‘It Was a Mistake for Me to Choose This Field’: A Survey Lays Bare the Experiences of Black Women in Economics

Years ago, as a graduate student, Lisa D. Cook received some of the best advice of her budding academic career — while tramping up the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Cook had been paired with another hiker, a British economist. Up until that point, Cook, who is now an associate professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University, had studied philosophy and liked wrestling with big ideas. She’d started pondering, in her writing, why some countries are rich and others are poor. But she also liked data and was a quantitative person. Those interests — the broad questions and the hard numbers — felt at odds.

Her hiking companion gave her a solution: Become an economist.

Today, Cook remembers that advice vividly, and not just because she received it on the tallest mountain in Africa. The guidance stood out because it was so rare.

As she visited campuses in the United States to discuss pursuing a Ph.D., she met current graduate students who told her she wasn’t prepared, who asked her to perform mathematical problems at dinner or, once, to read aloud from a canonical textbook. After she left those places, she reflected. She didn’t know if the behavior was deliberate. But as a black woman in mostly white spaces, Cook said, the message she took away from those behaviors became clear: We want to actively discourage you, and possibly humiliate you.

Decades later, it can seem like the needle hasn’t moved. According to the results of a climate survey that leaders of the American Economic Association called the first of its kind for the organization, which were released in September, 62 percent of black women reported experiencing racial or gender discrimination, or both. That was the highest percentage of any racial group. “I would not recommend my own (black) children to go into this field,” wrote one respondent. “It was a mistake for me to choose this field. Had I known that it would be so toxic, I would not have.”

Recent headlines have shed light on the field’s inhospitality to women. What’s acknowledged less often is how antagonistic the discipline can be for black women in particular, who face the dual, often intertwined, burdens of racism and sexism. The AEA’s climate survey is a welcome admission of the problem, Cook and her mentee, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a research scholar in economics at Harvard University, wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

But acknowledging the problem is one thing. Now, they wrote, economists and institutions must tackle it.

The Birth, Not the Murder

In 2017, a disturbing paper made waves. Alice H. Wu, now a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard University, mined posts made on the anonymous economics message board. Words most uniquely associated with discussions of women, Wu found, are terms like “hotter,” “lesbian,” and “pregnant,” and crude expressions referring to female anatomy, The New York Times reported.

Then, in 2018, news broke about a prominent Harvard economist’s alleged sexual harassment. He was later suspended for two years, and lost his research lab, the Times reported.

As conversations about power and gender privilege percolated, the American Economics Association created a couple of ad hoc committees to explore creating a code of professional conduct and then to make further recommendations about improving the professional climate for women and minorities. That committee recommended undertaking a climate survey.

Not everyone agrees that a survey will make much of a difference. People have been talking about and working toward fixing these problems for years. And data already existed about how many black women were studying economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

But the climate survey could offer more analysis of what people’s experiences were like inside the discipline. “We had the birth,” Cook explained, “but we didn’t have the murder.”

The survey was first sent out in November of 2018, and received 10,406 responses from current and former AEA members — a 22.9 percent response rate. Black women, the survey found, reported taking the most measures to avoid possible harassment, discrimination, or unfair or disrespectful treatment. Examples of those measures included not accepting admission at a particular grad school, avoiding a conference, not continuing research in a particular field, or changing the content of a class you teach.

Twenty-nine percent of black women said they’d encountered discrimination when it came to promotion, and 38 percent said they’d encountered discrimination when it came to pay.

Written feedback corroborated the stats.

Open any undergraduate macroeconomics textbook, one survey respondent wrote, and look up structural unemployment. Race won’t be listed as a reason, the person wrote. “Why do textbooks ignore it? Because economics is dominated by people who have little concern about the consequence of racism, and people who have the concern are excluded.”

“I’ve noticed that white scholars can publish articles that do not cite black scholars or scholars who’ve published in ‘non-major’ journals,’” said another respondent. “But, black scholars cannot get away with not citing an important paper by a white scholar.”

“The majority of my students are white students,” said another, “and some of them still (in my opinion) have a problem in seeing a Black woman as an expert/authority figure.”

For Opoku-Agyeman, the survey results weren’t exactly shocking. She knew the landscape and had co-founded the Sadie Collective, an organization dedicated to equipping and empowering black women in economics and related fields.

But they confirmed for her what senior black economists had been telling younger folks: “You’re going to face some stuff.” To an alarming degree.

‘They Knew Nothing Else About Me’

Opoku-Agyeman had already faced some stuff. Before arriving at Harvard, she was intrigued by economics and found community and mentorship at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The university received a $1.3-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to establish a pipeline of underrepresented students to pursue doctoral programs in economics.

But at one point, Opoku-Agyeman, a math major, approached a lecturer to ask him about the steps to earning a Ph.D. in economics. According to Opoku-Agyeman, he told her, “That’s too hard for you.” He discouraged her multiple times, she said, including in front of fellow students.

Cook was Opoku-Agyeman’s mentor, and when she heard about the interaction, it broke the professor’s heart. That’s an attitude she recognized from 30 years ago and saw once again in the survey responses.

Cook, too, had faced some stuff. Lots of it. She was raised by parents who were committed pacifists, who desegregated basically every space they occupied in Milledgeville, Ga. Her local skating rink wasn’t open to black people until 1980, Cook recalled.

In a way, Cook says, she’s glad for the experiences because they helped her filter out the “noise” while trying to advance as a black woman in her academic career, in order to pry open the door for the next underrepresented student or economist to fit through.

She found personal success. But she wishes people wouldn’t say, “‘Well, you’ve made it, so everything must be OK.’ No. I’ve had extraordinary training in nonviolence … This is not the kind of preparation that one should have just to enter the economics profession.”

“It should be as easy for us as it is for other people,” she said.

Right now — as the survey makes clear — it’s not. Ask black women why, and their perspectives vary. But a common thread is an experience of being ostracized from vital parts of the discipline.

Cook said she’s met people who question her achievements. There was a period, she says, when it seemed like every other person at AEA and National Bureau of Economic Research meetings would ask if she was a sociologist. “They knew nothing else about me. They just saw a black woman.”

Belinda Archibong, an assistant professor of economics at Barnard College, said at a scholarly networking event, she was once mistaken for a server.

Robynn Cox, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California, said she was once targeted by an economics-conference employee. The employee, who registered Cox the previous day, followed Cox and pulled her out of a presidential session she was chairing and interrogated her about not having her name badge on. Cox said she had to plead with the employee to present.

“Economists study behavior,” Cox said, “but somehow we forget that those biases and beliefs impact our interactions with people.”

Andria Smythe, now an assistant professor of economics at Howard University, said that as a student, certain topics, like inequality, were rarely broached in her classrooms. None of her professors were black, Smythe said, “so I never felt a comfort level even approaching my professors and saying, Hey, why is this missing from the curriculum?”

Later, Smythe, who grew up in Jamaica, taught at a liberal-arts college in Lynchburg, Va. Little things stacked up. She couldn’t find a hairdresser or the food she liked to eat. To exist, “I had to give up so much of myself,” she said.

Then came Charlottesville. In 2017, while white supremacists rallied in Virginia, Smythe was visiting family in Baltimore and had to drive back to Lynchburg. She worried about what could happen if her car broke down in an isolated stretch.

Smythe said her non-black colleagues were always very supportive. “But I didn’t know how to say, Guys, I’m literally scared to drive back to campus.”

She eventually left for Howard. In the classroom, Smythe said, she immediately felt lighter. The students weren’t different. But she was. “For the first time, I feel like I belong,” Smythe said. “And there’s a difference between fitting in and belonging.”

‘No Fault Of My Own’

How much the clearer picture of black women’s experiences in the discipline will actually alter the discipline itself is an open question. As some of the survey results indicated, just inquiring about diversity provokes backlash.

“Devoting any time or attention to ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘climate’ is a ridiculous ‘politically correct’ waste of time,” one survey respondent wrote.

“As a white, male researcher, I already experience the flip-side of affirmative action when my applications for some positions don’t stand a chance through no fault of my own,” wrote another.

There are people who fundamentally do not believe that systemic barriers exist in the discipline, Cox said.

For those who do, the survey provides nothing new because the data was already out there, said Rhonda V. Sharpe. Sharpe, who founded the nonprofit Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race, examines pipeline data. In 1998, she found, about 1 percent of economics doctorate degrees went to black women. Twenty years later, that percentage had dropped to 0.4 percent. For undergraduate degrees, black women have hovered around 2 percent for two decades.

We didn’t need the AEA climate survey to tell us how black women felt, Sharpe said. “The pipeline has been telling you that for years.”

For its part, the AEA has already made some changes, like adopting a code of professional conduct, forming two task forces, and funding an ombudsperson who fields reports of harassment and discrimination. Marianne Bertrand, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who chairs the AEA standing committee that administered the survey, said she wants to repeat it again in four to five years.

Cook said that putting actual numbers to the discrimination and harassment faced by black women could make a big difference. After the Times op-ed ran, Cook said that people emailed, called, and tweeted at her. People poured their hearts out — people who felt heard for the first time.

“Everybody keeps saying we’re missing, and increasingly missing” from the profession, Cook said. Looking at the survey results, she said, “Well, now we know why.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.