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Abstract
Economic education is distributed unequally. Among U.S. undergraduates, women and underrepresented minority students collectively major in economics at 0.36 the rate that white, non-Hispanic men do. The authors establish a definition of full inclusion in economic education and use that definition to evaluate the status quo and to compare institutions. A companion resource, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, provides interactive access to the data to attract and inform the attention of economists, university administrators, and others. The authors explain why the need to improve the distribution of economic education is urgent, including the imperative to support economic policymaking. Lastly, they point the way forward, identifying currently available resources and reasonable next steps for all involved parties to take.
Notes
Acknowledgments
The authors thank, without implicating, Steve O’Connell, Lucie Schmidt, Robin Shores, Melynda Wilcox, the students in Economics 73 at Swarthmore College, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts; and Morgan Smith and Bo Yeon Jang for expert research assistance. No funding for this article has been received by either author. The views expressed here are those of the authors and may not be shared by the members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or the other members of its staff.
Notes
1 The statistics reported in this article are authors’ calculations using completions data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) at the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Here and in the rest of the article, we report on the race and gender of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who graduated with bachelor’s degrees from four-year, not-for-profit private or public, Title-IV participating colleges and universities. Additional details on the data are in the appendix.
2 Unless otherwise noted, all calculations reported in this paper use this 2011–2015 period. We use five-year averages to smooth through some of the natural variations in the data and to partially address the fact that representation in some of the groups we examine is very sparse.
3 A word about the vocabulary is in order. With respect to gender, the IPEDS survey reports a variable “gender” with possible values “male” and “female,” thus conflating gender and sex. In this article, we often use “men” and “women” on the hypothesis that respondents tend to rely on self-identified gender. With respect to race and ethnicity, we use the categories and terminology of the survey. To allow consistent comparisons across time, we use the IPEDS (NCES Citationn.d.) historical race and ethnicity categories, which do not separately identify Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders or individuals identifying two or more races.
4 To gain further insight into the problem with share data, consider an extreme and simplified situation in which non-Hispanic men at a particular school major in economics at an ideal rate, while there are no women economics majors of any race/ethnicity. A third group, Hispanic men, comprises the remaining student population and majors in economics at a rate in between the two others, say 70 percent of the ideal rate. If the share of Hispanic men on campus were 10 percent, while non-Hispanic men and all women represented 30 percent and 60 percent, respectively, 19 percent of all economics majors would be Hispanic men, creating the impression that they were disproportionately attracted to the major. Ultimately, of course, if a department were to attract majors from each demographic group at equal rates, the composition of students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in economics would perfectly reflect the composition of all graduates.
5 While this article focuses on the economic education of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, we note the heavy participation of temporary residents in economics nationally. The institution-level measures reported later in this article allow consistent comparison across colleges and universities with different proportions of temporary visa holders.
6 Note that the undergraduate business major is considerably closer to demographic balance than is the undergraduate economics major. Nationwide, 48 percent of majors in business are earned by women and 22 percent by URM students; by contrast, as was noted in , 31 percent of economics majors are women and 12 percent are URM.
7 The supporting figures are available upon request.
8 As noted earlier, if this standard were achieved, economics majors would be a representative draw from the population of all students, but looking at share data alone is often misleading. In their study of economics majors by gender, Avilova and Goldin (Citation2018) similarly scale by the number of degree recipients because women earn more bachelor’s degrees than do men.
9 We calculate, and can provide upon request, modified indices for institutions that enroll few white men, including women’s colleges and historically black colleges and universities.
10 Values in excess of 100 would correspond to situations in which groups other than white males are, on average, majoring in economics at higher rates than are white males, and thus would point to a form of imbalance not frequently observed in economics departments.
11 For a more general exposition, see Hamilton and Darity (Citation2017), who note that administrators, teachers, and students shape the educational environment and emphasize that the source of racial inequality is structural, not behavioral.
12 See the appendix for notes on the construction of the data and the composition of the institution subsets. Online versions of the tables in this article include rates for Native American and Asian American students.
13 The statistic that opens this article—that, collectively, women and underrepresented minorities majored in economics at 0.36 the rate that white, non-Hispanic men did in 2015—is indeed consistent with the reported mean EEII value of 54.1. Note that, by construction, the EEII overweights URM men, who have higher rates of participation in economics than do women, relative to their representation on campuses. Note, too, that the 2015 figure is lower due to a slight downward trend in the relative rate at which women and underrepresented minorities major in economics.
14 Of course, these figures result from one extreme approach to the objective of full academic inclusion, in which the majoring rates of every other group is brought up to that of white men; alternative approaches involve drawing more white men into majors dominated by undergraduate women and would not necessarily lead economics departments to be larger than they are now.
15 This section borrows language from “The Sorry State of Diversity in Economics and What You Can Do about It” by David Wilcox, speech given at the Seventh Annual Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education, May 31, 2017.
16 Rock, Grant, and Grey (Citation2016) point out that the participants routinely overestimate the amount of conflict that will actually be created on a diverse team. See also Lount et al. (Citation2015).
17 Regarding misperceptions about the field that many students harbor, Bansak and Starr (Citation2010, p. 33) find that students “widely view economics as a business-oriented field that prioritizes math skills and making money—a combination that is a turnoff for women, but not so much for men. Thus, emphasizing uses of economics for social welfare analysis, while de-emphasizing its business applications, may help to rebalance predispositions at the outset of the principles class.”
18 Another source full of diagnoses of what is wrong with economics pedagogy and replete with practical suggestions for what to do about it is Bartlett (Citation1995). Although dated, the diagnoses and suggestions in Bartlett still ring true to us more than 20 years later.
19 Complementary to this article, the site also provides suggestions for course content and evidence on the extent of the underrepresentation of women and URMs in the field of economics and discusses why that underrepresentation matters. Comments on or suggestions for the site can be sent to [email protected].
20 Participants in the PhD Excellence Initiative must be U.S. citizens. More information about the Initiative is available at http://www.peterblairhenry.com/phd-excellence-initiative/.
21 The daylong experience was organized by Williams College faculty members Matthew Gibson, Sarah Jacobson, Sara LaLumia, and Lucie Schmidt. This team intends to summarize their model and make it available to other institutions that might be interested in replicating the event.
22 Participants in the RSI must be either U.S. citizens or permanent residents. More information about the RSI is available at https://gsas.harvard.edu/diversity/research-scholar-initiative.
23 Enforcing demographic balance at the front of the classroom could come at the expense of overburdening members of the faculty who are women or underrepresented minorities, if compensating adjustments in other dimensions of departmental burden are not implemented at the same time. In return for taking on critical teaching responsibilities, women and underrepresented minority instructors could be provided with more generous allotments of teaching assistants, research support, or service releases. Other approaches may be available as well. For example, introductory classes could be team-taught as a means for broadening the exposure of students to women or underrepresented minority faculty members; of course, in implementing this approach, it would be important to avoid any appearance of power or rank imbalance between participating faculty.
24 For example, the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina offers a wide variety of resources and events to “support a mutually respectful intellectual environment in which diversity and inclusion are valued.” https://cfe.unc.edu/initiatives/diversity-and-inclusion/
25 See https://sites.google.com/swarthmore.edu/enhancing-inclusivity-in-econ/home. Fernando Lozano of Pomona College and Amanda Bayer of Swarthmore College won the initial grant to organize the collaboration.
27 Lucie Schmidt, “Teaching Economics in a Summer Bridge Program,” Williams College, presentation for the AALAC Workshop on Diversifying Economics, February 2016.
30 Alternative approaches are possible. For example, Williams College, under the auspices of the Allison Davis Research Fellowship, partners with Mellon Mays to provide support to students in economics and other fields that are not eligible for funding under Mellon Mays alone. See https://osap.williams.edu/fellowships/.
33 Other professional organizations also represent long-standing institutional efforts to broaden representation and research in the field of economics, including the National Economic Association (http://www.neaecon.org/about), the American Society of Hispanic Economists (http://asheweb.net/), and the International Association for Feminist Economics (http://www.iaffe.org/).