Harvard Economist Is First Woman To Win Prestigious Award

Susan Athey wins Clark Medal for most promising economist under 40

Susan C. Athey, a Harvard University economics professor, has joined an impressive list of economists by winning the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for 2007. Because Athey is the first woman to win the award since its creation in 1947, her accomplishment is particularly noteworthy.

A Clark Medal winner is "really someone special," said Edda Leitherner of the American Economic Association, the organization that awards the medal. Among the 30 Clark Medal winners, 10 have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, including Paul Samuelson, the late Milton Friedman, Lawrence Klein and Joseph Stiglitz. Some say it is more difficult for an economist to win the Clark Medal than the Nobel Prize because the Clark Medal is given to just one person every two years, whereas the Nobel Prize can be given to several people at once and is awarded annually.

Economics is a male-dominated field. At Stanford University, where Athey formerly taught, she was the only tenured female economics professor. At Harvard, where she teaches today, there are three women among the 50 tenured economics professors. "That's pretty typical," said Athey. "In the more mathematical ends of economics, it is even more skewed toward men."

Athey said she has had only a few female leaders to look up to in her profession and that her own small cohort is the first group of female economics professors to "systematically" have families. Athey's husband also teaches economics at Harvard; they have two young children.

Economists do their most important work during their 30s, making it difficult for women professors who want to have children. The Clark Medal itself might add to the pressure because it is given to a promising economist under the age of 40.

Athey broke the mold. She went to college at age 16 and finished her doctorate by age 22. She was "driven," said her father, Whit Athey. Her career path since has been "impressive and a little intimidating," he said. He recounted a skit her students did at her wedding in which they imitated his daughter teaching students located in Massachusetts from a cell phone she lectured into while driving across a bridge in California.

But it was her work ethic that helped Athey to establish tenure at a young age, well before she would have children. John Roberts, Athey's adviser at Stanford University, where she got her doctorate, said that when Athey went on the academic job market, she was "the hottest thing ever. Normally, a graduate of a good program in economics might have two or three [job] offers. She stopped accepting requests to interview when she had 24 offers."

"If there are a couple schools competing to hire you, it is much easier to talk about maternity policies," Susan Athey said. But more typically, in academia, the tenure process begins when a professor is in her 30s, coinciding with child-rearing years and putting women at a disadvantage.

"Universities were not designed to discriminate," she said, and more of them are beginning to look at "how their career paths impact women."

Athey said her selection as the Clark Medal winner on April 20 has generated an "overwhelming response" from women in the profession. Her winning the award "helps them to see what is possible," she said. "I'm fairly approachable. I tend to have close relationships with students. It helps humanize the leadership of the profession to them. The fact that I have [a] family is very inspiring to them. They are very conscious of the choices they'll be making, especially the graduate students."

Athey has done both applied and more fundamental economic research, some of which has affected governments' policies. She has done significant research on how the rules and design of auctions affect their outcomes. She created an auction-based system for the Canadian government to use to price timber that diffused, to an extent, the softwood-lumber trade dispute between the United States and Canada. Athey also has done research on whether central banks should use their own subjective interpretations of macroeconomic data in making decisions about interest rates.

According to Athey, the Clark Medal will give her an opportunity to step back and think about how she can have the biggest impact. "It gives me more of an audience, a chance to think about what kind of papers I can write to change the way research is done in the profession that might have a policy impact," she said.

Roberts said Athey got along well with other students and was a "strong feminist" with many friends in the doctoral program. "She is very dedicated and ambitious in a good way," he said. "But ultimately, what it is all about is just how smart she is."

Source: U.S. Department of State

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