 Everybody could settle down and take your seats. Welcome to the Economic Policy Institute. I am Thea Lee, president of EPI. And I am thrilled to introduce today's panel discussion on Women in Economics, the Washington Edition. Last week in New York City, EPI showcased all six of our amazing women economists and their research at the Ford Foundation, which is a longtime EPI Foundation supporter. And today, we have a really amazing panel for you. It is a multi-generational group of women economists and aspiring women economists to talk about both their work as economists, their experience in the field, but also the field itself and what it has been and what it could be to be more welcoming and nurturing for women and people of color. For myself as a woman of a certain age, as a daughter of immigrants from two continents, from Asia and Europe, I made my way to Econ grad school at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. And I made a career as a trade economist in Washington, DC. I put up with a lot of crap along the way and scrambled over a lot of obstacles. Sometimes I was the only woman in the room or on a panel or speaking out. But I think here at EPI, we are certainly committed to making sure that the next generation of women economists has fewer obstacles to scramble over and more support at every step along the way. And at EPI, we are committed, of course, to hiring and nurturing a diverse and a talented staff. But really, our goal is much, much more than that. It is ensuring that our work, our research agenda, our outreach, and the partners that we choose are transforming the way we see the economic challenges and injustices that we see around us. And at this particular moment in history, this seems more important than ever. So thank you all for being with us. Thanks to those of you who are watching on live stream. Without further ado, I will hand over the panel to our wonderful and talented moderator, Heather Long of The Washington Post. Thank you so much. Huge thanks to Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute and to EPI for hosting this event and to all of you for being here. This is a huge moment in the field of economics and there's a lot of positive momentum, I think, to try to make change and increase diversity. And what we want to do, and Thea set the tone, we want to get real for the next hour. We want to talk about some of the problems that still exist and the doubters who still don't think we need to make change. But we also want to have this be almost like an exercise class where you leave with a little bit of an adrenaline rush. You leave with some ideas and some enthusiasm for things that you can go back to your organization or that you can join, initiatives that you can join to try to make positive change so that in 20 years we don't have the same number of female and minority economists that we do today in the United States and around the world, which is not enough in my opinion. So we have a great panel to try to unpack all of this today. Sitting right next to me is Kayla Jones. She graduated in 2018 with her bachelor's degree in economics and is already shooting to the top as a scholar at Harvard University. And perhaps even more impressive, you are part of this chain. She was one of the people who founded the Sadie Collective, which is working to increase specifically African-American female economists in the profession. We're looking forward to hearing more about the latest on what's going on with the Sadie Collective. Next to her is Professor Nina Banks, who is associate professor of economics at Bucknell University in my home state of Pennsylvania. She's also on the board here at EPI. And she seems to like to wear a lot of hats. She is also affiliated with the women's studies department and gender studies department at Bucknell. And she helped to co-found the Africana studies department at Bucknell. Next to her, it feels like Janet Yellen needs no introduction, but she's currently a Brookings fellow. We all used to see her as chair of the Federal Reserve and as head of the Council of Economic Advisors before that, and is also going to be president next year of the American Economic Association, which is very much at the forefront of trying to change this profession of economics and these issues. So before we kick it off with our panel, we thought we'd just get a sense of where the audience is at. So what we know in economics is about a third of PhD students at the moment are female in economics. Let's pick a year like 2030. Raise your hand if you think by 2030 we can have 40% of economic PhD students as female. Can we go from a third to 40%? All right, so that's some enthusiasm. Keep your hand up if you think we can get close to 50% by 2030. Can we really move the dial? OK, so we have some pretty good enthusiasm here. Just, all right, so to kick it off for our panel, if you had to give a short elevator pitch about why economics needs to be more diverse, sort of one of those 30 seconds to a minute convince the skeptics, why don't we go down the row? Sort of what would you say to the people who aren't in this room and are still on the fence? So I would say the key advantage of having more diversity in economics would be not only would it lead to a better science, but it also will lead to a better pedagogy as well as to the creation of better policy dimensions. So we think about the current status quo of economics. Most economists are white men, of course, and that can be dangerous because it can lead to group think. And also, it can cause a profession to miss crucial information and leading to incomplete policy solutions, and overall US economic policy would be increased and be more efficient if we had those from different backgrounds and different perspectives being able to be a part of that process. So Heather asked us to get very real, and I'm going to be very real here. I don't use the framework of diversity when I talk about inclusion, especially the inclusion of populations who have historically been excluded based on race and ethnicity in the United States. And here I'm talking about African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and Native populations. There's this wonderful quote by Angela Davis, which, and I'm going to paraphrase it, but she says that when people link diversity to equality and justice, that's OK. But she said there's a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference and the change that brings about no change. And I think that unfortunately, that is really the model of diversity that has taken hold in higher education in the United States. So when I talk about diversity, I talk about diversity of thought. But when I talk about inclusion, I talk about it in terms of those populations that have been excluded historically. And that's a matter of justice, not a matter of diversity. Diversity in thought is lacking in economics with respect to the dominance of the mainstream approach rather than heterodox approaches, which are often marginalized. So I would say it's important to focus on diversity, first of all, because the lack of diversity in the economics profession, to my mind, points to a problem with the culture in the field and the way it works. The American Economic Association recently conducted a survey that showed that women in minorities feel less valued and less included socially in the profession. They feel their talents aren't fully realized. Women in minorities who've suffered harassment and discrimination throughout their careers. And to avoid that, a large share of women report altering their behaviors in ways that are counterproductive to career progress. And the climate overall that promotes underrepresentation, in my view, of women in minorities is something that serves to diminish job satisfaction of those who are in the profession and is unfair in that sense. As Kayla mentioned, and I would agree, I think the lack of diversity also skews the field's viewpoint and diminishes its breadth. Women work in every field of economics, but they particularly tend to focus on fields that are important to people in their lives, health, education, development, labor, discrimination, income, inequality. And I believe that the underrepresentation of women in minorities skews the work that's done in the field. Women and men tend to bring different approaches to the same problems. There was a recent survey that found that women and men have systematically different views on a range of questions, for example, relating to health insurance and the minimum wage. And they see the world differently. Women are much more likely when asked to say that labor opportunities, labor market opportunities for men and women are not equal, and they're more concerned about inequality. So I think that the prevailing views are probably biased by the relative lack of women in minorities. And finally, I'd say that in policy-making contexts or decision-making contexts where people work together in groups to make decisions, that having diversity is very important to actually ending up with better solutions and better outcomes. There is a good deal of research that shows that diverse groups outperform and solve in complex problems, and that ethnic diversity promotes better deliberation and disrupts a tendency to conformity in thinking. So let me stop with that. Well, first of all, we just want to encourage people to tweet a bit some of these ideas to try to get the conversation going even beyond this room. We were talking about hashtags earlier, and we thought hashtag women in econ is starting to be a bit of a trending one. And of course, econ Twitter always has a lot of people discussing. So why don't we go back down the row and be really blunt? Do you feel you've experienced discrimination in your economics career so far? And maybe you could say briefly about the gender and racial ethic diversity or lack thereof in the department where you studied economics. Janet referred to that American Economic Association climate survey that was done earlier this year, and in that, I believe, 30% of women and 25% of non-white economists said that they have experienced discrimination in the field of economics. I think those numbers really woke people up. In addition to some of the more stark comments, one of the ones that's been getting a lot of attention is an African-American woman who said, I would not recommend that my own child go into this field because of all the discrimination and bias that she felt she had experienced in her career. Let's maybe get a sense. Kayla? So unfortunately, I have experienced some discrimination so far, so once during my senior year of college, I went to visit for a meet and greet at a university that was interested in applying to and I met with some of their senior economic faculty members. And from our first interaction with some of these professors, they assumed without even asking me that I lacked the relevant background to be eligible to apply to that program. And they also made blatant comments about whether or not outside the program would I be able to fit into the city that the program was located in? So needless to say, I won't be applying to that school. But luckily for me, from my past participation with the AEA summer program, I have great mentors there who have a sense of what programs are out there that prioritize diversity and inclusion and have a track record of graduating minority students. So I'm glad to have them to serve as a guide for me moving forward to help mitigate instances like that. So I studied economics in the 1990s at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which is a heterodox program. And in those days, I think it was fairly diverse although we didn't appreciate the amount of diversity at the time. There were two women in my class, it was a small class of about 12 students. And I think that there were two black women, African-American women in the entire program, about a third of the faculty were women. And I think that that was, and they were phenomenal, the entire faculty were phenomenal. But I think that made a difference. In terms of graduate school, I didn't really feel a sense of bias except on occasion thinking that male students had an advantage because after class they could hang out with the professors and become close with the male professors. But I never felt comfortable doing that. So that was really the only gender issue that I thought about as a graduate student. Since getting the doctorate degree, I have experienced discrimination a few times, not often I have to say. Unfortunately, I experienced sexual harassment very early on in my program. I went to graduate school to study development economics. I wanted to become a development economist. And after my first year I went to Washington DC and I worked for an organization, a government organization in the Washington DC area and my supervisor was an economist. And he spent, he was 20 years older, married, and he spent the summer harassing me. And I'm not very comfortable talking about it, but I will just say that I ended up not becoming a development economist as a result of that experience. Really because I assumed that if he could get away with it in DC, in the DC area, working for a government agency that there were probably a lot of men like him in the field. And so I ended up not pursuing development economics, which was really my love. Recently I've been experiencing a different type of, I wouldn't call it discrimination, I think it's more of a bias that exists towards black economists in general, not just black women. And this is a bias where our research is not cited or our research is attributed to someone else. And I can think of a number of examples of that. There's a conversation taking place nationally about black women in economics, but there's something, I think, there's a missing variable there. And the missing variable in that conversation is black women who are actually economists. Black women who've gone through graduate programs, have masters and doctorate degrees and who've worked as economists. And so I think that that conversation would benefit from having an engagement with black women who are at the senior level. Some have retired and some are about to retire. Julian Malvo, Cecilia Conrad, Margaret Sims. That conversation about black women in economics was really, I think, initiated by the presidential address of Rhonda Sharp in 2018 before the National Economic Association. And again, rarely do we see Rhonda cited during the context of the conversation on black women in economics. And for my own part, I've been spending many years researching, I call it excavating, the economic thinking of Sadie Alexander. And there are conversations taking place about Sadie Alexander that discuss my work but almost never cite any of my research findings. And so that's a common problem that I think that black economists have and that I'm experiencing right now. Can you just say briefly who Sadie Alexander is for anyone who might? Well, when I started researching Sadie Alexander a long time ago, around 2003, most economists thought that the first black economist in the United States was George Edmund Haynes. One of the things that I found a few years ago when I was digging through her archival records, some records going back to the 1940s, is that George Edmund Haynes was probably not the first black economist. And so I continued to do research on that question. And I found that in fact, Sadie Alexander was the first African-American economist. So she's the first African-American economist. She got her degree in 1921 from Penn but women's colleges in the country were the places where women, white women who had doctorate degrees went to work but they were racially discriminatory towards black women. They didn't admit black students and they weren't going to hire a black woman. So she did not have a career as a practicing economist. She ended up becoming a lawyer instead but her legacy has really been lost to the profession. Julian Malvaux has written a seminal article on Sadie Alexander and the loss to the profession but I've been really trying to excavate her life and restore her to the canon of economic thought. That's who she was. She was amazing. Well, I studied at Yale between 1967 and 71. There were not a lot of women but there were three of us in a class of about 25 students. There was no racial or ethnic diversity. I noticed on the faculty at the time there was not a single woman tenure track faculty. There was one woman who is very well thought of but she had a position as a lecturer and that struck me as unfair and I also noticed at the time there were several faculty couples where both husband and wife were economists and the women were not allowed to have faculty positions. They, some of them continued to do research but were never really able to have normal academic careers so that concerned me in terms of the position of women in the field. That said, I never felt any sense of discrimination whatsoever during my student days at Yale. I had mentors who were famous economists. My interests were very mainstream in macroeconomics and international which was Yale's main strength at the time and faculty really supported me. I had wonderful mentors and received a lot of support in the job market so in that sense I have no complaints whatsoever. My first job was as an assistant professor at Harvard though in 1971 and that was a completely different story. When I went there I was the only woman on the faculty and I found it very lonely and discouraging life. I guess I felt it was an extremely, as you can imagine, very competitive, sink or swim environment. It was very much a publisher-perish situation. I understood that almost all assistant professors perish and I expected to be one of those and I was really completely on my own in terms of doing research and I had virtually no one to talk to or to work with which was not a very, an atmosphere that I would say is very conducive to success. I wouldn't say it's discriminatory but it certainly was a situation that wasn't conducive to success. I think if anyone had asked me at the time that I think I had a fair shot, I would have said, yeah, everybody's on their own and I have as good a shot as anybody and if I don't get it it's completely my fault but after I was there for about three years another woman was hired on the faculty and lo and behold what happened was that we immediately became close friends, started talking about one another socially and started talking about work, started working together over the next few years. We wrote seven or eight joint papers and both of us ended up getting tenure not at Harvard but at other places and I guess when I look back on it, it seems to me that this was a pattern that what I recognized is that being in a tiny minority and not having a network and not having people that you can hang out with and form research collaborations with that often research collaborations are very important to success in economics and those collaborations don't form just because two people happen to share common intellectual interests and decide we'll get together. It comes out of a social network going out for drinks after a seminar, meaning socially talking about work and beginning to work together and I think that was a serious disadvantage and is for people who find themselves in minority situations. So in terms of have I experienced discrimination, I don't think I would exactly call that discrimination but I would say that in many ways the culture and the environment is not conducive to the success of women and minorities when they find themselves in small numbers. It's really hard to hear these stories and particularly from you, Kaila, that's still going on. I think too often we think this is a problem of a bygone era and it's not given what you're sharing with us today. You know, we're sitting here in Washington, D.C. in a place stones throw from the Capitol and the Federal Reserve and the White House and I was wondering maybe we'll reverse come the other way on the panel this time but how different is it in the policy world versus academia? Is there any sense that it's a little bit easier to navigate some of these challenges in one world versus another? I know Nina, you were sharing that just harrowing story of what happened when you came to the policy world and tried to get in development economics but maybe you two could weigh in a little bit on some of those similarities and differences. Do you want me to start off? Or do you want to begin? I don't really think I know the policy world much in D.C. anymore. I mean, I think one of the big issues in the academic world is that the work is nonstop. That it's all day and pretty much every day but I don't think I've had enough experience in the policy world to really be able to differentiate the two. So Heather, I think my sense is I'd be hesitant to generalize about D.C. There are different pieces of it and they operate differently. So I've spent many years at the Federal Reserve and one of the things we found actually Brookings recently did a survey of economists in the federal government. There's better representation of women and minorities in the federal government and one of the things that the American Economic Association survey showed is that there's a higher sense of satisfaction and less feeling of marginalization and discrimination among women and minorities who work in the federal government although it still exists. It's less pronounced than in academia. And I think the contrast I see is that academia is an environment where you're expected to be entrepreneurial to go off for five or six years or whatever you have as an assistant professor to write a lot of papers to become famous, to figure out how to do that. And it's very much publish or perish and you're evaluated at the end of say six years and it's either up or out, you get tenure or you're gone. And in the meantime, at least in my day and I think it's still true, you don't have annual evaluations. When you're evaluated it's almost all research oriented to some extent teaching at least being able to succeed as a teacher is probably a constraint. There's people don't evaluate you on how do you interact with others unless there's something utterly egregious your role in mentoring students or how you interact with students and faculty whether you're attentive to diversity and inclusion. These are things that aren't discussed. You know, let's say economics is famous for example especially academia for a seminar culture that is very aggressive and hostile. Certainly there are seminars where you would be lucky to get through your very first slide without interruption in which you explain what you're gonna do and it's not uncommon for somebody to interrupt in slide number one and to say, I just have to tell you that you've asked the wrong question and you're looking at it the wrong way and you've not even succeeded in laying out what you're going to do. And often there are extremely aggressive typically men who are responsible for that culture and also individuals who don't behave that way and see that that creates a culture that is hostile and makes it difficult for anybody but particularly women and minorities to succeed and to feel valued and they won't say anything. They realize it's not the way it should be but they don't say anything. And it's just people don't interfere with other people and tell them your behavior in these seminars the way you're treating people it's creating a hostile culture. It's a culture in which academia in which that wouldn't be done and it's in department chairs, well they weren't departments. They're members of departments and these are things they tend unless something rises to really being a very serious problem not to attend to. So let me now contrast that with what I saw at the Federal Reserve which I would regard as a workplace that takes diversity and inclusion much more seriously and is much more systematically attentive to thinking hard about how to create an environment that will promote diversity and inclusion and will be supportive. It's an environment which there are human resources professionals and who are thinking much more systematically and regularly about the environment, surveying it in the same way the AEA does taking climate surveys. There are annual reviews and feedback on performance at the Fed yes it reviews economic research and the quality of policy analysis but also looks at interactions with colleagues ability to communicate how will people work with and mentor others that they work with. There are groups that meet routinely to think about whether or not there are practices or a culture that's impeding the progress of women and minorities. There's active focus on mentorship, there's succession planning and in succession planning a focus on what does our pipeline look like is it sufficiently diverse. Would women and minorities be able to fill positions that could come available with it, have a chance to rise and if people aren't ready there would be discussions of what do we need to do to make sure that these people have the experiences that will prepare them to fill those roles and conscious thought about how do we need to develop people and give them the leadership and training that they need to succeed in this organization. So to me that difference in kind of management of groups of professionals and systematic thinking about diversity inclusion it actually makes a difference and of course still the numbers and experience there's more to be done. I said Washington it's not all the same and you mentioned policy jobs where people work all the time. Let me just say another important aspect for women is work-life balance and the Fed thinks seriously about how can we promote the careers of very promising people who have responsibilities that can't be 24-7 in the office. How do we make those success in that possible? There are other parts of Washington I worked in the White House. The White House is a completely different environment. It's 24-7, it's aggressive, it's competitive, there's a ton happening. The culture is extremely macho, it's extremely aggressive and even in administrations that have placed high, very high priority on making sure that senior positions are filled with women and minorities. Still the culture is one that I would say is not terribly supportive of success for those groups. Well that was pretty diplomatically said I think. Janet Yellen doesn't tweet to our knowledge from that. Yet, yet, but no I was struck by what you said. I mean there's been such an abundance of studies and basically data and evidence coming out in the last two or three years, people sharing their personal experiences to try to enlighten the field of economics that there is a problem. And it feels like there's been an acknowledgement that there is a problem. Just in the last few weeks I guess graduate students have been going to seminars and taking an iPad and sort of recording and taking notes on how the female versus male speakers are white versus non-white and whether who gets challenged on that first slide and they're building an actual data and evidence to show that just what we know anecdotally is happening across the country with women and people of color getting challenged on the first slide a lot more often than white men. But I guess let's turn the conversation to potential solutions. What do we do about this? It feels so daunting to try to make change on so many of these issues and we've talked both about many of you have mentioned mentors and how important colleagues and mentors have been to you being an economist today or on the path to being an economist. Others have talked about the different types of research ideas and questions that are asked when different types of people are in a room. We've talked a little bit about hiring practices and how important structuring a hiring practice can maybe be to getting a different type of pipeline or looking at different candidates. So I'm wondering there's so many different initiatives going on but maybe each of you could sort of touch on two or three that you think are really momentous or maybe that we need more people need to be trying and doing. Maybe we'll start with Kayla and the Sadie collective among others. So yes, so in summer of 2018, Anna Pukulajiman as well as Fanta Troye approach me with the idea of starting a conference exclusively for young black women who are interested in economics, which was an opportunity that I was eager to help them be a part of because I'm also very passionate in making sure that this space is diverse and also inclusive. So I worked with them last fall to put on our first annual conference which we were able to host at Mathematica Policy Institute here in DC and we also were able to garner a lot of support on Econ Twitter, we were able to raise a lot of money through just networking with economists on there to put on our first event which was pretty successful. We had over 100 attendees present. We had people come from over 30 plus institutions and we're excited to put for our second annual conference this February at Urban Institute. Yeah, I think that there are a number of really important initiatives going on within the profession and some have been going on for quite a while. The summer program, for example, and there's a mentoring program for people who are graduate students, there's a program, it's called DITE that is for junior faculty from underrepresented groups to ensure their success through the tenure process. That's a program out of Duke University that was initiated by Sandy Darity and Rhonda Sharp. I'm working on an AEA task force that has outreach to high school students and undergraduates and this is a newly formed task force so we're just getting underway. I'm on a subcommittee with Anne Owen who is at Hamilton College and so we are looking at curricular issues because I think our sense is that the curriculum is often off-putting to people from historically excluded groups in the United States. Another issue or initiative that I was involved in that I have been involved in is that I organized a summer conference that brought together economists to look at issues of importance to communities of color in the United States. I brought together economists from the National Economic Association in the American Society of Hispanic Economist and so it's a research conference that's held during the summer and increasingly we've also focused our attention on the concerns of indigenous communities so I think that's one way that I've been trying to increase these initiatives within the profession. Well, I'm involved with the American Economic Association's initiatives in all of these areas and you've mentioned the mentoring and the activities of the committees on women in the economics profession, minorities in the economics profession that have long run mentoring programs. We have a new standing committee on the status of LGBTQ individuals in the profession. You mentioned the task force, Nina, that you're serving on a new task force to attempt to attract more women and undergraduates into the field and I see Amanda Bayer sitting here. She's running a task force, another new task force, I think is very important on best practices in the profession that's trying to look very concretely in different areas that we're involved in from running conferences to conducting research, working with students, hiring, promotion. What are best practices? What are the things that work? What's a real set of suggestions for things that individuals can do that will promote diversity and inclusion and I think the recommendations have recently been disseminated now on the AEA website and I think they're well worth looking at. We've hired the AEA for the first time as hired in an ombudsman who is available to help AEA members deal with episodes, incidents of sexual harassment or violations of the code of professional conduct in the context of AEA activities and one of the things that this ombuds person can do is accept reports from individuals, anonymous reports of instances in which there's harassment experienced and if the ombudsman receives multiple reports about a particular individual from a number of people while being very careful to preserve privacy and anonymity, the ombudsman has the possibility if the individuals want of identifying them to one another, sometimes an individual doesn't wanna press charges or undertake actions against someone that they feel has harassed them if they're the only person but when they realize that they're one of several that motivates action and so on all these fronts, the AEA is really trying to step up what it does to deal with harassment and discrimination. Thank you and we're about to open it up to the audience for your questions and feedback and just before we do, we've touched on a lot of different initiatives that are underway that are very powerful but what I find as a reporter when I go out and ask economists about what's going on in economics and how we make change, particularly maybe people who are more male or white, I often get a lot of support for yeah, we could do more mentoring or we could do more conferences that seems low hanging fruit but when you really ask about should we have a quota or how are you gonna be held accountable if still there's fewer than 1% of black females in your department or in your field, then you start getting the feathers up on some people then you get some, well we don't need to go that far these sorts of things so I'm curious to hear from this panel, I was struck hearing Christine Lagarde from head of the IMF now incoming head of the European Central Bank say in a 60 minutes interview she just did that she had a rule when she was at the IMF that she instituted that she refused to attend a meeting where she was the only woman. She felt that she needed to take a stand like that and some have suggested to the AEA that maybe they should ban the manals, the all male panels at their conferences just to try to really for a couple of years or a year or two to try to make a statement and again sometimes there's pushback on this notion that's a step too far and so I'm curious to hear from you all is there a role for some of these sort of very tangible quotas do you think or would you prefer to stress other initiatives? So yes I do think having quotas would help to create a more even playing field in terms of creating more spaces for women and minorities to be invited to different panels as well as to rise up in different leadership positions. However, I do think that moving forward as future generations come along that we need to make sure that all economists are in accordance with the importance and the value of having more diversity and not necessarily creating people, not necessarily creating quotas but just having, making sure that everyone is aware of like why diversity is beneficial in the first place. So I don't know about the quota. When I think about a quota, I think about a cap and then in terms of panels or representation I think it depends on the particular issue but I would look at it differently in terms of hiring practices because what I think works what I think worked in the past was affirmative action in terms of diversifying the profession probably from the 70s into the 90s affirmative action was really effective. So it's a really good thing that I am not a diversity officer at any college or university because I would impose a hiring freeze and the only departments that would get money are those departments that use money for initiatives tied to inclusion for people who have been historically excluded and you would be shocked at how many departments suddenly would start hiring more women and men from underrepresented groups. So that's affirmative action. So well I guess I'm not in favor of hard and fast quotas. I do think setting some sort of numerical floor for inclusion can be a practice that encourages a lot more reflection and attention to try to achieve for example, diverse seminars and meetings. So and maybe Christine Lagarde's rule that you mentioned of not participating in anything with as few as one is not bad, not a bad rule most of the time is a floor. There's an interesting article that appeared in the newsletter of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics profession by Justin Wolffers and David Romer. They ran Brookings Panel on Economic Activity for a number of years and they described that when they took it on, they self-consciously decided that they really wanted to increase the level of diversity in Brookings papers and so it's certainly an informal guideline for them was no manals and so at least one but hopefully more than one and they described that keeping track numerically and setting a floor forced them to be much more self-conscious in thinking and certainly when it came to discussants, they were very careful not to ever have situations where there were only male discussants and paper writers, they tended to think about their friends, people they knew and that led them typically in the direction of men and being much more self-conscious about wanting to achieve diversity and trying to hold their own feet to the fire did improve the level of diversity, it made them think about different topics to have about broadening the agenda of what they included in Brookings papers because sometimes to achieve greater diversity, they realized that women and minorities worked in areas that hadn't traditionally been covered and that resulted in improvement and so I think this numerical guidelines, I wouldn't want to call it hard and fast quotas but it's not a bad idea. All right, we're excited to hear from the audience, we have some mics that are going around if you could raise your hand and then state your name and affiliation if that makes sense. We're going to try to take maybe two or three questions or comments and then have the audience respond or the panel respond. Thea, why don't we give it to you? Hi, so Thea Lee, the EPI. So I want to push the panel a little bit in terms of when do we get beyond the just like barely scraping by and not having all male panels and how do we get to the next level where we have both a critical mass and intellectual critical mass but also the kind of energy and dynamism that comes from having a truly engaged set of economists who are looking at a whole different set of issues and I think we're trying to do that here at EPI, we brought some new people on board, we're really excited about that but that it's beyond just sort of like limping along and not being terrible but being great and being amazing and showing that a diverse economic profession actually is going to ask and answer a whole different set of questions. So that's what I'm looking forward to for the next stage and I'd love to hear all your views on that. Right, there we go. Hi, I'm Helen Sonnensche, I'm a retired economist and have gone through much of the activities or the responses that has been mentioned. I particularly want to ask about the culture that you had talked about because I had experienced it so often. In the culture, there are a couple of issues. One that's so dominant is male interrupting females constantly and in fact, I thought we were beyond what I've read in the paper just a couple days ago where Bob Woodward was interviewing the authors of a book on Me Too and he continually interrupted and of course it was just one on one but there was an audience and the audience contained a lot of women who suddenly started erupting with don't interrupt her and the interruptions stopped. Related to that is the question of how many women does it take to whether it's in a panel or in a meeting or whatever to change that culture just because of the presence of women. I think there was a study not too long ago about how many women there would need to be as percentage and another one last item about culture is the issue of ignoring women who might raise their hand, might have a question and so forth and if they get their question answered then somebody comes up to them and I've had this happen to me many times. Why do you ask so many questions? Well, those seem kind of related. Maybe we'll pause there for a second and see if Nina, do you want to jump in on this notion of how we push it to the next level in changing the intellectual discussion in organizations? And again, it goes back to the point that I made initially where we need to embrace diversity of thought in economics and stop marginalized heterodox perspectives within the profession. I mean, think about the irony of the sessions last year that occurred in January in Atlanta and there was all this buzz about gender and women and at the same time the one association in the profession, International Association for Feminist Economist that is devoted to studying gender disparities and issues that affect women throughout society and in the profession was very much concerned about having their sessions cut by the American Economics Association. We have a lot of work to do within the profession in terms of embracing diversity of thought and that is tied to, I think in terms of your question, the outreach issues are essentially curricular issues at the undergraduate level and also the high school level. The economics curriculum is very unrealistic. It tends to not reflect how the world actually operates. It makes problematic and that's putting it lightly, problematic assumptions about women, about men of color, about discrimination. So we need to start there. My son who is in 10th grade missed ninth grade economics and so I worked with him over the summer with an online program and I was really shocked that there were so many really terrible statements that were made in the online course and it was boring. That's another problem. Economics is really, really boring, I think, in high school and sometimes in college treatments and so he gave it about 5% of his attention and he aced it but had absolutely no interest in it. And so we need to make it more interesting. The typical economics class consists in college of white males who tend to speak with authority on subjects even when they know very little about those subjects. And so I think that that is intimidating to a lot of other people. Why take an economics class in that environment where a class that doesn't reflect your lived experiences when you could take a really interesting public policy course or sociology course? So that I think is a big part of the problem and the long-term solution is tied to changing the thinking and the curriculum within the profession. And Janet, what about an organization's outside academia? How can you get that going, sort of going from good to great within the organization? It's... Well, I think the constant focus is leadership from the top on making diversity and inclusion important and explaining why it's critical to the success of the organization and then systematic focus, assessment, follow-up. In a place like the Federal Reserve, I mean, to take the second question about seminars and what can you do about people interrupting in a place like the Fed, and we've done this at Brookings too, you see that this is happening, that a hostile environment is being created in the culture and the person running it can simply say, no, this is not something we can tolerate. We're not going to accept this kind of thing. We're gonna monitor it. And I think this wouldn't happen in a university, but it certainly can happen in a place like the Fed that say, no, this is a really poor practice and we just won't accept it. We're gonna have a rule that the first 10 minutes the person has to be allowed to speak. That's great. Kayla, actually, I was just thinking in what they were saying about have you felt the freedom to be able to suggest different research tracks and ideas that you wanna pursue or does it still feel like, sometimes people say, why do that? Do something more traditional? So for me, luckily, I have a great network of supporters to help me throughout my professional journey. So as Dr. Banks mentioned, the AEA program is a great source of professors and just a community of individuals who really care about advancing diversity in the cause and who also are very receptive to my ideas and just generally we're just helping minority students navigate the econ profession. Let's get some more questions. We have two up here and then we'll head towards the back. Hi, I'm Kari Harris. I work at Merrill currently, graduated from Morgan State University in 2018 as well. One thing that I think is common among the comments is that there's this idea of regulating diversity and inclusion, but as far as long-term impacts, I think, is there any talk around creating value with diversity and inclusion rather than trying to regulate diversity and inclusion so that there are more long-lasting impacts of what it is everyone's trying to do? Hi, Erica Payne, founder of the Patriotic Millionaires. I have sort of a gossipy question for you, Janet, which is I remember seeing the Time Magazine cover of Larry Summers, Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan basically setting themselves up as the Holy Trinity during the time that they were in the process of making decisions that helped destroy the American financial system. And it doesn't seem to have tempered Larry Summers' arrogance remotely, but be that as it may, you and Brooks Lee Bourne were both very assertive in your views and challenging them on the actions that they were taking. And I can't imagine, but that there had to have been gender dynamics in that, or if there were, I'm just curious of the inside view of how that went and how you felt. All right, it feels like we have to address that one. Should I start? Let me try that one. Well, I have to say at the time, one of the things that I noticed was, as you mentioned, there were three men on the cover of Time. The fit vice chair at the time was Alice Rivlin, who was a formidable and impressive person in her own right. And I will say even at the time, it really bothered me that it was not a for some. And I regarded that frankly as a slight to a person. I have always held in the absolute highest regard. So I don't think I really spoke up at the time as forcefully as I should have in retrospect about what was happening. I was, you referenced Brooks Lee Bourne and various things that were going on with respect to financial deregulation. I think Brooks Lee was 100% absolutely correct about her concern about derivatives and the guys there really clobbered her. And I will say I watched that, I wasn't a principal, but I watched it and in retrospect, thinking about it, I definitely feel there was an element of what is this little woman think she's doing telling us guys in the industry that we should be doing things different. There was some substantive concern there, but I do think that there was definitely an element at the time of sexism in that. And Kayla, do you want to answer the question about how do we get beyond, I thought it was beautifully phrased regulating diversity and do you want to address? So I think that with diversity in economics, one thing to just state that diversity is important and try to have diverse people are part of your organization. It's also important to make sure that those individuals feel valued in that space. And I think that moving forward in order to a really advanced diversity that economists need to be more insightful about whose research that they're citing and Dr. Banks point about making sure that the right person is being cited for their research is very important moving forward as well as in the academic space for professors if you do notice students in your classroom who are female, who are black and brown to make sure that you see them, that you encourage them to think about studying economics as well as recommending that they take the quantitatively demanding courses that's needed for an economics PhD program as well as just making sure that students have mentors available to them. Because one thing that my mentor, Dr. Cook, also says, always says is you cannot be what you cannot see. It's important that students of color have mentors they can see and they know from early on what economics is and what kind of work economists do to make sure that in the long term we not only have just more people in these spaces but making sure that they can contribute and actually feel as though they have a sense of value in their field. Great, some questions at the back. Okay, sure. My name is Ben Gadgelor. I'm the Center for American Progress and I had a question about terminology. It's directed to Nina. You had mentioned you were talking about affirmative action and how that's helped out and you said it helped out women and men of underrepresented groups. Can you explain why you said that? Oh, thank you. You've been following me on Twitter, right? So there are... One of the problems, and this is why I focus on issues of inclusion rather than diversity, again, because I think that diversity is so broad that the people who have historically been excluded, we call them historically underrepresented, but that term also I think has been applied incorrectly to lots of different populations. So historically excluded is more accurate and gets to those four populations that I'm describing, but the other issue is the way that we describe the groups of people, the women, all of these populations of women and men who've been historically excluded, sometimes it's framed as women and minorities and the problem with that terminology is that it implies that women are white, right? And so I try to be very careful by saying when I'm talking about the historically excluded groups, women, because that includes all women, and then men, so I said women and men from underrepresented groups, right? Or I would say women and men of color. And I think that's a more inclusive way of talking about those populations rather than saying women and minorities. Thank you. Everybody says women and minorities, but I think that we need to have better language. Thank you, powerful point. In the back, I think the microphone is there. Hi, everyone. My name is Brikisha Sams and I work at Pew and I'm also a master's student in applied economics at George Washington. And my question is related to, is a PhD the only path that folks can take to make a difference in the economics community? Because I think a lot of times we focus on educational attainment, but we only think a PhD can make a difference. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on folks like me who are getting a master's who don't really want to be in academia but also want to make a difference in the economics community. That's a great question. Maybe we should pause there and then Nina or Janet, you want to weigh in on that? You know, I'm in a world where economists have PhDs, but I know that there are many economists with master's degrees in the policy world. And in fact, I think that in the policy world that it's very common for people to have a master's degree as a terminal degree who are doing a lot of research. Well, I would just add that, well, there are certainly a set of jobs like those in economic research at the Fed that absolutely require a PhD that in the policy community and people working on the hill and think tanks and nonprofits, a master's in economics or a master's in public policy is very good background to make a contribution. A lot of government agencies, Treasury hires, many people who have master's in public policy, international affairs. You could also be national economic council head, right? The last few have not had PhDs. Maybe some more comments here. I'm not sure where the microphone is, okay. Hello, how do y'all? I'm Catherine Edwards. I'm a former EPIRA and now an economist at the Rand Corporation. Very nice of you back. Thanks, EPI for hosting this. The Council of Independent Colleges released a report with NORC that looked at what were the undergraduate institutions that had the highest yield ratios in terms of taking an undergraduate major and turning them into a PhD. And they found for women and men and underrepresented, I don't remember how to say it, but the right way to say it that for getting PhD STEM women, the best institutions were historically all women's colleges. And for getting PhD STEM people of color, the best institutions were historically black colleges and universities. So we talk about inclusivity and how important it is, but it does seem like exclusivity is a key part of the production process. So how do we weigh and balance that? Hi, my name is Susanna. I dropped my economic studies from Atlanta to move to DC to organize restaurant workers. And I do love your question. You were studying the Masters about how to do more work without seeking a PhD. And I really kind of want to respond, like, you know, I'm doing a lot of like labor organizing and like my interest would be labor economics. But my question is, I didn't think I was gonna be called on, but I'm gonna speak this into existence that I will work at EPI, whether it's in 10, 15 or 20 years. However long it's taken me about seven or eight years to work on my degree, I'm 25. And I'm still a sophomore. Everyone has their timeline, you know, but sometimes being working class where your parents can't afford your tuition or it's too expensive for you and you're trying to avoid student loans. What kind of support systems can women, specifically someone like me, Latina, immigrant queer, what kind of support systems can we find during our studies? You know, there's a lot of, I hear a lot of the struggles and bias and harassment discrimination for women in economic spaces. For those of us trying to still enter those spaces, what kind of support systems can we find? I'm still kind of figuring out how to go back to school while I'm organizing. But otherwise, I'm just in awe of y'all and everyone here. But what kind of support systems can those of us still studying or trying to go back into studying find? Thank you so much for sharing and speaking out. I think in many ways those two questions work together and this concept of how do we build those support networks that seem to be in place in a lot of women's colleges and historically black colleges just to build that network. Kayla, you're the freshest on the lines right now. What advice can you give? Yeah, so to address your question about what kind of support systems are in place, I would definitely recommend you look into applying to the American Economic Association summer training program. So it's a program that I actually was a part of twice and the program is being held currently now at Michigan State University and the program as Dr. Banks also mentioned has been very integral in being an initiative that's been very intentional about getting more minorities within the economic space. The program has been going on since the 1970s and I don't have the exact numbers but I do know that a lot of the current African American and other minority economists have matriculated throughout their program and what the goal of the program is, it helps to expose minorities to the rigor of graduate studies and economics. So when you do have time to enroll in school, again I really hope that you do and I really hope that you can figure everything out and I really do applaud you with sharing your story and being very candid and open and honest about your struggles and I do hope that you eventually go back but if you are able to attend the AEA program from that experience you'll definitely learn more about what graduate school looks like in economics as well as you'll be able to meet individuals who really care and who are really invested in your success and you're also able to meet a network of students alongside with you who are interested in studying economics and the program is also designed for minorities as well so you'll be able to meet people who look like you who are of interest in economics as well. Excellent advice from Kayla and if I were there I would give you a hug, you can make this, you'll make it. And I am a proud alum of the AEA summer program, I went through it back in the late 80s and I'm also a proud graduate of a women's college. I am a firm believer in women's colleges and I would hope that my second son will go to an HBCU. I think that those environments provide an education that is so important because young people are able to learn in an environment that is supportive, it's intellectually rigorous, it's demanding, but it's also very supportive and they don't have the type of intellectual or perhaps emotional or even physical or sexual assaults that take place at other institutions. So it is, I'm looking at you, but somebody over here, sorry, asked the question. I think that those are really important and I wasn't aware of that study but I think intuitively I knew it. It had to have been the case because women's colleges empower women and so when women leave women's colleges, they go to graduate programs more often, at least in the past, compared to women who go to co-ed schools. Maybe a couple more comments. I'm gonna stand up just so I can see you. I'm Alisa McBride, I'm with AFSCME and represent public service workers around the country and I'm curious to hear if the profession was more inclusive of women and men from underrepresented constituencies. What would we be learning more about or hearing more about in terms of the content of economics, both in the press and so maybe we can hear from our moderator on this as well as in terms of academic papers. I'm a big consumer of wonderful economists from the EPI who support the work of union organizers and educators and leaders. So I'm curious what you think is missing from the substance as a result of the lack of inclusivity. Hi, I'm Eleanor Lacane and I was one of the first women graduates of Yale and an economics major, so. And it's the first time I realized I've been in a room with so many women economists, so thank you Thiele and Economic Policy Institute. I was delighted to learn about the great work the Federal Reserve is doing to cultivate women economists internally. That's awesome. And also that the AEA has a task force on building on best practices. So I'm wondering, obviously, if Federal Reserve is doing great work, EPI has done great work. And you know, Thea and the wonderful women here in this panel, I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about how do we identify those best practices and bring them throughout government and academia so the next generation of women don't hit all the obstacles we've been hitting. And was there one more hand up yet? Let's get one more. You're the last one, so. Hi, my name is Jasmine Foske. I'm an economist at the Department of Homeland Security. A little higher. Hi, so I'm very excited to be here. I wanted to say thank you, first of all. I read recently a response from an economist, George Lowry, about having a quota for affirmative action and the unintended consequence of having a distinct perception that it creates where it's hurting the actual race relations that is trying to solve the problem. So I was curious how you guys would perceive I guess a potential solution to addressing that for women specifically. And in addition, one other question just curious, how would we attack the bias that exists towards economics as a field in general? I don't know if you guys have encountered this at all in your experiences, but I've noticed that there is a misunderstanding, I think which stems from the curriculum and the introduction that people experience in school towards economics and the importance of it. Well, we have a lot of different issues to tackle there, from how does the discussion change in the room and the research agenda change as we have different perspectives, how do we make sure the next generation, 20 years from now we aren't, or even 10, we aren't having the same discussion we're having, we have to have today. And then two more at the end there on the unintended consequences of quotas. And you're right, the bias towards economics, I mean, after the Graver session, there's a sense that a lot of quote smart people got us really, really wrong. And I think you're right, we get letters to the editor along those lines, why are you even quoting so and so anymore? Because they clearly messed us up so much. So maybe we'll go down the road, but everybody can kind of pick and choose which question you'd like to attack or address. Maybe we'll start with Janet and then go backwards. Well, on the first question of what's missing from research because of the paucity of women and minorities, I would say work on the labor market that say focuses on important issues like the earnings gap, the gender earnings gap, discrimination and equality, work in the home, families, children, healthcare. I think those are all topics in issues and development as well are examples of topics that would receive more attention than they do with greater representation of women and minorities. And I think even within fields, the focus might be different. I saw an interesting study recently about medical research and it looked at patents. And what it found was that patents where women were the inventors more often focused on female diseases and patents where men were the inventors tended to focus on male diseases. And so even within a given field, just the choice of questions, what's salient to you, what seems important, what attracts your attention? Even within given fields of economics, the focus would likely be different. On the issue, you said of best practices and how can we figure out what they are? This task force that Amanda has headed is really trying to come up with concrete suggestions in different activities of what changes can we make in how we behave and carry out our work in different areas that would change the culture of the field and how we treat people in outcomes. And hopefully, I mean, the AEA will be holding sessions at the upcoming meetings on best practices. We would like to stimulate a conversation broadly in academia among economics departments. I think I said earlier economics departments typically don't focus very much on these topics that people go off and do their own research thing, but attempting to generate an environment where there's more systematic attention and there are a list of concrete practices that faculties can discuss of things they ought to be doing to promote a more inclusive environment and monitoring and assessing their performance against those benchmarks I think can be helpful. I guess what I would add to that, maybe a shift in some values, the value of cooperation for example, I think that women are more likely to focus on issues of distribution of resources, so to bringing different assumptions to the table rather than the assumption of scarcity. If I look at my own work, and it's very different from the work that other people are doing, I look at as a feminist economist unpaid work, but because I'm African-American, I focus on the community. So I think that's an example. And then to the question of affirmative action, and I think it was a question about resentment, I don't worry about resentment because the resentment is already there. So I, right, and the goal then is to have a critical mass and affirmative action is always forward-looking in terms of the next generation. So you get the critical mass and it benefits the next generation. So I guess that's my answer. So to address the question about the best practices for increasing diversity, so as former chair Yellen mentioned, Dr. Amanda Bayer is currently in the room and she has a website diversifying economics which with a bunch of great advice and tidbits about how to make sure that we can move forward in promoting diversity in our respective institutions. And then to address the question earlier about the unintended consequences of enforcing quotas. So I do believe, I do agree with you that in some instances it can cause tension among some members of the profession. I do think that it'll be important to have also some sort of diversity training moving forward, maybe in more formal settings for economists to make sure that, as I mentioned earlier about, not only should diversity be important just for show, but also make sure that those individuals feel valued in the field. Thank you so much. We're about out of time here. So for final thoughts from the panel, as I was talking to a female economist of my generation, I'm in my mid-30s, a bunch of them texted me this morning. I said, what should I ask? And I was really disheartened how many wrote to me and said, I'm seeing fatigue on these issues in my organization. There's been this crescendo earlier this year that we're gonna address it, and now people are sort of sick of hearing it. And I thought, oh, you're gonna be kidding me, you know? And so I'm just, maybe we can end on an inspirational note. Sort of, what keeps you going? Well, how do you kind of, what keeps you excited to be in this field of economics and be addressing these issues? And I'll just say, personally, this is also an issue in economic journalism. And I would say, myself, some of the things I've started, we just started a group for economic journalists. If anybody's in the room who is an economic journalist, we're having our first meeting in two weeks. And we're very excited to support each other and get together. Another thing we do, I go to the Federal Reserve Press Conferences and I tweeted this summer that for the first time ever there were four females sitting in the first row as economic journalists asking the Chair of the Federal Reserve questions. It's never happened before. So trying to show people that these milestones are happening and my boss won't like this, but I'll say it. I mean, I personally had to write an email to my organization to stress that in our own department, diversity was going backwards, not forwards in hiring. And we have three open positions and many of the younger reporters were hoping that that would be changed and be a part of the process going forward. So you have to speak out on these issues. You have to kind of make the change happen even if it's not there in every way you can. And I would just note to those who are asking about what can you do with a master's in economics? I have a master's in economics or financial economics, so please become a journalist even if you don't want to become a full PhD economist. But anyway, final thoughts from the panel. Thank you so much. Yeah, so for me, what keeps me going is my passion. I know that economics is an area that I'm really interested in learning more about and it's an area that we can really make a difference, you know, as minorities in terms of helping to ask more informative policy questions. And for any young students in the room who are interested in economics or may be watching online, I just would say that even though economics can be harder sometimes, it can be very rewarding. And I just would encourage you all to seek mentors and just have a good support system to help navigate this profession. Let me start by saying that it's not, they are not experiencing diversity, fatigue, it's diversity, backlash. And what keeps me going is that I love the work that I do. I love my job, I adore my students, I have very supportive colleagues. And I think that the work that I'm doing is really important so it's easy to keep going. Well, and I would certainly second that. I think economics is a fascinating subject with enormous policy relevance. It's been for me and so many people I know a terrific career. It's kept me wanting to get up every morning and work on problems that I think have the greatest relevance to human welfare. I have not the slightest regret for going into economics and would urge others that it is a wonderful career that can really make a difference to the world. And as far as work on diversity goes, I feel excited that we're at a point where our efforts are beginning to take off. I know certainly the American Economics Association has become increasingly focused on this. We feel a charge of energy may be coming out of the Me Too movement that I think is energizing. A lot of change and a lot of desire to improve the situation. And I don't feel any myself, any sense of fatigue or see that in the people that I'm working with. Thank you so much to our panelists. And can Dr. Baer stand up so people know who, thank you, yeah, to come. And thank you to EPI. We invite conversations after the panel ends. Thank you.