The Anti-Hero Economist
I had just taken a new job — making the unusual leap from government economist to academic. Landing in a public affairs school, I looked to advance research and contribute to the profession. I reached out to a colleague leading a woman’s committee.
After sharing that I was interested in service opportunities, we discussed a potential new role on the committee — one needed due to an expansion of the committee’s work. I was game. The process started for me to join the committee at the end of the year.
#MeToo #EconTwitter
Shortly after that was settled, murmurs, and then roars started popping up on social media about #metoo women in the economics profession. A professor, how it so often starts, had treated at least one of his female students badly. We rallied (at least we’ve made this much progress) in support. Friends of the accused started defensive attacks (ugh), demonstrating once again how society’s knee jerk reaction is to try taming women into submission. The economics profession was no different.
I got snarled up in the back and forth online with one person attacking me for calling out people who were acting defensive because they were so loud and sucking air away from the most important issue — supporting victims. It made me just annoyed enough to take action. Others suggested that we make buttons or signs to bring to the next annual meeting in protest. That seemed like a simple enough task, I thought.
I looked up button making online — easy. Crafting a design was perhaps more challenging, but still doable. Finding a poster printer — again, easy. Forking out the cash for production — worth every penny and shared amongst those of us who’d had enough.
The Annual Meetings
I ended up attending that year’s conference with an extra-large suitcase shoved to the brim with cardboard posters and buttons. Plans were made among ally economists. We wanted to bring attention to the issue and break the silence regarding micro aggressions and bad behavior society assumes we will put up with — especially in our male-dominated field.
Attending the conference that year was slightly complicated by the fact that I was supposed to assume my new role on the women’s committee — a committee historically known for deafening silence when accusations popped up and whose focus was generally on fitting into the broad conservative vibe of the profession. Would I annoy the committee by publicly protesting and passing out buttons? At the end of the day, our actions were so non-harmful that I hoped my committee colleagues wouldn’t mind or, at a minimum, would be understanding.
The noise we made at the meeting turned out well. People gravitated towards and wore the buttons which either said #MeToo #EconTwitter or Support #MeToo #EconTwitter.
The response on the woman’s committee was mixed. I brought the buttons to our committee meeting the first day of the conference. Some grabbed them with ease and excitement. Others looked on in horror, and one person actively opened their eyes wide and said, “no thanks,” when offered. By the end of the conference, she was wearing a button too. It had helped that the president of the association chose to wear one of the buttons along with many other leaders.
Pearl Clutchers
Coming back from the meetings, it felt like we’d accomplished something. If nothing else, continued awareness and a drum call to individuals engaging in behaviors that diminish equality and advancement. However, a couple of weeks later I was summoned to a meeting with the leaders of the committee and a staffer. At this meeting, I was told that I would have to leave my public activism behind. That the committee relied on the executive board for funding to do its activities and, as such, they had always functioned “behind the scenes” to make meaningful change so as not to ruffle feathers with the executive board.
Their goal was clear— do not agitate leadership or do anything publicly that might. They asked me if I could comply during my time on the committee. Sure, I agreed. There is no right or wrong way to advocate for women and, different actions (or inactions) work under different scenarios.
Still, I’m not going to lie, it felt…icky. Like the power women have today was not being recognized. For example, if the committee did something to supporting women that leadership didn’t like and leadership cut their budget, a public call to action would surely correct that wrong — no?
Service Duties as Assigned
As the year progressed, I engaged in activities on behalf of the committee. We had been awarded funds to support research encouraging women to stay in the profession. I pulled together a team of experts to evaluate and suggest recommendations for which projects to fund. I responded to one angry applicant who was convinced she deserved the funding but had not gotten it. Reminding me that many in economics work off privileged positions of status and will easily try to use it when they don’t get their way. The behavior making it more difficult for newbies and others to enter.
Another interesting project fell into my lap. A global funder whose mission was to improve women’s experiences and gender equality was interested in talking with us. The head of our committee, busy with teaching and other commitments, told me to go ahead and start conversations with the group. I gave it my best, which was easy since they were a foundation after my own heart. We easily coalesced around general ideas of activities our committee could engage in that they could fund, and they asked for a simple, brief write up of some broad-brush strokes for a potential grant.
There were so many ideas, and my research had been leaning into gender, labor supply, and the high skilled workforce over the past decade. It was easy to fill the page with ideas. The funder liked the rough draft and asked us to continue to the next phase of writing a formal proposal with a budget.
The Anti-Hero Economist
I consider myself an outsider to the traditional economics track. I started my studies in liberal arts, transitioned to social work and public policy, before eventually landing in economics and receiving my PhD in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota. Midwestern at heart having grown up in Fargo, North Dakota, I am an outsider to the elite and Ivy League schools on the coasts. In high school, I applied to two colleges: the University of Minnesota and Boston College (they had a brochure in my guidance counselor’s office). There were no college visits for me and my single mother. I was rejected by Boston College, but I did get into the University of Minnesota.
The fact that I did not grow up in a traditional economics department has its pros and cons. Pro — I can get away with a lot more non-traditional behavior without caring about the consequences on my reputation.
Lots of women in economics have instead scaled up the sharp, edgy, steep, traditional mountain of the field. When they get to the top, they are so battered and bruised that it is all they can do to stay there, to hang on. They don’t want to rock the boat. They got there by buying into the traditional structure, by not being different.
Con — that is not me. I’m relatively un-phased by the top-down culture in economics. I don’t understand the culture of being silent and falling in line to hierarchical rules when diversity in teams and thought is been shown to better drive innovation.
In this scenario, I can be viewed as a rule breaker, which can make me a target. Which brings us back to my story.
While developing a proposal with the granting organization, I had not done my due diligence to check around the organization to find out who else might be interested and who else might want to have their own work carved out in the grant. This was entirely unintentional on my part.
Working in a service job for a professional organization means that you do the best you can with zero time and no compensation. But, in a world of hierarchy, dominance, image, and prestige, I had broken unwritten rules and unknowingly steps into others territory.
Hornet’s Nest
What ensued was chaos. With limited time to complete the proposal for submission, I wrote it, got feedback from those around me and the committee. The full committee voted in approval of the draft proposal and budget, and I continued the work. A colleague on the committee agreed to work with me to review the final draft, and we moved forward.
I worked up to the last-minute writing the proposal (during my summer vacation) and finalizing a budget. To get a budget estimate as close to reality as possible, I interacted with stakeholders trying to find out who could help move the plan into reality. I found a presenter for an interactive session on developing a toolkit for university departmental leaders to respond to issues of sexual harassment and abuse — a leader in her field and a national expert on the topic.
I hemmed and hawed about who could run an evaluation and eventually landed on creating a budget estimate for my institute to run the evaluation — knowing we could change it later if needed — but also knowing that our institute director had led the association’s prior evaluation of mentoring activities for female economists, so it seemed low risk.
The day the proposal was due, I asked our committee leader and the association staff if they could review it. I was nervous they wouldn’t have enough time but at least the committee had voted approval, I thought. I was relieved when they miraculously did the favor of making time to review. “This will be transformative,” I was told. “Excellent, I agree this is great,” was more feedback I was given.
I submitted the proposal by the end of the day with relief. We did it! And now the waiting process would begin. I thought I would have some time to get back to my vacation and other work. But then…an email inquiry to discuss the budget.
Even while I had been asking budget questions throughout the development of the proposal, it appeared as though either I had not asked the right questions, or the right people were not being asked. There were questions. Why funding for X, why moving funding through the association to Y? Why hadn’t I had the budget reviewed on the last day before I submitted it? [Answer: I was writing it until the very last second and figured the details of the budget were less critical than getting support for the budget description that described who and how we would do the work.]
Then, the accusation: The budget submitted was claimed to be significantly different than the budget the committee reviewed — why had I done that?
There is a lot that I do not know. I wasn’t invited to the meetings between the committee chair and association leadership to discuss the proposal even though I knew the proposal and budget best. It quickly turned into a game of telephone where questions were asked, accusations made, and feelings hurt among players outside of my periphery, which were then translated to me with agitation and accusations.
My assessment in trying to find out what the chatter was all about was that the proposal and budget were written in a way that didn’t pass the sniff test of the association, which appears to have, unfortunately, made our chair very uncomfortable. And, within the chaos, I became the scapegoat.
An accusation ensued that I had totally changed the budget from what the committee approved (not true). It felt like an episode of the twilight zone. The chair or one of the executives had calculated that only 12% of the funds were staying in the association (an organization that did not, I was previously told, have the bandwidth to implement many of the activities we were recommending be done on behalf of the association). This was interpreted as a ghastly error. Instead of just working with me to make the budget more inline with the organization’s preferences, I somehow became enemy number one; someone who could not be trusted.
This is a story as old as time. It is, after all, easy for anyone in a traditional top-down culture to pin outsider women as evil, mischievous, seedy, and not trustable when they have independent opinions and thoughts or are go getters…or when they do not easily fall in line. I had been swept up in a traditional gender-baiting cycle, and I was annoyed.
Why was I the one flagged as incompetent? Why hadn’t the leader of the committee had my back? These cycles are not only driven by men, but also, sometimes more often, by women as well. Society’s perceptions of how women should behave are all encompassing and gender neutral — meaning that both men and women engage in these types of fast-driving, stereotyping of women.
The Nest Grows
The story, of course, doesn’t end here. Women in another committee, who had a stake in and dedication to programming that increases inclusivity and the climate for women, had gotten wind that we had submitted a draft proposal to fund activities. What were we doing, they wanted to know? Why were we doing that when they themselves had ideas for what needed to be done and had already been engaged in thinking through similar ideas?
I called on my support network — we all, hopefully, have them — to ask for help. One happened to be on the other committee. How can we work together? I asked. How can we collaborate and fold in ideas to work together?
The environment was lukewarm. But I was able to talk with a few of the nay-sayers and, from appearance anyway, work towards buy ins and agreements to fold their work and interests into the grant. At the same time, I was dealing with my own committee chair who was annoyed and now acted like she distrusted me — the same person who had been absent for most, if not all, the development of the grant proposal — was now trying to step in to “fix the problem.” That meant she started asking me to copy her on emails and then, eventually, to stop talking and email others entirely.
I was frustrated and annoyed for being scapegoated. I am all about collaborating and, for me, it was exciting that others were so interested in the grant. I wanted to take the feedback and update and evolve the grant, but instead I was told to stand down. I was converted into a secretary — taking notes and working on updates and edits but with no leadership role.
I tried my best to find a path towards consensus, but everything I did agitated the chair of the committee. I was caught in a hornet’s nest of strong-willed female economists (some of whom were loud, mad, and offended for not having been consulted). They had stiff opinions about what we should do and that I, an unknown to them (“who is she?”), was bold enough to write a proposal without their feedback was not ok.
I find it important to keep two things in mind: I was not an insider of this women’s club, and I was writing this proposal as a service activity for a volunteer committee. I am not going to lie, the overreactions and control over my actions by the committee chair made me check out. I also wanted to respect the leadership space even if I didn’t agree with the plan and the opinions that were accumulating about me.
Female Stamps: She’s Young and Inexperienced
People were hearing stories that I was in over my head. I was 47 years old, had built programs and projects funded by Congress to the tune of $12 million, raised more than $2 million for innovative projects in my first year as an academic, and had worked in the harried bureaucracy of the federal government for over a decade. Even so, the committee chair told me I didn’t have enough experience with organizational bureaucracy — that the position appeared “too much” for me. She told me executive leaders were asking her who I was and what she was going to do about me … and my position. She then told me, six-months into my work on the committee, that she was not going to renew me in the position once it expired in six more months. The “problems” with the grant being the main reason.
After that, she told me she wanted to kill the grant. The grant was overwhelming her. I started sweating. We’d worked so hard to get to that point. I asked her, instead of killing it, to pass it on to my colleagues on the other committee who had been arguing that they had been looking to engage in these activities for a while now but didn’t have the funding for it. I would have rather had the other committee carry the torch than lose the opportunity to make lasting change in the profession. She agreed to pass it to them (phew).
At that point, I was still checked out. The last thing I needed was all this drama, and I was frustrated by how I was being treated and the assumptions made about me. My communications with the funder slowed as others took over.
The grant was revised by others with all the components that were in the original grant, but funds were increased to include more funding for a staffer at the association to manage grant activities and other things. After the revision, the grant was approved by the funder — yea! If anything, even if I had been pushed out, at least we were still going to get resources for activities that could have a solid impact on women in the profession. And, if I had to be the scapegoat but we could get there in the end, so be it.
A Trip to Mexico?
In early December, the funder asked us to participate in a late January workshop they were hosting in Mexico for grantees. Who could go? Most of the busy ladies who had taken over the grant development from me were all booked up — none had time for a week-long workshop in Mexico. My mentor who had stayed engaged with the grant development, partially to save some of the work that I had originally written into the grant, agreed to go. Then I agreed to go, mostly to support her. And a third committee member signed up to go as well.
The grant was large, almost $1 million, and the work involved in the grant was going to require lots of effort. So, the three of us would travel to México. The funder had told us we could send up to six people. I, one of the initiators of the grant who was passionate about the work but who had been edged out, was one of the very few individuals to prioritize making this last minute trip.
End of an Era
I did not go to the association meetings in early January of that year. I felt frustrated, mistreated, and embarrassed. Since telling me I would not be renewed in my service position and with grant activities moving forward essentially without me, I was unmotivated.
When the meetings did roll around, the agenda for the winter committee meeting came out via email. As if things could not get any more awkward, reading through the agenda is how I found out that the person replacing me in my position was the third person heading to Mexico with us. She had volunteered to review the draft grant at the beginning, had attended some of the discussion meetings after the original kerfuffle, and had been holding a different position on the board. I had no idea she was replacing me.
To make it even more uncomfortable, my mentor had to back out of the trip to Mexico. So, we were down to two members who would be attending the Mexico workshop — my new replacement and me, a defunct board member who had been trivialized and marginalized.
Mexico!!!
Organizations focusing on uplifting women are amazing at breathing life into us when we are at our lowest. I expected to go to the workshop, participate, and head home without much of a murmur — except the occasional complaint from my children for being away from home all week. But what I experienced was something so much more than that. We dug deep into trust building, cooperative learning, and creating supportive spaces for new ideas and thinking outside of the box. We were encouraged to throw out our old plans and start envisioning without the constraints of the already known. It was invigorating.
But something else also happened, my heart for the work, which had grown grinchy, small, and empty, began to fill up again. It was refreshing to hear what others around the world were focused on and find that these very different organizations had more similarities than differences. We built up relationships, heard from experts, and broke out into smaller groups to imagine a world where women experience full equality.
Since there were only two of us from our organization, and breakout moments were awkward but still fun since we were allowed to let our ideas run wild. On day two, however, my colleague had to step out for a work meeting from back home that she could not miss. I was left by myself with the funder who I had primarily engaged in conversations with at the onset. She was pushing me to re-envision the work.
Feeling awkward, I ended up telling her that I was no longer a key member of the grant. Conversations followed, and, at that point, I realized that the funders had been keenly interested in me and my work in our original discussions with them. I was one of the reasons they had decided to fund the work. They believed in the vision I had for the work.
They were worried that I was no longer in a leading position on the grant and, in fact, had no role. She encouraged me to stay engaged and asked how they could support. It was not lost on any of us that while I had been shut out of the grant development, I was only one of two who took the time to prioritize making it to the workshop.
Having my grinch heart grow an inch by her belief and confidence in me gave me confidence to speak to my colleague who was at the workshop with me and explain to her the outline of events that led to my ouster. She was unaware of most of it. She and I connected around the work, and we continued to develop a strategy about how I might be able to reengage in leading the work.
Rough Landing
I left México reinvigorated and with a clear goal for working towards getting my leading position back. I immediately contacted confidants who knew the association deeply to ask for advice on how to re-engage. “Focus on your skillset and your ability and desire to lead and less on any personality conflicts,” was one piece of advice. “Yes, it’s a fact that the committee in the past has lost money or was threatened that they would lose money by the executive committee,” was another response in trying to help understand why the committee continues to be so conservative with its actions. “Contact someone who has the power to help get you back in,” was another piece of advice.
I ended up asking for a temporary position to be created that would sit alongside the executive committee who would oversee the work of the grant. My colleague whom I met in México was going to try to get buy in within the committee to place me in the position, perhaps a tall ask but we left México full of hope. The goal was to have some follow up meetings upon return from México to discuss next steps.
The temporary position was created, but I was never allowed to fill it. I was never contacted about a follow up meeting upon return and found out later that it had happened without me. The chair refused to include me in the meeting. Debates ensued among the group who met that I am not privy too. At least one meeting was had between the funder and the new leaders of the grant. Still zero communication with me.
Since I was originally on the grant, I had been receiving standard email reminders from the foundation regarding due dates of materials. Upon receipt of one of these, I emailed the members of the group that was meeting without me to ask if they had that submission under control. I was courtly told yes. I shared that it is hard to know since I was being completely excluded from the association’s meetings on the grant. It was at that point that the two identified leaders of the grant suggested I meet, just with them, to discuss.
It felt like a set up. A divide and conquer method — they were intentionally excluding me from the large group meetings after our return from México. Now they wanted to meet with just me. Why would they only meet with me without my mentor and my colleague who was with me in México, both of whom were supportive of letting me lead the grant?
Standing Their Ground Against This Mistrustful Ruse
I went into the meeting focused on listening mode, but when I got to the meeting, there was an already established agenda. I was asked how I knew the funders and why I was interacting with them. I was asked to describe what, if any, roll or responsibilities I had at the beginning of the grant — even though the second person in the meeting was the chair of my committee and knew the answers. I was asked to provide the receipts of my earlier involvement in the grant. I was then told that the leadership group would include five individuals from two committees and the executive team — and that I was not being invited to join the leadership group.
If I wanted, they would welcome me working to assist my mentor in the piece of the project she had written into the grant with the funding coming to our university. I baulked. “So, you do not want me to participate in a leadership role, but you are happy with me doing the work?” “Oh, no, no, no,” was the response. Others will be doing other work on other pieces of the grant, and other similar responses ensued. Then, I was reminded, “Well, if you do not want this position we are offering you, you are free to just not participate. Nobody is making you participate. We are all here in voluntary service rolls.”
It’s me, Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.
They also asked me to stop communicating with the funder. They wanted to control the message and, to ease their leadership of the grant, they wanted to have a seamless connection with the funder. Somehow, they felt comfortable asking me to not communicate with the funder even though I was technically no longer a part of their organization because they had pushed me out. I said that I would be communicating one last time with the funders to discuss how this meeting had gone, but that after that I would abide by their request. They asked me to copy them and stated some preferences in how and what I should communicate to the funder.
The Anti-Hero’s Last Stand
This is where I cut ties, at least for now. I am not sure I will take up the worker bee position I’ve been offered. It’s clear I am not welcome. It is also not clear if the grant will focus on continuing to fund activities that can make as much substantive change as could be if those involved dreamed big, without limited or boundaries, like we were encouraged to do in the workshop.
The association recently did a climate survey of its members — a second survey four years after the first one. The recent survey showed none-to-little improvement in women’s feelings and experiences of feeling welcome within the profession. After this experience, I understand why. It’s time that, as a collective, we do better. We owe it to ourselves and the generations that come after us.