectrum of brain types, from systemizing to empathizing and those types map pretty well onto the stereotypes of the male and female brain. On average, women are more likely to be at the empathizing end, men at the systemizing: but of course, an individual can be anywhere. We’re talking about probabilities here, not destiny as a result of having an XY or XX haplotype.
Picking up on an idea that was floated, that using economic models is very like using a map (both are stylised models of the real world we use to aid in navigation) we would expect the skill of the use of economic models to be correlated with the ability to use and read maps: ie, the greater spatial abilities connected with the systemizing brain types.
So we asked the only female economist that we know, Lynne Kiesling, about her ability to read maps: and it’s very high, higher than the average man’s. One anecdote doesn’t support a theory all that well: perhaps I ought to ask Andrew to ask his colleagues about their map reading skills?
April 24th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
What to make of those of us who can read a map just fine, but never, on any given moment, have any clue as to which way is east or south or west or north? Would directional intelligence be a systemizing or empathizing trait? This kottke.org blog, http://www.kottke.org/04/04/directional-intelligence, provides an interesting conversation on the subject – one guy even attributes his girlfriend’s lack of directional intelligence to her lack of testosterone….
April 27th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Directional I have to admit I’m not sure. Perhaps associated with the systemizing, as general spatial ability is. But it doesn’t take all that much to work out where the sun is, correlate it to the time of day and thus work out where north is.
But to go back to the basic theory: it’s not testosterone in the blood stream that we think is responsible for EQ and SQ, it’s testosterone at a specific point in the pregnancy, the fetal exposure to it. Levels in later life don’t have anything to do with it.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
But wouldn’t testosterone levels at that point in pregnancy affect how much testosterone one has later in life? I’m finding all sorts of links between high testosterone and diseases, including prostate cancer, diabetes, reading disability, ADHD, and autism. But I can’t find anything that compares testosterone levels in utero with testosterone levels in life.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
No, I don’t think it works that way. To use an analogy, rubella (German measles). If a pregnant woman gets this it can have catastrophic effects on the development of the fetus: and what effects depends upon which precise stage of development the fetus is at when the mother gets it.
At any other time of life rubella is normally simply a mild nuisance. So we’ve established the idea that certain influences can have a great effect if they are upon the fetus (thalidomide might be another example?) during development.
That’s what I’m thinking about when I say fetal testosterone levels: not about levels throughout life, not even the reaction of an adult to different levels, but to the effect of uterine testosterone levels upon development.