Esther Duflo: preference

Transcript context

…Last question — if you could institute a reform to increase opportunity for women in economics, what would you do? I think there are two things that one could do. I don’t know if they are reforms per se. One is to change a little bit the climate in the economics profession. It’s not particularly anti-woman per se. Some people argue it is, that people are, for example, more likely to interrupt women than men, et cetera. But even if they weren’t, they are, just in general, likely to interrupt each other. We are not a very touchy-feely culture in economics. It doesn’t bother me, it turns out. So that’s not something that has stopped me in any way. But it bothers many people, and it tends to bother women and, I think, minority more. Changing the culture, of course, is not a reform per se. But there are small things you can do that can help. One thing we’ve done at MIT — very simple — is to institute the rule that someone who gives a seminar gets the first 15 minutes uninterrupted. And that has, for our seminars, the development seminars, I think it’s actually improved the experience for everyone, the speaker and the audience. So that’s one. That’s not huge, but think of this as one — I’m not the magic-bullet type of person, and I don’t think there is one there — one of the silver bullets you could do there. The other is something we could do outside of the economic profession, which is to change a little bit the image that economics has to the outside world. I think for a lot of high school students, college students — they are a bit like me when I was considering economics. It’s like, number one, it’s talk about interest rate and central banks, and it’s kind of boring. And number two, it uses incredibly crude tools. In fact, both of these statements are wrong about the state of our discipline. In fact, we study any number of issues, including those, but also extreme poverty, discrimination, inequality, and we study them with lots of very sophisticated tools and relevant empirical tools, et cetera. I think if people were more aware at an early age, before they choose a field, there would be more women to start with choosing to study economics. And then hopefully, more would continue, which, I think, is something we really need. Not just women but also minority because economics is a social science, and as a social science, we do need diversity in experiences and points of view, et cetera, because people with different backgrounds, including gender and life experiences, will be interested in different questions and also will bring a slightly different perspective to those questions. So it would make the field more vibrant. Esther Duflo, thank you very much. Congratulations again on the Nobel Prize, of course. And the new book with Abhijit Bannerjee is Good Economics for Hard Times. Thank you.…

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