Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - We are supported by... Esther Duflo

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

We Are Supported By, hosted by Kristen Bell and Monica Padman is a 10 episode limited series podcast. Each episode deep dives with a woman who has put a crack in the glass ceiling. Episode 6: Esther Duflo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We Are Supported By is brought to you by Chevrolet. Find new roads. Hi, Mom. Hi, baby. How are you today? I am pretty good. I have a little bit of a head cold. I know.

I'm sorry that happened. That's all right. That's what happens when you live with feral children. They go outside and, like, lick the dirt, and then you get a head cold. And it's not COVID. We got tested. We did get tested. Because, you know, they are saying with this variant, you're supposed to get tested if

you have a sore throat. The symptoms are different. So I was like, yeah, doy, let's get tested. Because, you know, they are saying with this variant, you're supposed to get tested if you have a sore throat. The symptoms are different. So I was like, yeah, doy, let's get tested. And I was obviously nervous that 24 hours waiting, but it's not. Can I ask you a real talk question? 100%. How do you feel about Delta's name being Delta right now? It's a big bummer. Yeah. It's a big, big bummer. But I'm really hoping that the Delta variant won't be as strong as the original COVID and people will still say Corona. I mean, it's a bummer for Corona. The beer company. The beer company.

And I don't know if anything's called COVID. It feels like a duvet company, but I don't know if that's been started yet. If not, it's a billion-dollar idea. But it could be like a germ-free, bacteria-free, like protector duvet company. Wow. COVID. COVID. Yeah. Because I think you're thinking of duvet, the hard D. Yeah. COVID duvet. And comforter. Oh, wow. And which is weird because I've never called it either of those things. Do you know what I call it? Pagina. That's what my Polish family always called it. Pagina. And it took me forever to like

remember to say duvet or comforter because I so recklessly said pagina. It sounds sexual. It sounds like a female body part. It kind of does. But duvets can be sexual. Okay. Okay. It is a bummer that it's her name. To be honest, she's six, so she's impressed every time she sees like a Delta Airlines ad or anything. She's like, oh my gosh, my name. So every time she hears

anyone talk about the variant, she's like, my name. And I'm like, she's still excited about it. Maybe it's a good thing because her life's really easy. This is true. Because she needs some adversity.

She's privileged. She's privileged and she's got a lot of charisma. She's a little ball of magic and she gets away with everything because of that. So she can either give you puppy dog eyes or make you laugh. And because of that, her life is too easy. So maybe she does need this to follow her around forever. That's right.

That's right. Tell us about our guest today. This is a big one. Esther Duflo. She is a French-American developmental economist. She is a professor of poverty alleviation and developmental economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some people refer to that as MIT. That's right.

Which you know to be the smartest place in the world. It's where Will Hunting worked, so obviously. Obviously. She's also the co-founder and co-director of J-PAL, which is a poverty action lab. She is a Nobel Prize winner in economic studies, the first woman. And she shared it with her husband and Michael Kramer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. And I learned so much during this interview. Me too.

I don't like numbers or math or anything. And developmental economics is really interesting because she'll take a problem like, why aren't these kids learning in school? But she'll look at it through the lens of like, who's eating breakfast? Tally those numbers. Who drives a long way to like, who's eating breakfast? Tally those numbers. Who drives a long way to school? Are they sleeping enough? Tally those numbers. So

she can kind of solve any problem. And I didn't realize that math could help people. Yeah, that she's using a very right-brained skill to solve a kind of left-brain problem, which is a weird thing. She's amazing. It was so interesting. And you guys are going to love this. And she's got a very strong right and left brain, which normally people are one or the other, but she is incredibly strong in both sides.

And that is one of the reasons she is such an amazing interview. We are supported by Esther Duflo. We are supported by is supported by Pete and Jerry's Organic Eggs. We all know it can be difficult to choose the right eggs, right? They all look the same. Yeah, that's the trick.

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It's like a spa. It is literally like a spa for the baguettes. They're never treated with harmful chemicals or pesticides. They can forage for delicious little grasshoppers and grubs, whatever they eat. And they always have access to fresh water. And right now, Pete and Jerry's is giving away a free dozen eggs to the first 150 listeners who go to PeteAndJerrys.com slash supported. To claim your free dozen eggs, go to P-E-T-E-A-N-D-G-E-R-R-Y-S dot com slash supported. Pete and Jerry's organic eggs are available nationwide at fine grocers near you. All that's left will be shattered We're gonna lift us up Gonna sing out loud

Gonna stand up tall Hi there! Hi, how are you? So good. Thank you so much for joining us. I know it's been a lot of back and forth scheduling and we're so grateful you made time for us. Second woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, only first female economist. So there's a first in there as well. There's a second and a first, two titles. Also only 57 women total

have won the Nobel Prize, which is crazy since 1901. Yes. Yeah. And economics, I think it's been 86 in total people, but two women. Two women, yes. The first one being, as you pointed out, a political scientist. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and say two out of 86. That's low. We're just looking at the numbers. That's too low.

Not a great percentage. Not spectacular. I got a question right off the bat, because this is really interesting to me since I'm like not a numbers person. I'm a feelings person. So everything in the world goes through a feelings filter and numbers are very hard for me. I'm sort of one of those people that's like, oh, no, I don't really care if my kids are good at math. I just want them to be kind people. to be kind people. But in reading about you, I've realized I am incorrect because there's so much that comes from being able to do the math about things. And would you explain to us why economics

is so important, why it actually factors into every part of our lives? Right. So first, I would say you're not incorrect in that there are many ways to succeed in life that do not involve math and to be useful and productive and transformational that do not involve math. That said, there are also ways that math can be put to good use to change the world. And economics is actually one of them where economics is in every topic that we care about. Think about racism, think about climate change, think about globalization, think about the pandemic and its impact on the poor countries or on poor people within our countries. All of that are subjects which are their core economic subjects. They are about how people make decisions, how resources are allocated,

how we make difficult trade-offs. And that's what economics is about. And often we think about economics as, oh, it's about inflation and the GDP and the stock market. And many young people, perhaps rightly, have no interest in such things. Yeah, that's a snooze fest for me. You talk about interest rates and I'm like, I'll see you after this nap.

But it turns out I would share that lack of interest. And in fact, it almost put me out of economics when I first started because I said, this is so boring. This is not what I want to do. But it turns out that economics is so much more than that, and that most economists do not study. Some economists study interest rate, and we need some people to study interest rate. So great, all power to them. But many economists do not study interest rate whatsoever.

They study education. They study health. They study how to convince people to use less electricity or how to convince people to get vaccinated. Or why is it that police are more likely to arrest black people and white people? Is it because black people commit more offenses or is it also because there is an inherent bias? And believe it or not, these are questions that the tools of economics can help us address. And for me, I decided to stick to economics because I've always been hoping to make a difference in the life of the world's poorest people. And economics is also a tool that helps us do that.

poorest people. And economics is also a tool that helps us do that. In particular, it has helped me think about what programs can work, what programs do not work in terms of fighting poverty. Quiz partners on the ground to help them evaluate their programs and try what was effective, what's not effective, so that we can scale up what's effective and not scale up what's not. What I love is that you started out, Kristen, by saying like, oh, I'm not into math or I'm not good at math. But I think what's so funny is that's sort of inherently part of this whole gender issue.

I think like girls from the get-go are told, math may not be for you. Maybe you stay away from it. And also it's like math is just hard for everyone. So at the beginning, I think it's hard for everyone. Boys aren't great at it. Girls aren't great at it. But the boys are encouraged to continue and say like, you'll get this. You'll get this. Even if it's just subconsciously because the groups they're seeing. Yeah, are all men. I mean, minus you and a few other women, the groups they're seeing in like graduating classes and, you know, above them are all men.

And so that's got to be hard. That's even just subconsciously for a girl who likes math, even if it's really, really hard or stimulated by, to want to proceed. I wish more authority figures and role models, and thank goodness for people like you who can show that it works, can tell young girls like, oh, it's going to be hard. That doesn't mean you're not going to be good at it. But also that there's more to it, like what you explained. I have all these feelings. I think about global poverty as I'm falling asleep at night. But also that there's more to it, like what you explained. Like I have all these feelings. I think about global poverty as I'm falling asleep at night. I'm like, I've got to

figure out what to do. And sometimes that's the end of the sentence and there's no further thought on it because I don't have the math backup of like, well, I don't know what to do. Do you sort of feel like you're maybe like the silent private investigator for all of the world's problems? Like everybody's like, we want to help global poverty. Yeah, are you the real life Veronica Mars? Because you're like, yeah, I've got some stuff to solve this. Like I've got the answers. When everybody has the feelings, do you ever feel like economists,

they're not like turned to very often? They're not turned to for the answers because people have lost a little bit confidence in economists. So if you ask people, what are the experts they really believe in, that they really trust about their own field of expertise? Economists come very, very, very low. The only lower people are politicians. Oh, wow.

Nurses and doctors, everybody trusts. Scientists in general, people also trust. Historians, weathermen. Oh, boy. In weather people, it's twice as high as a trust in economists. Stop. Twice as high? Twice as high. 25% of people report, and it's a poll that was done in the UK and then a very similar one in the US.

and it's a poll that was done in the UK and then a very similar one in the US. In those two countries, 25% of people report trusting economists about economics, whereas 50% of people report trusting weather people about the weather. So that gives you a sense of the level of trust we are in economists. And in part, I think there are many reasons for that. But one of the reasons is what you're saying about, oh, I don't understand math, so I don't understand what they do.

And this is something complicated that it's all kind of hocus pocus and has nothing to do with my life. In part, it's because people mostly think economists are in the business of forecasting the economy, what's going to happen in the future. And we are really, really, really bad at it. Like terrible. Yeah.

Meaning professional forecasters and economists are just not very good at forecasting. And in part, it's because most economists are too prompt to say that they have the answer to all of the problems. So going back to your question, no, I don't think I want to present myself as someone who has the answer.

I think what I want to present myself is as someone who has the tools that can help you or anyone who is active in the ground realize if they happen to have the answer. So what we do in my lab, I run a lab called Jamil Poverty Action Lab, which is really a network of,

now it has 500 researchers all around the world. And what we do is we work with partners who have a project, for example, a wonderful organization working on education in India called Pratam. And we work with them and they have an idea of why is it that kids have issues learning in schools even when they go to school. And we are there not to tell them this is what you should do.

We're there to hear what they do and then work with them to set up an experiment to see if it works the way they plan for it to work. So what we do is that we say, look, let's treat your innovation like a vaccine or like a drug. We have to try it. So how did we test for the coronavirus vaccine? We do randomized control trials. So we take a sample of 50,000 people and some of them got the vaccine and some of them got a placebo. And therefore you can compare the chance to be infected in both groups. And if you see a difference, you know it's because of the vaccine, because people were chosen randomly and therefore exactly similar.

Well, what I do in my work is that, and what we do all do at the Poverty Action Lab, is that we are trying to do the same thing, but for any number of ideas that are useful in people's life. So a new idea to improve how kids learn in school. So if I were to go back with the example of Pratham, when I first met them, their idea was we need to teach at the right level. We need to teach kids that are in front of us. We don't need to try and complete the curriculum

when kids are just so diverse and have no idea and don't understand what's going on. So that was their idea. And they had a program to do that via camps or via remedial education. And what we did is worked with them to set up a number of experiments where we could demonstrate that, wow, this program really, really works because we tried it in hundreds of schools and then thousands of schools. And we can see that the kids who benefited from this program do much better than similar kids who haven't gotten it yet. And the advantage is that after that,

you do have an answer. And it's not me who has the answer, it's Pratham who has the answer, but I was able to demonstrate that it's a good answer with their help. And then once you have that answer, it's very simple to explain. It's like the vaccine, you know, it works.

Yeah. So we can take this idea and take it to government and take it to NGOs and get it scaled up and used so that it reaches millions of children. So today, this program of Pratham, it reaches millions of children in India, and it is now being scaled up across several countries in Africa. Wow. And the answer I didn't come up with. All I did is kind of facilitate the demonstration of the answer so that it can then easily be adopted in other places when it works. But you're like the calculator, like the one that can say, but yes, you have an idea and a wonder, does this work? And I am the person that could tell you this might work or this might not work or at least give you more data.

And I just feel like the reliance on economists, like you said, the trust factor. I mean, look, I barely trust Merle Weatherman. I think his name is Flip Spiceland. And I just feel like I can't even I can't begin to trust a name like that. Flip Spiceland, but- That's a made up name. I just, sincerely, does it frustrate you? Because you were one of the youngest faculty members

to be awarded tenure at MIT. I mean, you have all these labels that should make you this shining star that people go to. And there are a lot of economists like that. But sometimes when the general public doesn't trust economists, does it get frustrating when you know that your sole goal in your heart is to help people? You know, not really, because I think we need to earn that trust. And I think each of us in our

work need to earn that trust by doing work that is relevant and useful. So I do think it's a little bit unfair, the level of mistrust for economists, because I think it represents to some extent a wrong vision of what economists do and are. Recently, we wrote a book called Good Economics for Hard Time, which was trying to be a bit of a loudspeaker for what economists do in reality. So that maybe people understand and get familiarized with all of the type of different work and also the diversity of results and the fact that people work with a lot of facts. But I think it is on us economists to earn this trust. It's not on us to expect that it's going to come naturally. In my own work, I started working with others, in particular, Michael Kramer and Abhijit Banerjee, who got the Nobel Prize with me. I started working, doing these randomized control trials.

And very quickly we realized that if we wanted to make a difference, not only do we have to do the research, but we have to have an institution that will help diffuse the product of this research and the results to the policymakers and to the public and to the NGO so that these results become useful. And never, never did I take for granted that I come up with a shiny new paper and publish it somewhere and then people will immediately say, oh, this is wonderful.

We are all going to do that. You must be correct because you were published in this journal with equations and tables. That's, I think, the one thing that we understood early that it is our job to go towards policymakers. And we've been successful at doing it. Today, we've reached 400 million people around the world with policies that at some point we have found to be effective.

Wow. And that's a big we. It's like the 500 of us. But started out as eight of you, right? It started as eight of us. And then today like the 500 of us but started out as eight of you right it started us of eight of us and then it stays 500 of us plus all of the people who worked with us NGOs the field staff etc it is not nothing so you feel that it makes a difference eventually you touch life by just going in a sense by adopting this more humble approach which is is A, I don't have the answer, but I can

help you find out if you do. And B, once we've done that, we've done it for a particular problem. So I don't have the hope to have solved the entire global poverty, but I can cut it in more manageable issues. And one by one, I think we can make some progress. And it adds up. For example, over the last 30 years before the coronavirus crisis, there really were a lot of progress made in the life of the very poor. For example, infant mortality got cut in half, maternal mortality got cut in half. Almost all of the kids around the world go to school or went to school before the COVID crisis. So there are improvements in many of the practical, everyday aspects of the life of people in poverty. And this is due in large part to more focus on concrete, achievable, solvable issues over the last few years, which has created a window and an opening for us to be useful. And my hope in life is to be useful. Well, you're succeeding. So I found that

a way of finding influence, so to speak, is to not jump up and down and yell, listen to me, I've got the answer. But it's to establish my quarter in one little corner, make progress there. And then somehow the world spread that, oh, these people, they actually have something to bring to the problem. Support comes from Chevrolet. Look, if you're a busy mom like me, you live in your car some days. Even getting one kid to all their activities, it seems like herding cats. But Chevy gets it. They have a whole family of SUVs perfect for whatever size your family is. Even if it's just you and your

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slash supported. That's betterhelp.com slash supported. I want to just highlight something because you said it a couple times that often, in general, economists have this like, I have all the answers, we have all the answers, we can predict. I mean, not to get too gendered, but that is such a male quality. Were you saying that that's what people think about economists or what some economists think about themselves? Like, is this lack of ego that you're showing us right now, like where you've just separated it? You're like, I don't have the answers. I'm ready to admit that. Is that common in your field,

do you think? I think that's a female perspective you're bringing to the table that's different. You know, it depends a bit on subfield of economics. And you're right that in development economics, which is very female, and I should say very friendly, most people are like me, I would say. Yeah. Which is quite agnostic,

quite open about what they know or what they don't know. And in particular, the vast extent of what they don't know. And quite determined to take a little piece of the problem and really try to address it. And there are two reasons why development is a more female field than other fields of economics. For example, macro, which is still very male-dominated.

The first one is that a lot of women, I'm sorry to say a stereotype, but I think it is probably a correct one, but a lot of young women are really interested in changing the world and making a difference. And that's why a lot of them actually don't go into economics, because they think that's not what economics does. But if they do, then they choose the field where you can have an immediate impact, like development economics or studying public policies in the US or studying social issues like racism and discrimination. That's where you're going to see women, to the extent they do economics, that's the field they choose because that's why they've gone into the field. And I think one way to get more young women to choose economics as a field

is actually to demonstrate that this is actually a big part of economics and an important one and a growing one. The second reason why you see more women in these fields is that they are more characterized by this more humble break-by-break approach. Let me take one problem, admit what I don't know, and let me be guided by the evidence and the fact and what I can learn from others who have been working in this area for a long time. So that's what makes development economics. Not only it's a fantastic subject, because what could be more important than to try to solve global poverty and to improve the life of people who live in poverty? But it also makes a very, very pleasant field to be in because most people will share those

two features. One, to be passionate and very ambitious in terms of their objective, but the other, to not put their ego into the problem. Yeah, and I don't want to blame the men. It's mainly society. It's that we tell men that it's good for them to have all the answers, that they should, that if they don't, they're weak. And we tell women— And oftentimes we make people feel stupid when they don't, they're weak. And we tell women, we make people feel stupid when

they don't have the answers, even as kids. Like there's all these, you know, children's books now trying to drill in the lesson. Like it's cool to say, I don't know, because then you can wonder about something together. Yeah, for sure. But I think we do that more to men. Like that's a fault of ours that we place on boys more than we place on girls. On girls, we amplify nurturing. And so it's not a surprise to me that the women who choose economics choose the kind of nurturing form of it. I don't know. I just find it kind of interesting, the layers underneath that lead to these decisions. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I fully agree with you that there is no reason to think it's like in our gene or in the biology, but it is what being

instilled in girls from the very beginning. Yeah. And that's related to what you were saying earlier about the attitude of boys and girls with respect to mathematics and to STEM in general. For example, when girls and boys are faced with the same hard problem, girls will tend to conclude that she isn't good at math because she's a girl. After all, girls are not good at math. Whereas the boys will tend to conclude that he's good at math, therefore he should try harder and find the solution. Exactly. And in fact, there are psychology experiments on this phenomenon called stereotype threat. Oh, I love stereotype threat.

Will you explain it a little bit? So this is work by a psychologist called Claude Steele. And one of the first experiments is to take college kids who think of themselves as being good at math, girls and boys, and present them hard problems. And if you do that, girls tend to do worse than boys at these problems. But if now what you do is just before the problems, you say a little sentence, which is, you might have heard that girls are less good at math than boys, but actually that does not apply to this particular test. And then they do the same exercise. And then the difference between boys and girls disappear.

It's crazy. That one sentence. That's why it's called stereotype trait, which is the girls conform to the image that they think, oh, if I'm struggling, it's not because this is a super hard problem that I should be challenged by. It's because I'm not good at math. So that's another problem. Then the emphasis on nurture problem, which can conspire to the same result, which is we're seeing fewer girls going towards STEM. And then that's self-reinforcing because if there are not very many women in STEM, then there are not many role models. And you're not seeing many female professors or people whose career has been successful to lead you in this direction, to mentor you when you start to provide companionship and the like so it sort of feeds on itself unless you're one day deciding to make a special effort to remedy the situation and by the way something very similar can be said about minorities there are few women in economics but there are even fewer black people yeah and this

is really a disaster for the field because this is social science, right? Yeah. And it's very difficult to imagine a social science field, any sociology, economics, even psychology, that is completely uniform because society isn't uniform. Exactly. So with a completely uniform white male field,

we would have a very narrow view of even what the problems we need to try and address and so on and so forth. So putting diversity of gender, of lived experience, of background, of races, et cetera, is really essentially into, you know, the richness of the field. I think it was in Whistling Vivaldi, which is a great book. Yes, exactly. They talked a lot about stereotype threat, which was the first time I've heard it. And it was through the lens of minorities. And I had never heard anything like it, how that one sentence prior to trying a math problem

could change the entire experiment. And one of the things I've been doing with my kids, my daughter just auditioned for her play and she was talking about being really nervous. And I was applying that technique of saying before her performance, I'm going to turn my nervousness into excitement. I'm going to turn my nervousness into excitement. She repeats it.

And I mean, who knows if it's working, but I certainly, like, that was what was recommended in the book about nervousness. And I was like, why not? If we have some data that this silly little sentence that you can't possibly think could adjust someone's emotional well-being during an experience, whether it's an audition or doing a math problem, why not apply it? Yeah, something that we are learning across a number of experiments across different domains is that sometimes a small shift

makes a big difference because it changes your entire perspective of how you view the challenge or the problem. So in the example, the data you get is you're struggling. Just a sentence changes that because it kind of puts it in a different social context.

And similarly, kids, for example, that's something that works, that the economists do in particular, Leo Bernstein at the University of Chicago, they did a very interesting work at a business school where they participate into career counseling sessions. They had groups of just women and group of women and men, and they were asking them to sign up for a particular track of jobs. And they had a small, small shift into what people could expect about whether their choice was going to be public to the member of the groups or just left private.

And what they found is that women in this business school, so highly selective already to be ambitious, if they were in a mixed group and they thought that their choice were going to be made public, requested placement that were much less ambitious. Whoa. But if you promised them privacy, they were just as ambitious. Whoa.

Or if it was woman only, they were willing to be just as ambitious in public or private. So basically they don't want to be perceived as too ambitious by the men around because that might dim their marriage prospect. Well, look at what we do to ambitious women. Every woman, certainly in this country, that's tried to be super ambitious. You know, thank God Sheryl Sandberg changed it from being bossy to leaning in. Like we have to change all these labels because any woman who starts to wear a pantsuit and speak about things

that she's very qualified to speak about, we just rip her apart. And it's all about attractiveness and what she's wearing. And it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We have to separate this like procreation marriage. Do I find you attractive from your brain and your sort of status within your

career yes and we don't so that's the experiment that shows that that we don't and that also shows that we pick it on very subtle clues because it's just a small change into is it going to be public or private that until it changed their behavior so we are trying to pick up clues from the environment into how we should behave, which is why an apparently small modification like the one you were mentioning with your daughter can be effective because it sort of changes the way in which we perceive what's going on.

Yeah. And so this is, in the case of your daughter, it's her psychological states. But in the example I just gave, it's about how society is going to perceive who I am and what's acceptable. Did you have any role models when you were coming up or deciding to study economics? Was there a woman that you saw above you or did you just see all men? When I started economics, there weren't that many women. There were some, but there weren't that many women and not very many in development. But I can't say I wasn't particularly bothered by it. Yeah.

Why do you think that is? Just like personality or parents or... Yeah, do you find that because your father was a mathematician, your mother was a pediatrician, right? I find that such an interesting fusion of what you're doing because you're helping heal through the statistics, through math. So I think you gave an exact description, which is like, in some sense, I feel that in my career, I've managed to fuse the interest and the strength and the passion of both my parents. Not only my mom is a pediatrician, but she's also deeply committed to poverty. And from when we were kids, she used to travel to poor countries and in particular,

poor countries where there were civil wars to try and set up programs to help kids there. So we kind of were raised in that ambition. And I think that's where my desire to do something useful. But at the same time, I was attracted by academia and by rigor and by being slow and try to get the right answer as opposed to work in urgency. So I didn't really want to be a doctor. And my father had that aspect. So that's kind of how I managed to combine both of their strengths and qualities.

And given that, at some level, when I decided to start economics, I was so assured and confident of what I wanted to do that I didn't really need a role model and nothing could really move me from that track. In fact, when I arrived in the US and started my PhD, I realized that development economics was really not a very big field. It was very small. And in fact, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kramer

were just starting to rebuild it from scratch a little bit. It had lost a lot of this veneer or appeal. And I was like, sure, whatever. There are no students. Doesn't matter. I came to do this I'm gonna do this and if it doesn't work out then I'll find another way to get to my goal which is to to be helpful for the poor people so I think I've been very very lucky and fortunate to have such a strong north star in terms of what I want to achieve. It does help into sorting all of that

junk about what will people think and am I going to be manageable or not? It doesn't really matter as long as you're moving towards that objective. You said something in there that I'll consider as a low back tattoo. I feel like during this series, I'm going to get so much wisdom on my low back tattoo because I need to hear it. You said ignoring the urgency. Those words, I'm going to think about them for a while because we're so susceptible as human beings to urgency from a sale you see on a TV commercial to an impulse buy at the supermarket, what's by the counter. To social media. Oh, social media to anything, ignoring the urgency. And you were able to accomplish so much and have this incredible impact

by deliberately ignoring the urgency and sort of just doing it step by step, brick by brick. And that is fascinating because we don't put, certainly as Americans, put any emphasis on brick by brick. That's how it gets done. That is, thank you. I'll take that as a nugget of wisdom. How many female professors are there at MIT? I should know, but I don't.

Okay, but definitely more men, I would assume. Oh yeah, many more, but I don't know the ratio. I know the student body is about half-half now. Oh, it is? Oh, wow. Which is already good progress. Big time. The faculty body, not yet.

It's mainly a technical school with a lot of faculty in STEM fields. And so we're still working as an institution, still working on our gender diversity. Well, I'm so happy to hear that about the student body. I was not expecting that. And in fact, I was like, oh my gosh, I love the idea that you're standing in front of a class of a bunch of boys and you're in charge. But oh, Kristen looked it up.

16% of MIT faculty are women. Okay. I think I've fallen into this problem where I think if you work in a field that's male dominated, which, you know, a lot of these super highly successful fields are, that you have to like adopt male qualities. But I think I'm starting to learn and take in that that's not true. I think historically, it was true, perhaps, where to succeed in some of the STEM fields and in economics, as a woman, you had to be even stronger and more aggressive than the men

because otherwise people would permanently question your legitimacy to be there. And I think that doesn't change at parity. It changes before that. It's enough to have a group of women around to create a space where you can behave the way you want to behave and not be self-conscious about the fact that you don't share the same manners of speaking. The STEM fields have actually recognized earlier in economics

that there was a problem with gender balance, and they've really tried to work on it for many years and have made progress. First, starting with a student body, which is where you have a student body at MIT, and then moving, you know, graduate students and then assistant professor and faculty. In economics, haven't been as interested until a

few years ago you start seeing research on whether we have a culture for example that's not very sympathetic to women so for example there is a recent paper by pascaline duper and other that looks at interruptions in seminar and shows that the woman gets interrupted more and get asked like more aggressive questions in seminar. There are papers showing that women get less credit from co-authored work and so on and so forth. So I'm not saying that everything is perfect, but again, it depends on the field. So it is much easier to be a development economist. And if you're a female development economist, you don't have to behave in any particular aggressive way. You can just be who you are and you'll find people to work with

and people will invite you and listen to you for what you have to say. It's harder in fields like macro again, which have very few women, where the culture is still very male dominated. And hopefully that can change, partly because the field as a whole is realizing that it's suffering from it. Yeah. So in recent years, in many departments, you start seeing these small things.

But as we were saying, these small things can make a difference because they change the entire way the tone is set. So for example, in my department, we have now a rule that you have to let the speaker speak for the first 10 minutes before you can interrupt them. Out of a talk of 90 minutes. So that might seem unambitious as a goal,

but it was a big change actually from the normal seminars where the first slide, immediately people start interrupting you and asking you questions. I'd like to apply that rule at home when I get home. Just like, I want to be able to talk uninterrupted for 10 minutes

about whatever I want. And then after that, come at me. After that, you guys ask your questions. So we've started that in our department and many other departments have started similar things. I think it does, you know, little by little, it actually changes the entire culture and atmosphere in a way that makes it more inclusive. And again, it's not just about women.

It's also about minority and perhaps even more about minority that might feel more easily questioning their legitimacy. Yeah, dismissed. Often easily inappropriate. Yeah. The very fact of people realizing that such bias exists, either against women or against minority groups, makes a difference. For example, even among teachers, if you make them aware that they are biased against, say, immigrants or against minority, that makes them less likely to be biased against immigrants. or against minority, that makes them less likely to be biased against immigrants.

So people also act in a certain way, not out of meekness, but just out of inertia. Implicit bias is so strong. So the bias is implicit and unacknowledged. And so therefore you think that you're just behaving completely appropriately because you don't even see what might be the driver of your behavior at the moment or another. So the fact that there is a conversation around the fact, for example, that the Black Lives Matter movement heightened the conversation about minority, the fact that there is more conversation about gender in the STEM field or in the successful field like finance, etc.

That actually in itself, the fact that the successful field, like finance, et cetera, that actually in itself, the fact that the conversation exists, I think in itself contributes to progress in ways that are incremental. But, you know, this is almost my motto about anything, is that all progress is progress. And it kind of eventually builds on each other until you get like a big social norm shift.

And suddenly these problems are much less dominant. We Are Supported By is supported by Framebridge. Framebridge makes it easier and more affordable than ever to frame your favorite things without ever even leaving the house. You can do a gallery wall or send the perfect gift to someone from like art prints to diplomas or all the photos that are just sitting on your phone. FrameBridge can do just about anything. You can frame all the

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This special offer is only good at ZipRecruiter.com slash S-U-P-P-O-R-T-E-D. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. I kind of love that the field of developmental specifically, which, you know, the field of economics has not a surplus of women, but they're the ones that are going to look at the data as to how to make these incremental changes to get more women involved everywhere. There's something really cute about that. You did some research in female leadership, I think in India.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and like what the big takeaways were? Yes, absolutely. So I've worked on women politicians and in particular women leadership at the local level. So in India, they have a law that at the local level, at the village level, one third of each village must elect a woman as the head. And they passed this law because otherwise there was very few women elected in this leadership position. And when it happened, at first people said, well, it's not going to make any difference

because in any case, women are just the puppets of their husband. So there is going to be a real head who is the husband and then the woman will be just the front. And I thought, well, maybe, maybe, but then maybe not. Let's compare. And it turns out it was very easy to compare because in order to ensure fairness, they actually randomly selected where they were putting a reservation for women and where they didn't have one. So we can totally compare. And the first thing we found is that women do very different decisions than men. In particular, women invested much more in the goods that other women wanted.

So it is not true that they wear the shadow of their husband. They might be in public. But then as soon as he's not watching, they're actually doing their work and they completely transform the villages in terms of the water and sanitation infrastructure in particular. The second thing we found is that people hate to have a woman as their policymaker. They hate the idea. And this first generation of women get clobbered exactly for the reason that you talked about. It's like put a woman in position of power and she's seen as like ambitious and not motherly. And so most of these first women elected that they didn't even run again once the seat became open. But by the fact that they were there, they actually opened people's mind to the possibility of having women in power. And when you do this implicit bias test,

you find that very strong implicit association that it's men who are leaders and women who are working at home is less bad in places that had a woman as leader. And also if you ask people to rank a speech, so we took a speech that was made by a policymaker in a village, and then we had male actors.

You will like that, Kristen. Either female voice talents or male voice talents recorded the speech. And people thought that the speech was so much better when it was read by a man in general. Well, they didn't have Kristen reading it, I guess. Or Amanda Gorman, for Pete's sake. But when they had had a woman as policymaker,

that difference vanished. Oh, man. Interesting. So the fact of, even though you don't like the one you have in front of you, it forces you to realize that, oh, actually, a woman can lead. Yeah, subconsciously, they're changing. And other women started running, and they were elected. So we wereconsciously they're changing. And other women started running and they were elected.

So we were talking about role model before. This first generation of women, they get clobbered, but they open people's minds almost like at their own cost, but they open people's minds such that other women can enter and can lead. And it goes further, which is now the last paper we did is we interviewed parents about their ambition for their daughters and their son. And in places that had a woman as leader, parents became much more ambitious for their daughters than in places where they didn't have a woman leader. In fact, the gap between boys and girls in terms of the hope for education, et cetera, disappeared in those villages. And the girls were, in fact, much more likely to continue on to secondary school.

Wow. So just having this woman as leaders, even though there is this bias and people effectively don't like them and ranking them negatively, all of these changes did happen. And they are self-reinforcing because after that, we continued collecting data for several cycles after and the effect on the fraction of women who are in power continues to be higher in places that have been exposed and because the exposure is by rotation eventually

everyone gets exposed and then therefore you have like a rise in the movement of female leader, which, you know, does lead to an increase in ambition towards girls and the possibility that girls have in their lives. It's so fascinating because I get so frustrated with humans' resistance to change or difference just in general. Like you're saying the simplest things, like they just saw a woman in power and yeah, the first one got, you know, bombarded. But then the second one ran and then people got more excited for their girls. And it's like when we had a woman as elected vice president, I mean, like or don't like her. I don't care. All of that aside, there was a female sitting in the White House in a huge position of power that we had

never had before. When we found out the results of that election, I was crying the whole day. I just was. And my little girls looked up at me and they were like, why are you so sad? I thought you were excited. And I had to tell them their tears of excitement specifically because you will go to school in a time where there will be a little more diversity, where you will see someone who looks like you in a position that you could hold, that any girl could hold now. And it's just breaking down those barriers. It's so, it's so small, but it's so important. It is.

And even I remember on that day, I just remember being on social media and seeing all of the women in my life posting pictures of, and like across political lines of like, this is a cool day. Yeah. Knowing its significance. Yeah.

It was really important. Yeah. So I completely agree, except with one thing. I don't think it's small. I think it's very big when a woman becomes vice president. Well, yes. And I also think that the fact that a woman run for president the cycle before,

even though she got clobbered in part for being a woman, that also plays into that. It also did open the possibility. But look at that. The first one got clobbered. And the second one got elected. And the second one got elected. And that is exactly why we wanted to do

this particular podcast because the women who go there first, the women who are tapping on the glass are usually the ones that do get clobbered. That's been sort of apparent and giving them some acknowledgement and hearing their stories and their trials and giving them some credit

for opening up doors to everyone else we just thought was was pretty important yeah i think that that's really key and critical and it's great that you're doing this program because i think that role model effect is important it's been really uh shown in various domains so there were many many reasons for me of course to be super excited when I got the Nobel Prize I'm not going to hide it but one of them was like I'm a woman yes this is going to be for for some time and I'm young enough that hopefully I'm going to be there for some time and for some time there is going to be a woman Nobel Prize winner who who is going to be out there to some extent.

Yeah. Oh, it's so important. It's major. It's so important. I find it so interesting, specifically the part about parents and when there's female role models and leaders in the area, how that just infuses into them more ambition for their girls. Because it's not that parents don't have ambition for their girls. It's that they want to protect their children. They want them to succeed in the easiest, best way they can. So if the world is telling them the way for the daughter to succeed is to stay at home or to cook or to clean, they're trying to protect them. They don't want to be like, hey, go outside the box and perhaps get clobbered. Like, you know, like that's hard for a parent to do. So it makes sense that when they see it, they feel confidence to pass that down.

Yes, I think that's exactly right. And also people get both influenced by social norms and sometimes they get mistaken about what the social norm is, which contributes to keep it in place. So there was this paper about Saudi Arabia, very interesting experiments where they took a bunch of males and they asked them what they thought about women working outside the house. about a woman walking outside the house. And they asked them their own opinion. And they also asked them what they thought other people were thinking. So it turns out that over half of the people actually were comfortable with the idea that their wife would walk outside the house.

But they thought that most of the other people would not think it's okay. So in a sense, the individual opinion was, I'm actually fine with it. But I think that other people in my peer group are not fine with it. So I'm not going to do it. So what they did in this experiment is that they took half of those people and they informed them and they say, you know what? Actually, most people think like you. And most people think it's okay to have a woman work outside the house and then they followed the choices of these husbands and these wives over

time and in particular they gave them an opportunity for a job that could be done either from home or from an office and they found that the people who were informed that the social norm was more liberal than they thought were actually more likely to be willing to sign up their wife for a job training program or to give them the chance to do this job outside the house as opposed to stay inside and doing from home. So we're really influenced not just by our own opinion, but by what we think is acceptable. Yeah. And what we think is acceptable moves even slower than what we ourselves think is acceptable. And that contributes to a lot of the difficulty in moving the needle. Hence, again, the role of exposing people who have had different trajectories or people

who think differently or, you know, role models. trajectories or people who think differently or, you know, role models. Do you think that's because we, I mean, mainly the media highlight the polarization of so many opinions so often, like that is the clickbait of like, well, 50% of people believe this, 50% of people believe this about whatever topic it is. And that we're just sort of always, our implicit bias is that at least half the people are against us at all times when really maybe we could all be on the same page. We just don't realize it. I do think that the media and social media accentuate that phenomenon in two ways. Accentuate probably the desire to conform because you're so quick to be called out if you don't inside your own little echo chamber, whatever it is. And so it becomes very important to not stray.

So people are very conservative, not necessarily in their opinion, but in terms of the risk they're willing to take vis-a-vis what other people in their peer group might think. vis-a-vis what other people in their peer group might think. Yeah. The other thing is that the media does accentuate more polar opinions. So, for example, in today's conversation, there is a lot of discussion that, you know, Republicans don't like to wear masks and Democrats love to wear masks. And we see a lot of graphs about Republicans don't have masks and Democrats have masks. So from that, we might infer that if they're a Republican or they live in a Republican community, they really shouldn't wear masks so that they are not going to create any problem for them, for themselves.

Despite the fact that maybe personally they would like to wear masks. But the media just told them Republicans don't like to wear masks and vice versa for people in Brooklyn. Maybe they would love to go maskless, but the media is telling them everybody in Brooklyn is wearing a mask. They look stupid if they don't have a mask. True. Groups. We love groups. So that creates this hard behavior, which is you ignore your own information or feeling to go with the group, then it might be that we all think the same thing. Republican, Democrat have the same views about masks,

which is sometimes it's appropriate and sometimes it isn't. But the small initial difference gets played up by this echo chamber and insistence on the difference. And it kind of becomes endogenously generated, which is indeed it's true now that if you go to a Republican community and no one wears a mask and vice versa. And it doesn't mean, for example, that people wouldn't be very easily persuaded by just telling them something simple. For example, a doctor whom, again, people trust, giving them the information that a mask can protect you. And in fact, we've done some experiments with doctors

where we showed video with some messages on COVID. And we found that although, for example, Republicans and Democrats have different ideas at the beginning, they are just as receptive to the doctor's message. Really? So they start from a lower level, for example, of mask wearing or willingness to pay for a mask.

But they are totally persuadable, just as Democrats are persuadable. So that shows that it's not that they strongly believed in that message, in that idea. It's not that not wearing a mask is a part of their identity. It just happens to be the equilibrium

where everybody had kind of congregated around. But in fact, you know, people could change their opinion with very little. Wow. And it shows in today's political conversation where the media has a role and social media has a role, we tend to be too, I think, pessimistic

about people's ability to listen to you if you give them some concrete, actionable information. And what I found in my research in India, in the US, everywhere, is that actually if you give people concrete, actionable information and not bullshit, they actually are pretty persuadable, no matter where you start from. That is helpful, helpful, uplifting. I love that. This was wonderful. Really, really incredible. I feel like I could listen to you talk for hours and hours and hours. Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and educate us. And for being a role model.

Yeah. It's important. Well, thank you to the both of you for assembling the role models. This is a great project and I'm proud and honored to participate. We'll talk to you again. Yes. I hope so. Bye-bye. Shatter, shatter, the rest will be shattered glass.

And break the glass.