Breakout Moves: How Women in Academia Succeed

>> Jennifer Burns: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming out to this live taping of the Hoover Institution's celebration of International Women's Day. I'm Jennifer Burns. I'm an associate professor of history at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. My research focuses on American history and the history of economic thought.

And my most recent book is Milton Friedman, the last conservative. I'm really honored to be here on this panel with such accomplished scholars. What I'm gonna do is introduce briefly each panelist in turn, and then we'll turn to some questions and have a free flowing conversation. And then we do believe there'll be time for audience questions at the end.

So for this to my left, we're joined by Carolyn Hoxby, the Scott and Donia Baumer professor of economics at Stanford University, the director of the economics of education program for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Seated next to her is Valerie Ramey, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

She's also professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught for 36 years. And to my left, we have Brandis Keynes Roan, a professor in the political science department at Stanford, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the founding director of the Hoover Institution center for Revitalizing American Institutions.

So I'd like to start off, if I can start with you, Carolyn, if you could tell us just briefly in your own words, about the major problems and questions that you focused on in your career.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: So I'm an economist of education. That means that I work on every issue that has to do with education and money, basically.

I like to put it that way. So I work on school finance. I work on school choice. I work on pure effects. I work on the effects of all kinds of different interventions on children and students. We're really interested these days in how we pay teachers and whether we pay them sufficiently to have good instruction in the United States.

So just any of those questions. I work on those things. I'm also a public economist. A public economist is somebody who works on taxes and spending. So if you want to know about your taxes, you can ask me, but ask me afterwards because other people will probably be a little bit bored.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Thanks. Okay, Valerie, how about you?

>> Valerie Ramey: I'm also an economist. I work mostly in macroeconomics, although I have several areas where I got very interested in microeconomics. In macro, one of the themes has been business cycles. What causes business cycles and whether government programs, such as fiscal programs, government spending transfers, can stimulate the economy when it's in a recession and stabilize business cycles.

A second theme in the macro area has been growth. One question is whether volatility induced by business cycles can actually lead to slower growth in the long run. And then, most recently, I've been looking at the extent to which global warming is likely to cool global growth. In the micro area, I've done work on the sources and reasons for the rise of wage inequality, starting in the 1980s.

And then one of my passions is also studying time use, both over the entire 20th century. Changes in the way people spent their time, but also more recently, why it is that particularly educated parents have dramatically increased the amount of time they spend doing things for their children, even though they now have fewer children.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: My main area is american politics. I work on american political institutions, elections, public opinion, and areas of political economy. I've done a little bit of work that veers into comparative politics of other countries, but the heart of my work is on the United States. Just a few topics.

So the great thing about being an academic, as other comments have already suggested, is you get to work on a variety of things over your career. So much of my work has looked at the US presidency, the ways in which presidents both try to influence and respond to public opinion.

I have actually a project on electoral business cycles. So different, very special type of business cycle, and looking at ways in which policy uncertainty affects various parts of the economy differently, and what types of political factors affect those influences. So, factors such as polarization between the parties and a lot of my current work has been looking at changes in the us campaign finance system and ways in which that shaped the us political system.

So one of the large changes over the past decades has been to decrease the influence of political parties in the fundraising process, try to empower individual congressional members more in terms of fundraising, and empower individual donors more in terms of their role in the fundraising process. There's a lot of cheerleading for those developments.

The type of research I do tries to look at the variety of effects. So it doesn't go in saying this is good or it's bad, but sort of what are the various effects? And then, only then, once we've learned what the effects are, can we start to take a step back and evaluate whether these are good or bad things.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Great. So one thing we all know is there's a lot of, maybe, say, drudgery or just kind of hard day in and day out work when you're a scholar or an academic or trying to break new ground in a field. And then there are the moments. Maybe it's a eureka moment, or maybe it's just a moment when things really start to come together.

And I think it's that intellectual excitement that's what draws us, draws us to universities, draws us to become scholars. I wonder if you could give us some insight into a moment in your career that was just really intellectually exciting, that really felt like, this is why I'm doing it.

This is where the pieces are coming together. Can I start with you, Carolyn?

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: So I almost feel like I have so many of these moments that I can't name one. I guess that's kind of a good thing. I often find that when I'm teaching undergraduates, an undergraduate will ask a question and it will really stump me.

And then on my way back to my office afterwards, I think, wait, I think I could answer that question. This happened to me a couple of years ago when we think that early childhood education should have a disproportionate effect on people. Because when you're really young, your brain is developing faster than it is when you're older.

But a lot of the evidence on early childhood education doesn't actually show that it has a disproportionate influence on people or that it has necessarily a lasting effect. And so this used to be frustrate me all the time when I was in class, because my class would say, well, why doesn't it have an effect?

We expect it to have an effect. It's not having the effect that we expect. And so I was walking home from class, and I thought, maybe I will just stop by Green library and look to see what the neuroscience says about brain development and the age at which brain development is occurring.

And I had this kind of aha moment, although it was aha from reading books, okay? Which I suppose is good. That's why we have libraries that early adolescence. Was the time when your prefrontal cortex develops. And so that is one of the key times to actually do interventions for children is early adolescence, which is 10 and a half for girls, 11 and a half for boys.

And I thought that was a true aha moment. It's really, it explained a lot of things to me that I'd always been able to see in the data, but I hadn't really understood why it was that there was this, what I think of as a great parting of the ways among early adolescents, with some who continue on a steep upward trajectory of cognitive skills and others who really just don't learn very much in terms of cognitive skills after a certain age.

And so that was a great aha moment. But generally speaking, I just love teaching economics, so I have, like, fun aha moments all the time. It's just I don't wanna say it's one big pleasure after another because teaching is not that fun, but it's pretty fun. It's pretty fun because students ask good questions, and coming up with the answers is always a pleasure.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, we all want job satisfaction, that stimulation of being around other people, working it out. I mean, I find it really interesting that that's also an interdisciplinary story that you went outside of your discipline for insights. And I think that's actually just on the biggest level, something Stanford does really well with so many programs and so much encouragement to try to cross those boundaries.

 

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: Right, yeah, and it makes it. So on this particular example, sticking with the example for a moment, I took out all these books from the library, and then I went home and I read for four weeks. I did nothing but read neuroscience, and it was a fun break from economics and taxation.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Great, yeah, Valerie.

>> Valerie Ramey: So I've had a lot of wonderful moments. That's a great thing about research, but it really is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. But the one that I remember the most was actually in the early 1990s. I was finishing up a paper on the us auto industry.

I'd done a lot of work on that. And one of the big things in the us auto industry is the way the import share really started rising in the seventies, to some extent in the eighties. And then I took a break to go to the applied micro seminar because they had interesting stuff going on there often.

And I saw for the first time the rise in the college wage premium, the average wage earned by a college educated person versus non college educated. And I looked at that graph. I think James Smith presented this paper and I said, that looks just like the import share of motor vehicles.

So I went back to my office and I said, well, it can't all be motor vehicles. And then I started looking at durables, and it had that same pattern. So I went to my colleague, George Borjas, and I said, I think there might be a link here. And then I just told him my idea, and he knew all the stuff that I didn't know.

But it was like clouds parted. I could see clearly how all of this was linked together and had a vision almost. And then suddenly the clouds came back, and I spent the next six months figuring out how to get back to that vision, exactly what I needed to do with the model, and then what we had to do with the empirics.

But that was so much fun because we did get back to what I had seen in that sort of ray of light.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, that's another great story, and that's the collaboration, right? Whether it's going to the seminar or walking to the colleague's door. So I'm very glad we're all off Zoom and we're back in the real world where we can have these serendipitous encounters.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So I mentioned to Jennifer ahead of time that I'm cautious in naming my aha moments cuz almost all of my research involves observational data. And with observational data, you're running lots of different statistical types of tasks to make sure that what you think is true is actually true.

So you have to be very careful not to get too excited at that first regression result and sort of fall in love with it and decide you're devoted to it being true, because that's really the path to possibly a very bad outcome. You have to be prepared that that result may go away.

So, having said that, I have had gratifying moments where it seemed that my instincts might be correct. And that's reassuring recently, and I will note this is something that, in academia, I at least think of this as a very positive interchange. And you can ask my colleagues if they agree, but I think they do.

There are two colleagues here at Stanford who had written a paper criticizing a paper that I'd actually written. I was not at Stanford at the time or at Hoover at the time, but written with two Hoover fellows long ago, David Brady and John Cogan. And David Brady's also in the political science department, saying they used to be right, but things have changed the way that congressional elections work now.

They work differently. And I took seriously their paper. I didn't think, this is Adam Bonica and Gary Cox. They're very smart people. They're very good scholars. But I thought they were probably missing something important. And that basically, while they said we were wrong, we were more right than wrong in that our original article had been about incumbent members of Congress.

Their response lumped together incumbents and challengers. And I thought, what I think has happened is things work very differently for challengers now challenging candidates of Congress, but that incumbents actually haven't changed as much. And so after a lot of analysis, we showed that that, in fact, is the case.

And I did receive a nice email from Adam recently saying that, they have a follow up paper where they build on our results. And so I point this out partly that a lot of academia is, this is, I think, a valuable kind of not learning just for us, but for the field, sort of, that there are developments in the world.

Things do change. It's okay to criticize each other and to push back, and that by doing that in a civil and respectful way, there's been a lot of knowledge, and it is gratifying then to feel like you pushed back. There was some success in there.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's what it's all about, that there's a core of disciplinary knowledge or methods that can settle these disputes.

And you're absolutely right that one of the best pieces of advice I got was someone said to me, criticism and rejection are just part of academia. And the sooner you can accept that, the truth will set you free. And especially if it's someone right down the hall that might feel a little dicey, but it's okay.

You can work it out.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: And you learn from each other, but importantly, the world learns from that.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, exactly.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: I often feel that when I, the first time I present a paper in a big conference, I'm always so pleased to present it because I feel that until I'm there and I get the questions and I get the feedback, I don't know what the confusions are or the gaps are in my own work.

And I am not averse to their asking me questions. I want them to ask me questions so that I myself can find what's there, because that's the fun part, is actually understanding, including sometimes when you confuse other people, you need to know, why are they confused? Why have I not explained this well?

And I find that fun. So I really enjoy it.

>> Jennifer Burns: So, I think we have some in the audience who might be thinking about academic careers are or on the way. Can you give us a sense of your path? And maybe, I don't know if there was a moment when you felt sure this was what you wanted to do, but maybe some steps along the way or turning points and just to mix it up.

Can I start with you first and then we'll go, right to left?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay, yeah. So I did some undergraduate research, and I would definitely suggest that anyone interested in an academic career do that in one way or another. That could be working as a research assistant or in a laboratory, but that could also be doing your own independent work as a senior thesis.

So I became really convinced by doing some junior independent work, which was with Kathy Thielen, who is a political scientist in a very different part of the field than I am. Actually, but who was very supportive, and then doing a senior thesis, actually, with an economist. I was an economics undergraduate major with Harvey Rosen, both of them were great mentors.

And I think one thing you can even take from that is that neither of them, Harvey, is a public economist, so does related, but different work. And Kathy, very different work, very qualitative work in political science that you can have great faculty mentors in a variety of areas.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Can I just follow up and ask, as an undergraduate political you were undergraduate economics major?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: I was in a political economy program, so that's where I did some research in both political science and economics.

>> Jennifer Burns: Did you have a debate? How did you decide what field you thought you wanted to pursue in the doctoral level?

Was it home program based?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: I did my PhD in Stanford's graduate school of Business, political economics department.

>> Jennifer Burns: Okay.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: But that program tends to produce more political scientists than economists. So in that sense, I knew what I was signing up for. And political science is an unusual field in that the graduate programs are somewhat different than the undergraduate programs.

But I had a sense of what I wanted to, the types of questions I wanted to start, and they were about American politics, yeah.

>> Jennifer Burns: So you weren't locked in?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah.

>> Jennifer Burns: That's great.

>> Valerie Ramey: Valerie we'll go to you. So I was a debater in high school and really was into debate.

And then my father, after seeing a lawyer for some family property that my mother had inherited, he said, you should be a lawyer, they have a license to steal.

>> Valerie Ramey: So I said, okay, I like to debate. So then I thought political science is a good major. So I lived in Tucson, and I went to University of Arizona, and I started out as a political science major, and I liked those classes.

However, I was also a debater in college, and the topic my freshman year was resolved that the federal government should guarantee full employment. Suddenly I learned what the Federal reserve was, all of those sorts of things, because nobody taught us economics in high school back then. And I thought this was pretty cool.

And then my husband, he was my boyfriend at the time, also wanted to be a lawyer, was also a debater, and he'd heard that economics is also a good background for law because of the antitrust stuff. So we said, yeah, economics is neat. So we switched. Then some of the more senior debaters went off to law school and were lawyers.

They said, we hate it, don't do it!

>> Valerie Ramey: So we said, no, what do we do? We thought, well, MBA or PhD. And our mentors at the University of Arizona, who I'll talk about later, said, no, no, you'd be bored doing an MBA, you wanna get a PhD.

And then my mother always wanted me to go to Stanford. And so then they told us what we needed to do to get into Stanford, and both my husband and I got into Stanford.

>> Valerie Ramey: So we fell into it.

>> Jennifer Burns: That's great.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: Okay, so I have a pretty funny story about how I became an economist.

My father was the head of what I think we would now call health and human services, it wasn't called that at the time, for first in the state of Ohio and then for the state of Massachusetts. So there was always a lot of discussion around the dinner table about poverty, unemployment, people who were on welfare and so forth.

And my parents idea of a nice Sunday outing was to take us to the projects so that we would get to see housing projects around these states. Or we would go to the area in Detroit where they had the riots so we could see how it was burned out.

That was my parents' idea of a Sunday outing. So I was always very interested in issues like this. And then when I was in 8th grade, I think it was 8th grade, might have been 7th grade, I had a teacher who was a PhD economist. And the reason why he was teaching in middle school was that he had wanted to avoid the Vietnam war, okay?

So he kept going to school longer and longer and longer so that he could stay out of the Vietnam war. So he ended up getting a PhD, cuz that takes a long time. And then when he became a teacher, he was kind of frustrated because he couldn't teach anyone economics.

And they said, well, you can teach this very selective little class economics for the middle schoolers. And on day one, we started reading Adam Smith, and I was a convert. Like, that was it. That was it. I've never looked back. I've been an economist ever since. I knew I wanted to be an economist when I went to college.

Never thought twice about it, really. Although if I could do it all again, I might also be an art historian. That would be kind of fun.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: And also, I think one of the things, and I really have to say that I love about economics, is that you can be an academic economist and you get to do scholarship where you generate the questions, and it's all up to you to generate the questions.

But I served as an economist when I was in college for the chief economist of a very large company in the world. And I loved that, too. I thought it was fantastic. I loved having someone pitch questions at you just over the plate. Every day you have to answer a new question, and I thought it was fun.

So you don't have to use it in a way that's a scholarly way, necessarily, you can also use it in a practical way, and it can be a lot of fun, too.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, so it's been interesting as we put together this panel, reflecting on my own research.

And I focused on the biography of Milton Friedman, who one thing I discovered, a sort of secret to his success, were all these different women that he collaborated with over the course of his career. And then I also discovered the way that his great collaborator, Anna Schwartz, was just treated so terribly by her peers.

They essentially refused to give her a doctorate, although she was co-authoring a book. That would be one of the sort of path breaking books in economics in the 20th century. So when I think about that, and then I think about a panel like today, we've definitely come a long way, and there's been so many welcome changes.

But just thinking about, we're not quite where we need to be. And if you think about your field or your discipline, are there maybe a couple of changes, or you had a magic wand, what could you change? And then, if there is any sort of practical steps you think to get into a place where your discipline and universities are open to talent, wherever it comes from and whoever is the bearer of the talent.

So you have any thoughts on that?

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: Well, yes, I mean, I think if I had a magic wand, I would definitely change some things about the economics profession. I think women still struggle to be taken as seriously as men, and that is sometimes a problem. I also think that women tend to get pigeonholed in certain areas.

People think you're gonna work on this because you're a woman, and they sort of assume that that's what you're gonna do. On the whole, though, I have to say, I think things have changed so much since when I was young. That I think if we continue at this kind of a pace, that it will be really pretty good for people in the upcoming generation.

The one thing I will mention is that women still face a certain amount of weird sexism in my field. That sometimes there's some social media things that can be very unfortunate, and we just, I guess you learn to tolerate them over time. But I wish people didn't have to tolerate them.

I wish people didn't have to get used to them. And sometimes young women will ask me, well, what should I do about this, that or the other? And I think you just better. I often say you need to develop a little bit of a thick skin and let things just, like, run off your back like water, and not worry about stuff too much, because otherwise it'll bother you.

So you need to develop a thick skin. I think it's a good idea.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, that's maybe a whole other panel how these attitudes hit social media or hit the anonymous message board and just can become very toxic. So the collision of technology and old attitudes and the effort for social change is a really tough one.

Yeah, so, Valerie, you retired after 36 years. I've seen a lot. Any reflections on this?

>> Valerie Ramey: I think it was pretty good, even when I started out. Now, I probably had an advantage in that. My husband was in undergrad with me, graduate school, and that got rid of a lot of the problems of, say, that single women might have in those venues.

So I never really saw that side of it, although I've certainly heard stories from others. So I think there's been tremendous progress that has been made. And in terms of what can do, mostly, I would say the things that are holding women back is part of it, is what's going on outside the career.

It's just home production takes time, and particularly if you're a child bearer, there are just certain things that women tend to spend more time on than men. And so that does have an effect and certainly I was really helped. I was able to have children before tenure without feeling like I was destroying my career.

Because the University of California was one of the first places that had, where you could extend your tenure clock for a year. And if you were smart enough to have your child during the year? I had my first during the summer. Not knowing this, you could actually get some teaching off.

So it was really good for me. Because I had a husband in the profession and because the University of California was very progressive on those sorts of things, that it went smoothly for me. And I just hope that other people, that whatever made it easier for me that we can try to replicate that with other sorts of things.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, so I want to both answer your question and. But also agree with the massive progress as well, that I had one of my children, junior, and the second one after tenure. Unfortunately, there was a large fight at MIT, even though it was 2001, when I had my first child, and that was seven years after the Family and Leave Act had been passed.

MIT did not have an institute wide policy at the time. It was actually an interesting situation, which is that my understanding is that in the kind of biological and physical sciences, women felt strongly. That the leave should only go to women, that the men should not get it, too, because most in there, in most cases, the men had a wife who was very or partner who was very a kind of stay at home lead parent.

But in the humanities, often the men were the lead parent. And so the humanities didn't want any policy that left the men out. And the social sciences, which I were happy to go with either. We're sort of saying, let's just get something off the ground, but we didn't have one.

But in the end, we negotiated out something where I could take some time off. There was no tenure extension. That was those have come in. So I look at the way that particularly parenthood is treated now and see massive progress and think these are very good things. So that is good.

Fortunately, I did not have to deal with the social media environment then. So not all has progressed. I don't consider the kind of. There has always been gossip. That's not new. But it was the case before that if the person spreading gossip about you was the person that you got the job over, everyone knew it was the person.

That's who was spreading it. And I did not have anyone that I got a job over spread gossip. So I want to also be clear about that but now rumors can just be put up on these posts. And who's saying these rumors? We don't know. Is this someone who even knows the person?

Is this someone who didn't get an interview at the place that that person got an interview? That's not a good situation. So, the best solution is what's already been said, that we as a field simply ignore it and that we, or certainly take any statement like that with the complete kind of malicious gossip that it is and don't take it.

The other change I'd like to see, and I think this is partly, I want to say, I don't think my department would bias in this way. But I do think that women in the field feel there's such a bias, whether it's actually there. So I want to just put it out there that women seem to feel they have to single author more and men feel much more comfortable co authoring.

Well, if that's true, for whatever reason, then the men are simply gonna have more sites over time and they're gonna have more articles. And you can kind of do these divisions. I think both single authoring and co authoring are good things. And I think that this is something where it's important both for women, since we're in Silicon Valley, women have to be willing to lean in.

But I think it's also important for departments to play a kind of leadership and mentorship role here in letting junior women and graduate student women know that. Particularly in fields where co authorship is now the dominant form of publication, that this is something that they'll, you know, give them full credit for.

 

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: There's some research that shows that women are more likely to single author. And I think it's because I can, without naming names, I can think back to some famous co author pairs where the guy always got the credit and the woman did not, even though they were, in fact, equal co authors.

And so you can see why people don't want to be in that situation. That's why I think it's both we have to do our part in.

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, I think these all point to, we were discussing kind of offline. I think some of you heard the message maybe from actual senior colleagues, you know, don't have kids until you have tenure or think, you know, just really open, overt statements.

And now we have more subtlety the challenges of co authorship or the secret. Internet message board that can be really problematic or can sink your chances before you even know it's out there. So there's new forms, and maybe we need to be even more alert because they have become so subtle.

So, okay, there have been obstacles, but we've all made it up here onto the stage. And I'm imagining all of you had mentors and guides along the way. Can you talk a little bit about the people who really shaped your way, your path into the field? And I'll go with you, Carolyn.

 

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: So I feel like I've been so fortunate in my life in terms of mentors. I really have. I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and then I was at Oxford, and then I was at MIT, and then I went back to Harvard as a professor. So a lot of my colleagues when I was at Harvard as a professor were people who had taught me as undergraduates.

And I almost felt like I was in my family, you know, like I'd known them since I was 18 years old. And there was only one woman in my department apart from myself. That's Claudia Goldin, Nobel Prize winning, very recently. She's a wonderful human being. But it wasn't, you weren't gonna find a lot of female mentors because there just weren't any.

So Jim Paterba was one of my thesis advisors at MIT. I mean, he's one of my best friends now. I think I probably talk to Jim several times a week, every week. Hank Farber, a Princeton professor now, was another one of my advisors. Marty Feldstein was a great influence on me and really made sure that I got lots and lots of opportunities.

And I was so close, Marty, unfortunately died a few years ago, but we were so close that when he died, I felt almost as though my father was dying. It was like that, really, really close mentors. And I just feel like I could keep going. I could just keep going and I could name 25 other people.

John Taylor is right here in the room. John Taylor, wave your hand. He's been a wonderful mentor for me. So I think that in a way, you just have to, you have to make sure that you find the people who work for you. And I largely think that women cannot depend on just other women to be their mentors.

It's not realistic. I think it's nice for younger women to sometimes be able to see how women cope with situations. So I think that's a useful thing. But I don't think you can depend on their being your main mentors. I think you just have to find your mentors where you have the intellectual knitting together.

I think the main reason, actually, to, you know, to have, like, women who are your bosses or your leaders or faculty is that you get to see them cope with situations, and that gives you a set of skills that you might not pick up from men. So I'll give you an example.

When I first was an assistant professor at Harvard, I had a colleague who's a very difficult person, okay. And he used to make people cry all the time. And I'm talking about men. These were not women. He would have people crying in seminars. He was so mean. And I just thought, I am not going to let him get to me.

The first time he tries to do this to me, I will step on his head. And I could see that all of the female graduate students were like, yeah, she took him out. He never did it again, of course, right? At least not to me. Okay, so I think there is a way in which people have to learn those sorts of skills.

And sometimes those skills are, you can only learn them from watching another woman take out a guy. He really got much better. He's quite peaceful now.

>> Valerie Ramey: So I had wonderful mentors. So I'll start with undergrad. I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. And my two mentors there were Ron Oaxaca, the famous Oaxaca decomposition, and Vernon Smith, who was the father of experimental economics, who went on to win the Nobel prize.

So Ron Oaxaca was great. So my husband and I worked as research assistants for him, and we just learned so much about how exciting research was. So that was great. He, along with my husband's other mentor, would tell us what we needed to do to take the right math classes to get into Stanford, which is what we wanted to do.

And then Vernon Smith, he really liked the honors paper I wrote for his class. And he says, I think you can turn this into a regular paper. You can use the lab and co author with Mark Isaac and Arlington Williams and set it up. And I got my first publication, experimental economics, and it was actually reprinted elsewhere.

So that was wonderful. And they helped us get into Stanford, which was our dream. And here at Stanford, Bob Hall at the Hoover institution was my main mentor. I was his research assistant. I had my office at Hoover for four years next to him, and he was great.

He's guided me through my entire career. And then, of course, the other two members of my dissertation committee, John Taylor, who came, unfortunately, after I'd taken my coursework, but still really helped me plug some of the gaps and the tools that I needed for my dissertation. And then Steve Derlof, who had recently come here.

So they were just great. And I kept up with all of them. And then as an assistant professor at UCSD, we had Clive Granger and Rob Engel, who were at their peak doing time series. Both of them went on to win the Nobel Prize, but they set such a wonderful culture and you could just ask them any question.

They were so useful. And so I really hadn't learned much time series here. I was able to go there and basically breathing in the air or talking to them outdoors, looking out over the ocean, learning time series. It was just great. So they were wonderful mentors.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So I've already mentioned a few of my mentors, my undergraduate mentors that I mentioned, Kathy Thielen and Harvey Rosenk.

I've mentioned two that were here. I was a research assistant here as well at Hoover as a graduate student. So that was for John Kogan. And then I also worked with David Brady, who was here. My committee was formative. So obviously in graduate school, your committee is a key part, and that included Keith Crabel, who's at the business school, Terry Moe, who recently retired from Hoover, Doug Rivers, and then John Kogan, who I mentioned.

So, but there were other people at Stanford. This is where I don't want it to sound like an academy awards speech.

>> Jennifer Burns: Right.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: He's sort of a little worried about this, but that having a lot of mentors is helpful. I mean, there was this kind of, and I know in some fields, some level, in some of the lab sciences, that's the design, because it's so and so's lab.

But having a diversity of mentors, I think, really helps because you learn different things. So I think even if you're in a field where you're working in the so and so lab, getting to know other faculty is a great benefit. I'd add that I was a junior, started in my first job at MIT, and I was fortunate to have a wonderful group in the American politics group there with Jim Snyder, Steven Salabahira, and Charles Stewart.

They were all very supportive of my career, but also very supportive when I was having a child. And as a junior faculty, which was relatively unusual, there were wonderful women in the department. They weren't in my research area, so consistent with, they were very friendly and supportive. So that definitely was wonderful to have them as colleagues.

And I will say it was helpful for me. You get into this kind of intellectual question of what's a mentor? There was certainly a networking effect in political science where there are women who, you know, I may have only talked to three or four times. They weren't at the institution I was at, I'd meet them at a conference.

There weren't many senior women in American politics at the time. And they would give encouragement, they'd give helpful pieces of advice. And again, whether that's a mentor or whether that's just a really wonderful colleague, but I've definitely tried to play that forward. Fortunately, there are a lot more women now, so that's maybe less on one person to do that, but we all have to play our part.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, mentoring is as mentoring does, and I hear that mentors go throughout your whole career, right? And so in graduate school, you're sort of handed your mentors, but you have to keep seeking and cultivating those people at different stages of the career. Especially I think that junior faculty, time can be a place where you're kind of fledged the nest and maybe there's nobody there, you still have a ways to go and you still need that mentoring.

And I hear also mentoring is everything from just observing at a distance to that almost demystification. Like, okay, here's how you go from University of Arizona to Stanford. I'm going to break it down for you in very tangible ways. So, yeah, these are all things we can pay back and that we should be looking for.

What I often say to graduate students or prospective graduate students, you really need to talk to the other students in the program and find out if you're going to get that type of mentoring that you need. And the person with all the publications and a great reputation, you don't want that person to leave you high and dry.

You really need them to be invested you in the way that we've heard here. So just something to keep in mind if you're evaluating graduate programs.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: Also, I think one of the things that sometimes we think of someone as a mentor and the person did not do all that much for us, but the person gave you encouragement at that crucial time when you were feeling like, is this a good, am I doing good work?

Am I not doing good work? Am I really making progress? Am I not? And they just made the intervention at the right time. And I often think when I'm talking to graduate students and undergraduate students, it's very easy to start picking apart what it is that they're doing and telling them, you need to improve this, you need to improve that, you need to improve the other thing, instead of starting with some encouragement and saying what's good about what it is that you're doing.

Because those little suggestions that you make about, no, I think this is a good project. I want you to keep going. I'm excited about what you're going to find out. Sometimes that makes a big difference, and it can be pretty short.

>> Jennifer Burns: So I wonder if you have any specific advice for women entering the field or thinking about careers.

Could I start with you again, Brandis?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yes, so we were talking about mentors, and I was tempted to put this in that answer, but I think it's more of an advice, which is to develop a really strong set of graduate student colleague. So some of the people I've counted on the most are the people I went through graduate school with.

They've become co-authors, many of them are close friends, and they've been the sort of person where they were coming up with you in the field. Many of them are in the field of political science, but some are in other fields. Since I was at the business school, they're in fields such as marketing.

They might have gone into psychology, and particularly in terms of female graduate student colleagues, often they were not in my field. And honestly, it's been enormously helpful, of course, most directly to have people in your own field who know exactly what you're going through. But there's something helpful in having people in kind of adjacent fields because you can really tell them everything, data, things you wouldn't say to anyone else in your field.

That's, you know, just kind of, you want to be really blunt and they can give very helpful feedback because they're in a very similar situation and they don't even know the people. And sometimes that's helpful, too, to have that outside. So that would be my most important. The second is that I think it's important, and I work on this, but I think it is really important to always take what happens to you in the best possible light because I think things have moved a long ways.

I agree with the prediction that the rate we're going, it's all looking terrific, but that doesn't mean there won't ever be some stumbles. So I once went to a job interview, I had told them I was pumping, for instance, and I was given a glass room to pump in.

So this is one of those moments where that's not how you wanna get the job. And also, you have to remember that the person who's doing this is not doing it in a nefarious or, this is new. They apparently had never had someone who came for an interview who was doing this, you know, and you have to just, you can just name lots of those incidents.

And again, so I would just, you know, remember that mistakes get made, but often they're really just give them the best case scenario. The third is something I'm very much still working on, which is to learn to say no, which is that, and how to say it, which is that.

And I think that this is true for everyone. It is not specific to women, but it is the case that sometimes with the best of intentions, universities will say, well, we want to make sure that this committee is even between women and men. But then if women are only 20% of the university and all of the committees are even women and men, and this happens with race and ethnicity as well, arguably in an even bigger way.

And there have to be ways to sort of remind people and to think carefully about what's a reasonable request and then what is maybe an opportunity they want you to feel you have but that you're not obligated to take up.

>> Valerie Ramey: Okay, I'd like to echo many of the things you said, it was very good.

Not taking things a bad way, I think, is good. We're all learning. And actually, the best example, I had my daughter-in-law, who had just gotten her dental degree and had bought out the dentist practice, and then they were having a retirement party for the older dentist who was male.

And everybody assumed that she was somebody's wife or hygienist, and she got up in arms. I said, you know, people are learning. Most of those people at that party had always gone to male dentists. And so you just kinda take and you say, no, I'm the new dentist.

And you just try not to get mad about it cuz that's energy that isn't useful. The other thing is, particularly for academia and particularly, say, economics, don't let the rough and tumble of the economics profession or other academic professions intimidate you. It's our idea, Ideas are important. Policymakers listen to them.

So it's important to have a marketplace where ideas compete very vigorously. And so don't take critiques of your ideas personally. So I found my debate background was really useful because we would just argue, argue, argue over some topic, and then we all go out for drinks together, and so we could separate that.

And so it was easier for me coming into academia. My only issue was at the end of a seminar, I'd say, well, did I win or lose? That was actually hard for me to get used to. The other thing is, to the extent having a family that supports you, that was so important for me, I just naturally don't have much.

I didn't have much confidence. I have more now. But my parents were so good. I was an only child who was born to them when they were in their 40s. And when they saw my test scores at elementary school, they said, Valerie, you can do anything you want.

And they kept telling me that, and that was really good. And then I met my husband when I just graduated from high school, and he also said, I'd say, I'm gonna fail this exam. He says, no, you're one of the smartest people out there. And he would just keep telling me that until finally I said, okay, I'm not gonna fail.

And that made such a difference. Particularly, I think women often lack confidence, and my family just wouldn't let me get away with it. And that was the best gift they could give me. I wanna echo the family point. My husband is a professor, also at Stanford. He's the other professor Hauksbee.

We sometimes call one another, like Professor Hauksbee and the other Professor Hauksbee.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: And it's wonderful to have someone who always knows what it is that I'm doing and is supportive of it 100% of the time. It really makes a huge difference. He and I have offices at home that are, we've never had office.

We've been together since we were 20. We've never had offices that were separated by more than a few feet. And so he knows a lot of econometrics, and I know a lot of English literature, but the support is really, really important. I think as a female academic, an economist, you have to be very organized.

You have to make sure that your whole life is organized so that you can travel, you can do things, you can go to your conferences, you can be in Washington, DC to testify or do something else. And so you really have to work together with someone else to make your work, to make it possible.

I think it would be very, very difficult for me to manage if I did not have a very supportive family. There are lots of days when I'm like, I'm off to the airport, I'm going. And that someone else needs to be at home some of the time. So it's really, really helpful.

 

>> Jennifer Burns: Yeah, great, on that theme, and I think we're gonna be able to move to questions shortly, is if you have any advice for the aspiring economist or political scientist who hopes to also be a mom or a dad while they're pursuing that career, and from what you've seen or observed or any suggestions or thoughts, maybe we'll start with you.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So I would say one thing is to really be willing to pay for high quality childcare and household health. And in our case, we delayed kind of buying a house and having a nicer apartment and that sort of thing to put the money into high quality childcare.

I just called, just where we were when our first daughter was born was an area that was lessen daycare oriented at the time. Daycares keep improving, so that's just at that point where we were living was more of a hire, a babysitter, nanny. I just called that woman this week to wish her a happy birthday.

We're very close. I mean, and it was a very good investment that we made in that. And for us, that was, I mean, I think in general, I could not have worked, and I think many other people can't work. If the childcare or the household help is holding you, you're spending all your time cleaning the dishes, right?

Or cleaning the apartment, that's time you could spend working. Obviously, you do wanna spend time with your kids, so it doesn't. But you've decided you're gonna work and not stay home with the kids. That's been a decision. So if you make that decision, then the best way to feel good about the time you're at work is to know that your child's in fantastic care and that they're getting high quality care.

The other piece of advice I'd give is just to recognize it was actually a good friend of mine from college who's male. He is married to my roommate, who's female, but it was him who said it. He said, Brandis, I make, and he's in the business world, he said, I make trade offs, too.

Just remember that that I don't do. And it was helpful for me to kind of think about that, that, you know, there may be aspects you want to get to as high as you can get to, but that everybody. This isn't simply a female thing, that men make decisions, too.

How often will they be home for dinner with their family? Are they gonna decide to be out every night? Are they gonna decide to travel six months a year? That everyone is making some trade offs if they have kids, and that it isn't this sort of us versus them and with those trade offs, to feel comfortable with them.

I have done travel. I've brought my kids often with. This is part of the caretaker I would pay for. Obviously, that's not covered by the place you're visiting. I would pay, when the kids were younger to bring them with me and to, particularly if I was doing a more extended visit.

But sometimes even for three or four days, they would come with me. We'd have the caretaker with us. I did that here once for Hoover, actually, for a week or two, and those were great experiences for my kids. And I had a caretaker I felt very good about doing that with.

Not everyone would wanna do that, and other people might choose different ways of doing it. But again, I would just add that it would be unfair to say that there's never been a trade off, right? I mean, that I've said this is part of saying no, that I've said yes to absolutely every invitation I've ever had, and that's okay.

And then you just need to think about what you want that balance to be.

>> Valerie Ramey: So I completely agree with the high quality daycare. So we had live in nannies. So I grew up in the Panama Canal zone, so panamanian nannies. That's why I wanted my kids to be able to speak Spanish good.

So we had live in nannies. It was wonderful because basically, we came home from work, and I know what it was like several months when one of the nannies went on an extended vacation. Because when the nannies were there, we came home to a child who had been bathed.

Of course, on weekends, we would bathe them and they had been fed, and so then we would have quality time. We would read to them. We just weren't exhausted. And when they got sick, it wasn't the case that one of us had to stay home with them. The nanny stayed home with them.

Now the nanny would, once they got to be like three years old, the nanny would walk them to preschool for half a day. But she was always there. We couldn't save any money when we were assistant professors because we put it all into this. We didn't live in a nice neighborhood, but we wanted a big enough house.

So the nanny had her room and it was worth every penny. We were investing in our career, so anything that saves you time and energy so that you can have quality time with your child and quality time for your career is worth the investment. Also, I would say something else is, so outsource the tasks that you can do.

The other thing is management. I've been talking to a lot of other women in the profession, and we figured out that even though fathers are much better now at really helping out with children, women still are the ones most likely to do the management. And management takes a lot of brain power.

And it's interesting. Once my youngest became very self sufficient at age 14, and then my mother had passed away and so suddenly I didn't have a lot of caregiving, I said, good, I can finally get caught up with all of my ideas to do list. I'm going to work on this project and that.

Well, you know what? My to do ideas list got longer. And why was that? Not because I didn't have extra time, but because suddenly there I could focus on my career and the ideas just bubbled up. So don't fool yourself. All of those other things will affect your creativity.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel unless you have ten children or something. But it's just hang in there.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: I don't have any children. I'm not sure I have very good advice. I have a former PhD student who's now a professor in Florida and she has 12 children and she seems to go cruising right through it.

When she was a PhD student, I was always amazed she would be pregnant every other year. And I was like, what? How are you going to manage this? And she just was like, fine. She was perfectly, perfectly fine. So some people can manage it all. I guess my only piece of advice is, first of all, I don't dislike doing housework particularly.

I kind of enjoy it. It's like a break from, you know, sitting at my desk and doing academic work. And I also believe in getting up really early. I think that's a good idea because you get all of your, you get everything done before you go to the office in the morning, and then when you come home, everything is ready to go.

And so that may be just me.

>> Jennifer Burns: That's great. No phony nodding if I don't get up early. So early bird gets the worm, as they say. Okay, so we have some, if anyone has questions, we do have some microphones and it looks like we have some questions down front.

They'll come and bring you the mic.

>> Speaker 5: Thank you so much for this. I am curious to know, what is the biggest challenge that you have faced in your careers? Biggest challenge you have faced in your careers or maybe just a big challenge?

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: I don't know. I don't think I have a really great answer to that question.

I think every time you write it, you work on a new project, you never exactly know how it's going to turn out. And so I think that can be quite challenging because there is a point you get to where you sort of feel I've made this big investment in this project and I'm not sure how it's going to turn out.

And so I think that's a big challenge. I certainly think that just when I was a young woman in economics, I thought it was kind of just a big challenge to be, like one of the only women. I used to go to conferences. I tell this story because I think it's funny.

I used to go to conferences that were big conferences, so there would be like 100 economists and I would be the only woman. And therefore I thought that the lavatory was like my own personal space. So I would go in to the lavatory and I would practice my talk and I could do whatever I wanted.

And then when other women started to attend, I was kind of like, what are you doing in my space? So it was a challenge, but also, I guess you kinda got used to it. And there were a lot of fun times, too. But it was definitely, I wouldn't say it wasn't ever a challenge.

 

>> Valerie Ramey: I would say balancing home and career was hard. I'm an only child, and so when my mother was ill, that was hard. And I was sort of sandwiched because my children were still young and just figuring out how much to take break from my career. Luckily, I was already tenured by the time that I had the sandwich issue.

But that was probably the biggest challenge. Your family is so important to you, but so, you like your career, too.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: I definitely, I think I was most stressed in those early years of being a junior faculty. So getting the publications out quickly is really important. You know, it's not now or never, but it definitely has an impact because it takes a while to get through the publication process, and then you need time for people to read them and start.

So my first kind of the main dissertation kind of paper received what's called a revise and resubmit, which is usually the best you'd get at our top journal. And then it was rejected on the revised and resubmitted version. And that was really hard, because then you just start from scratch.

So then I went to what was considered our second best journal. I got a revise and resubmit, and it got in. So that was great. But, you know, each of these rounds is taking six months. It can be easily six months to here. Then you've got six months of revisions.

I had other papers going through, but, you know, that was hard. And in some ways, if you tell the story in the whole way through it, so you got it in and it's in a top three journal, that's a great outcome. But when you're going through that and you don't know if it's going to get in, that's very stressful, period.

 

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: I should have added. I now realize what my biggest challenge was. It's part of the reason I'm here at Stanford. My husband was a professor at Yale and I was a professor at Harvard. And we were like this for twelve years, preceded by, I guess, four years of both being in different cities.

And that was really challenging. We had, I can drive between New Haven, Connecticut, and Boston, Massachusetts, with my eyes closed. There were days when one of our cats was very elderly, and so I would have to go to give him medicine in the middle of the day, and I would leave class, drive to Connecticut, give him medicine, and drive back to Harvard to go to a seminar in the afternoon.

So it was four and a half hours of driving in just that day. And that was a challenge, I will say. I read a lot of books on tape, though.

>> Jackie Wambua: My name is Jackie Nwambua. I'm a junior studying economics. My question is more of what was the process of acquisition of skill, especially when you felt that the learning curve was so steep, what did you do to bridge that for yourself?

 

>> Jennifer Burns: That was acquisition of skills.

>> Jackie Wambua: Yes, acquisition of skill.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So I would say I did a variety of things. I had to brush off Up on some of my math. I'd actually always liked math growing up, but in talking about when the moment came that I knew, I didn't mention I had considered becoming a professional musician, which I'd done very seriously since I was a child.

So-

>> Jennifer Burns: Which instrument?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Piano.

>> Jennifer Burns: Piano.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, so I was really in college trying to think about, am I gonna become a musician or not? And then came to this conclusion. So for me, going into academia was the practical choice, which I realized for most people is not.

They're deciding between becoming a lawyer or something like that. But I needed to get back and so I took more math to buttress. But I would say a lot of the really important learning I did on the research was working with faculty then as a research assistant and as then as leading that into becoming a co-author.

Okay.

>> Valerie Ramey: So as undergrads, our mentors had told us what kinds of classes we need to take. And then as grad students, you talk to fellow grad students and figure out that you actually need something. So I audited some classes in math here, and then my husband took some of the undergrad I took.

He took PhD-level courses in math cuz he figured it out. So you often learn in the graduate program what kind of things, and then you also teach things to yourself. I taught a lot to myself, and the amount that I've learned since leaving graduate school is just so much.

So it's just get really good at teaching yourself, knowing who to ask to make the process quicker.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: I agree with the teaching yourself things. We as professors, if you're going to be teaching at the frontier to students, you have to learn new things every single year. You cannot just stay with the education that you got when you were in graduate school or when you were an assistant professor or something.

You're always learning new things and you just have to have confidence that you will learn it. So I went to do work at the Internal Revenue Service, because I work on taxes, and they have completely different programming languages than we normally use. And I thought, do I wanna learn another programming language?

I already know about five. And I thought, you will learn it. And it wasn't bad. It was kind of fun after a while. And I think you just have to have the confidence that you'll enjoy the process of learning. It can actually be, even if it seems at the beginning, like, I don't really want to do this, the learning process can be pretty fun.

So although I have since forgotten that programming language, mostly.

>> Jennifer Burns: Do we have a question?

>> Lindsay Hendershott: Hi, thank you all so much for the engaging conversation. My name is Lindsay Hendershot. I'm a postmaster's degree research assistant here at the Hoover Institution. And as someone who's flirting with the idea of potentially pursuing a PhD and being at Hoover and actually getting a lot of experience before that, I find myself in rooms with behemoths of my industry.

And I have to say, it's amazing, but sometimes very overwhelming. Early in your career, have you all ever experienced a moment where you had to pull yourself out of those feelings of maybe feeling less confident? How have you done that in the past? Thank you.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: I just don't think I'm the best person to answer this question.

But let me tell you a story about one of my advisors at Oxford. His name is James Mirrlees. He is a Nobel Prize winner. And he was a giant, even when I was a graduate student. It was before he won the Nobel Prize. But he was just an intellectual giant.

And he never gave you problems to solve that he could solve himself, okay? I'm serious. This is how he did it. We had tutorials. In those days, we didn't go to class. So we met one on one. He would give you a problem and say, I think you should go home and solve this problem.

Then I would come back and show him and he would say, I got a lot further than you did. But somehow, he was so charming that it never upset me at all. But it was definitely like you knew you were in the presence of somebody who was truly brilliant, and that he did always get a lot further than I did in the problem.

 

>> Valerie Ramey: I mean, sometimes I would be intimidated by people, big names and stuff. And what I know now is you learn so much as you go on. So think of yourself as at the start of the path, and so you're holding somebody up who's much farther along the path.

But that doesn't mean you can't make that same journey.

>> Caroline  M. Hoxby: Right, and things that you think that seems like it's amazing that they know those things, it's not, because once you've done it for a long time. So one of my advisors, Hank Farber, who was at Princeton at the time, he could look at any table or figure or regression that I showed him and he would know exactly what was wrong.

And I always thought, how does he know these things? And now I've been a professor for many years, and I'm like, I know these things. A lot of them is just experience, so don't be intimidated. A lot of it is just like, you get used to it over time.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, I was gonna say, so the business school, when I went there, and I should note this may have changed a little, but it had a very much more hierarchical atmosphere than is really, I think, commonly accepted in a lot of political science departments. So as a first or second year, I mean, you were expected to show up for seminars of visiting faculty, and it was pretty clear you were not supposed to say much.

I mean, you were supposed to silently watch. But in some ways, you could say there is this flip side where, since I spent many years at Princeton, there was this atmosphere of, isn't it great we wanna encourage every graduate student, even the ones who just walked in the door, to make all these comments in seminars?

And you don't wanna be the jerk, but as a faculty member, I sometimes felt like, well, but are the comments equally good? I mean, maybe there is something to a little hierarchy here. But also, as has just been said, by the time you're a fourth or fifth year PhD student, you're gonna be able to make really great comments.

I don't think it's a reasonable expectation, even if it's allowed to expect first years to, say, dominate a seminar.

>> Jennifer Burns: So I think we're at time. This has been such a rich conversation. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you to my panelists, and happy International Women's Day.

Thank you.