Does Economics Make You Sexist?

That is the title of a new paper by Valentina Paredes, M. Daniele Paserman, and Francisco J. Pino, to be presented at the forthcoming AEA meetings:

Recent research has highlighted unequal treatment for women in academic economics along several different dimensions: promotion, hiring, credit for co-authorship, and standards for publication in professional journals. Can the source of these differences lie in biases against women that are pervasive in the discipline, even among students in the earliest stages of their training? In this paper, we provide direct evidence on the importance of explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduate students in Chilean universities, among both entering first-year students and upperclassmen. The survey elicits measures of implicit bias, explicit bias, and gender attitudes. We document that, on a wide battery of measures, economics students are more biased than students in other fields. There is some evidence that economics freshmen are more biased already upon entry, before exposure to any economic classes. The gap becomes substantially more pronounced among upperclassmen, in particular for male students. We find evidence of an increase in bias in a limited sample of students that we can follow longitudinally. A significant part of the gap between economics and non-economics students can be explained by differential exposure to female professors.

Work through here is the top link is failing you.  I would note by the way that gender relations in Chile have a reputation for being especially…bifurcated.

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