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The past few years have been tough for anyone who employed fewer women or underrepresented minorities than white men named John. Bosses responded, at least initially; according to the job board LinkedIn, the seventh-fastest-growing job from 2019 to 2023 was “vice president of diversity and inclusion.” And in business, concerns about masculinity and paleness have sparked a wave of new searches.
A new working paper is part of this trend, though it suggests that new thinking is needed. MIT’s Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez look at the “social divide” between American PhDs in the sciences, social sciences, engineering, and health. One might hope that having “Dr.” in front of your name would be enough to erase any childhood disadvantage. But it seems not to be the case.
Academia may seem like a niche profession, and… yes, it is. But it has the advantage of having quantifiable outcomes, with the primary goal being to land a position at a highly ranked university. And the authors argue that if academia has a problem, then other elite professions where productivity is harder to measure and networking is even more important probably have it worse.
Stansbury and Rodriguez stratify their sample by their parents’ education level, looking for differences between first-generation college graduates and those whose parents had a graduate degree without a doctorate (about a third each). They also compare those who earned their doctorate from the same institution, in the same subject.
It turns out that students whose parents didn’t have a college education are 13% less likely to get a tenure track position at a top university than those whose parents are more educated. They also tend to end up at lower-ranked institutions. So even when you take into account the possibility that disadvantaged students are starting from a weaker base, they still perform worse.
This class gap in career success is about as large as the gap for race and gender, but it seems to work differently. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no class difference in the dropout rate, with the difference playing out entirely within the profession. At the same time, women disproportionately drop out of academia, and underrepresented minorities disproportionately drop out of college and struggle while in school.
What’s going on? Perhaps there are differences in self-confidence or in the ease with which people can form the kinds of relationships that will allow them to advance. In academia, there are many unspoken rules about how to advance. (For example, never underestimate the fragility of your senior colleagues’ egos.)
The data offer some clues. Disadvantaged economists appear to be somewhat less productive than their more advantaged counterparts, although this explains only about a third of the gap in the types of jobs in which they get tenure. They are also less likely to get research grants and are slightly more likely to co-author with others with similar backgrounds.
In any case, this is also happening beyond the hallowed halls of academia. The authors find a wage gap between classes in the private sector (but not in the civil service, where wages are probably more rigid), as well as a long-term difference in their chances of leading others. There is also a gap in job satisfaction.
What about economics? It starts from a higher level than other academic disciplines. Previous work by Stansbury and a co-author has shown that Stansbury PhD students have more educated parents than any other academic discipline, including classics or art history. But in the most recent study, there is no discernible difference in the class gap between disciplines, so economics may not be worse than the others.
Definitions seem to matter. A recent survey found no big differences in the treatment of academic economists based on their parents’ education level. But when divided by parents’ income, the gap is more stark. Among those who grew up in upper-middle-class or high-income families, 46% said they felt intellectually included in the field, compared with 37% of those who grew up in low-income families.
This brings us back to thorny questions about what class actually is, whether it’s parental income, education, or something else. In the United States, part of the problem is that the concept doesn’t seem to be as ingrained in the national psyche as it is in Britain, where a crystal accent is a valuable asset. However you define it, its effects deserve closer examination.
soumaya.keynes@ft.com
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