Summer 2017 reading list

Looking for some compelling beach reading? This month we’ve compiled a list of recent prominent papers that we’ve been itching to dig into all year. The papers listed below touch on issues related to women in the workforce, and some specifically address women in economics. Taken together, these papers illustrate the breadth of recent work explaining gendered outcomes in the labor force and demonstrate the many channels that may contribute to the gender earnings gap.

For each paper we've included a brief summary, and for the CSWEP Annual Report we’ve highlighted the key takeaways. Happy reading!

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Can Women Have Children and a Career? IV Evidence from IVF Treatments
Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug, and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen
American Economic Review, June 2017

In their June 2017 paper, Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug, and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen estimate the causal decline in women’s earnings due to childbearing. The authors use in vitro fertilization (IVF) outcomes as an instrumental variable to identify the effect of having a child on women’s earnings. This novel approach yields strong results that show significant and persistent declines in the earnings of women for whom IVF is successful.

Recognition for Group Work: Gender Differences in Academia
Heather Sarsons
American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, May 2017

In her May 2017 paper, Heather Sarsons shows that female economists up for tenure receive less credit than their male peers for coauthored work. Tenure rates are similar for male and female economists who have mainly single-authored work (conditional on the quality of the work), suggesting that the gender bias arises when there is uncertainty about the contribution of members of a group.

Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability
Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart
American Economic Review, March 2017

This March 2017 paper by Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart uses survey and experimental data to document that women are more likely than their male colleagues to accept a task that will not benefit them in terms of being promoted, but that needs to be done for the sake of the workplace. For example, in an academic setting, women are more likely to take on roles in the faculty senate or departmental committees, whereas academic economists show common agreement that increasing hours spent on research would be more beneficial to the individual. This finding has implications for the gender distribution of power and promotions in the labor force.

Bargaining, Sorting, and the Gender Wage Gap: Quantifying the Impact of Firms on the Relative Pay of Women
David Card, Ana Rute Cardoso, and Patrick Kline
Quarterly Journal of Economics, October 2015

Using data from the Portuguese labor force, David Card, Ana Rute Cardoso and Patrick Kline investigate the role of firms on the gender wage gap. The authors look at two complementary ways in which firm payment practices or policies may contribute to the gender wage gap: 1) sorting effects (i.e. women working at jobs that overall pay less to employees), and 2) bargaining effects (i.e. women bargaining lower salaries within a workplace relative to their male peers). Overall they find that through the combination of these channels, firm-specific employee-payment practices explain about one-fifth of the gender wage gap in Portugal.

Women and Power: Unpopular, Unwilling, or Held Back?
Pablo Casas-Arce and Albert Saiz
Journal of Political Economy, June 2015

In their June 2015 paper, Pablo Casas-Arce and Albert Saiz show that a gender quota implemented in Spain’s electoral politics improved the electoral outcomes for parties that were most affected by the quota. Their results employ a triple difference research design and suggest that female underrepresentation in electoral politics is a result of agency problems that cause party leaders to behave suboptimally.

Report: Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession
Shelly Lundberg
American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, May 2017

This May, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) released their annual report which includes the 2016 Annual Survey documenting the historical advancement of women in Economics. This report gives a thorough and broad overview of the gender distribution in all stages of economic education and academic careers. Notably, the report states that:

• “[T]here has been little progress in increasing the representation of women in economics during the past decade, with the female share of PhD students and assistant professors remaining essentially constant and a continued lower probability of advancing to tenured associate professor for women, relative to men.” (pg. 759)
• “In the face of the growing representation of women at the baccalaureate level, the stagnation of the share of women in entering PhD classes means that entering PhD students represent a declining fraction of new baccalaureate women. This latter decline is no doubt rooted in the analogous decline in the fraction of women undergraduates who major in economics and may in part stem from the way we teach economics at the undergraduate level, as stressed by Goldin (CSWEP Newsletter, Spring/Summer, 2013).” (pg. 771)
  
• “Over the last decade, the proportion of women receiving their PhDs has been almost exactly the same as the proportion of women entering PhD programs six years prior (Figure 3). There is evidence of attrition from graduate school into academia, however, as women’s share of assistant professors is on average 10 percent less than their share of new PhDs (Figure 3).” (pg. 770)
• “Over 40 percent of the full-time female faculty in Top-20 economics departments are in non-tenure-track positions.” (pg. 771)

Additionally, the CSWEP Annual Report states that the “[the committee] plan[s] to make department-level longitudinal data available to individual departments so that they have this information to determine appropriate steps to achieve gender equity in their student and faculty populations,” (pg. 771). This would be an important addition to the already impressive 44 years of collected data that the CSWEP has on the composition of economic faculty.

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Authors: Fiona Burlig and Emily Eisner