As universities grow more diverse, economics departments continue to lag behind, especially when it comes to training and hiring Black economists.
Black undergraduates are less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in economics compared to their White counterparts, according to a 2019 report in the Journal of Economic Education by Swarthmore College’s Dr. Amanda Bayer, Franklin and Betty Barr Professor of Economics and David W. Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for Economics, titled, “The unequal distribution of economic education: A report on the race, ethnicity, and gender of economics majors at U.S. colleges and universities.”
In a 2018 National Economic Association address, Dr. Rhonda V. Sharpe — founder and president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race — pointed out that the number of Black women graduating with bachelor’s degrees in economics stayed stagnant from 1996 to 2015, only increasing by about 1%. For Black men, the number of economics undergraduate degrees jumped by 47%.
Yet, despite gains for Black men, most Ph.D.-granting economics departments have no Black faculty. Sharpe’s research with University of New Orleans Economics Professor Gregory N. Price reveals that, across 127 economics departments, the number of Black economists hired, 47, didn’t change from 1996 to 2015.
“In general, the track record of all (colleges and universities) in the USA that confer doctorates in economics is vulgar,” they write, “as over the past 51 years, and perhaps even longer, the typical Ph.D.-granting economics department has had no Black Americans on its faculty.”
The scant faculty who are hired often wrestle with the climate of their departments. A survey by the American Economic Association found that only about 17% of Black economists felt people of their race were “respected in the field” compared to 82% of White economists.
The problem: A leaky pipeline
