Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. I don’t know, it’s such a big question. I think that if you look at the support women get throughout their careers in academia, the opportunities they get to build their own big research groups while simultaneously taking on caring responsibilities — because women still disproportionately get that in society — it is really challenging to succeed and be a really successful professor if you’re trying to do all of that other stuff as well. Probably in financial sectors, in private sectors, you might get more flexible opportunities to return to work. I know that the pandemic has had a huge impact on the ability of women to come back to work because of the chance to work flexibly and things like that. Probably the private sector has done an awful lot of the work that academia and public civil service should be starting to do and is leading the way, but I don’t doubt that there are still huge discriminations and issues around sexism and racism within the private and the corporate sector as well. Then government is a completely different issue because you don’t only have the internal politics of what’s going on and who gets promoted and who gets to be the public face, but also how the media is portraying those people, and the impact that that has on the general public’s perception of them. That’s obviously also extraordinarily sexist and racist and biased. Probably we should all be learning from what works well in the private sector — and also what doesn’t work — and trying to emulate that. If I think of 20th-century history from my naïve, distanced standpoint, it seems to me it was the commercial book market where women make a big breakthrough. You have Margaret Mead, you have Rachel Carson, you have Jane Goodall, which is what, 1971? The buyers of the books — they don’t seem to care, if the book is good or interesting to them. Then you have big advances for women in science that is led by for-profit incentives, basically. That’s really interesting. I wonder if it’s still the same today. I wonder if people in that commercial book-market world would still celebrate and see the achievements of women scientists or the achievements of women, and take them as seriously as the achievements of men. I still get the feeling — despite you having a huge amount more writing and popular opinion around the need for more women scientists, or the work of women scientists, or the history of women scientists — it’s still a very specific type of person who will go into a bookshop and buy that. Not every man who’s quite biased or opinionated on these issues will go and buy that fantastic history-of-women-scientists book even if they exist. I think booksellers and book marketers can do quite a lot of magic in that space, but we have to make sure it’s being read and exciting everyone.…

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