Do Female Economists Think Differently?
And if so, is it a good thing? It doesn’t sound like it from this article:
Economics is becoming less of a man’s world, and new research implies that as more women enter the profession that could lead to changes in economic policy.
“Without a doubt it will change policy,” said Ann Mari May, an economics professor at University of Nebraska in Lincoln and one of the study’s authors.
May and her co-authors surveyed hundreds of members of the American Economic Association for the study, which is due to be released in an upcoming issue of the journal Contemporary Economic Policy.
What they found was surprising: Despite similar training and background in economic principles, male and female economists tended to hold sharply different views about some of the biggest and most hotly debated economic issues.
For example, female economists were more likely to say employers should provide health insurance and that income distribution should be more equal. They also were more likely to disagree with the use of educational vouchers.
Women also were far more likely to conclude that job opportunities for men and women are not equal, and that specifically the economic profession favors men over women….
May thinks that as more women enter the field their voices will start to be heard when politicians and others craft economic policies. A more diverse group of expert opinions could lead to more rigorous debate and, perhaps, different ways of thinking about the nation’s major economic challenges.
It basically sounds like the female economists have socialistic tendencies that are at odds with liberty, freedom, and a capitalist society. In what way is their socialism going to help the economy and with “crafting economic policies?” In no positive way that I can see.
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Image courtesy shutterstock / Jozsef Szasz-Fabian
These are economists? Let’s parse the following: ” … female economists were more likely to say employers should provide health insurance … ” On what basis would say that? They would have to show that employees and employers are better off if employers provide health insurance. If they don’t or won’t show it, than it’s nothing more than social policy disguised as economics.
” … and that income distribution should be more equal … ” Typically, income distributions get skewed as a country gets more prosperous because spectacular opportunities open up for people with good ideas. But another reason income distributions gets skewed is how we measure them. We measure them on per household basis, and as households atomize as they have with increasing number of single person households, distributions gets skewed relative to married households. (A household with two earners, each earning x, will have twice the income of a household composed of one person earning x.) Then we have the problem of aging household (with low incomes but high wealth) and we have the problem of illegals skewing the income distribution. If these women really wanted a more equal income distribution, they would be pushing woman to get married and stay married, and they would pushing to have illegal immigration halted. Again, if they don’t think through any of their proposals, then they’re just pushing another leftist social policy.
“They also were more likely to disagree with the use of educational vouchers.” This is a testable hypothesis: Do vouchers produce better or worse outcomes for students? If they’re not willing to test it, again they’re just pushing a leftist social agenda and supporting the Teachers’ union.
Finally: “Women also were far more likely to conclude that job opportunities for men and women are not equal … ” This is also a testable hypothesis, and saying so doesn’t make it so (unless you’re a leftists and the truth is what you proclaim it to be independent of empirical reality). But then if they’re just pushing leftists social agendas as opposed to being real economists, the likelihood is they will not have many job opportunities as economists, and their statement will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…I suspect this has less to do with “female economists are economic illiterates” and more “women who go into higher education are scientific illiterates”. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the sort of people who need access to the AEA’s journals are the sort of people 100rsns.blogspot.com warns us about.
More to the point – the article states study’s authors surveyed only members of the AEA, which wikipedia (I know, not a valid source!) states as being 85% higher-education/government/non-profit – hardly paragons of free market discourse. I would need to see their survey methodology to comment further…but I won’t, because that would take up valuable time earning money.
I would be more interested in this study if it was a random sampling of people with varying levels of economics education (ie bachelors and up) and see how that differs by education level; I hypothesize it would vary greatly – however, such a study would probably bring out awkward questions about work in pure economics as a profession.
Yes, it will be bull hockey study after study, “proving” that government cheese for women’s benefits and woman-only quotas in industry are good for the economy.
As a married man, I always thought the difference between male and female economics is:
1). Male: “I want to buy $X of stuff but I only made $Y. X > Y. I must now buy less.”
2). Female: “WE NEED $X of stuff but my lazy no good failure of a husband only made $Y. I will put it on our credit card again. That’s like getting stuff for free, isn’t it?”
you left out the part where:
female: i earned that, it is mine. you earned that, it is ours.
Well Skeptic, let’s go all paleo, evoPsych on this, shall we?
Cave-Man: “I go hunt now. Me work hard, spear sabre-toothed antelope, whole family have dinner.”
Cave-Woman: “I go gather berries. Me better get berries before no-good hussy Groglina get them for her familiy and leave nothing on berry bush for us…”
Hunters create wealth through their actions. More and better actions makes for more wealth. If a hunter wants more, he can work harder for it and spear another antelope. Gatherers gather what nature has already provided, which certainly takes work, but extra work above and beyond doesn’t make more berries than nature already provided. If a gatherer wants more, she’s better sneak off to the berry patch before the other tribe members get there, which hardly seems fair.
So, hunters worry about incentives and gatherers worry about equitable distribution. Both make sense for their individual spheres, but it’s a problem when the gatherers start trying to tell the hunters how to hunt. If those female economists want any more antelope burgers, they’d better stick to gathering berries.
Harrumph! Doubtful analogy. The ecology can support a limited number of animals per area just like it can support a limited number of plants. So if too many people hunt in the same place that depletes the resources just as much as too many people gathering in the same place.
Indeed. In fact, you see herds of herbivores, but you hardly ever see herds of carnivores. There are packs of carnivores, but they fight for territory against other packs: they take a zero-sum view of the game.
Having said that, JMH does provide food for thought.
I wonder how broad their definition of economist was?
Economics is like engineering – lots of subfields.
Some economists crunch numbers to the point they are glorified statisticians. Other economists are social studies types who are glorified sociologists.
My guess is that the females they refer to are coming from the sociology side rather than the statistics and data side. The sociology side is prety politicized.
As an engineer pursing an BS Economics (for fun an dinterest) degree you sir are spot on!
Economics has become a field that tries to quantify and justify Social Engineering desires.
Example, a fundamental assumption of the Macro crowd is that Income Inequality is bad for the economy and must be controlled. In Econ if you get a result you dont like, you just change an underlying asumption, I wish that worked for Engineering, battery power would never be a problme becuase I just assume I have a perfect battery, BAMO it all works out great!!!!
Of course, there have always been socialist economists: Marx, Keynes and the Keynesians (Samuelson, Krugman, Stiglitz, etc); and perhaps most influential within economics, Walras.
In fact, the entire socialist calculation debate shows that economics does not necessarily support free markets.
Do female economists tend to socialism? possibly. Will more female economists shift policy towards socialism? I expect that reality will have more of an influence than economic thinking, on policy. In fact, I expect that reality will have more of an influence than the number of female economists, on economic thinking.
I wonder, can there be a socialist physics? A communist Quantum Theory? I wonder how Margret Mead would have accounted for girls coming of age in Kabul rather than Samoa and would she have recommended the Afghan model for primary socialization?
I wonder, can there be a socialist physics? A communist Quantum Theory?
If only those evil anions would stop hoarding all the electrons they don’t really need, and share them with the cations, everything would be perfect.
#OccupyValenceShell
Perhaps it has nothing to do with them being female, rather females who tend to take this academic path tend to be filtered though Grievence Studies, Victimhood 100, and Oikophobia 101. While Economics is not as soft of a “science” as sociology or anthropology, it still remains quite subjective and vulnerable to hijack from academic extremists.
There could be some truth to this though. Perhaps the male DNA in my brain left behind by bearing two sons knocked the socialist right out of me. I was a socialist before I became a mother, so perhaps. It would be interesting to see if women with more male offspring are less socialist.
I think you are probably right about the filtering. Perhaps the solution would involve a required internship (not in a human resources dept) in the real economy as a requirement for an advanced degree in economics.