So, yesterday, Mr. B and I went to George Washington University (Motto:so that’s what a $60,000-a-year cafeteria looks like!) to hear one of my favorite economists, Dr. Tyler Cowen talk on a number of topics. You may recall that I’d reviewed his book earlier and pretty much hated it, which was the reason I hid my face in the audience the whole time, serial-stalker-like. In person, he is extremely amiable and can talk about a great deal of topics at length. Questions ranged from what he thought of the financial crisis (“everyone got overexcited,”) to why his ethnic dining guide was so popular (“It’s not. I keep it just for me,”) to why gold prices are going up, to why eating at restaurants is like sex, to why we should be surprised there isn’t more war in the 21st century. That’s how his blog works, and that’s how Dr. Cowen pretty much works, too. It was really cool to see a blogger I respect in person. Also, he’s married to a Russian woman, and given that I know a bit about the species myself, I give him mad props.
What really intrigued me the most, though, was the audience breakdown of his lecture. Given that it was on a college campus, I did expect a lot of people to be students, and given that it was sponsored by the Local Libertarians, I did expect a lot of it to be guys. But the amount of women in the room was extremely surprising:
and, later on even startling:
I’m wondering why the amount of females was so small? And what does this say about the Internet as a whole? More importantly, what does it say about me that I’m willing to skip out on Happy Hour to listen to explanations of the financial crisis?
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Ok, I have a few questions:
1. How do you extrapolate from a lecture in economics to the whole web? Especially in web communities, which blogs are and from where many non-economists know Tyler Cowen, for instance, women are the dominant gender. According to a headline today ‘men are showing signs of fatigue’ on the web. This fascinating infographic illustrates that difference too: http://bit.ly/caDmwq
2. How does the ratio of men to women at the event compare with the ratio of men to women in the economics stream in GWU? To the economics stream in other universities? In business settings in general in the US? I attended several AEI and other think-tank/ lobbying group meetings/ talks when I spent a summer in DC. I did not see many women there either and women my colour almost never.
3. Am I right in reading that you are expressing concern about the ‘talent pipeline’ for the future? The latter does bother me. We hear the stats about how women are now the majority in law/ medicine/ science and then we see ratios of the kind you mention at events and in board rooms etc. Is this a shift in how business might be done in the future (no old boys’ clubs, because old girls decide it is ideal to work and then go home after work) or just a sign that exclusion may continue and power imbalances, never mind the pipeline may persist?
And I think you mean ‘number’ not ‘amount’ of women; the latter conjures images of women in a heap somehow… :-/
1. I was being somewhat sarcastic, but I think not entirely incorrect, because the lecture was advertised on Marginal Revolution, meaning that at least a portion of the audience had to have come from there. If you know Tyler Cowen, you know he is an economist, and ostensibly would come to hear him talk at least a bit about economics. This signals to me that girls (at least at the university) are not interested in listening to economists speak. I don’t know what kind of advertising was done for the event, which may have also something to do with it. I extrapolate it to the internet because, it is my feeling (not based on any concrete data) that the majority of sites I enjoy (with the exception of personal/family-related blogs are read mostly by men. I.E. Marginal Revolution, Reddit (extremely hostile to females in general), any business blog, etc. It would be interesting to do an empirical study.
2. This would also be interesting to find out. I know that, once I started getting into upper-level classes, women started becoming significantly less, although not as drastic as the drop for Mr. B’s engineering classes (maybe 1 or 2 girls, and in computer science classes my friends had, 0.) Even though I know lots of great women in economics (my coworkers, Milena Thomas, Jodie of Economists do it With Models,) even as I look around my workplace,all of the advanced economists are men. I would say that economics isn’t as drastic in ratios because it does have a humanities aspect which draws women, but only one of my actual econ professors was a woman.
3. Yes. I am pretty concerned about it.
1. That explains partly why most non-Indian men think I am a guy. :-/ I don’t try to correct them because on occasion, when we meet in person, the expressions on their faces are priceless. I think a few weeks ago, there was a Copyblogger post about how a woman took a male pseudonym and saw her web related income rise. Not saying that is common but of interest anyway.
2. That says something at once sad and amusing to me about the state of women’s advancement and the perception of western countries in India (I can only talk of my birth country) and vice versa. When I read engineering and an MBA finishing in very early 1990s, a quarter of my class was made of women. With a couple of exceptions from the MBA class, all women have built strong careers and raised families. On a broader level in India, more banks (traditionally a male preserve anywhere, and in London, notorious for misogynistic associations) are run by women than anywhere else in the developed countries. When I started out in the IT industry there were few women in ‘management’ but the story on the technology side is totally different. Exactly the opposite of the ‘humanities’ thing you mention. I am aware that many million women in India remain in a poor state in many ways. So could it be that there is a bell curve of aspiration and achievement? And you at the leading edge will never see the bulging middle? A working hypothesis if there can be one?
I have only one question:
Were the women in the room piled into a heap, or poured into a glass?
Or did you perhaps mean the NUMBER of women in the room, and not the AMOUNT.
/grammar rant.
Snap!
That’s what I said at the bottom of my first comment 
“Amount” can be collocated with countable nouns if the noun refers to a group or a unit. That’s semantics, not grammar, because grammatically there’s nothing wrong with using any given quantifier at its particular position within a sentence.
Froylein, I’d like to see your source for that.
Semantics, Semitics, whatever…
How about one of the major dictionaries or the Longman Language Activator?
Never heard of Longman, but all my dictionaries (Oxford, Merriam Webster, etc.) support my stance – “Amount” is only for items that cannot be counted or considered discretely. Just as you can’t have 5 waters, you can’t have a large amuont of women.
You can have five waters if “waters” refers to individual beverages and not a substance just as much as invertedly, “amount” can refer to a group or unit of otherwise countable items / people. The current editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam Webster’s, the American Heritage Dictionary and the Dictionary of Current English Usage should tell you as much.
Yes, exactly my point – you can have five discrete containers or quantities of water. If you order “Five waters” in a restaurant, you are implying the container (a glass). Without the container, the construction makes no sense in English (although not so in Inuit).
To refer to an “amount” of discrete, countable things is similarly inaccurate.
It’s not inaccurate if the countable things are referred to as a group or unit. Vicki’s introductory line to her observation “90% men and me” shows she’s referring to a unit, not a number.
Froy and Tzipporah, please be my book editors
Point taken on the amount issue. Don’t think it’s necessarily wrong. I think you can definitely ask for 5 waters and not have it mean anything more than 5 bottles or glasses, it’s just won’t sound as good, which looks like what happened here.
Vicki, it’s prefectly ok to use amount in this context; even when you order five waters, you don’t order the containers but the water. The semantical emphasis is on the matter, not the quantifier, in all languages of predominantly Germanic origin (just as you get a “slice of bread” and not a “bread slice”; the quantifiers are interchangeable to a large degree except for much / many).
Don’t you love it that the really hot debate topic on a gender/economics post is about grammar? (yeah yeah, semantics, whatever)
OK, no, seriously, the issue you’re seeing could be a result of the discipline’s training weeding out non-hegemonic interpretations. For example, if you’re in an Econ PhD program and you want to bring in anthropological, sociological or psychological perspectives to inform your research, you’re gonna get slapped down.
The thing is that women, more than men, are going to see social phenomena in a larger context in which those perspectives are necessary to understand what’s going on. Standard (Chicago-school) economists are still saying things like, “No Shit! Apparently dueling wasn’t irrational!” http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/dueling-for-your-supper/
And I see that my comment there asking if economist had ever heard of anthropology or sociology has been deleted. (Shakes head)
I think the men in Economics departments need to keep up. Elinor Ostrom, the only woman economist to win a Nobel is a political science academic who was recognised for her work on economic governance. They can hide their heads in the sand but multidisciplinary approaches is where it is at. Or is it a lesser Nobel because a woman won it? :-/
Well, we know that as more women move into a profession the pay goes down. So maybe it’s good for Vicki, salary-wise, that she’s in a male-dominated field.
Tzipporah, that’s an interesting point about pay going down as more women move into fields that I could see being true. It might be better for me salary-wise, but I still don’t know what I make compared to similar male colleagues :\
Econ is all about multidisciplinary, especially with areas like behavioral economics and game theory. Unfortunately if you combine something like anthropology and economics, as Tzipporah said, you might be looked down on.
Here’s an additional data point for you: According to my Facebook Page’s Insights thingie, my fans are 83% male, which is roughly in line with what you saw here.
This is great data. Thank you. Perhaps the title of your blog is skewing it?
Honestly, I believe that most people reading econ blogs are male. Although maybe we should have a female group or something of econ bloggers, even though female groups are often described as “ghettos” by those who see females in professional groups as limiting.