Dollars and Sense Episode 2

In this podcast episode, the host discusses the lack of diversity in the field of economics. Only 8% of financial CEOs are women, despite women making up 46% of the financial industry workforce. There is also a lack of representation for black men and women in the field. The host interviews Radhika Balakrishnan, a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies who holds a PhD in economics. They discuss the underrepresentation of women and minorities in economics and the challenges they face. Radhika shares her own experiences as a woman of color in the field and the efforts being made to increase diversity. She also discusses her work on the Global Initiative Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Board. Welcome to the second episode of this podcast series. I'm your host Sophie Moresky, and I'm thrilled to bring you another episode of Dollars & Cents. In today's episode, I want to zoom out in order to look at the bigger picture of diversity in economics. We all know that our financial system is flawed. We know that many low-income and minorities are the ones lacking a financial education. But does this extend into the professional field of economics? Only 8% of financial CEOs are women, despite 46% of the workforce in the financial industry being made up of women. Even looking beyond gender, black men and women make up 8.5% of certified public accountants, yet there are only 37 black-owned investment and asset management firms. Is there a tie between financial literacy and involvement in economics as a professional field? Let's find out. Today, I will be interviewing Radhika Balakrishnan. She is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and holds a PhD in economics. Radhika is currently on the board of the Global Initiatives of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Throughout her career, she has served on several boards, the Commission for Gender Equity for the City of New York, the Global Advisory Council for the United Nations Population Fund, the International Association for Feminist Economics, just to name a few. She is also the co-author of Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice, the Radical Potential of Human Rights. Funny enough, Radhika and I met in a summer Spanish class. In her free time, while she isn't busy saving the world of economics, she can be found in weekly Spanish classes. For me, these classes turned out to be quite the experience. For one, I was the youngest one there. The class was small, consisted of five or six people, mostly retired folk, me, and Radhika, a professor who was on summer break. At the end of class, I knew everything about everyone. We tried our best to gossip in Spanish. I learned all about my classmates' crumbling marriages, travel aspirations, newborn grandchildren. At least, I thought I knew everyone. I remember Radhika telling the class about her work as an economics professor, and that prompted me to Google her name when I began researching guests to interview for this podcast. Very, very quickly, I realized that I knew nothing about her at all. She had served on all these fancy committees that I'd never heard of, and immediately, I knew that I needed to interview her. I purchased her book, sent her an email, and a few weeks later, now, I feel ready to get to know the other side of Radhika. Thank you so much for joining me. I am so grateful for your time. How are you? Good, how are you? I'm hanging in there. We caught up for a few minutes. Turns out, Radhika is still in Spanish classes, although I'm not, but I'll save you guys the listening time and jump right into my questions. My first question is, could you tell me about yourself, your background, and how you got into the field of economics? Okay, my background. When I, it's a little bit of a long story. I started college wanting to become an electrical engineer, and I was one of three women in a class of 300 at the time. And anyway, long story short, I decided that I didn't want to be an electrical engineer, and I went because I was very interested in policy and politics. It was the 70s, a lot of protest movements and stuff. And so I went to this dean, and I said, I can't do this anymore. And he kept saying, no, we need women in engineering, I can't do this. And then he said, well, you have all this math, what about economics? I was like, I have no idea what that is. And so he said, well, go take a class. And I fell in love. I just thought, oh, my God, here's a field where I can use my nerdy interest in mathematics with my policy, politics, activist world. Anyway, so that's how I ended up starting to do economics. And then I had some really good teachers who were great mentors. And I eventually ended up getting a PhD in economics. And so that's how I ended up in economics. Was that advisor who, like, kind of pushed you to take a finance class or an econ class, was he the first person who really pushed you in the direction of that field? This dean, it's the first time I'd heard about economics. I didn't know anything about it. And so he's like, well, you've done two years of electrical engineering, you have this many credits in math. If you want to get out in four years, have you thought about this? And I hadn't thought about it. And when I went there, it was just so fascinating to me. Do you think there's maybe a lack of awareness around economics as a field? Why didn't you think about that as a potential career path for yourself? I mean, you have to remember, it was the 1970s, you know, it was a different time. And it was the late 70s. And I, you know, it was just, it was, it just wasn't in my worldview. I don't think it's necessarily that I didn't know about it. But the one thing about economics as a field, I mean, you're looking at issues of who gets to participate in it. It's one of the most underrepresented fields in terms of race and gender. You know, people always talk about STEM fields being, you know, really bad in terms of representation. Economics is just as bad. And at the undergraduate level, there's fairly good representation. But somehow going to the graduate level, it just falls off. And I'm actually now, I belong to and one of the founding members of the International Association for Feminist Economics. So it's a particular aspect of economics, which is feminist. And one of the projects that we're doing is trying to find out why there's so few women. Well, there's very little feminist economics taught in economics departments. But then there's another project where they're looking at why there's so few women in economics. So at the graduate level, I mean, it's abysmal. I mean, it's really bad. And it's global. Very few. Do you have any theories as to why that is? Well, you know, we're trying to, we're actually doing research right now to figure it out. But one, it's just misogyny. You know, there's a study that is out there. If you Google it, I'm sure you can find it. This graduate student, I think it was a graduate student, maybe not. Anyway, this person went to different economics conferences and started documenting how women presenters were asked questions versus men. And it was just, I mean, and she did this huge study. And it's like, it finally made it to the New York Times. And just the hostility that, and I can tell you, when the study came out, and there was press about it, all of us on our listserv were just like, oh, yeah, you remember that time that this happened? You know, with all of us, it's happened to. So there's just this tension and hostility. It's such a male domain. So that's one just in terms of, I mean, and, you know, and for example, African Americans in the US, I'm talking about the US, you know, even though there's been so much attention trying to increase, there's just, you know, there's no way to get in there. There's so few and I have, you know, there's the National Economic Association, which is an economic association of African American economists. And, you know, all the work that they're doing, and there's some amazing people there. But the pipeline to have an increased number is very small. So I think, you know, just structural issues, right? The stuff that everyone has to deal with issues of sexism, racism, it's there, and it's there in economics. And then not only is it there in economics, then if you say you want to study issues about sexism and racism, they're like, wait, you want to tell us that we're wrong about the way we construct the world? But yes, and then they're like, no, you can't do that. So I think those are the issues that that kind of prevent. And so but now there's like, finally, I mean, it's 2023. And finally, they're saying, Oh, maybe we should figure out why. So, you know, but it's true. I mean, and most of us don't teach in economics departments, because economics departments are so hostile. How has being a woman of color in economics or any experiences that you've had shaped your work and ideas? Yeah, you know, when I started grad school, that's how when I started undergrad, I was one of three of 300. And then when I started my PhD program, I was the only woman in the class. It was 25 of us. So percentage wise, better, but still, and it was tough. You know, I mean, I had great colleagues. I mean, my fellow students were great. Some of them are still my closest friends. But it was it was tough. You know, I mean, I had a professor of statistics. And I'm the only woman in the class. Right. And he said, Women can't do statistics. But in in the class, when I'm looking around, I'm like, you're telling me I can't do this. Are you like? Needless to say, I did well and he got fired. So yeah, and I'm like, yeah. And so, yeah. And we had a small group. And then I left grad school for a couple of years and I came back. There were fewer women. I mean, there were a few more women in the in the department. And we used to have to meet, you know, like we'd go out to dinner once a month just to support each other. And, you know, it's hard. It's very hard. There's an organization called the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, and they're still trying to do studies to figure out how to increase women, you know, in the in the not. And that's what I'm saying. Undergrad, it's not that bad. Graduate programs, it gets worse. So something happens in between, you know, the study of economics, you know, in terms of getting PhDs, it just goes down. That's really fascinating. Could you talk about your work on the Global Initiative Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Board? What goals do you guys strive to achieve? So, well, let me let me tell you a little bit more about the my the academic work I do, because that connects to being on that board. So for the last, I don't know, 15 years or so, I mean, somewhere around there, I've been doing work on looking at at using human rights norms and policy to to examine economic policy issues. So, you know, why? But when you participate in the economy, I mean, I know you're interested in financial literacy and and issues like that. So when you think about. Economic policy, right, what's its purpose? Right. You know, it's a simple question, but it's not easy. So if you start looking, I mean, is it to make money for the seven guys that have more than half the world's income? No, right. That's not the purpose. I mean, the level of inequality that we're seeing right now is it's just horrible. And so what the work I started doing is to say, OK, there's international law, right, that's coded in in in human rights. So in human rights, there's sort of most people think about civil and political rights, you know, the right to free speech against torture. People don't think about economic, social and cultural rights, which are also human rights laws. Right. And so if there are these human rights laws and countries have signed on to these laws, what does that mean about their economic policymaking? So that's kind of the angle that I took. And so the book that that you looked at and tons of other work that I've done is really trying to push that agenda, saying, OK, if we look at human beings, well-being. Let's let's take a simple one. The right to help. Right. So if you have the right to help, what does that mean about economic policy? It means something, right? It means that governments have to fund health care, right? Like you can't have the right to help with only, you know, the people who have jobs having health care. So so the right to education, all of these different rights that people have implies something about economic policy. So I started doing that work. Yeah. In the early 2000s. And then worked with the person who's heading up the global initiative on economic, social and cultural rights. And so that's how I got to know her. And so now and I've been I've been on many boards of organizations. So this is the one I'm on now. And and they've done some really great work. They did this huge conference a year ago called the answer is I think it's called Answers Public, which is looking at the role of the state. What do we want the government to do? And how do we get them to do it? And right now they're in the middle of a huge initiative globally on on taxation, because the one thing that's happened is that the amount of taxes have gone down, paid for the amount of taxes paid by rich people and corporations has decreased by a huge amount. So this is a kind of a campaign to try and increase taxes. So that's some of the work that they're doing. I actually have an all day board meeting tomorrow of this organization, but they do great work and really great stuff in it, too. How can young people who are interested in making a difference, like how can they get involved or how can they make a change? Well, I would say some of the ways is to look for organizations that are doing kind of organizing work. And so, I mean, the global initiative is not a grassroots organizing. It's more of a policy policy place. But there are tons of organizations that are doing economic policy work in the US. In New York, I'm trying to think of the top of my head. It used to be called Nesri. Anyway, they changed their name. I looked it up after the interview for anybody interested, and now it is called Partners for Dignity and Rights. They are doing really interesting work on economic policy and human rights. I mean, there's so many organizations. So I don't want to push, tell you which ones or give you a list, but there's some really good people doing organizing work. So it depends on what your interests are. If you want to, do you want to work on issues of policy? Do you want to do organizing work? You know, unions are doing incredible work right now. Feminist organizations are doing really good work. So I kind of think it depends on your niche. And also, you know, you're in high school. I think high school students are doing some of the best climate change work that is out there. I mean, when was it? Right before COVID, there was that huge walkout. And that was awesome. I mean, and that was done by high school students. And I went there. I was just like, this is so awesome. So I mean, yeah, climate change. It's so it depends. I think young people want to get involved. There's, you know, and and Black Lives Matter protests during COVID. That was all led by young people. So I don't think that young people don't have a place. I think they're they're taking the lead in showing us what to do. OK, thank you. Those are all my questions. Yeah, that was it. OK, so where are you going to go to college? Yes. Every senior in high school's favorite question. Where am I going to college? Well, stay tuned, because I don't know yet. And I will spare you the details of my grueling college application process. Anyways, I had a really fun time catching up with Radhika, hearing everything she had to say. I learned a lot from her. Definitely learned a lot more about her life, her story. And I hope that you all learned something about the things that people are doing in the world to make economics more diverse and that not all hope is lost. There are people like Radhika out there who are wonderful and have spent their whole lives fighting for change, despite the hostility in the field of economics. It definitely makes me feel better. Somebody who put down an economics major in all of their college applications, that there are professors like Radhika out there who are fighting for diversity in economics, fighting for feminist economics to be taught. And what are you going to study? Economics. You are? I think she sounds happy. I think that was good. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Dollars and Cents. As always, I'm your host, Sophie Moresky. I'll see you in the next one.