Doing Economics

6.8 Guidance for Women and Minorities Doing
Service
Before closing this chapter on doing service, I should discuss service for
women and minorities. As a straight Caucasian male, I will never know
what it is like to be a woman, a member of an underrepresented minority
(URM), or both in academia, and my understanding of the specific issues
women and URMs face is very much second-hand. Nevertheless, I would
be remiss if I did not at least address the fact that the demands of service
can be much more onerous for women and URMs, and if I did not address
what people like me can do about it.
If you are a woman or an URM, you are much more likely to be asked to
do service than someone like me.
12
That is because in most cases, the
institution you will be working with will value diversity and inclusion, and
so it will want to have voices like yours represented everywhere possible.
Obviously, the fact that there are fewer women than men and fewer URMs
than straight white men in tenured positions means that if we are to have
diversity and inclusion everywhere possible, one group will do more work

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than the other. So depending on how underrepresented the groups you
belong to are at your institution, you may have to fight tooth and nail to
protect your time. This starts with having a conversation with your
immediate supervisor (usually a department chair, less commonly a dean) or
a mentor to whom you explain that since they are invested in your success
by virtue of having hired you, they will understand the foregoing, and so
you may have to say “No” to service opportunities more often than some of
your colleagues.
Though it can be especially daunting to say “No” to senior colleagues
who will be the ones deciding on the fate of your career, you must develop
an argument you can deploy when you are asked to do more than your fair
share of service. This can be something as simple as “I would love to help,
but as a member of an underrepresented minority, I tend to be solicited for
service more than most, and so I have to respectfully decline this time.
Once my place in the profession is secure, I will be more than happy to
help, but I am sure you will understand that for the foreseeable future, I
have to budget my time wisely.” Additionally, a good supervisor or mentor
can also advocate for you by in turn explaining to others that, as a woman
or an URM, you have to protect your research time. For example, when you
go up for tenure, your department chair should include a paragraph that
clearly explains that you have done the right amount of service for someone
in your position, and that as a woman or an URM, you may have had to
decline some service opportunities.
In recent years, various professional organizations have been providing
service and support resources for women, URMs, and LGBTQ+
economists. The AEA, for instance, has its Committee on the Status of
Women in the Economics Profession, its Committee on the Status of
Minority Groups in the Economics Profession, and its Committee on the
Status of LGBTQ + Individuals in the Economics Profession. Some smaller
professional associations (e.g., the Agricultural and Applied Economics
Association) also offer such support networks. These are good resources to
address the issues addressed in this section and provide mentorship.
If you are a straight Caucasian male, you are privileged by virtue of
being in the majority, at least by historical standards if not in actual fact at
your institution. The least you can do is to keep the previous paragraph in
mind when interacting with your female and URM colleagues. More

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importantly, you should use your privilege to argue for diversity and
inclusion in hiring, for forming conference panels that reflect diversity, and
for inviting diverse sets of seminar speakers to speak at your institution.
You should also strive to create opportunities to highlight the research done
by women and URM scholars. Privilege is entirely wasted on the privileged
if it is not deployed to lift up those without it.
Notes
1
. Although many institutions will try to protect junior faculty from having to do any (or at the very
least too much) service so that they may dedicate themselves to teaching and getting their
research agendas off the ground, this tends to go out the window after tenure, when the service
expectation often goes from none or very little to quite a bit. One rule of thumb when it comes to
tenure (i.e., the move from assistant to associate professor in the US) and promotion (i.e., the
move from associate to full professor in the US) is this: in order to get tenure, you need to excel in
teaching and research. In order to be promoted to full professor, you need to excel in teaching,
research, and service.
2
. For the remainder of this chapter, unless otherwise noted, I will use “institution” to refer to any or
all of those entities.
3
. A closely related option, if you have the resources to do so, is to organize a small, two-day
conference at your institution featuring a mix of junior and senior academics in your area of
research.
4
. A joke I once read—and I unfortunately cannot find a source for it—went something like this:
“Scientists have finally proven that information can escape a black hole. They unfortunately could
not prove the same for an edited volume.” And indeed, my experience with them is that you
should avoid contributing to them, and you should avoid having to edit them even more.
5
. Getting paid to review is uncommon when reviewing manuscripts for journals, but it is more
common when reviewing book manuscripts.
6
. One of the most useful things my advisor ever taught me had nothing to do with economics, and
everything to do with being organized, and thus productive: “Never touch a piece of paper twice.”
What he meant was that once you get started on something relatively short and self-contained
(e.g., a referee report, a letter of recommendation), you should finish it before moving on to
something else.
7
. And that is really at best. Many journals do not see fit to inform their reviewers of the editor’s
decision, which is somewhat excusable considering that this is heavily dependent on whether a
journal’s editorial system is set up to do that. What is less excusable are those authors who fail to
thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on their manuscript.
8
. Or worse, if you get asked to review your own paper. I once caught an author who had agreed to
review his own paper, which was handled by another editor. To no surprise, his review of his own
paper was overwhelmingly positive, with some light comments wondering about whether the
standard errors were clustered at the right level. When I alerted the editor in charge, the paper was
immediately rejected, and the author’s name was circulated among editors as someone who could
not be trusted.

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9
. For example, compare Baron (1970) with Sandmo (1971), both of which look at the effect of
output price risk on the behavior of competitive firms respectively in the International Economic
Review and the American Economic Review.
10
. Fortunately, many journals post open calls for applications when they are looking for new
editors. This is especially true of association journals, or journals that are run by professional
associations, but it is changing for some unaffiliated journals.
11
. I can think of at least two of my papers that came out of social media. My paper on food prices
and food riots (Bellemare 2015) came from seeing many people on social media claiming that
food price volatility led to social unrest, and from my asking myself: “Is it really food price
volatility, or is it rising food price levels that cause social unrest?” My paper on the use of lagged
endogenous variables for identification purposes (Bellemare et al. 2017) came from a
conversation with Tom Pepinsky on social media where we both observed that, in the papers we
reviewed, we saw too many instances of people lagging an explanatory variable in an effort to
exogenize it.
12
. A female colleague at a liberal arts college commented: “[W]omen and BIPOC faculty do a lot
of invisible advising and mentoring. At [my institution], I think one of the main burnout factors,
particularly for BIPOC faculty, is all of the informal advising they are asked (or sought out) to do.
When I was on the college promotion and tenure committee, I was astounded at how intense it
was. Further, I personally get female students in my office probably once a week who want to talk
about what it is like to be a woman in our department, and to strategize about how to manage this.
You don’t get credit for this generally, and it comes at a steep opportunity cost, especially if you
are junior.”

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