Information on Co-Impact Grant Awarded to CEDPC and CSWEP
CEDPC and CSWEP have partnered with Co-Impact to improve the climate for women working in economics and address the barriers that prevent the advancement of women within the field.
Excerpts from the Proposal
Motivation:
Advancing a more diverse and inclusive profession has proven challenging. First, it is difficult to attract young women and minoritized groups into economics because they do not see themselves reflected in the field as it currently stands and often lack role models at their educational institution, a Catch-22. Second, the professional climate experienced once in the field discourages many women and minoritized groups that had sought this career path. Discouragement results in shifts in research agendas or places of work in a search for more welcoming colleagues, exit from the profession, and ultimately, much-unrealized potential. Third, economics, more than other social sciences, has a “bias against bias,” embedded as it still is in rational models that make it “impossible” for discrimination to be a thing in equilibrium and with a revealed preference approach that wants to rationalize every behavior or experience as a reflection of exogenous differences in skills or preferences rather than a reflection of normative stereotypes. In other words, the models and methods that economists (male and female) feed on daily make the conversation about the current state of the profession and efforts to fix it more complex than in, say, other social sciences or the humanities that have a less narrow view of human nature.
In this context, our initiative seeks to promote information, dialogue, and expectation- and norm-(re)setting, with the ultimate goal of systemic institutional change within the economics profession. We believe this goal is best achieved by gathering information and programming activities that target both the senior leaders within the profession for the most immediate impact and the younger generation for more persistent and longer-term change.
Objective:
A profession-wide intervention designed to improve the professional climate, the goal, and the responsibility of all leaders and members in the AEA. Gender parity in the economics profession, not only in terms of bodies but also professional accomplishments, will be our North Star. While we fully understand that it will take longer than the length of this initiative to achieve this ultimate goal, our initiative will have set the seeds for that North Star. In particular, we hope that our initiative will trigger long-lasting institutional changes in the profession that will make it more attractive for women to pursue careers in economics and make it easier for them to succeed. We will re-set norms and expectations currently contributing to a toxic culture in some economics departments, conferences, and seminars. We will equip departmental leaders with the tools to govern inclusive workplaces, including more robust hiring, compensation, promotion, and service allocation practices that will be free of conscious and unconscious biases and stereotypes, better strategies to address the unique needs of their female faculty (such as those related to work-family balance), and more robust tools to identify, and respond to, toxic behavior. We will increase the share of women and minorities in leadership positions in their departments (e.g., department chairs or journal editors).
The more inclusive environment we will help foster via this initiative will strengthen the field of economics and speed up its scientific advancements. Fewer talented individuals will opt out of the profession, and the increased demographic diversity we will have engendered will also increase the diversity of thoughts and ideas in an academic discipline.
Year 1 Projects
- Focus Groups for graduate students (more information coming soon)
- Chair's survey design and implementation (more information coming soon)
- Midcareer Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Program
- 2025 Inaugural Chairs Conference Event