Gender Stereotype in Academia: Evidence from Economics Job Market Rumors Forum

Alice Wu
Additional contact information
Alice Wu: Princeton University

Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing.

Abstract: This paper examines whether people in academia portray and judge women and men differently in everyday "conversations" that take place online. I combine methods from text mining, machine learning and econometrics to study the existence and extent of gender stereotyping on the Economics Job Market Rumors forum. I first design a propensity score model to infer the gender a post mainly refers to from text, and simultaneously identify the individual words with the strongest association with gender. The words selected provide a direct look into the gender stereotyped language on this forum. Through a topic analysis of the posts, I find that when women are under discussion, the discourse tends to become significantly less academic or professionally oriented, and more about personal information and physical appearance. Moreover, a panel data analysis reveals the state dependence between the content of posts within a thread. In particular, once women are mentioned in a thread, the topic is likely to shift from academic to personal. Finally, I restrict the analysis to discussions about specific economists, and find that high-profile female economists tend to receive more attention on EJMR than their male counterparts.

JEL-codes: I23 J16 J23 J71 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-gen, nep-hme and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwjFN4HbBrDBbnFqZzdLWThDb0U/view

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:cheawb:2017-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().