Diversifying the dismal science
Jul 26,2021 - Last updated at Jul 26,2021
BOSTON — Although economics uses mathematical models and machine-learning techniques, it is still a social science. But compared to most other disciplines, the profession does not even come close to representing the societies we live in. In the United States, women received only 32 per cent of US PhD degrees in economics in 2018, compared to 57 per cent in other social sciences and 41 per cent of doctorates in science and engineering. Worse still, black and Hispanic economists accounted for just 3.7 per cent of newly minted economics PhDs — considerably lower than their combined share of doctorates in other social sciences (14 per cent) and in science and engineering (8 per cent).