Past, present, and future: Status of women and minority faculty in agricultural and applied economics

Abstract

As with many academic fields in the United States, white male faculty have historically been the norm in the agricultural and applied economics profession, but demographics in the field have started to shift over the past several decades. This paper presents descriptive evidence of the current and historical status of underrepresented and historically underserved groups in our profession, including white women and racial and ethnic minorities of all genders. It also provides a snapshot of perceptions of departmental climate, data on incidents of harassment and discrimination in our profession, motivations for switching academic institutions, and finally, data on strategies for retaining faculty from diverse groups.

How women saved agricultural economics

“…Overall, women in agricultural economics exhibited preferences for specialization that mirrored those of their sisters in general economics rather than men in agricultural economics. For a fuller picture of the current status of women on university faculties, see Hilsenroth et al (2022).…”

Food insecurity and COVID‐19 risk in low‐ and middle‐income countries

“…A strong theme that resonates in this special issue is the extent to women face additional vulnerabilities in various aspects of the food system, for example, in research and development in the United States (Hilsenroth et al, 2021 ) as well as in the informal sector in LMICs (Egger et al, 2021a ). Future research should better identify, which demographic groups, including women, are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity and the source of such disparities.…”

The contribution of the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in agricultural and applied economics

“…The motivating facts we discuss here draw from the efforts of many researchers who have carefully documented—often at a high opportunity cost to themselves in terms of their usual scholarship—disparities by gender, race, or both across a number of areas including promotion and tenure, publishing, and academic presentations. This includes the work of Wu (2020) documenting misogynistic and hostile language on an anonymous online economics discussion board, a 2019 Journal of Economic Perspectives symposium on women in economics (Boustan & Langan, 2019; Buckles, 2019; Lundberg & Stearns, 2019), the work of Doleac et al (2021) documenting who gets invited to academic seminars in the economics profession, findings from a pair of surveys conducted in 2019 focusing on agricultural and applied economics (Hilsenroth et al, 2022), and the work of Moser (2021) on Blacks in agricultural and applied economics. We list four motivating facts below, but encourage all readers to spend time reading and reflecting on each of the studies cited in this section.…”

“…Agricultural and applied economics, whether one views it as a field of economics or as an adjacent but altogether distinct discipline, also suffers from similar shortcomings 1 . In agricultural and applied economics departments, women and underrepresented minorities make up just one out of every four full professors in majority research appointments (Hilsenroth et al, 2022). Moreover, although the percentage of doctorates awarded to Blacks is higher in agricultural and applied economics than in economics, that percentage has declined over the last few decades (Moser, 2021), at a time when the percentage of doctorates awarded to Blacks was increasing on average in disciplines other than economics.…”

“…Second, our focus on gender and race requires careful consideration of intersectionality and the reality that gender and racial identities are not mutually exclusive. Following Hilsenroth et al (2022), this leads us to use the phrase “white women and underrepresented minority women and men” for the remainder of this paper which, while perhaps not the most elegant, has the merit of being accurate.…”