Leaders of the American Economic Association, economics’ largest professional organization, vowed to step up efforts to curb harassment of women and minorities after fresh complaints reignited criticism of the profession in the past year.
(Bloomberg) — Leaders of the American Economic Association, economics’ largest professional organization, vowed to step up efforts to curb harassment of women and minorities after fresh complaints reignited criticism of the profession in the past year.
“The issues that we’re talking about this morning are just simply fundamental,” said Christina Romer, president of the AEA and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is the overwhelming issue of our time for our association.”
Romer, speaking Friday at the AEA’s annual meeting in New Orleans in a panel co-hosted by the organization’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, said the association plans to conduct its second survey about harassment within its ranks by the end of the year. The AEA also plans to start offering bystander training to help those who witness or are aware of harassment report it, she said.
“We are committed to making more progress,” Romer said, adding that harassment hurts victims as well as the discipline at large.
Late last year, several economists shared accounts of sexual and professional harassment on social media, often without naming their accusers for fear of retaliation. The AEA added Friday’s panel to its conference agenda in November following uproar over complaints from some economists that changes implemented by the association in the past few years haven’t done enough to discourage the behavior.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Nobel laureate Philip Dybvig is facing an inquiry by Washington University in St. Louis about allegations of sexual harassment by a former student.
The profession grappled with harassment at the AEA’s 2018 annual meeting and adopted a new code of conduct following it. After conducting a survey that found that nearly half of all female economists reported having been discriminated against because of their gender, the association adopted procedures for investigating violations of its ethics rules.
Since then, fewer than 12 official complaints have been made, Audrey Anderson, an attorney working with the AEA, said. The AEA’s sanctioning powers are limited to revoking membership, barring individuals from leadership positions within the organization and from receiving awards. It cannot fire its members from their jobs at universities, the government or private institutions.
“We started off with the sense that maybe we could really make a massive difference in terms of the number of cases that came forward,” Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair who was president of the AEA in 2019 when it implemented the ethics measures, said on the panel Friday. “What we have learned is that it is a very difficult problem and that the AEA, unfortunately, has fewer powers and fewer resources than many other possible adjudicates.”
Bernanke, speaking to the panel virtually, said the harassment problems are intertwined with the profession’s low representation among women and minorities, and its culture. He added that a number of new programs, including ones that mentor young women and minorities, have not had much of an impact on representation.
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