Race and Ethnicity in the Economics Profession: Problems and Remedies

Abstract

Blacks, Latinx, and Native Americans are severely underrepresented in economics. They report hostility, discrimination, bias, and feeling invisible and ignored. They experience discrimination in their earnings and feel unfairly treated. Economic theory and the typical curriculum fail to consider the lives and experiences of underrepresented minorities. The lack of underrepresented minorities perpetuates when students fail to connect to mentors and role models whom they feel they may be able to communicate with and relate to. Structural theories of inequality explain these patterns; gendered racism and stereotype bias explain the variation among racial and ethnic groups. These problems and others are discussed, as well as solutions to increase racial diversity in the economics profession.

KEYWORDS: :

• DEI
• race and economics
• diversity in economics
• race and economics profession

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Barbara Hopkins for inviting me to participate in the ASE sessions. Joyce Chen, Barbara Hopkins, Yana Rodgers, and Myra Strober provided insightful thoughts during interviews with me. Thanks to Gary Hoover for all he did and still does as well as permission to use the CSMGEP survey results from Bayer et al., 2020. Thanks also to Marianne Bertrand for permission to use the Allgood et al., 2019 survey results as well.

Notes

1 I had contacted feminist economists I knew who worked on these issues for one published essay in 2023 (Kim, 2023a). I also did the same for another essay (Kim, 2023b) and had posted my interest in talking to people about gender in economics on the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) listserv. Finally, I had presented preliminary findings at the Allied Social Science (ASSA) and IAFFE meetings and had invited others in these sessions to be interviewed for this project. Using a snowball methodology, I had interviewed about 20 women by zoom in 2020 and 20 more in 2022 during semi-structured interviews. From these, I use excerpts from four interviews that had not been used in these earlier publications.

2 Many disciplines have their own version of these, including sociology, philosophy, political science, and psychology. The latest of these, stratification economics (Burnazoglu et al., 2022), draws from these. But stratification economics is less complete than those of others; hence I draw from these more complete variations that I find relevant regarding race. Sidanius and Pratto (1999) focus on race, while Miller (1976) is more applicable to gender. Sidanius and Pratto (1999), however, believe that African American men suffer more than African American women. Although this is true with policing and the criminal justice system, this is not necessarily true with economic and employment outcomes (Kim, 2020).