{"id":12477,"date":"2019-12-11T07:58:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T07:58:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themint.kinsta.cloud\/?p=12477"},"modified":"2020-02-15T14:15:40","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T14:15:40","slug":"proper-gander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/proper-gander\/","title":{"rendered":"Proper gander"},"content":{"rendered":"

Girls are low in numbers. Nigella Vigorosso-Heck demands a recount.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last month the Economist magazine published an article entitled Sample Bias. It argued that women \u2013 and particularly schoolgirls \u2013 were \u201cshunning\u201d economics and that gender diversity in it was still problematic. The Royal Economics Society\u2019s (RES\u2019s) new Discover Economics campaign was hailed as a game-changing moment that would widen the pipeline into the profession.<\/p>\n

I have a problem with this narrative.<\/p>\n

The RES campaign is laudable. But it is symptomatic of a gender evolution in economics that is already well underway rather than a game-changer in and of itself. If anything, the RES is turning up quite late to the party.<\/p>\n

Discover Economics is a new three-year campaign, launched by the RES in October 2019. According to its website, the campaign aims to:
\n\u25a0\u2002broaden the appeal of economics to potential students;
\n\u25a0\u2002change their perceptions of economics and economists; and
\n\u25a0\u2002increase diversity among economics students. Women and state-educated students are currently under-represented among undergraduates and A-level students.<\/p>\n

The current iteration is just a website but there are promises of a great deal more substance to come. To be clear, I, and others who teach economics to teenage girls, welcome this project. I wasn\u2019t at all surprised by the data from this summer\u2019s A Level exams that showed that A Level economics is male-dominated. Boys are twice as likely to study economics than girls and there are only three other subjects (Further Maths, Physics and Computing) that have a wider gender disparity in favour of males. That\u2019s a fair reflection of most co-ed schools that I know of.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s look at the gender gap. It is almost always explained by saying that girls just don\u2019t like numbers.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, this does not convince me that schoolgirls are \u201cshunning\u201d the subject. In 2009, there were 6,827 female candidates for A level Economics. Ten years on, in 2019, that figure has risen 40% to 9,599. While the gender ratio has admittedly stayed relatively constant, girls are definitely not shunning the subject, they are actually showing up in economics classrooms much more frequently. In my school, we are seeing a year-on-year increase in the number of girls wanting to study economics.<\/p>\n

So what is going on?<\/p>\n

Firstly, let me try to explain the dismal science\u2019s rise in popularity. Economics is the fastest growing A Level subject of the past two decades \u2013 so much so that schools are struggling to recruit economics teachers (see previous article). The two biggest spikes of growth occurred in 2008\/09 and in 2016\/17. My belief is that schoolchildren (girls and boys) look to economics as the subject that would help them understand the world better in these times. The Great Recession and the Brexit vote dominated media attention, and they continue to dominate media attention; economics, they thought, had the answer.<\/p>\n

Secondly, let\u2019s look at the gender gap. It is almost always explained by saying that girls just don\u2019t like numbers. Table 1 is often used as clear evidence of that assertion: it shows, for example, that girls are far more likely to take courses in the social sciences and arts than the quantitative subjects. But we need to be careful here. There is a long history of academic literature that has tried to separate the \u201crational differences in preferences between gender\u201d from \u201csexist mumbo-jumbo\u201d. <\/p>\n

In my experience, girls aren\u2019t afraid of numbers. They outperform boys in every maths metric there is at school. Instead, I think there is something more subtle going on. <\/p>\n

The Economist was right to point out that most teenagers associate economics with money. And when they are asked to draw an economist, they will draw an older man in a suit. This shouldn\u2019t really be a surprise. The great forefathers (note even my use of language) of economics were old men in suits. To be more precise: they were old, white, rich men in suits. As a direct result, the subject was shaped to reflect the sorts of questions that old, white, rich men in suits were interested in answering: questions about money and personal wealth. Economics is associated with money because it has been about money almost all its life. <\/p>\n

But that is changing.<\/p>\n

When schoolgirls look to understand the world better today, they don\u2019t have to listen to old, white, rich men in suits anymore. Until recently Richard Lipsey and Paul Samuelson wrote our textbooks. Today, Wendy Carlin\u2019s Core Economics is the new default textbook at university. She put income inequality in Chapter 1 \u2013 not supply and demand. <\/p>\n

\n\u201cSchoolgirls can finally see their own passions and interests being discussed by female economists in print, on TV and social media.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tim Harford\u2019s Undercover Economist is no longer most teenager\u2019s first foray into popular economics. Over the past few years, I have seen Dambisa Moyo\u2019s Dead Aid and Kate Raworth\u2019s Doughnut Economics name-checked in more university application personal statements than any other author.<\/p>\n

Even the Economist magazine itself has its own female editor in Zanny Beddoes who is shaping the public discourse to reflect more social liberal values. She is quoted in her first interview in the role as saying that \u201cwe don\u2019t want to be the grandpa at the disco [any longer]\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is my view that schoolgirls can finally see their own passions and interests being discussed by female economists in print, on TV and social media. Consequently, the subject isn\u2019t just about old, white, rich men and their money anymore. It already has a wider appeal and that will lead to gender gap closing in the future.<\/p>\n

Having said all of that, I am not advocating complacency. As I have already said: the RES\u2019 contribution to the wider appeal of economics is welcome – as is Rethinking Economics, Economy and, of course, this magazine. There is still a lot of work to do (as can be seen above). But let\u2019s give credit where credit is due.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe credit for greater female participation in economics should go to the female economists themselves.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The credit for greater female participation in economics should go to the female economists themselves. At a time when the head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, and the latest Nobel Prize winner for economics, Esther Duflo, are all female, schoolgirls finally have influential role models to inspire them to study the subject. The RES, I\u2019m afraid, is already a bit slow on the uptake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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