![]() In response to her paper, Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and emeritus economics professor at MIT, called the website a “cesspool.” Blanchard added that the site had “become a breeding ground for personal attacks of an abusive kind.”Īnya Samek, an economics professor who was first attacked on the site in 2009, said it persists because there has been no way to hold the site accountable. The site has drawn criticism since at least 2017, when Alice Wu, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a paper highlighting the sexist nature of many of the postings on the site. “The biggest enemies of America are: Blks,” read another. “Things were WAY better when women were focused on rearing children and feeding their husbands,” said one post highlighted by the researchers. On average, 13% of the posts from universities were considered toxic. These posts included the use of racial slurs and assertions that women have smaller brains than men.Ībout 11% of the postings on EJMR, the researchers found, originated from among several hundred universities, including those they classified as the top 25 research universities. They classified about 10% of those posts as “toxic" because of their racist or sexist content. The researchers used publicly available data to determine the internet addresses for about two-thirds of the more than 7 million posts that have been made on the site since 2010. “The idea that in an anonymous space, people behave in this way, it reflects pretty poorly on the profession,” Goldsmith-Pinkham said. Speaking in an interview with The Associated Press, Goldsmith-Pinkham sought to dispel those concerns, saying the group does not plan on “releasing anything identifying” individuals. Others have expressed concern that the research could lead to a “witch hunt” among those who posted on the site. ![]() Some economists, particularly women who have been attacked on the site, say they hope the revelations lead colleges and universities to investigate the postings. The revelations have provoked debate on social media among economists about privacy, free speech and online abuse. “It’s not just a few bad apples,” Ederer said in a presentation Thursday at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stanford and the University of Chicago did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It was written by Florian Ederer, a management professor at Boston University, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, and Kyle Jensen, an associate dean at Yale.Ī spokeswoman for Harvard declined to comment. “Our analysis reveals that the users who post on EJMR are predominantly economists, including those working in the upper echelons of academia, government, and the private sector,” the paper concluded. Yet the new research indicates that users of the website include individuals at top-tier colleges and universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago, and many others. That fact had fed speculation that those who posted hateful messages on it were mostly online cranks who might not be economists. The site, known by its acronym EJMR, is run by an anonymous individual and is not connected to a university or other institution. Some economists have long condemned the website, Economics Job Market Rumors, for its toxic content. universities, according to research released Thursday. WASHINGTON (AP) - Anonymous comments with racist, sexist and abusive messages that were posted for years on a jobs-related website for economists originated from numerous leading U.S.
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