The economics department at Yale University is participating in a national activism push to encourage women to enroll in undergraduate economics programs.
The “Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge” is a national campaign funded by the National Bureau of Economic Research to raise awareness about the underrepresentation of women in the field of economics. The website for the program claims that it aims to “promot[e] an inclusive community within the field of economics, particularly for women and other underrepresented minorities in the discipline.”
“This question of how to get women into the field and how to treat women in the field is something that is being very heavily debated right now, and I think it’s hugely important,” Claire Goldsmith, an economics major at Yale said. “It’s something I’m really excited and hopeful for, that this research, this larger challenge and the debates being had right now will make [economics] a more accessible and open field for students in the future.”
“Most undergraduates, when they come to campus as freshmen, don’t have a clue what economics is,” Claudi Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard explained. “Males want to major in it more than females even before they know what economics is because they take their cues from what they read in the paper, what they see on television and what their parents and their relatives tell them, and generally, that isn’t good information.”
There is currently no push to reverse the wider gender imbalance that exists in academia. Women have earned almost 10 million more college degrees than men since 1982. Since that time, women have earned the majority of associates, bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. As of this year, women make up the majority of American law students.
“Where men once went to college in proportions far higher than women—58 percent to 42 percent as recently as the 1970s—the ratio has now almost exactly reversed,” the Atlantic reported in August.
Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute offered this analysis on the issue in 2013:
Just as a thought experiment – imagine the public reaction if the educational degree imbalances of 4.35 million bachelor’s degrees and 9.7 million college degrees overall favored men, and not women? I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that a college degree imbalance that large in favor of men would be considered a “national crisis.” College degree disparities, when women are over-represented, never seem to be much of a concern. And with those enormous gender imbalances in higher education favoring women, do we really need hundreds of women’s centers on college campuses all over the country, women’s only study lounges, and female-only campus housing for STEM degrees?
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