“Okay. I am going to just say it: I’d like to see a woman ask a question,” economist Cecilia Rouse said to her �ֲ���ý audience. 

“A student,” she clarified, and a laugh rippled among the students, faculty, and staff who were asking some Q’s during a lively Q&A session after Rouse’s talk in a Pettengill Hall classroom back in April.

Rouse is no stranger to commanding a room: She chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisors. And as a professor of economics at Princeton, she’s certainly no stranger to speaking with students. 

She’s also a woman, and thus no stranger to the fact that economics is infamously dominated by men, a fact that “is not a trend, but always the case in economics — everywhere,” says Lynne Lewis, Elmer W. Campbell Professor of Economics at �ֲ���ý. With colleague Nivedhitha Subramanian, an assistant professor of economics, Lewis welcomed Rouse to �ֲ���ý on behalf of the student club Women in Economics, the Department of Economics, and the President’s Office.

Nicknamed WE@�ֲ���ý, the economics club was founded by Lewis and a colleague in 2018 following high-profile national media accounts of discrimination against women in economics.

The discrimination was “nothing new,” as Lewis said in 2018 but “at the same time it was great to see the topic getting attention.”  how “gender and racial gaps in economics are wider, and have narrowed less over time, than in many other fields.”

Among economics majors at U.S. colleges, it’s understood that about 70 percent are men and 30 percent women. At �ֲ���ý, 74 percent of the economics majors this year were male. That’s within a senior class that is fairly gender balanced at approximately 46 percent male, 52 percent female, and 2 percent transgender and/or gender non-conforming.

Open to all students, Women in Economics focuses on supporting female-identifying students who wish to study and explore economics, finance, consulting, and related fields through various efforts, including invited guest speakers like Rouse, who can expand the notion of who can both major and thrive in economics.

Jane Dodge ’24 of Winchester, Mass., is the community liaison for WE@�ֲ���ý. She’s not an economics major — English is her choice — but knows that economics at the college level ,” a culture that make it hard for female students to see themselves thrive in the field of study.

Students often have a preconceived notion that studying economics is “all about [going into] finance and making money,” says Dodge. But it can be other things. “It’s about looking at how people make choices and ways wealth can be distributed” — which has value that spans most academic majors, she says.

As part of her visit, Rouse spent informal time talking with students, including a gathering in the Fireplace Lounge in Commons, where she offered direct encouragement and advice. At her evening talk, she was introduced by President Clayton Spencer and interviewed by Lewis and Subramanian.

An example of economics’ multidisciplinary reach came during Rouse’s talk when she addressed economics and energy in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Even though the the invasion has “raised the issue” — mostly due to soaring gas prices — so that “as we make this transition to clean energy, we need to be independent there too, because we don’t want to find ourselves at the mercy of another country,” says Rouse. “We need some energy independence.”

Rouse suggested looking at politics as a component of economics, rather than an opponent.

For Caitie McGlashan ’22 of Hopkinton, N.H., Rouse’s insights into how politics, policy, and economics can inform and benefit each other were eye-opening. 

It’s tempting to think of politics as “this nuisance that prevents beneficial economic policy from getting through,” says McGlashan, vice president of WE@�ֲ���ý. But Rouse suggested looking at politics as a component of economics, rather than an opponent.

“When we have some sort of constraint in economics, we incorporate it into our modeling and use it to make the model more realistic. We don’t just ignore it,” McGlashan explains. “So Rouse framed politics as a constraint that can be modeled into the likelihood of a particular piece of economic legislation being effective.”

The trifecta of politics, public policy, and economics are also all components of a slightly older — but ongoing — issue a little closer to home: COVID. Lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic have had lasting effects on the economy, and it’s only made it more clear that a single decision can have widespread consequences.

COVID variants keep appearing, but no nationwide lockdown has been announced since the first one in March of 2020. Cases are still high, even with vaccination rates, so why hasn’t the economy been hit as hard as that first time?

“Two years ago we knew nothing about this virus,” says Rouse. Information battled with disinformation. “Remember, people were wiping down their groceries — and being told they didn’t have to wear masks, [that COVID] was overblown. Shutting down the economy was what we just needed to do. It was a very extreme policy simply because we didn’t have the tools.”

But now we have those tools, says Rouse. We know what upticks in cases look like, we know ways to react and mitigate exposure, and more importantly, we have vaccines; all tools that affect the way an economist calculates what actions to take.

And for economics students and those considering studying economics, the job market for economists is “red-hot” right now, says Rouse.

Economics doesn’t afford a single path or a single tool for its majors. “It’s a fantastic toolkit to help understand so much of the world around us,” says Subramanian.

“You’re able to ask important questions and use data to answer them,” says Lewis. True, it can be a means to a specific career goal, as are many academic majors, but it’s also about “finding ways to make people better off, and crafting policies that address poverty, discrimination, environmental pollution, and inequality.”

Each week this fall, we’ll be introducing new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the third of our nine new faculty members, Nivedhitha Subramanian.

Name: Nivedhitha Subramanian

Title: Assistant Professor of Economics 

Degrees from: Duke University, Ph.D. in public policy studies; Northwestern University, M.A. in economics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S.B. in economics.

Economics because: Like many U.S. high schools, Subramanian’s did not offer economics. “But I really liked math and I really liked social studies,” she recalls.

“One of my favorite teachers — with whom I’m still in touch — suggested that I would really like economics because it combines the two. And she was right.”

Her work: As a development and labor economist with a focus on gender, Subramanian looks at the economic challenges facing less-developed countries.

Specifically, she uses data to explore how gender, social expectations, and even reputation affect workers’ choices in developing countries, particularly Pakistan — questions like, “How do we hire people? What are the constraints that people, particularly women, might face in the labor market?”

For example: For her dissertation, Subramanian conducted experiments on how gender norms affect women job seekers in Pakistan. To gather data, she used Job Asaan, a Lahore-based platform for female job seekers created by a team of development economists at Duke, including Subramanian.

In the first experiment, some job seekers were given extra, gender-specific information about job postings, such as the gender of the job’s supervisor. Boom: Application rates doubled among job seekers armed with that information; in addition, job seekers with that information were more likely to apply to a job with a female supervisor.

“There’s this discrepancy between what women want for themselves and what they think that their parents or their families want for them.”

In the second experiment, some job seekers were reminded, or “primed,” about family expectations, being asked if they had discussed their job search with their family. (The answer was not surprising: “an overwhelming ‘yes,’ because in a South Asian context, especially for young people, it’s something you discuss with your parents,” says Subramanian.)

However, being reminded of family affected job seekers’ behavior, lowering their applications by 30 percent. “This is consistent with women knowing that their families might not be supportive of their job search,” Subramanian says.

At the same time, women who got the family reminder were more likely to apply to jobs when also given information about the gender of coworkers, which suggests that “they believe their families care whether they will be working with men or women,” explains Subramanian.

“There’s this discrepancy between what women want for themselves and what they think that their parents or their families want for them. And that was really impacting which jobs they apply to.”

In terms of policy, Subramanian has suggested some easy-to-implement strategies to increase job application rates, like providing accurate information in a job posting about the gender of a job’s supervisor, or, for businesses seeking workers particularly, “simply publicizing the fact that they have female supervisors and/or that they have mostly or all female employees.”

Why development economics? Subramanian, who is Indian-American, grew up in the U.S. but traveled to India frequently.

“Just seeing the differences in day-to-day life and the two different contexts sparked a lot of questions for me,” she explains. “In college, I took a class on development economics, and I realized that those were exactly the questions that I wanted to answer, using really interesting methods.”

Context matters: “Part of the joy of this kind of research is learning about other contexts — about what other communities and societies look like — and then understanding sort of the bigger picture of your work.”

“There seems to be a lot of interaction across departments, and I thought that was really exciting.”

To that end, “being able to work in a country, living there for longer periods of time, is just incredibly valuable to understanding the context and doing high-quality social science research,” Subramanian says. “Granted, in the current state of the world, that’s not always possible.”

Why �ֲ���ý? “I am an economist, but I really like talking to other social scientists and learning from broader communities,” she says. At �ֲ���ý, “economics and sociology are literally on the same hallway,” sharing a floor in Pettengill Hall with several other academic programs, including Africana and classical and medieval studies.

“There seems to be a lot of interaction across departments, and I thought that was really exciting,” she says. During her visits, “I really liked talking to everyone I met, including all the students. They were fantastic, and so I was really excited about getting to interact with these faculty and students going forward.

Why teach? “Teaching is exciting,” she says. “There’s almost no parallel feeling to seeing something click for a student.”

This semester, she’s teaching statistics, a rite of passage for econ majors. “Students come in with mixed feelings about how excited they are. Even if they are initially less excited, you can help them see why knowing statistics is useful for interpreting the world around us. That’s just really rewarding.”