Wielding Data, Women Force a Reckoning Over Bias in the Economics Field – “Longstanding complaints about the barriers women face in the economics profession are beginning to resonate within the male-dominated field. It is not difficult to find an all-male panel at the annual January mega-gathering of American economists. They are as common as PowerPoint presentations and pie charts. One such panel this year met to sleepily critique President Trump’s economic policies, but it was overshadowed by another panel, two ballrooms away, that jolted a profession that prides itself on cool rationality. That panel on Friday was stocked with women, each of whom presented new research that revealed a systemic bias in economics and presaged a move by the field’s leaders to promise to address some of those issues. Paper after paper presented at the American Economic Association panel showed a pattern of gender discrimination, beginning with barriers women face in choosing to study economics and extending through the life cycle of their careers, including securing job opportunities, writing research papers, gaining access to top publications and earning proper credit for published work. Economics departments have gradually increased their share of female faculty members over the past 20 years. But only one in five tenure-track economics professors is a woman, according to the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession…”