Women in Economics: Marina Azzimonti and Arantxa Jarque

Mary Clare Peate: Hello, I’m Mary Clare Peate, and you’re listening to the Women in Economics podcast series from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Today, I’m joined by two economists at the Richmond Fed, Marina Azzimonti, director of the Center for Advancing Women in Economics, and Arantxa Jarque, its associate director. I’d like to ask both of you. How did you choose economics? We’ll start with Marina.

Marina Azzimonti: Hi, thanks for having us. So, you know, I grew up in Argentina, and as you probably know, Argentina is known for its constant ups and downs, crisis. So, basically, when I was in elementary school, we had a huge hyper inflation. And before, the country was pure chaos, I started saving in dollars at the age of 11, you know, because I felt that’s the only thing that feels safe. And that, kind of, prompted my interest in understanding, you know, soaring debt crisis, why do countries enter into this, and also political economy because I was seeing that a lot of this was basically, you know, big politicization, political fights driving the economy directly into, like, an abyss.

Peate: That’s so interesting, and Arantxa?

Arantxa Jarque: Yeah. I also got into it because of the topics. I grew up in Spain, so we were a bit better off in that sense. But I was definitely, it was part of the conversation we’re having. How do we make poor countries richer? I thought that was a very pressing question, and actually, my intro courses as an undergrad did a great job to keep me excited. I would say my intermediate courses, not so much. They felt a little bit dry and, kind of, detached from real-life questions. So, I actually was thinking about majoring in business. I did major in business, but lucky for me, when I did take, like, the more advanced classes, especially econometrics, it really blew my mind, as did other advanced econ classes, like industrial organization. I would say it was the rigor of the tools used in economics to understand these questions and to try to answer them. They really spoke to me, those tools, especially in contrast, I have to say, with the tools that I had seen in the management classes.

And then, I was very lucky to get the right information and help from my professors to actually access the academic path, and I managed to come to the U.S. from Spain to study my Ph.D. And I landed in an excellent program in Rochester where I got a great education and I almost met great friends and colleagues, like Marina, who was there.

Peate: Such a great story. So, we’re going to fast-forward a little bit from how you got your start in economics to now. You both recently launched the Center for Advancing Women in Economics at the Richmond Fed. Can you tell us a bit about the center and why you decided to start it?

Azzimonti: So, as Arantxa mentioned we met back in the Ph.D., so we’ve gone a long way. About 20 years ago, we, you know, worked in different places, and we met again here recently, both driven by our desire to, you know, help women succeed in the career of economics. So, we launched the center with the main objective to champion diversity in economics, both in academia and in policymaking. And, sort of, why did we think about this? Well, we are the Fed, and part of our mandate is to choose policy that takes into account a broad, diverse set of views, including those of women. And women tend to be underrepresented in the profession, so we thought, you know, this could be a way to help them both succeed in their academic careers and also get involved into policymaking.

So, as you know, women are underrepresented in the profession, so we felt it was necessary to make sure that those women that choose this path are connected with each other and are following the steps necessary to succeed. So, for example, data from CSWEP documents that, even though 34 percent of Ph.Ds. are women when they graduate from the university, a much lower number of them becomes assistant professor or economists in the Fed, and the amount that get to senior professors or tenure professors is even smaller. It’s, like, around 19 percent. So, there’s this, like, leaky pipe where we lose a lot of women in the middle. And why does this happen? You know, it’s still a question for which we don’t have really good answers, but surveys by CSWEP point to difficulties in the profession, to certain barriers that women face in managing work-life balance. Maybe they feel they are less connected. They are less welcome. It is more difficult for them to interact, so a lot of what we are doing in the center is trying to take down these barriers, to think about it a little more carefully about how we can help them succeed and stay in the path.

Peate: That’s great. And just for some of the audience, what is CSWEP?

Jarque: Yeah. This is one of the committees that the American Economic Association has formed. CSWEP is the Committee for the Success of Women in the Economics Profession. And they do amazing work that we hope to collaborate with them, in fact.

Peate: Great. Thank you. And, Arantxa, what kind of reactions have you received?

Jarque: Yeah. So, very positive feedback so far, and, in fact, lots of requests to collaborate.

I want to also mention that we have also heard another type of feedback, which is that some of our initiatives would actually benefit a wider set of economists. So, we are also very excited about that possibility, and we’re thinking hard about how to make it happen.

Peate: That makes a lot of sense. And so, just to get into the details, Marina, what specific steps or initiatives is your center taking to advance women in the economics profession?

Azzimonti: So, we organized the center around three main components. One of them was to mentor women in economics. So, as I said before, they could be successful in the pipeline. The other one is to connect them because, as you know, networks are very important for success. You know, you tend to get more invitations to seminars. Your research gets more widely known. You get more opportunities for other people to learn about your research and for you to get feedback. And the final one is to promote their high-quality research.

So, when we thought about how to implement these, we thought of three initiatives, one for each one of our components. So, the first one is a fellowship. So, we’ve just launched the fellowship program, and this year we have our first two fellows. They are Stephanie Johnson, who is an assistant professor at Rice at the School of Business, and Oliko Vardishvili, who is an assistant professor at UC-Irvine. And basically, they are going to attend our core weeks. So, for those of you that are not familiar, the system we have in the Fed is that the research department meets once every six weeks, and we bring together not only our own researchers, but researchers from other Feds and universities. So, we hope that by them coming to core weeks they can expand their network and they can, you know, get in contact also with our own team. We are also going to fund some travel for selected conferences that we feel can benefit them, and throughout, we are going to provide advice, you know, how to make presentations, try to connect them to people in their fields of study, et cetera.

The second pillar is our directory of women economists. So, we have collected data on all the women that have Ph.D. degrees that are working in the system, and that, we hope is going to be useful for people that, you know, want to find women by, you know, field of study, field of specialization, seniority. Sometimes, you want to invite, you know, keynote speaker or you want a referee, or you have a fellowship opportunity or location. You know, sometimes, you go to a conference, and you want to see who is nearby. So, hopefully, this is going to be useful also to help other people interact with them, invite them to conferences, and include them in their initiatives. And also, if you are, like, even a reporter or a journalist that you want to get in touch with a policy expert, we are going to be able to find them here. Acacia Wyckoff, one of our RAs at the Richmond Fed is the one that worked really, really hard on making this happen.

The final involves promoting their work. Whenever a senior economist comes to the Fed, we interview them. You know, we record them, and we ask them about their research specialization, what got them excited about, you know, the recent work they are doing, and if they have some advice for women that are trying to follow their paths. And for junior economists, we are spotlighting their work. You know, maybe they have recent papers. They come to present at core week, and then, we just want to make that available to a broader audience than the people that came to our core week. So, we are making an effort to publicize theirwork in social media and our website, et cetera.

Peate: And, Arantxa, your center has also collected some data on representation in the Federal Reserve system as compared to academia. What finding most surprised you?

Jarque: Yeah. So, this is actually the data from the directory. So, we started scraping those websites and getting excited about this way of finding people, and, of course, being economists, we’re like, “Oh, look. We have some data. Let’s analyze it.” And so, there’s a brief summary of what we found on our website, and people can read one of the Richmond Fed economic briefs. Once we put together the data for the 12 Feds and the Board, this comes down to about 25 percent female representation, which is very comparable to the data about academia. So, we’re very comparable in that sense.

We also collected information on the areas of expertise of the women working at the 12 banks. The highest shares of women work on macro. That’s 42 percent of the women at the Feds, and 30 percent work on, like, microeconomics, and a significantly smaller portion works on financial economics, 19 percent. Of course, we do know that, in the economics profession as a whole, women working in macro, monetary economics, and financial economics range only between 14 and 21 percent, according to some studies. Some other economists have looked at this data. So, this, again, speaks to this issue that there are women doing work that is relevant for the Fed, but is, kind of, hard to find them. So, it makes sense to make an explicit effort to reach out and connect with them so we can all learn from their work.

I have to also mention that, as we were working on the directory, we, kind of, like, realized that we had to collect data also on women with Ph.Ds or in general econom[ists] with Ph.Ds. working at the Fed who may not be in the traditional research track within the Fed, like jobs that don’t put as much emphasis on academic publication. And that, you know, that’s also very interesting, and we’re excited about finding out more. And it made us think as well because, you know, some of these jobs may actually don’t have the—You know, if I channel Claudia Goldin’s concept of the greedy jobs, definitely the academic publication job has components of that, those greedy jobs that’s intense hours and, you know, you can’t just, like, reduce your time or if you leave, like, projects may get stalled. So, it’s complicated. And so, it’s, kind of, interesting to find out more about these other jobs that Ph.D. economists can do at the Fed and learn more about how they make it work. Their representation is a little bit higher actually. Of all the Ph.D. economists working at the 12 Feds, 22 percent are in jobs outside of the research track, and in those jobs, women are 32 percent. So, that is higher than the 23 percent that I cited before.

Peate: That is really interesting. Thank you. And to close, I want to ask both of you to paint us a picture of what success looks like in five to 10 years. Marina?

Azzimonti: So, as you know, the directory is one of our big initiatives. We are very excited to launch it and to make it grow, and we hope that in five to 10 years this becomes the go-to place to look for women working in a range of fields within economics, both in terms of academia and policymaking. And for this, we need to grow it, and that’s going to take us a while. But we hope to include the broader profession as time goes by.

Now, I mentioned earlier that this year we have Stephanie and Oliko, our first 2024 fellows. So, if I think of the two of them, what will I hope? I would hope that this experience helps them develop a robust network, that they get to meet a ton of people, that it makes them super productive, that they choose to stay in academia, that they survive, you know, tenure or eventually decide to even come to one of the Feds as a senior economist, and that eventually themselves become mentors for women that choose this path. So, this is, kind of, like, an ideal world in five to 10 years, as I would love that to happen.

And in terms of our website, you know, as I said, we are interviewing women economists. We are showing their work, so we hope we can become like a library, like memory-building, history-building of all these women that are now very productive and that are role models for other women in the profession to be showcased and to know more about them. Not only about the research, but them as individuals.

And within the Fed, we hope we can really connect women that are working at the Fed to take advantage of our different synergies. Because as I said before, you know, some of the work is very similar to academia. We need to write papers. We need to publish them, but there is also other dimensions that make the Fed a very unique place to work and it’s nice that we can connect and, you know, learn from each other.

Jarque: Yeah. You really summarized it very well. I would just say that maybe, of course, we have succeeded as a center to promote the advancement of women in economics when we become irrelevant. Right? Hopefully, in five to 10 years we have shut down the center because we’re convinced that women do not face any barriers and we see that their work is well represented in the profession’s mainstream. That would be amazing.

Peate: Well said. I want to thank you both for your time today. This was a great conversation. To hear more from the Women in Economics podcast series, visit stlouisfed.org/womeninecon. You can also stream Women in Economics wherever you listen to your podcasts.