Author: ekfletch

I am an independent researcher on issues of gender, labor, violence, education, and children.

2014 CSWEP Mentoring Breakfast

Calling all junior women faculty and job market candidates:

The 2014 CSWEP mentoring breakfast at the ASSA is back! This is a fantastic event, and I really encourage women on the job market to attend as well as junior faculty. There’s always a really interesting crop of big name and successful economists who are willing to discuss everything from publishing to tenure. Plus, breakfast!

Details below:

CSWEP is pleased to host two mentoring/networking breakfasts for junior economists at the AEA/ASSA Meetings from *8:00-10:00AM* *on* *Friday, January 3, 2014* *and Saturday, January 4, 2014 in the Philadelphia Marriott Grand Ballroom, Salon D.*

Senior economists (predominately senior women) will be on hand to provide mentoring and networking opportunities. Junior economists are invited to drop in with questions on topics such as publishing, teaching, grant writing, networking, job search, career paths, and the tenure process. Junior economists who have completed their PhD in the past 6 years or graduate students who are on the job market are particularly encouraged to attend. A light continental breakfast will be provided.

The event is an informal meet and greet affair in which junior participants are encouraged to drop in with questions on topics such as publishing, teaching, grant writing, networking, job search, career paths, and the tenure process. Senior economists who have committed to attend at least one hour of the breakfast are affiliated with institutions such as MIT, Duke, UCLA, NY Federal Reserve, UC-Santa Barbara, UC-Davis, UC-Santa Cruz, Maryland, Kansas, Agnes Scott College, University of Virginia, Yale, RAND, Princeton, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Rutgers, Tufts, Washington University in St. Louis, Iowa State, Tennessee, George Mason, Dartmouth, University of Warwick, UT-Austin, Brandeis, The Wharton School, Michigan, Stanford, Wesleyan, Colgate, Boston University, Marshall, Notre Dame, Missouri-St Louis, and Indiana.

Space is limited and pre-registration is required.  Send an email with the subject heading “CSWEP Mentoring Breakfast” tocswep@econ.duke.edu <mailto:cswep@econ.duke.edu>, containing your name, current institution and position title, research field interests, and your PHD year and institution. Also indicate your preference for Friday or Saturday’s breakfast, or your willingness to attend either morning. Priority will be given to junior faculty and graduate students on the job market.  Priority will also be given to registrations received byDecember 18, 2013.  CSWEP will confirm registrations on December 19, 2013.

Thank you for your assistance informing junior colleagues about this opportunity.

Best regards,

Marjorie McElroy, CSWEP Chair

I was on the news!

Having spent some time working as a journalist, I’m not used to being the one sought out for expertise. On Thursday, the local news asked me to answer a few questions about the minimum wage. Despite the initial nerves, it was kind of fun. I don’t think they picked my most eloquent quotes, but here is the web story.

Thanks to Dan Lally for finding it for me before I was willing to search and to EPI for some last minute cramming.

Women and work and the stalling of a drive toward equality

Phillip Cohen of the Family Inequality blog has a piece in the Sunday NYTimes about women’s labor force participation over the past half-century. I’d quote from it, but there are too many things. I say just go read it.

He also mentions Sarah Damaske‘s new book, For the Family?: How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work,
which I promptly ordered (and think you should, too).

AEA Registry of RCTs mini-review

It’s hard to read a paper these days related to development economics or health interventions without an RCT. Ideas for RCTs pop into my head on at least a daily basis. The focus on causal identification and answerable questions in the field means that RCTs are all the rage, and the American Economics Association wants you to know that they’re all in support of it. To do their part, the AEA sent out an email last night about a new registry for RCTs, which is likely overdue. Clinical trial registries are common in other fields, in fact, the US government hosts its own, and it seems to work much better than other government websites that have been getting attention lately.

I searched both registries for “domestic violence”. Clinicaltrials.gov gave me 84 trials in various stages of recruiting, in progress, and completed, most of which seemed relevant to my search, although not all will have easily testable social science implications. The great thing about registering social science RCTs is that you know they’re designed with social science questions in mind. My search of the same terms on Socialscienceregistry.com found me three studies, of which only one was relevant, but I’ll cut them some slack for inviting AEA members to contribute only recently (I also happen to know that not many RCTs addressing domestic violence have been done). A similar search on intimate partner violence brought up a lot of studies referring to research partners. So, the search function is a little slow and very clunky, which will only get worse as more studies are added, but I do think it’s a good idea, overall.

Random thoughts on gender and professorships

I was recently privy to a discussion among some new faculty about what to have students call you, where “you” is a young, relatively freshly minted Ph.D. and new professor. There were lots of varying viewpoints, many of which I’ve heard before, ranging from “women just can’t have their students call them by first names and maintain distance and respect” to “I felt so much more comfortable when my professors let me call them by their first name and I went to office hours, so I let my students call me by my first name,” to “I like the ego trip that comes with being called professor so-and-so.” The gender issue is one that is particularly sticky and I’ve discussed it with many female colleagues at every stage of their careers. I come down on the side of staying Professor Fletcher until a student graduates. Having been subject to lovely gender- and age-based attacks such as “my male professor in another course says everything you’re teaching is crap,” and “you’re unprofessional” has only heightened this resolve.

During this discussion, one colleague framed the answer to this question in a way that I thought was incredibly insightful and a great use of his privilege, as a male in the classroom, to even the playing field. He said that a female member of his doctoral dissertation committee had told him under no circumstances to allow students to use his first name. The reason, she said, was that she couldn’t, and so he shouldn’t.

It seems rather simple, but I’d honestly never thought of it. Given the differential treatment women often face in academia, male professors exercising the privilege of letting students use their first names and subsequently seeming “more accessible” is actually a detriment to women’s careers. Another female colleague, who is up for tenure this year, told me that she felt that being hard on her students early in her career had hurt her student evaluations, and thus her chances for tenure. Though she doesn’t like to make such distinctions and would never say it, that’s a conversation I’ve never had with a man.

I do think it’s getting better, but until it’s actually better, we should all do our part. And having everyone be addressed the same way is a good way to level the playing field.

As a side note, the New Faculty Program through the Center for the Integration of Learning, Teaching and Scholarship at Lafayette College is pretty great.

Job Listing of the Month

Perhaps it’s because I’m a bit simple minded, but I never fail to be amazed by globalization. My favorite job listing from the November JOE is for openings, three to be precise, at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. The best part is that it’s so matter-of-fact. There’s no need for qualifiers, just “competitive pay” and an “annual research grant”. Wouldn’t it be so simple?

On the Wisdom of a Job Market Candidate Wiki

I wrote last year about EJMR’s foray into the world of journals and article publications and thought the idea was pretty neat. Having a repository for information on journal publishing times, response times, decisions and more, all crowd-sourced, could provide a useful set of information for would-be submitters to certain journals. In theory, if the information were correct, it could even prompt users to avoid journals with slow response times, which would in turn encourage those journals to step it up.

Transparency’s kind of cool.

I was less enthusiastic about EJMR’s Candidate wiki but EJMR keeps surprising me. One of the things that Economics prides itself on as a discipline is our centralized (read: “we’re so efficient”) job market. Ads come out in the JOE the first every month. In January, we hold our national conference and search committees hold interviews with candidate who made their shortlist. Flyouts happen in January, February and into March, hiring completed by early Spring.

In reality, it doesn’t happen this way for many candidates. There are other sources of job advertisements for one. But more than this, the last few years have seen a lot of bottlenecking at the top of the candidate pool. “Star” candidates get tens of flyouts and offers for jobs they don’t intend to take, but keep those schools waiting and thus the market clears very slowly. In addition, the uptake in web-based application systems has proliferated, making applying both relatively easy–once you’ve done the work of setting up an account and uploading–and extremely annoying–as you’re setting up your fifteen millionth account. It’s this really weird mix of efficient and entirely the opposite and likely skews the number of jobs people apply to.

Given our obsession with efficiency, I’m not surprised to see EJMR get into the job candidate wiki game. One poster took the entirely predictable economicky defense: “I’m pretty sure a reduction is search costs is welfare-enhancing in virtually all matching models, from micro theory to macro-labor,” but plenty of others were worried about the potential for sabotage. EJMR doesn’t have the greatest reputation, but I wonder if this is part of trying to make itself a little more legit. I can definitely see the appeal from the demand side of having a number of top candidates in place. Since it’s a wiki, it’s never going to capture anyone, but a lot of the top schools seem to have candidates posted and it will likely grow. I’m interested to see where it goes.

Preliminary Regression Presentations

I am more than halfway through my seventh time teaching something called Econometrics or Quantitative Research Methods or Applied Statistics or whatever you’d like to call it. I’ve taught it now at a few different levels, each requiring more or less work, more or less writing, more or less math, more or less me being totally overwhelmed by grading.

This semester, I am not having students blog. Instead, we’re taking more in class time to discuss readings. The other big change I made is that instead of having students turn in their preliminary regression results last week, I had them make five-minute presentations to the class. It was an experiment and it was one of those experiments that made me feel like a teaching God. I can’t recommend it enough (based on my sample of 18 students, but only 1 cluster (class)). Presentations are great because you can grade them as you go, but additionally, they allowed each student in the course to learn from the others’ missteps. I had students fill out peer evaluations (anonymously) so they get additional feedback than just mine and they have to really understand what they’re doing in order to present it to the class.

I think they enjoyed it, too!

Marijuana and Alcohol: Substitutes, but for whom?

The push for marijuana legalization seems to be gaining steam, with even the Monkey Cage Blog asking whether pot was the new gay marriage, meaning solely that the trend lines in polling around the country were starting to cross, with a majority supporting it rather than a majority opposing it (The American Prospect denies that it’s that important, though, at least politically). The New York Times Editorial board published a piece today citing research by Dan Rees of Colorado-Denver and Mark Anderson of Montana State to support the idea that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes, which means good things for road safety.

Logic: more marijuana use means less alcohol use means less driving drunk and more driving high, and driving high is safer than driving drunk.

While it’s odd in and of itself to herald impaired driving (even if it’s in comparison to even-more-impaired driving), I’d question whether we knew all that much, in a scientific sense at least, about driving high. Surely, it happens all the time (I’m from Colorado, people, I know it’s happening and so do you), but it’s not clear that those who would drive drunk see marijuana as a substitute and thus would drive high instead. There’s been no evidence presented that the specific group of those with a propensity to drive drunk sees marijuana as a substitute, which is the key to the road safety argument.

Secondly, the Rees & Anderson paper says “there is evidence that drivers under the influence of THC compensate for these impairments. For instance, they tend to drive slower and take fewer risks.” Admittedly not having read the studies they cite, I’m curious whether these drivers are being more careful and following less closely because marijuana makes them more relaxed and in less of a hurry, or because the consequences of getting caught are higher. Legalizing marijuana would eliminate the second concern, taking road safety off the pro-legalization side. It may be that THC itself induces the behavior, but I’m not convinced by these logical leaps.

Honor Codes, Cheating and Social Norms

I spent lunchtime yesterday at a gathering of students and faculty put on by Lafayette Student Government. One of the suggested topics for conversation was the possible implementation of an Honor Code. It’s apparently an extremely contentious issue and while each member of the group I encountered had different perceptions of honor codes, one of the biggest takeaways from the conversation was that social norms, or the “culture of cheating” plays a big role. How individuals perceive the actions of their peers wields influence in how much cheating actually occurs.

Today, one of the New Yorker blogs highlighted cheating and this paragraph stood out to me:

Social norms, too, play an important role in the decision to cheat: if cheating seems more widely accepted, people are more likely to be dishonest; the reverse is true as well. In one set of experiments, psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University found that if someone had obviously cheated, by finishing a problem-solving task much more quickly than would be possible had he completed it honestly, other people in the room became more likely to cheat as well—but only if they perceived the cheater to be like them. If the cheater seemed different—in this case, if he wore a rival school’s T-shirt—students became far less likely to cheat. In the case of the Long Island students, it seems that, while relatively few students actually cheated, most were aware that it was a regular occurrence. It was a student, in fact, who first brought the alleged cheating to the attention of a Great Neck counsellor. Cheating was a known, somewhat accepted norm; little wonder that it swept through five separate schools.

We didn’t really come to any conclusions. I’ve been at schools where the Honor Code meant you had to sign something saying you didn’t cheat on each test or paper and at schools where the professor wasn’t allowed to be in the room. One colleague noted the Honor Code at another college was inhibiting to learning and trust because students would turn each other in for any kind of collaboration, even that which was sanctioned by the professor.

Ultimately, though, it was a good opportunity to encourage student government to take initiative. Any change in the culture or implementation of an Honor Code has to come from them to be credible.