Hope everyone is well.
It has been hard to ignore recent events related to EJMR so I thought it was time to make an official statement.
1) EJMR has and always will condemn sexism. Over the years the site has become much better at tackling attempts to post sexist content, with a growing team of moderators, stronger moderation policy, and a programmed bot to auto-delete offensive posts. Indeed I believe most of the words that were cited as most offensive in the study were on the auto-delete bot for over a year, so you would not be able to find them with recent data. Unfortunately the bot would not have deleted these words in old posts, as the bot only targets recent posts to keep its load on the server low.
To help remedy this, last Wednesday I backdated the bot so it would auto delete all old posts with the offending words.
If someone wishes to suggest any words that should be added to the auto-delete bot they can ask the moderators.
2) We feel that recent attacks have ignored the wider context. There is clearly a sexism problem in the Economics Profession that is yet to be dealt with. Focussing on EJMR ignores the much larger problems to do with sexism in hiring and journal acceptance that women in the profession face.
Indeed with 20% of the users of EJMR being female, as well as 20% of the moderation team, EJMR is much better represented by women than the percentage of women in tenure track positions in almost all economics departments in the United States.
If the economics profession was sending EJMR a more gender balanced set of PhDs and Professors then this problem would not exist.
3) EJMR is the most diverse platform of the economics profession. It is the only place where people from all over the world of any race or gender can break bread as equals and discuss research on a daily basis. Here we do not discriminate on your origins or what University you are from. This is in stark contrast to the atmosphere and hubris that we endure in faculty lounges and seminars.
4) EJMR is less sexist than other social platforms, newspaper comment sections and even the comments on blogs of economic commentators. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & Reddit, as well as famous newspaper comment sections.
5) EJMR will always exist as long as members of the profession feel poorly represented by those at the top. Recent events has only deepened their beliefs that the top of the economics profession punches down at those below it and is not being held to account. For example it was transparent to all in the profession that the leading journal in economics had to make substantial changes to its editorial policy when it was pressured by EJMR, yet it failed to recognize EJMR's important contribution to restoring credibility to the journal publication process.
6) The recent study highlights a weakness of Machine Learning that we must become increasingly aware of if the profession wishes to avoid another round of embarassment. Anyone can program a tool to use data to match their priors. This makes it dangerous as someone that doesn't understand the limitations of the underlying model, the blackbox that feeds it, or the wider context can come to dangerous conclusions. As it is well known this can even happen with simple Excel spreadsheet at the highest level of policy making, and reminds us of the importance of peer review before making important decisions or speaking to journalists.
7) EJMR has so many positives aspects that are being largely ignored. This is list that was crowd sourced by users of the site https://econjobrumors.com/topic/lists-of-positive-contributions-of-ejmr
I hope this helps set the record straight. 20% of EJMR users are female, in two years time we are aiming to reach 30%. I challenge the economics profession to do the sa...See full post