Under cover of anonymity, economics gets more dismal
August 24, 2017 5:56 AM   Subscribe

For her undergraduate thesis at Berkeley, Alice H. Wu looked at the gender breakdown of anonymous postings on Economics Job Market Rumors (a.k.a. EJMR). What she found will be obvious to anyone who's been on the Internet since ever: "the discourse tends to become significantly less academic or professional oriented, and more about personal information and physical appearance when women are mentioned."

The paper has raised a furor in academic circles and even made it to the New York Times. Economists have been using the hashtag #EndEJMR to rally their dislike of the site and its culture.

Wu enters the economics PhD program at Harvard this fall.
posted by Etrigan (13 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
EJMR is toxic garbage and has been for a long time. A (female) friend of mine (also an economist) pointed out that any useful function having an anonymous message board serves is counteracted by the fact that women (and nonwhites, there was a ton of oh-so-ironic racism as well last I saw) have to wade through the garbage to find the useful information.

A lot of people I know have sort of reacted that "well, yeah EJMR is bad but it's not like the majority of economists are on it" but I don't understand why those people don't think this reflects badly on the profession collectively. We should ask ourselves why, given anonymity, so many of our peers or students spend time writing these things, not just wash our hands of it and pretend it's not our problem.
posted by dismas at 6:19 AM on August 24, 2017 [13 favorites]


I'd add (this is alluded to in the IHE article) It's especially bad because plenty of prospective grad students read it. I imagine it's quite discouraging to someone on the fence about grad school that their future classmates or professors are on it, and it probably emboldens the assholes.
posted by dismas at 6:24 AM on August 24, 2017


From the IHE article:

“All it takes is one person making disparaging comments to set a negative tone* that may cause some young women to opt out of the field,” he said. “In my experience people who assert statements like that are often immune to evidence or rational argument, and envision themselves as superior beings who are more enlightened than the rest of us.”

I do, of course, readily agree with the bolded statement above. It does seem to be that those who assert there is a one true thing to say about women in X are also incredibly rigid and assured of themselves. Don't forget, confidence in one's opinion is rewarded in our society even when those opinions or assertions are wrong or bad for us as a society. It's the confidence we trust over anything else.

*On the "negative tone," this one is also true as I've seen it but it does go beyond tone. Tone is what tells us that we are overstepping cultural boundaries. So that "tone" is actually setting an "action" that belittles the accomplishments of women, sets up roadblocks in their path, and can result in active sabotage of a woman's career. So when women pick up the "tone" and then decide to opt out of a field, it's actually a smart move for that individual woman even as it is also quite bad for us as a society. Tone is action.
posted by amanda at 7:06 AM on August 24, 2017 [8 favorites]


Seconded. And the absolute worst part about the people who are "immune to evidence or rational argument" is that they're also goddamn hypocrites. Because economics bows to the god of rational behavior. And if you are immune to evidence or rational argument, you aren't just a "dismal" scientist, you're not one at all, and I'd like you to stop calling yourself one immediately. (If you need a palate cleanser, there are also absolutely fantastic male economists like the NYT piece author Wolfers and MacArthur genius Colin Camerer who do world-class work, and call out this kind of horrible behavior publicly when they see it.)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 7:55 AM on August 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


Maybe tangential to this thread - but the research on anonymity as related to individuals' tendency to be jerks online is still kind of mixed (at least as far as I've seen lately). In some settings having to be named and identifiable moderates toxic behavior, in other settings not so much.

When people feel somewhat immune from the consequences of being sexist/racist they tend to do it anyway - names or no.
posted by pantarei70 at 9:22 AM on August 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


When people feel somewhat immune from the consequences of being sexist/racist they tend to do it anyway - names or no.

I have no doubt there are economists who would attach their names to some of the stuff I've seen on EJMR, perhaps couched in slightly less horrible language. Maybe not in mixed company.

But academic economics is a small profession; you're more likely to encounter other economists in real life repeatedly (especially in your field) than you might be to encounter other people who comment on an online news article (I mean, depends on the newspaper obviously). So it seems like a setting where you can actually concentrate social pressure.

Obviously, it's hard because academia is extremely hierarchical, which is why it can't just be women or people of color or junior professors or grad students who do this, but you need senior leadership as well. (Glad for Wolfers that he seems to consistently talk about the importance of women in the profession; I wish he wouldn't defend Charles Murray). It's great that Borjas, for instance, apparently doesn't think EJMR is as "refreshing" as he did last summer but I question the judgment of anyone who looked at it in the past and thought "eh, this is mostly okay." I just hopped on for the first time in about three years and, yes, there are a smaller proportion of blatantly racist and sexist thread titles on the main page, but you don't have to look hard and I imagine they're moderating more right now with the increased attention.

Whether it's by convincing people that their sexism and racist attitudes are unacceptable, or by raising the cost of saying racist and sexist things so they don't pollute the atmosphere, economists need to clean out our house.
posted by dismas at 9:49 AM on August 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


sorry if i'm posting a lot about this. it's a combination of a thing I care about, a thing that I've been fighting with grad school classmates about, and I really should be doing work right now prepping a class
posted by dismas at 10:23 AM on August 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


sorry if i'm posting a lot about this.

Don't worry about it. I learned about it from a professor who mostly tweets about her wacky kids, and she's been all over this, and someone commented that they missed the tweets about her kids, and... I swear I saw her eyes turn red through Twitter. This is a shitty situation that should be discussed.
posted by Etrigan at 11:43 AM on August 24, 2017 [7 favorites]


When people feel somewhat immune from the consequences of being sexist/racist they tend to do it anyway - names or no.

The legal equivalent of EJMR used to be the comments sections on Above the Law articles, which over time grew to have a ratio of about 1:10 useful-insider-comment-you-wouldn't-see-elsewhere:garden-variety-to-horrendous racism/sexism/homophobia/you-name-it. So if you wanted to see the useful insider comment, hot rumor, or hilarious scathing criticism of the tone or approach of the article itself (the ATL chief editor is kind of an industry sycophant and some of the articles and columnists really did deserve to have the piss taken out of them), you had to wade through some pretty unpleasant stuff.

While I'm sure the people who wrote the latter were jerks in their personal lives, too, they would not have written most of the latter if they'd had to attach their names to it. The legal profession is big, but that sector of it is not. (Unfortunately, the anonymity also made the insider comments and the witty article critiques much more feasible, too. When they shut down the comments section, an understandable final response, the site became less useful and much more a mere platform for industry shilling.)
posted by praemunire at 11:56 AM on August 24, 2017


Reminder that 'dismal science' was coined by the Charles Murray of the Victorian era. Thomas Carlysle was justifying slavery and indentured servitude's continued existence by saying the ruling class knew how best to utilize both black slaves and morally suspect Irishmen. If they were given the freedom of choice, they would make wasteful decisions and that would be dismal.

It's gross that it's still used. It's extra gross to be used when discussing poor treatment of women and minorities.

One of my majors was economics in college. Part of me wanted to stay in academia, but my risk averse side won out. I'm racking my brain to remember if I ever encountered any of this sexism in relation to my major. Not because I disbelieve it, but because I realize I've become so desensitized to trolling behavior it wasn't memorable. That is possibly a more depressing realization.
posted by politikitty at 1:07 PM on August 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


list of top words associated with men includes references to sexual orientation but also "philosopher," "keen," "motivated," "slides," "Nordic" and "textbook."
Is anyone else getting a racial dogwhistle off that term or do all these applicants have the same as-seen-on-TV cardio device in a dusty corner of the garage?
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 1:43 PM on August 24, 2017


Is anyone else getting a racial dogwhistle off that term

The term itself isn't problematic. The nordic countries provide a social safety net a lot of people support in an economy perceived as thriving. So long as people are proposing more progressive policies, their economy is worth studying.

Not that there aren't landmines when discussing it. They are also overwhelmingly homogeneous with very little immigration. Is that a feature or a bug?
posted by politikitty at 3:29 PM on August 24, 2017


"Nordic" appears to be part of some running joke on the site, the origins of which are obscure to me. It could be a joke about left-leaning Americans appealing to Nordic countries as a model, it could be a "joke" with racial overtones, maybe both.
posted by dismas at 3:53 PM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


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