The invisible Climate of Academic Economics

By Maria Cubel

In addition to salaries, publications or rankings, the quality of the professional environment determines who enters the academic economy, who stays in it, and what types of ideas are researched and debated. However, the quality of the work environment, so central to all othre professions, is rarely mentioned when discussing the vicissitudes of academic life and is systematically analyzed even less often. And although the first steps have already been taken to make visible the bullying academic or sexual harassment in economics, there is still much to study about the impact of the work environment, understood in a broad sense, on the production of knowledge and the professional trajectories of economists.

We put a grain of sand – Laura Hospido, Judit Vall Castelló and I – when two years ago we carried out the first survey on the work environment in the academic economy of our country under the auspices of the Spanish economics Association. The questionnaire was designed following the previous initiative promoted by the American Economic Association, which allowed us to place the Spanish results in a comparative context. In this entry I will summarize the results we obtained then,other similar studies carried out as then and I will offer a preview of what was obtained in the second wave of our survey,carried out in 2025,which is now ending.

The 2023 survey

The results of the first survey were very clear and difficult to ignore. Not because they revealed something completely unknown, but because they put figures comparable with those of other countries to experiences that for years have circulated in the form of anecdotes or rumors during private conversations.

When carefully worded questions are used to measure who feels valued, how treatment is perceived, or what strategies people adopt to avoid unwanted interactions, the emerging portrait of our profession is far from reassuring.

Let’s start with something basic: feeling valued. Among those who have been in academic economics for less than 20 years, only 36% of men and 28% of women say they feel valued within the discipline. Not in your specific university or center, but in the profession as a whole. That these percentages are higher among those who have been working in economic science for more than 20 years should not relieve us too much. This may reflect a selection bias (the highest rated stay), adaptation of expectations or changes in hierarchical position rather than a real improvement in the environment. Conversely, when asked about the specific institution in which one works, the answers are much more positive and hardly vary by gender or seniority, which points to broader and less localized dynamics.

Strong gender differences appear when asked about experiences of discrimination. Only around 4% of men report having suffered discrimination based on sex. Among women, the percentage exceeds 40%. These figures are very similar to those of equivalent surveys in the United States. we are, therefore, not facing a local anomaly or a specific cultural problem, but rather a persistent pattern in the economics profession.

If we look at the earliest stages of the academic career, the picture does not improve. Women report greater difficulties as students in key dimensions such as access to quality advice, research resources or in selection processes. these differences do not disappear with the passage of time.At the academic stage, women more frequently report having received unfair treatment in promotion decisions and, to a lesser extent, in compensation. In the case of promotions, the proportion of women reporting negative experiences is approximately double that of men.

There is also a phenomenon that has gone unnoticed for a long time and to which this survey puts figures for the first time: non-promotable tasks. By this we refer to organizational and training activities of “departmental life” from taking minutes or