University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has a tenured position, a resume full of hot-topic published papers and a senior fellowship at the Brookings Institution. Yet not long ago she considered quitting the field.
Anonymous postings on the Web site Economics Job Market Rumors — a public discussion board where female economists are often the subjects of long and vitriolic threads — blasted her research and presentations. Combined with bullying from a man in her department, the often-objectifying comments were almost the final straw, Kearney said.
“It was just exhausting and completely demoralizing,’’ she said.
Now Kearney sees her field in the midst of a reckoning. The American Economic Association (AEA) is looking to create an alternative to the online forum after a paper called attention to its sexist language and a petition condemning it garnered more than 1,000 signatures.
The AEA plans to adopt a formal code of conduct, fueled in part by the revelations.
The attention to online abuse is adding momentum to a broader discussion about gender in economics. At the association’s annual meeting over the weekend, a standing-room-only session focused on gender issues in the field ranging from the lack of diversity in textbooks to classrooms.
The organization’s head, Stanford University professor and Nobel Prize-winning game theorist Alvin Roth, highlighted the online stereotyping paper — written by economics student Alice Wu — in his address.
While it is not quite the “Me Too” moment that the entertainment, media and technology industries are experiencing with tell-all stories of assault and discrimination, there is a gradual recognition in economics that women contend with unique barriers, whether intentional and explicit, as in the online forum, or more subtle and perhaps even unintentional.
“There’s a certain masculinity that’s been constructed around economics,” said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson, a member of the AEA’s executive committee and a Bloomberg View columnist. “Alice’s paper is a pivotal moment.”
Wu’s research found that Web site threads referring to women contained more than 50 percent fewer academic terms than those referring to men, and were more likely to contain physically descriptive words like “hot” and “attractive.”
The words most associated with posts about women included “breast,” “whore” and “kissed.” Those most associated with posts about men include “macro” and “supervisor.”
Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan and New York Times columnist who wrote about Wu’s paper in August last year, said he heard shocked responses to Wu’s findings from his male colleagues.
That contrasted with unsurprised reactions from many women.
“The culture is a troubling culture,” said Wolfers, who chaired the gender session at the AEA meetings in Philadelphia.
While Wu’s paper has generated a lot of conversation, he is concerned that too much of it has focused on the Web site, rather than the environment that allows it to exist and thrive.
“I fear there’s been too much talk about the wrong issue,” Wolfers said.
Universities and central banks play host to a less sinister, but still harmful gender dynamic that is pervasive in many professions: Women have a tougher time getting ahead in a number of measurable ways.
Papers penned by female authors are better-written based on a readability analysis and the gap is far higher in published than draft versions — suggesting they are not just innately better writers; they are editing more.
That is consistent with “tougher editorial standards,” according to research by University of Liverpool economist Erin Hengel.
That could hold back careers in an industry where writing output partially dictates success. Female-authored papers take more than half a year longer to publish in the journal Econometrica than those written by men, Hengel found in her paper, which was featured in the AEA discussion Wolfers organized.
Kearney, 43, is quick to point out that her mentors and role models have been male, and the profession has generally welcomed her.
And economics — a field in which tenured women at top schools are a rarity and three in four undergraduate majors are male — is already in the process of working toward better gender inclusion.
The US Federal Reserve is being led by a woman for the first time, though Fed Chair Janet Yellen is to step down next month after US President Donald Trump picked Jerome Powell to replace her rather than nominate her for a second term.
Or take, for another example, the US Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual Jackson Hole conference. At what is arguably the most important central bank idea-fest in the world, gender came into the spotlight in 2009.
That year, the Kansas City Fed noticed that not a single woman was featured as a speaker on the agenda.
The district bank began to actively seek women to attend and speak, and now-president Esther George began to host a small networking session for women attending the event, with the first in 2011.
It started at a restaurant around a single table. Last year it moved to an outdoor patio to accommodate the crowd of women in attendance.
“I ask the women at the table who else should be included in the discussion, who is missing at Jackson Hole, and who are the other women doing work we should know about,” said George, who is one of two women in charge of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. “It takes time, but we are seeing good results.”
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
RSS