An extraordinary event took place, almost unnoticed, at the University of York last week – 30 female economists, ten of them professors, met to set up a mentoring scheme for women in the profession. Organiser Professor Karen Mumford, the chair of the RES Women’s Committee, said: “Women are under-represented in this discipline. In 1992, there was just one female  economics professor in the UK and, although things have improved dramatically, they are still  relatively rare.”

The figures are depressing, despite the improvement. In 1997, just five per cent of professors of Economics in UK universities were women;  10 per cent of senior lecturers and 15 per cent of lecturers. The figures now have risen to 10 per cent, 20 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. The proportion of women among economics students is higher again, and the balance in sixth forms is nearly even. In other words, more girls and women get squeezed or discouraged out at every stage as they progress along the professional pathway.

No doubt there are many causes. In the London-based Women Economists Network Amanda Rowlatt and I set up several years ago (still going strong), we found there are many more women working in the government service than the private sector, and more in applied economics jobs than in academia. The conditions for working mothers are better in the public sector than elsewhere, and academic career tracks are extraordinarily difficult to combine with a family. The structure of the REF (and its predecessors) is institutionally sexist because of the requirement to publish lots of papers during prime child-bearing years. There are sociological reasons too – economics is socially more like engineering than like political science or anthropology. Some women believe that females are too sensible to buy into the intellectual character of neoclassical economics – I don’t buy this argument myself.

Anyway, intertwined causes mean easy solutions are unlikely. But the mentoring scheme for academic women economists launched at York is very welcome.

The most powerful book on this subject I’ve read recently is [amazon_link id=”069108940X” target=”_blank” ]Women Don’t Ask[/amazon_link] by  Linda Babcokc and Sara Laschever. It offers a simple but depressing solution to the gender pay gap: women need to ask for higher pay as so often we quietly expect merit to be recognised and rewarded. But when we do ask, the men pay up – and dislike us for it.

[amazon_image id=”069108940X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide[/amazon_image]

At the charity bookstall on the way to the park on Saturday I picked up a copy of Tom Stoppard’s [amazon_link id=”0571165702″ target=”_blank” ]Television Plays[/amazon_link] and have read Professional Foul, which I still remember seeing on the BBC when it was broadcast in 1977 (there’s a clip on YouTube). In Stoppard’s characteristically brilliant way, it combines wit, sharp political comment and insight into people’s weaknesses, in the setting of a group of lefty British academics attending a conference in Communist Prague. There is an important football match taking place, and one of the academics is in contact with a dissident.

Of course, in the late 1970s the fall of the Communist regimes seemed a dream so distant as to be delusional. Like many children of my time, I’d had occasional nightmares about the Cold War resulting in nuclear attacks – a nightmare of being the only person left in a devastated landscape of ash. Being set in its time, the play might have felt like a period piece.

But in fact, its ruminations about the nature of the collective organisation of society stand the test of time. (Its acidly funny critique of academic jealousy is timeless, too.) The most appealing thing about Stoppard’s world view is its reasonableness. As this dialogue puts it:

McKENDRICK: “The mistake most people make is, they think a moral principle is indefinitely extendible, that it holds good for any situation. ….. There’s a point, the catastrophe point, where your progress along one line of behaviour jumps you into the opposite line; the principle reverses itself at the point where a rational man would abandon it.”

CHETWYN: “Then it’s not a principle.”

McKENDRICK: “There aren’t any principles in your sense. There are only a lot of principled people trying to behave as if there were.”

[amazon_image id=”0571165702″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Television Plays, 1965-84 (Play Series)[/amazon_image]

I’m part way through proofs of a very interesting book, [amazon_link id=”0691151571″ target=”_blank” ]Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics[/amazon_link], by Daniel Stedman Jones. Most visitors to this blog will be familiar with the famous quotation from Keynes (from The General Theory) about practical men being “the slaves of some defunct economist …. some academic scribbler of a few years back.” The point is that when people attain positions of power, they are 25 or 30 years on from the stage at which their intellects and ideas were formed, and pretty much fixed into place.

This new book by Daniel Stedman Jones is about the influence of Hayek, along with Karl Popper and Ludwig von Mises, followed by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, on the triumph of free market ‘neoliberalism’ from the 1980s on. Although Keynes certainly seemed to have beaten their ideas with his own from the 1940s to mid-70s, they had at least as great an influence as he did from then until the current financial crisis. The author sets out two types of influence by these ‘scribblers’ of the 30s and 40s. The first is the ideas themselves, and the key books: The Road to Serfdom, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Bureaucracy. The second influence is the importance of practical organisation for political impact, through the Mont Pelerin society, think tanks, and political activity. I’ve not yet got to that part of the book.

A full review will follow when it’s closer to publication (in October). But it was interesting to reflect on what founding texts for a new dominant political philosophy have been published recently. I can think of some candidates, although none overwhelming – maybe that’s because one can only identify the key thinkers with hindsight, after the political organisation has proven successful.

Any suggestions for the key texts of the unknown movement that will replace ‘neoliberalism’?

[amazon_image id=”0691151571″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics[/amazon_image]

Economics is a late starter in the popularisation stakes, but there is a growing abundance of popular economics books now, in the wake of science, mathematics and history. About time, in my view, as economists claim such an important role in public policy, making public understanding of what we are saying vital for legitimacy. And there’s still a long way to go. So the new revised issue of David Smith’s [amazon_link id=”1781250111″ target=”_blank” ]Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics[/amazon_link] is very welcome.

It is really clear and accessible, as you would expect from one of the UK’s most distinguished economics journalists. This new edition incorporates issues that have become more pressing since the onset of the financial crisis (although it’s impossible to keep up with events  – Libor hasn’t made it in here). I particularly like the ‘Arguing over Coffee’ section, which looks at controversies in economics and is useful to help readers understand the reasons economists so vigorously disagree with each other on issues such as the effects of taxes, or globalisation.

There are now enough popular economics books that the Journal of Economic Methodology has a forthcoming special issue on them. We will all have our favourites. Tim Harford’s [amazon_link id=”0349119856″ target=”_blank” ]The Undercover Economist[/amazon_link] turned my eldest son into an economist – he is being turned loose on the world of economic consultancy in September. It would be remiss of me not to mention my own [amazon_link id=”1587991470″ target=”_blank” ]Sex, Drugs and Economics [/amazon_link]and [amazon_link id=”0691143161″ target=”_blank” ]The Soulful Science[/amazon_link]. New additions to the catalogue are always welcome, to spread the word, and keep things up to date. Free Lunch is terrific and as Jeff Randall highlights in his comment on it, it “cuts through the mind-numbing waffle” of much economic commentary. Highly recommended for students and general readers.

[amazon_image id=”1781250111″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics[/amazon_image]