Yellin’ at Yellen
A new working paper by James Bisbee (NYU), Nicolo Fraccaroli (Brown University), and Andreas Kern (Georgetown University), finds evidence that legislators treated Fed Chair Janet Yellen differently than male Fed Chairs.
They find that, compared to male chairs, Janet was interrupted more, and legislators were more aggressive in tone with her. "The same legislator who interrupted Bernanke in 2013 is 14 % pts more likely to interrupt Yellen in 2014, and 18 % pts less likely to interrupt Powell in 2018 than they were to interrupt Yellen in 2017."
They also find that this finding despairs for legislators with daughters!
An interesting paper with some great methods. Check it out below!
Paper Title” Yellin' at Yellen: Gender Bias in the Federal Reserve Congressional Hearings”
Abstract:
How prevalent is gender bias among U.S. politicians? We analyze the transcripts of every congressional hearing attended by the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 2001 to 2020 to provide a carefully identified effect of sexism, using Janet Yellen as a bundled treatment. We find that legislators who interacted with both Yellen and at least one other male Fed chair over this period interrupt Yellen more, and interact with her using more aggressive tones. Furthermore, we show that the increase in hostility experienced by Yellen relative to her immediate predecessor and successor are absent among those legislators with daughters. Our results point to the important role of societal biases bleeding into seemingly unrelated policy domains, underscoring the vulnerability of democratic accountability and oversight mechanisms to existing gender norms and societal biases.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4030121
References
Bisbee, James and Fraccaroli, Nicolò and Kern, Andreas, Yellin' at Yellen: Gender Bias in the Federal Reserve Congressional Hearings (February 8, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4030121 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4030121
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