Modest Proposal

Link here. I’m not sure if this is serious or a Jonathan Swift-worthy “modest proposal” designed to show the dysfunction of the current system. Later tweets suggest Chen is serious, but one can interpret the proposal either way.

It’s worse than Chen thinks. The current standard career track then goes on to 1-2 years as a postdoc, 6-10 years assistant/associate professor, often with “delay the clock” visits to other institutions or “restart the clock” lateral moves. And the current ethic strongly pressures women to delay child-bearing until tenure. It’s also hard to have children when your job lasts 1-2 years so you know you will have to move. That all adds up to a lot closer to 40 than early 30s. And freezing eggs is not magic. Fertility treatment is not guaranteed. Many women who counted on technology discover in their late 30s that biology will not cooperate.

This is a great paradox. In my time as an economist, starting in the mid 1980s, the profession has made great strides to include women. From a faintly hostile and frankly sexist view, most institutions are now bending over backwards to admit, hire, promote, and mentor women. (If you think it’s still bad now, you may be right, but you’re too young to know how much worse it was back then!)

Yet this lengthening of the apprenticeship period, and its effect on women, has gotten a lot worse. In the 1980s, an economists’ career was straightforward: 4 years undergrad, 4 years maximum grad school, 6 years assistant professor, and a pretty good chance of tenure at the first job.

This slowdown, together with the widespread norm that women will wait until tenure before starting families, is particularly difficult for women who wish to have children. As the tweet expresses. Not all women want to have children, of course. And some women may be happy delaying childbirth. But if you want more women, it helps to have more women of all types. If you can include women who want children in something like the natural biological window for doing so, you’ll get more women. If economics departments really did say, on entry to Ph.D. programs, “to all the women, it will be impossible for you to have children before you get tenure, so we have a lovely program that will freeze eggs for you,” I suspect there would be a stampede out, not in.

It would be nice if women and men shared child rearing more equally, and having children were not a “women’s issue.” Waiting for that to happen is not a short run strategy, and I don’t see economics departments putting thumbs on the scale for good dads. In fact, I saw somewhere that men were using paternity leave to write more papers without teaching, while their wives took care of the kids. For now, fix what we can. If you want women, face that having children is an important issue.

Why the slowdown? My best guess is that it reflects less demand for economics professors. We were all lucky that in the 1980s, undergraduates who wanted a generic major shifted from English and History to Economics, as those fields self-destructed. Wall Street started hiring financial economists. Opportunities in legal consulting, think tanks, Federal Reserve and other government agencies increased. All that has turned around. Undergraduates are taking computer science or “data science” instead. High tech Wall Street seems to think that machine learning will let them forecast stock returns. Tech hired economists for a while, but I generally sense stagnant or decreasing demand.

You might think that when demand slacks, wages would go down, but universities aren’t that competitive. We have reacted by slowing down the career track, as the humanities did before us. In some sense, we lower wages by stretching out the fraction of life spent in low-wage job classifications, but those jobs are also much less child-friendly.

Universities get choosier about tenure, but don’t adjust for age, and like to count papers rather than read them. It takes a larger body of publications to get tenure. Publishing is also slowing down and groaning under the weight of endless revisions, bloated papers, and internet appendices. People react with delay years during assistant professorship. Extra years in grad school and post-docs are conscious devices to pad vitas for tenure decisions, and to game university hiring which is choosier about numbers of papers also without adjusting for age. Departments got choosier about grad students but also don’t adjust for age, leading to a rat race to get more qualifications on the way in.

What to do? This is a case where coordinated effort and norm-building is useful, not just throwing up our hands at market forces.

The first generation of women in the profession have now come of age. Their courage and tenacity are remarkable. They made huge sacrifices to make it in a profession with a very male-dominated culture. Many chose not to have children at all. Others deferred child-bearing to the mid-and late 30s, often needing heroic means to do so. Some have written advice to outsource as much as possible. Hire housekeepers, shoppers and multiple shifts of nannies. All of that works for some very determined women. But if we want to be inclusive, and increase the number of women, we have to face that not everyone wants to do it that way. Without devaluing the sacrifices that the current generation of prominent female economists have made, it has to be possible to pursue our profession without such sacrifices.

Data would help. When did women in economics have children? How many do they have? Anecdotally, I have seen an uncomfortable number of women drop out for these “work/life balance” issues. Does that bear out in the numbers? The American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, runs an Annual Survey with lots of data, but I couldn’t find anything on this crucial issue. Let me know if I missed it. If it’s not there, I have a suggestion for the next survey. Is child bearing as rare and delayed as I think it is?

The answer seems pretty clear: We need to restructure the economics career track so that it is possible for women (and men) to have and rear children in the biologically natural age — mid 20s — rather than select for people who do not wish to have children or are willing to go to the extremes that long-delayed child-bearing and outsourcing entail.

(I’m also influenced by a point I saw somewhere on the internet: The easiest way to increase our overall falling birthrates is to start having children earlier.)

Once you state the question that way, the answer is pretty simple: We need to make it possible, acceptable, and normal to begin having children in graduate school. Graduate students feel harried and pressed, but I have news for them: This is the most time-flexible part of your life. Your formal obligations are just to show up for two years of classes, and then begin to write papers. When you have classes to teach and a tenure clock running, life will just get harder. A lot harder.

You will naturally have a hundred reasons why this is impractical. Yes, which is why it doesn’t happen. But they all seem fixable. Economics is not inherently more unfriendly to childbearing while working than the hundreds of other professions where this works more easily. In most academic jobs, the 3-4 course teaching load is the only fixed schedule. Academia should be a child-bearing sanctuary.

The first and most obvious impediment is that nobody else is doing it. It’s a lot easier to have children if your peer group is also having children. It’s easier to have a baby if when you go to a party, everyone brings their babies. Imagine if other people had their kids at the office for an hour or two after school. Campuses are a child-free zone. The women I know who had children in graduate school report precisely the opposite: They feel like oddballs at best and pariahs at worst.

Formal and informal support can help too. Many women I have talked to report strong advice, including from female mentors, not to have children in graduate school, to hide pregnancy from peers and potential employers. The same advice keeps going through post doc, assistant and associate professor levels. The current norm is to write lots of papers, get tenure and then have children.

But this is not a great outcome. Tenure is when your career starts. It’s when numbers don’t count any more, but quality does. It’s when you do or don’t write important and influential papers that people read and care about. It’s when you do or don’t become a leader in the profession.

Locational insecurity seems like another impediment, and a reason that economics does worse than so many other professions which are actually more demanding in terms of time and schedule. Pre-docs, grad students, post-docs, assistant professors, sabbatical or visiting professors, all know they’ll have to move in a year or two. That’s hard for finding long-term partners, and having the stability needed for child-rearing. Before assistant professor, these positions don’t offer any maternity or paternity leave, even from our bleeding-heart progressive universities that say they want to attract women!

If the career track is going to slow down, with tenure being some sort of capstone that happens a few years before retirement, then there is no reason the sequence of jobs can’t be a bit more stable.

Speeding up the career track would help. Given limited demand, that means being more ruthless at each step, weeding out who is really good and talented by means other than an accumulation of degrees, letters, and numbers of publications. But economics has gone exactly in the other direction. Graduate admissions either don’t ask for GREs, or place less emphasis on them. They value pre-doc, masters, letters, and other time intensive preparatory and certification activities instead. The tweet I started with is instructive. Now even pre-doc programs are adding certifications! (I gather that admissions committees are starting to value predocs less. They have seen a few too many letters about the best student ever.) Once in grad school, grades and tests have disappeared. Classes used to require long hard problem sets, hard final exams, and there were first-year comprehensive exams and second year qualifying exams. People actually flunked out of grad school. All that has gone by the wayside.

There were good reasons. Some of it was misguided “equity” — misguided because simply easing up on standards when there are only so many jobs means that other standards will take their place, and those other standards are harder on women. Some of it came for other reasons: competition for graduate students who didn’t like to see people flunking out of programs, a desire to get students focused on research rather than test taking. But one result is that a weeding is now abandoned, and we use processes that take much more time — and make it harder to have kids.

The hiring and promotion process has also trended to emphasizing large numbers of papers weighted by journal ranking. Nobody will remember more than a few papers each of us writes each decade. If hiring and promotion depended on writing one or two good papers, and showing the ability to write more, rather than just couting papers and journals, it might be much easier for women (and men!) to devote some time to children, rather than stay up every night adding robustness check 22 for internet appendix C. That would mean actually reading and thinking about papers at evaluation rather than just counting and relying on letters from people who mostly count. Adjusting for age in our decisions would also help. If you count numbers without dividing by years, you privilege years, and you thereby privilege men and childless women.

Some collective action would help. There was a move in the 1980s to make graduate school last 4 years, by withdrawing aid past that point. After all, two years of classes and two years to write one good paper ought to be enough. Now grad school goes on and on. That’s not just a delay while the biological clock ticks, I sense for many people it’s unproductive time, writing coauthored papers with senior people to pad a vita rather than learn to write independently. Individually, you can hire accounting for age and undermine the equilibrium.

One could get more radical. Businesses don’t have tenure, yet hire and retain a lot better than we do.

A correspondent writes suggesting child care is the answer. Perhaps, and certainly convenient child care on campus would help a lot. But I’m still an economist here. The university pays us, rather than provide clothes, food, housing etc. (Well, wait, housing. In the upper reaches there is a big income tax dodge that they give us housing rather than pay us and let us buy it. PhD students don’t make that much.) Not everyone wants full day employer provided group child care. If the request is that the university pay for child care, well, cash is always better than an in kind transfer.

Which brings us to a fundamental problem, money. Over the career, we pay economists less, because demand is falling. We do it with a 10 year period of $50,000 a year, which gradually ramps up to very high salaries for those who hang around and make it in the guild. Single men find that easier to do into their mid thirties.

We have opened up admission, hiring and promotion to women. But the profession has become more macho with a game of long hours and counting numbers of papers. The current implicit answer “women should be like men” and basically not have children at least until age 40 won’t work for most women.

Perhaps you have better ideas. Bottom line, if we want women in numbers, to join the economics profession, stick around, and become intellectual leaders, it has to be possible to bear children in the mid 20s. The tweet I started with must be a “modest proposal,” not our future. I look forward to your ideas.

I have long harbored these thoughts, but hesitated to write. After all, I’m a late-middle aged man, whose hard working wife had kids in grad school, and bore the brunt of raising them. The current rules of progressive discourse say that only lived experience counts. So, I’m braced for an avalanche of he’s not allowed to have opinions criticism. I hope if you disagree, you will tell me where I’m wrong instead. The goal of a more woman and family friendly economics profession is important.