A St. Lawrence University economics professor has conducted research about gender inequities in consulting that will soon be published in a top scholarly journal.
The R. Sheldon ’68 and Virginia H. Johnson Associate Professor of Economics Alison Del Rossi and Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt University co-authored the article, “Gender and the Consulting Academic Economist”, which is forthcoming in the journal ‘Economic Inquiry’.
Del Rossi and Hersch were interested in learning whether there were gender differences in paid consulting work done by academic economists. According to Del Rossi, there was little to no research on the extent to which economics professors do paid consulting work. She and her co-author designed and administered an original survey to learn more about how many consult, what their rates are, and their experiences. Del Rossi received a Faculty Research Fellowship Award to pay St. Lawrence students to assist with gathering basic contact information of academic economists who were sent the survey.
“The issue of differences in pay, career advancement, and treatment of female economists has been at the forefront of the profession, especially in the past couple of years,” Del Rossi says. “This work contributes to the general issues of gender inequities in economics and the lack of visibility and leadership of women in the economics profession.”
What the authors found from the 1,100 responses of economics professors in the U.S. was that women are less likely to do consulting work, charge lower hourly rates on average, have lower-profile roles in consulting, and are involved in less complex cases than men are.
Del Rossi and Hersch’s research uncovered that women report experiencing negative gender bias at rates that are 6 to 26 times the rates reported by men, and female economists are just as willing as male economists to consult in the future. Those findings, along with the reported negative bias, suggest women economists face barriers to participating in consulting, which provides evidence that women in economics are losing out on potentially profitable work and opportunities to be seen as trusted experts in their fields.
‘Economic Inquiry’ is widely regarded as one of the top scholarly journals in its field. Besides containing research on all economics topic areas, a principal objective of the journal is to make each article understandable to economists who are not necessarily specialists in the article’s topic area.
Del Rossi’s teaching and research interests include labor economics, law and economics, public finance and government behavior, risky choices (such as smoking and drinking), and economics of gender.
Learn more about St. Lawrence’s Department of Economics.
