139 Letter from Aliza Fleischer
Dear women tourism researchers
As I described in my contribution in this book, although I am a tourism researcher, Economics is my core discipline. All my academic studies were conducted in departments of economics and currently I am a full professor in the Department of Environmental (in the past Agricultural) Economics and Management at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Up until this year I was the sole woman researcher who has ever been in my department and only this year did we accept a new woman to our academic staff.
The issue of women in the economics discipline was discussed at length in a recent paper[1]. Just to give you a taste of their findings – only 14% of full professors in the economics departments in top American universities are women. In my university the percentage of women out of all full professors in all departments is around 20%. Actually, based on Kahneman and Tversky, it will sound worse if I write that 80% of the full professors are men.
The above is a good foreword rationale for what I want to share with you in this letter. I have had constant disagreements with my male colleagues regarding the stalled progress of women at the university. I hope that some of the arguments I have used will be helpful to you regardless of which side of the table you sit – whether you are a member in a promotion committee or whether you are being promoted yourself. The prevalent claim that I have heard is that there is no discrimination. Women and men are judged equally based on their academic performance, according to the rule “may the best man win” (as you can see there is already a gender bias in the rule itself). On the surface this is a reasonable argument since there are objective measures such as, number of papers, rankings of journals, number of citations, recommendations and so on, that are used in the promotion process.
Over the years I have asked myself where is the catch in this argument and why women are still a minority in the academic staff especially at the senior positions. This question can have a few answers and you can choose which one suits you best. The first answer is that women are less talented or intellectually capable than men. I hope most of you do not accept this answer. The second answer is that women do not want to have an academic career and if they do they prefer to keep it low key. Since all of you have an academic career I hope that you also disagree with this answer. A third answer is that women are treated differently than men. There is very recent empirical evidence[2] that women on job talks, seminars and conferences in economics are treated differently than men. Observations in numerous such events reveal that women receive many more aggressive and patronizing questions than their male counterparts. Another study revealed that letters of recommendation written for individuals applying for academic positions describe men differently than women. Women are described as