In the introduction to my book, The Undercover Economist, I invite readers to imagine that, as they leaf through the pages, there’s an economist sitting nearby. Because he’s an economist, he sees things — hidden patterns, curious puzzles — that they might not notice. The book had been out for a decade when a young economist wrote to me. She had a simple question: why was my undercover economist a “he”?
I was reminded of the question this week by the musician David Byrne’s embarrassment. Mr Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, has just realised that his new album is a string of collaborations with men. He apologised for being “part of the problem”.
It is easy for white men in a white man’s world to do this sort of thing without malice — almost by default. Sometimes we need a nudge to do better. Frances McDormand has just such a nudge in mind. Accepting her second Oscar for best actress on Sunday, she invited every female nominee in the room to stand up. “Look around, ladies and gentlemen, because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed,” she said. Adding a final enigmatic phrase: “inclusion rider”.
Inclusion rider? The idea was proposed a couple of years ago by media researcher Stacy Smith. Ms Smith observed that minor characters could easily be demographically representative of a film’s setting — which is likely to mean more women, more ethnic minorities and more disabled actors on screen. An A-List celebrity could simply insist on this requirement — an inclusion rider — in his or her contract.
This is a clever nudge. A straightforward demand for “more diversity”, however reasonable, can be evaded. A black Superman or female Gandalf apparently feels too bold for some studio executives. But the inclusion rider clause is specific and straightforward to satisfy; nobody is going to die in a ditch to make sure that straight white men get all the bit-part roles. Off-screen jobs could be covered, too. And it’s easy to imagine Hollywood A-listers throwing their weight around on this point.
There is no doubt that Hollywood movies fail any reasonable test of being demographically representative. The most famous test — imperfect but instructive — is named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel. To pass, a movie must contain two women, who talk to each other about something other than a man. A low bar, it might seem, but a surprising number of movies fail.
Despite some prominent examples of more diverse casting (the recent superhero movies Wonder Woman and Black Panther and the Oscar-winning Moonlight, which ironically fails the Bechdel test) it is not obvious that the situation is improving. Even online reviews are dominated by male reviewers.
We shouldn’t blame Hollywood alone for this. Data scientist Ben Blatt, author of Nabokov’s Favourite Word Is Mauve (UK) (US) conducted a computer-aided analysis both of recent fiction bestsellers and classics of the literary canon. One simple test: how often does the word “he” appear, relative to the word “she”?
In The Hobbit (US) (UK), JRR Tolkien’s adventure story that contains a variety of fairytale protagonists, none of them with wombs, the word “he” is used 1,900 times. The word “she” appears only once, referring to Bilbo’s mother. That is an outlier, but Mr Blatt found that many male novelists wrote about a world in which the opposite sex barely existed. This was far less true for female authors.
The economics profession has a particular problem when it comes to diversity, according to research by economists Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse. In the US, more than 50 per cent of both bachelor’s and doctoral “Stem” degrees — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are now awarded to women. But, in economics, the proportion is just 30 per cent and shows no sign of improvement. Economics is also behind the curve in including some ethnic minorities.
To the extent this reflects discrimination, or a hostile environment for women, that is a disgrace. And if it is purely, or even partially, that young women don’t find economics appealing, we economists should be asking why not. A monoculture in academia is unfair, and it leads to blind spots, like the significance of unpaid housework.
One recent study is a nice reminder that a more inclusive environment can pay dividends. The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment randomly assigned female recruits into mostly male squads of six. During eight weeks of boot camp, the squad members trained together and shared a single dormitory. The experiment markedly shifted the attitudes of the men, with substantial increases in their evaluation of mixed-gender teams, and more egalitarian views on women and housework. “Gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating,” noted the economists who ran the experiment.
There is a vast difference between an eight-week boot camp and the experience of watching a movie or reading a book that reflects our diversity. Still, we make what progress we can. I shall follow the topic of inclusion riders with interest. And the mysterious protagonist of The Undercover Economist? That street-smart enigma is now a “she”.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 March 2018.
My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.