“Who can it be now?”
I turn my head around from my seat at the seminar table to see who it is this time that has interrupted the seminar speaker for the Nth time before she even got through her introductory slides: it was a man, of course.
A lot of people at econ seminars get annoyed at questions that would have been answered naturally had the audience just been patient enough to wait for, sometimes literally, another slide; the back and forth that sometimes ensues between a questioner and the speaker; and, of course, the inevitable consequence of the speaker rushing through their results because too much time has been sent on answering questions.
[People from other disciplines are often gob smacked when they attend an econ seminar, where the culture of interaction often runs adversarial. I once had a public health colleague attend a seminar I gave at Berkeley, which was completely routine. After the seminar, she came up and asked me why the audience had been so rude to me: I explained to her that I did not consider them rude (still don’t), and that a healthy exchange was part and parcel of a good econ seminar, even if sometimes disruptive. Ah, youth…]
To deal with the timing and volume of questions for the recruitment seminars this year, David McKenzie and I recently suggested to our recruitment committee that we should perhaps have a 15-minute moratorium on questions – anything other than the most urgent clarification ones. The idea is not new – I am told that BREAD has started doing this at their conferences a while back – but our recruitment committee was happy to adopt the suggestion and we have now done this for 5-6 seminars. The response, from what I can tell, has been overwhelmingly positive: I have had people come by my office to say that the number of unnecessary early questions were clearly down. My sense is that it would be reasonable to consider extending this rule beyond the recruitment season for our regular seminar series.
[Interestingly, the 15-minute moratorium seems to throw some speakers off, who, naturally, expect to be interrupted. I have notices speakers stumble, search for a transition, after a slide – clearly expecting a question at that point, based on previous experience. We have also had a speaker stop and say, upon reaching slide 5 or something, that she had never reached that slide without being interrupted before. Relax, speakers: the floor is yours. Enjoy…]
Anyway, at the first job market seminar after we adopted the 15-minute rule, I was naturally watching a bit more closely – mainly to assess compliance. But, I noticed something else instead: the first 8 questions after the moratorium came from men. It should not be news that men ask more questions at seminars, but the skew seemed extreme. So, I started keeping stats, which looked like this:
MMmMMmMMFMMMMMM
Each letter represents a question by either a male or a female participant. Small letters are for follow-up questions – almost always by the same person.
Dividing the 90-minutes seminar into three periods, I summarized the stats after that seminar for colleagues in the recruitment committee as follows:
- There was a total of 40 questions, meaning more than one interruption every other minute within the 75-minute period after the 15-minute moratorium.
- Of these 35 came from men and 5 from women
- My rough estimate of men/women in the room is about 1 to 2 (16 women and 32 men).
- That’s about 1.1 questions per man and 0.3 per woman, but my guess is that most men (about two thirds) asked no questions. Same with women…
Turns out, of course, that this phenomenon has been observed in the wild before. A colleague sent this article from the Economist after I shared the stats, highlighting the following sentences from it:
Pretty similar to our setting re: the male skew. And, again of course, this skew is not limited to econ seminars. Just this past Friday, The Letters Editors of the New York Times announced that women account for only a quarter to third of letter-to-the-editor submissions and that they want to change that (see the bottom of the page)."Men, however, were over 2.5 times more likely to pose questions to the speakers—an action that may be viewed (rightly or wrongly) as a sign of greater competence.
This male skew in question-asking was observable, however, only in those seminars in which a man asked the first question. When a woman did so, the gender split in question-asking was, on average, proportional to that of the audience.”
Intrigued by the fact that (a) there had seemingly been so many questions, but perhaps worse (b) men were more than three times more likely to ask questions, I decided to collect more data from the same seminar series. After all, this was only one seminar – was it really always like this? Here are the stats from the next two seminars, during which I collected the same data:
Seminar 2:
12:39-13:00: MMMFfMFFMmmMMFMMMM (5 F 13 M)
13:00-13:30: MmFfMmmMmMMmFMFMMFMmMmM (5 F 18 M)
13:30-14:00: MmMMMMFFMFMFMmMmMMmmFf (6F 16 M)
16 questions by women 47 by men, for a total of 63 questions. Seems less skewed, but the gender distribution was also more balanced that day, making the odds more or less as skewed as Seminar 1. A colleague noted that the likelihood of men asking follow-up questions is even more skewed – consistent with the hypothesis that men are more likely to enjoy the sound of their own voices. Notice the significantly higher number of questions and follow-ups…
Seminar 3:
12:45-13:00 – MmMmMmmMmMMMMMFMm (16 M 1 F)
13:00-13:30 - MMMMmFMmMMMmMM (13 M 1 F)
13:30-14:00 – MMMFfMmMm (7 M 2 F)
36 questions by men and only 4 by women in a room where the male/female ratio was about 2/1.
All in all, very consistent across the board. And, once you see this, it is impossible to unsee. So, what, if anything, should we be doing about this? The climate, I think, is right for culture change right now: I work in a research department, which, after years of status quo, has recently made a conscious effort to diversify its hiring, has a Lecture Series which features all women speakers, and in an institution that has been making strides to reach gender balance in its ranks, including senior management positions.
I think that the answers (or, even better, questions) need to come from women, but I have one idea for men: hush.
If every man at makes a resolution before coming to a seminar to pause and ask themselves whether they need to ask that question before raising their hand, there will be more room for others, including the speaker, to speak. Of course, people reading this at the World Bank and other workplaces will immediately identify with the phenomenon at meetings, gatherings, etc. Men self-questioning quietly, rather than sharing whatever comes to their mind with the rest of us, can surely improve matters - probably at little cost.
A few other observations, as a result of lots of colleagues stopping by my office to share their thoughts about my fun seminar stats:
- There is definitely a speaker fixed effect: Some speakers are much better at handling questions and moving on than others. But, it is not fair to expect the speakers, especially graduate students and junior colleagues, to confidently handle a large room. Chairpersons can either empower or protect the speaker as appropriate. Meaning that we may choose chairpersons not randomly, but purposefully from colleagues who can strike that delicate balance of allowing some healthy dialogue while keeping things moving and encouraging a more diverse set of voices.
- What is the optimal number of questions at a seminar? It is true that the seminar with 60+ questions was much unrulier than the one with 40+. However, conditional on the number, some seminars seem to go swimmingly (we had one speaker finish 7 minutes early) while others are derailed (see the speaker FE point above). When I first counted the number and reported it, I thought that an interruption, on average, of every two minutes cannot possibly be optimal.
- But, first, averages can be misleading in this context (many questions are bunched, followed by a few minutes of the speaker progressing through their slide deck).
- Second, as a colleague suggested, think of the following thought experiment: suppose that you are having a long coffee with the job market candidate and she is telling you about their paper. You are so interested that you two devote 90 minutes for her to tell you everything about it. In that conversation over coffee, it is perfectly possible that you interject something every couple of minutes in the pleasant back and forth. While a seminar with a room full of different people is obviously different, it is not clear that the total number of questions per se is the problem.
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For the past 40 years Malaysia implemented the NEP purportedly to alleviate poverty of the Malay (Bumiputras). That policy was defacto not a policy of affirmative action but was positive racial discrimination. While it supported the elite Bumiputras in seeking scholarships, shares at discounts, land, licenses it was not a level playing field for even the Bumiputras. The Royalty and elite benefitted... from this policy. As for the non-Malays it was un developing them-not being able to participate in the economy or attend universities that carried a quota. Worst still for race relations it tore up the country through this segregation-there is still much hatred today with the government’s policies. Now in 2010, Malaysia finds itself unable to compete globally in the market. Free trade rules do not allow for discrimination and the failure to obtain an FTA with the USA, speaks by itself-the USA will not accept apartheid. In the process of trying to participate, the Malaysia government has come out with the NEM (New Economic Model). Let me say at the outset, that this is nothing more than a relabeling of the NEP to satisfy conditions to be accepted into a multilateral treaty of sorts! The World must not allow this. This will enable the Malay government to work with US and other companies in Malaysia contracts leaving out the Chinese and Indians. This must never be allowed to happen. The Malaysian government is attempting to enter the backdoor knowing fully well that the front is shut and locked because of the racial discriminatory policy.
Read more Read lessHi philip, I read your blog this morning. later today I read an article on The State of Entrepreneurship in Malaysia http://www.entrepreneurship.org/PolicyForum/Blog/post/2010/04/19/The-State-of-Entrepreneurship-in-Malaysia.aspx the article talks about Malaysia’s relatively high entrepreneurialism and its reflections in its entrepreneurship and innovation rank by the Legatum Prosperity Index: 28th... out of 104 economies. the article says that Malaysia’s performance is boosted by a flourishing high-tech industry. High-tech exports constitute over half of total exports. Moreover, high levels of royalty receipts indicate that Malaysia is able to capitalize on its innovations, according to the Legatum study. Similarly, the World Bank ranks the country 23rd out of 183 economies in the ease of doing business. I am intrested in your take of the above. Best, Yara
Read more Read lessThanks, Yara. One of the observations that we make in our recent report is that Malaysia has been highly successful in plugging the export-oriented segment of its economy into cross-border production networks. But Malaysia has been less than successful in attracting value from this growing integration with the region and the rest of the world. An entrepreneurial, talented and creative workforce, the... ability to develop and access technological capabilities, and the adequacy of finance all matter to change this situation, as the article you refer to mentions. In each of these dimensions, Malaysia still has some way to go. For example, Malayia ranks top of the world on the Doing Business indicators of ease of credit and has many incentive schemes in place for innovation. Yet, the latest National Innovation Survey (2005-08) suggests that 43 percent of innovating firms consider lack of finance as a very important concern hampering their ability to innovate. As our report mentions, for innovation to lift off, more is needed than just the innovation capabilities of talent, technology and finance. Competition, which is the driving force of innovation, also needs to be stimulated. Furthermore, to make sure that innovation efforts deliver the greatest bang for buck, the amplifiers for innovation also need to be in place. Efforts can be concentrated in product niches and in geographical clusters. That way, efforts are not diluted.
Read more Read lessAnonymous, thanks for your comment. Your observation is consistent with the fact that income inequality in Malaysia remains at high levels. This applies to the country as a whole but also within broad segments of society and in fact within each of the ethnic groups in Malaysia. Regarding the New Economic Model, I would not pre-judge how this is going to unfold. Of course, the broad policy principles... that have been announced will need to be implemented first - and implemented successfully - before any real change is going to happen. But I find it encouraging that the NEM, which was made publicly available, contains a frank assessment of the challenges facing Malaysia. The report highlights for example that the gap between rich and poor is widening in Malaysia and it does refer to many of the issues that you mention. The NEM does not stop at making assessments; it offers a way forward. The NEM proposes a whole range of policy initiatives. Affirmative action is just one of them (even though this is the one the domestic and international media focused the most on). The NEM proposes to modernize the country's affirmative action policies, by making the policy more transparent, market-friendly and targeted to the needy. To quote directly from the report on page 25(www.neac.gov.my/node/235): "A key component of inclusiveness is the fostering of equal and fair economic opportunities. Affirmative action programmes and institutions will continue in the NEM but, in line with views of the main stakeholders, will be revamped to remove the rent seeking and market distorting features which have blemished the effectiveness of the programme. Affirmative action will consider all ethnic groups fairly and equally as long as they are in the low income 40% of households. Affirmative action programmes would be based on market-friendly and market-based criteria together taking into consideration the needs and merits of the applicants. An Equal Opportunities Commission will be established to ensure fairness and address undue discrimination when occasional abuses by dominant groups are encountered (Table H)."
Read more Read lessThank you for this blog post and for your work on the World Bank Malaysia Economic Monitor. The Economic Monitor is a wonderful collection of information; I will be referring back to it often over the next few months. While in the main I cannot disagree with your analysis, on a few points I might have placed somewhat altered emphasis: An observation brought to great attention in the early 1990s (especially... by Paul Krugman and Alwyn Young for East Asia) is how economic growth cannot continue from just ever-greater capital and labour inputs, i.e., from "mere sweat alone". At some point, the law of diminishing returns sets in; truly enduring growth can come only from productivity increases through innovation. Although the World Bank Malaysia Economic Monitor achieves a lot more besides, one of its principal messages (indeed, its subtitle) ends up following that thinking in policy prescriptions: it leaves a reader with the impression that unless innovation occurs, the Malaysian economy will be held back at middle-income level plateau, unable to transit to high income. I agree that obstacles are, indeed, holding back Malaysia's economic development. But is the most critical of those bottlenecks that Malaysia's capital and labour inputs are already flush, so that unless there is innovation, Malaysia will not break out of its middle-income trap? I suggest that this last is just false. I don't disagree that Malaysia desperately needs a strong knowledge base, a lively scientific and intellectual community, and well-performing world-class universities and research laboratories. It needs all those but more besides. But, in my view, focusing overly on just one dimension - without the coordinated big push generating synergies across all the principal problems - runs the risk of misallocating resources and undermining economic performance. Why do I think this? Since 1997, physical capital investment in Malaysia has gone into free-fall. As a fraction of GDP, Malaysia's investment is now 50% what it was before 1997. That it has remained as high as it has is due to government pump-priming: private investment has declined even more sharply; as a fraction of GDP it is now just one-third what it used to be. Over 25% of local public university graduates remain unemployed 6 months after graduation. Four-fifths of Malaysia's current workforce is educated only up to high-school level. This is not an economy straining at the bit to escape the curse of diminishing returns, needing to be rescued by innovation. What it is, instead, is an economy desperately needing an integrated package of reforms, simultaneously to repair a grotesque under-employment of resources as well as to ignite innovation. In the short to medium term, breaking out of the middle-income trap might rely more on fixing the former than it does on succeeding with the latter. Your report is refreshingly up-front about how innovation is a complicated, multi-dimensioned, multi-faceted process. I might emphasize further only that patterns of development across the global economy have now reached a point where our understanding of innovation also needs to be enriched in new dimensions. Innovation to produce the next iPad or Google gadget is sexy. But not-so-sexy "frugal innovation" - using cheap labour to redesign products and processes, to make the world's cheapest, lowest carbon-footprint car, to run the world's largest assembly line for solar panels and zero-carbon energy storage - will likely have by far the greatest impact on the greatest number of people's lives in the next decade, and is likely where countries like Malaysia (or China or India or elsewhere in East Asia) need to lead. On the urgent need for structural reforms, we agree. But, again, I don't think those reforms are just to permit innovation (to drive growth), nor do I think Malaysia's middle-income problem is now because it has already reached the limits of what the economy can do with its workers and its capital.
Read more Read lessThanks for these insightful comments, Danny. They touch upon a fundamental issue, worth exploring into some more detail. But before responding to your question, let me first make a general remark about two fallacies that invariably pop up in different shapes and shades when discussing the role of innovation in growth and development. The first fallacy is that growth through innovation is just about... technological change resulting from ground-breaking discoveries often in the context of formal R&D programs. Innovation of course goes much beyond this and includes also nontechnological types of innovation and these types of innovation may apply to not just products but also processes and organizations. Innovation is also not just concerned with the creation of ideas that are completely new to the world. Equally (and, for growth, perhaps more) important is the diffusion of existing ideas that have been long established but may be new to a firm, an industry or even a country. Innovation through diffusion is a powerful source of productivity growth, but this is all too often insufficiently emphasized. The second fallacy is that innovation can be separated from the accumulation of human and physical capital. This fallacy arises perhaps from the fact that innovation—hard as it is to conceptualize, measure and control—is not easily captured by the straightjacket of the four- or five-variable economy-wide production function, where the accumulation in the factors of production and the growth rate of total factor productivity are separated. While this separation is analytically convenient and useful for broad-brush assessments, the reality is that innovation itself depends on factor accumulation. For innovation to thrive, it therefore needs to be supported by a healthy level of investment in human and physical capital. Turning to the question of whether innovation is essential to Malaysia’s high-income ambition, the short answer is yes. Let me amplify why by addressing the following three questions. Can Malaysia squeeze additional growth momentum out of factor accumulation? Certainly. On physical capital accumulation, as documented in our November 2009 report, the share of private investment collapsed dramatically following the Asian financial crisis and, unlike most other countries in the region, it never fully recovered. While there are several reasons why investment shares should not be expected to fully recover to pre-crisis levels, the current level of investment appears to be low for a dynamically efficient economy and the current report suggest some reasons why this may be the case. On human capital accumulation, there is also scope for improvement. The skills issue is perceived by some 1,400 manufacturing and services firms as the number-one obstacle in consecutive World Bank investment climate assessments. We also know that, while labor force participation of Malaysian males is among the highest in the region, female labor force participation is among the lowest. Will additional factor accumulation be sufficient to break through the glass ceiling between middle and high income? Not necessarily. All will depend on the type of factor accumulation. If the old ways of plain-vanilla accumulation measured by numbers is to be repeated, then the collateral benefits of economy-wide productivity growth are unlikely to materialize. Malaysia does not just need additions to the number of people or the stock of physical capital. To climb up the income ladder, it will be the skill, talent and entrepreneurship of the workforce and the quality of domestic and foreign investment that will determine the rate of success or failure in moving up the value chain. Is innovation essential? Yes, but not just the narrow forms of innovation (where focusing on easy metrics may produce inferior results) and not just through total factor productivity growth but also on the back of better-quality human and physical capital. To put it bluntly in the terms of the debate in the 1990s, the fundamental driver of growth needs to shift from ‘perspiration’ to ‘inspiration’ and the economy needs to transform from ‘sweatshop’ to ‘smartshop’. Innovation—the successful exploitation of new ideas—holds the key to success in this transformation. The alternative—perspiration without inspiration—will undoubtedly produce some benefit of growth, but is a risky proposition given the increasingly intense competition. With other countries striding ahead and moving up the value chain (China being the case in point), standing still is an option but it is not a very good one. In the current environment, innovation is not just required for growth, it is also essential for survival in the global marketplace.
Read more Read lessHi there Philip, Thanks again for another sound intellectual argument on the need for economic reforms, specific areas as well the accompanying policies that needs to be taken I get the sense that Premier Najib, at this point in time, needs a political strategy rather than an economic one. He appears to be floundering at every turn - coming under attack from within and without his party on any economic... reform initiative that he attempts. Would it be a good time for the WB to do a study on "sequencing reforms" with a focus on the political economy taking lessons from other economies that have managed disparate stakeholders but also learning from how Malaysia's earlier reforms were done in managing the different stakeholders and if it can be implemented at all under the present political arrangements. I am sure that you are aware that many of these recommendations have been coming in different forms since 1990 (when the NEP was to be reviewed) but have yet to gain traction because of the political arrangements. I fear the NEM, which captures many of the WB recommendations here and in last year's monitor, may go the same way. At this point in time, how to actually to get the reforms done is what Najib & Malaysia needs. Thanks Greg
Read more Read lessDanny’s optimism is commendable but the NEM reforms could turn out to be a second (or third) best means of driving growth. My logic agrees that Innovation should be the prime driver, while the second best option is a structural reform package without a strict innovation focus:- “Innovation led growth” will be difficult if not impossible to achieve without the requisite human capital base. Analogizing... Ibn Taymiyyah, Copernicus, and most recognizably Gresham – The playing field is unbalanced such that a couple “bad guys” have driven the good innovators ones out, and will continue to do so. This human capital bottleneck is illustrated via your typology of 3 kinds of innovation – Product Innovation; brain flight of product innovators, Organizational Innovation; distorted incentives and moral hazard has thoroughly corrupted the Organizations, and, Process Innovation; staff turnover leading to lack of institutional memory which could drive said innovation. To elaborate on latter point, the employee reaching a level of education or experience capable of driving process innovation will leave or is poached – it’s an artificially tight market for such talent. The second best option (Danny’s “the more besides”) is not feasible – precisely because these “other” reforms have are driven by a flawed government:- Government structures are corrupt; and worse, widely perceived as corrupt. Years of abuse have made the public disbelieving and cynical. “Trust” or social capital has been destroyed to such a large extent to make government driven reforms relatively ineffective. Yes, Malaysia’s existing structures are improving – recent reforms (the GTP) have shown encouraging results especially with regards to efficiency and, dare I say – “productivity” – of delivery. BUT, climbing back out of the hole will take a lot more resources than is able to be mustered based on the prevailing political will for reform. I’ll end with a name drop of a related and more recent theory – that of Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism – referenced to by no less than the eccentric laureate Stiglitz. Moving away from the individual perspective to a company level one, the government is driving good companies out by supporting weak ones. Your argument of facilitating vs orchestrating would seem relevant here. The pessimism might change as our work progresses – but my frank assessment is that we will have to live to fight another day.
Read more Read lessHello Philip, I'm interested in studying the economic reform process from the perspective of household savings in Malaysia. Do you by any chance have information on household savings or know where I might be able to find it? Bank Negara apparently does not publish the figure. Thank you, Stefan