this is a shame of econ research.
The Gender Problem in Economics is SOLVED!
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Downloaded the data set and replication file from AEA and took a look. There's something I can't reconcile with the way the majors are coded: if you tabulate the "econmajor" variable they have stored you get 244 economics majors. But if you tabulate the "Major" variable (which I presume stores all of the administrative data on student majors they got from SMU) there are 257 economics majors:
Economics - BA: 99
Economics - BS: 19
Economics - PMJ: 10
Economics w/ Fina Appl - BS: 124
Economics w/ Final Appl - PMJ: 5If you replace "econmajor" to be equal to one for these major categories, the effect on economics majors goes away (smaller point estimate, not statistically significant).
Now this includes PMJ (which stands for Pre-major I think). So maybe you don't want to include those. But the total list of majors adds up to 1397, their total sample size, and includes the pre-major category for many different majors. If you don't want to count pre-majors, shouldn't they be excluded instead of coded as being 0? I haven't bothered to check the results if that is done. And regardless, there's no way to get to 244 from the numbers listed in the "Major" variable: excluding PMJ gets you to 242.
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And regardless, there's no way to get to 244 from the numbers listed in the "Major" variable: excluding PMJ gets you to 242.
Can't you just look at the data of two variables side by side and see for what values of Major the variable econmajor=0? Would be more useful than saying "there is no way of getting 244".
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What is the identification strategy here?
It seems like many things vary between the role models, not just gender. In particular, I imagine their personalities differ. This seems pretty important in their setting.
Is it a response to gender, or to charisma differences?
If they had 100 role models instead of 2 it might be more believable.
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On EJMR we have always fought for:
1- papers with real implication on economics
2- papers not controlled by the HRM cabal
3- papers that share their data1- is very clear, for 2- one of the authors is based in Lancaster UK and for 3- the data is available
Moreover, many people here have long argued against quotas and in favour or more incentive-based way of tackling gender disparities.
This paper suggests one. It needs exploring, I am not 100% convinced by everything, but it clearly goes in the right direction.
And I can see the argument for role models when you are already enrolled in a principles class. It makes much more sense than teh LaCour story which was about meeting random people at the door.
So I don't get what makes some people so upset about it. I hope it has nothing to do with the gender of the authors.
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And regardless, there's no way to get to 244 from the numbers listed in the "Major" variable: excluding PMJ gets you to 242.
Can't you just look at the data of two variables side by side and see for what values of Major the variable econmajor=0? Would be more useful than saying "there is no way of getting 244".
Looks like it's a subset of the group above:
tab Major if econmajor==1
Economics - BA 99
Economics - BS 18
Economics - PMJ 1
Economics w/ Fina Appl - BS 124
Economics w/ Fina Appl - PMJ 2So why include some of the PMJ group but not all? (And where did the missing Economics - BS student go?) Seems suspicious if including all 257 students in the five categories means no significant result...
Although I'm not sure restricting to only BA and BS would impact the result, as none of the included PMJ students are treated and 2/3 are female. Still, given how tenuous the p-values are in the paper it still seems weird.
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On EJMR we have always fought for:
1- papers with real implication on economics
2- papers not controlled by the HRM cabal
3- papers that share their data
1- is very clear, for 2- one of the authors is based in Lancaster UK and for 3- the data is available
Moreover, many people here have long argued against quotas and in favour or more incentive-based way of tackling gender disparities.
This paper suggests one. It needs exploring, I am not 100% convinced by everything, but it clearly goes in the right direction.
And I can see the argument for role models when you are already enrolled in a principles class. It makes much more sense than teh LaCour story which was about meeting random people at the door.
So I don't get what makes some people so upset about it. I hope it has nothing to do with the gender of the authors.I am not at all upset about the overall message of the paper, and the gender of the authors matters literally not at all to me. Making sure young women have high-profile female economists they can look to as mentors or role models seems like a no-brainer to me. But they are selling a very "sexy", super hard-to-believe result based on very, very marginal statistical significance throughout their paper. That's the part that rubs me the wrong way: the over-selling of the headline result which is based on a point estimate that has a high degree of uncertainty!
Had they said something like "we know this is a large estimate, the error bounds are large, needs further investigation before we can draw conclusions..." then I don't think anyone would be upset. But they even put the point estimate in the abstract! It likely wouldn't be published in AEJ: Applied if they took a more cautious approach, which says more about our profession than it does the authors.
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On EJMR we have always fought for:
1- papers with real implication on economics
2- papers not controlled by the HRM cabal
3- papers that share their data
1- is very clear, for 2- one of the authors is based in Lancaster UK and for 3- the data is available
Moreover, many people here have long argued against quotas and in favour or more incentive-based way of tackling gender disparities.
This paper suggests one. It needs exploring, I am not 100% convinced by everything, but it clearly goes in the right direction.
And I can see the argument for role models when you are already enrolled in a principles class. It makes much more sense than teh LaCour story which was about meeting random people at the door.
So I don't get what makes some people so upset about it. I hope it has nothing to do with the gender of the authors.You represent yourself as someone who has been on EJMR for a while. If that were true, you’d be able to think of plenty of times when we criticized the research of men, and you’d know this wasn’t about gender. The sexism accusation is how the Ruptures authors tried to dodge our criticism as well. I suspect you just arrived here from EconTwitter.
This paper was published in a major journal and it is being heavily promoted by EconTwitter, yet it appears to have serious problems. This case kind of reminds me of the Wu paper. Do the authors of this paper have HRM connections?
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If you have doubts about the paper, why don’t you run a robustness check and write a comment? That’ll improve our discipline. Disparaging a paper in an anonymous forum doesn’t make economics better.
Table 4, col. 4: all coefficients--including the 0.08 effect of interest--are insignificant & their sample size is infinitesimal, yet the abstract says that "[t]he intervention significantly impacted female students' enrollment in further economics classes, increasing their likelihood to major in economics by 8 percentage points." LMAO what a joke.
How can someone guarantee that replicating and debunking the paper wouldn't get them cancelled for being s.E\ks-ist, using something they said 20 years ago? I know someone who had a different opinion on funding the Paw-lice, and they got cancelled using a similar method, despite being a top economist.
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This effect size reminds me of LaCour and Green, who demonstrated that simply a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser produced a large and sustained shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage for Los Angeles County residents.
That basic result turned out to be true. See Broockman and Kalla.
This result doesn't actually strike me as very surprising. It's also not a serious contribution to the study of economics, but I don't doubt the result.
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Think another poster pointed it out well, if you want more strong female economists you need more super higher iq females with strong math skills and that means focusing on 7-12 year olds when children's brains are absolute sponges and people arent thinking about sx all day because pre puberty.
2 side notes
how much effort are nursing programs putting into recruiting more men?For what it's worth of the one female friend I know who decided to go into econ due to a speaker, the speaker was a man rather than a woman.