Not all female economists agree that the culture is a problem.

“It’s a little belittling of women to say academic economics is an adversarial system and women can’t cope with it,” said Rachel Griffith, professor of economics at the University of Manchester and research director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

And some argue that the problem goes further than the toxic culture and also encompasses attracting women to the field.

Sarah Smith, an economics professor at the University of Bristol, is co-chair of Discover Economics, a three-year campaign led by the RES aimed at changing the perception of economics in the U.K. She agrees that at its worst, academic economics is “just a bunch of men asking a bunch of junior women aggressive questions.” She also says that a bigger challenge is that girls are put off by the profession’s association with money.

‘Tackle The Problems’
But Bateman of Cambridge says that fixing access problems will only delay women discovering the issues within the culture once they break into the field.

“You need to tackle the problems on the inside before those types of campaigns to draw more women into the subject can have maximum effect,” she said.

She added that women scarred by their experiences in academic economics tend either to enter other subjects such as sociology or philosophy or work as economists outside universities. The Treasury, for example, has a better male-female ratio than academia, with 38% of its economists being female.

The RES campaign is raising awareness of the problem, said Almudena Sevilla, co-chair of the group’s women’s committee. Still, she also said that—rather typically for economists—the strategy so far has become bogged down in the observation phase.

“We’re still arguing about the causes, but we’re moving into documenting each hypothesis,” said Sevilla, a professor of economics and public policy at University College London.

“Once you document it, let’s see what you can do to change it and monitor that change,” she said.

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.

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