Career Structure in Economics in Collaboration with the European Economics Association (EEA)

In 2022, the EEA launched a Career Structures Initiative, in collaboration with the Hub for Equal Representation.

The aim of this initiative was to promote research projects that helped provide an understanding of whether current career structures in economics promote the selection and retention of talent among academics (particularly in the context of women and other underrepresented groups), and to provide feasible policy recommendations to the EEA to further its mission to contribute to the development and application of economics as a science in Europe.

Having the best talent represented, rewarded and retained in the profession is both of intrinsic value, and can aid the advancement of economics more generally - especially as the discipline has moved to new forms of production for academic research, and continued to expand the set of societal issues studied by economists.

The initiative aims to harness and apply the tools of economic analysis to understand how career structures (from undergraduate to full professor) can be improved in the discipline (or indeed whether the current structures are well designed).

The initiative funded the work of five research teams and culminated in a one-day workshop at LSE (co-funded by the HUB, Stone@UCL and EEA) where this work was presented, as well as a policy panel involving speakers from the EEA, the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession CSWEP, the UK's Government Economic Service, Royal Economic Society and LSE. There were over 250 attendees, including heads of departments of economics, HR professionals, and interested scholars.

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