Gender, Race, and Academic Career Outcomes --Does Economics Mirror Other Disciplines?

• Author: Ginther, Donna K.
• Position: Research Summaries

The textbook model of the labor market posits that workers are paid their marginal products. In this setting, equally productive workers should be paid and promoted at the same rate. While in the general labor market we are able to observe individual education, industry, occupation, and earnings, in most cases it is difficult to link individuals' capital investments and productivity outcomes. My research has focused on academic labor markets because capital--in the form of federal research funding--and output--in the form of publications and citations--can be linked to individuals to yield new findings about academic careers and knowledge production.

Together with my collaborators, I have examined gender and race/ethnicity differences in research career outcomes as well as the effect of research funding on research productivity. New and improved datasets and administrative data have yielded key insights on these issues.

Gender Differences in Career Outcomes for Economists

With my long-time collaborator Shulamit Kahn, who has played a key role in this work, I have examined gender differences in career outcomes for economists and for other academic fields. We found that after controlling for research publications, women were significantly less likely to be promoted to tenure in economics. (1) Our most recent study used Academic Analytics data to update the analysis of the economics profession compared with other science and social science fields. (2) Figure 1 shows survival curves by gender and compares economics to the fields of mathematics and statistics, political science, biomedical science, physical science, and engineering. The only significant gender difference in promotion to associate professor is in economics, where women were 15 percent less likely to be promoted after controlling for publications, citations, and research grants.

We split the sample into top research and less research-intensive institutions, and our results suggest that women's promotion disadvantage in economics is driven by lower-ranked research universities. The results also show that the gender parity in academic promotion in science careers that Kahn and I found using data through 2001 persists at least in research-intensive universities. (3) Furthermore, our research shows that aggregating separate academic fields into the broad science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) category ignores the fact that each academic field constitutes a unique labor market. What is true of the economics profession does not generalize to other academic disciplines.

While women remain disadvantaged in academic careers in economics, the CeMENT program developed by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) and initially supported by a National Science Foundation grant to the American Economic Association has shown promise in improving women's academic career outcomes. CeMENT was designed as a randomized controlled mentoring trial. Together with Francine Blau, Rachel Croson, and the head of the CeMENT research team, Janet Currie, we evaluated the impact of the program six years and 14 years after the first cohort began the mentoring process. Our interim evaluation found that women who participated in the two-and-a-half-day workshop published more papers overall and in top economics journals, and received more research funding than comparable scholars who did not participate. (4) Our subsequent evaluation of six cohorts found that women who participated in CeMENT published more papers overall and in the top five journals, and were more likely to get tenure in the top 100 research departments. (5)

Figure 2 Probability of Receiving NIH R01 Award by Race and Ethnicity, FY 2001-2006 Black or African American 16.1% Asian 25.4% Hispanic 28.1% White 29.3% Full Sample 28.1% Probabilities for Asian and Black or African American investigators are statistically significantly different from White investigators' at the 99.9% confidence level. Source: Researchers' calculations using data from NIH IMPAC II, DRF, AAMC faculty roster Note: Table made from bar graph. Work with Rina Na examined potential mechanisms behind CeMENT's success. One can think of the CeMENT workshop as a random shock to professional networks. We found that women had significantly more coauthors after being mentored. These additional coauthors contributed to more...