The faiV was a new idea in 2014. For years, we had been sending out a “blog update”--a holdover from the days when blogging was a thing--usually around once a month, with a “round-up” of things from “around the web”. It was boring and, as far as we could tell, not really useful. Alicia Brindisi (Comms associate at the time) and Laura Freschi (Deputy Director at the time, now back as Engagement Director after a sojourn in the wilderness) had the idea to maximize FAI’s comparative advantage of “sense-making” by producing a new weekly email that would just focus on five new and interesting publications from other sources.
The faiV was born.¹
The original idea was to just have five links each week. But I meddled. Alicia would find really interesting things, and I would want to add links to provide context and connections. Soon there were a few more than five links.
When Alicia left FAI and I took over as the editor of the faiV in 2016, well, things really took a turn for the dense and linky. But the general content and purpose of the faiV was the same: to share our perspective and commentary on interesting new research on financial inclusion and social investment around the world.
Key to that is the definition of “interesting”: interesting was limited to the world of things that I saw and had the time to read (or at least skim). While many of you have told me that you are amazed at how much I do read, for me there is always the panicked anxiety of not reading enough. Right now, across three computers, I have more than 300 tabs open of things that I want to pay attention to. (A brief aside: my terrible tab management practices are enabled by a terrific Chrome app called Workona. I very highly recommend it, but just keep in mind that recommendation is coming from someone who is happy that they can have 300+ tabs open).
Given the nature of the faiV, there is a binding constraint on what can appear: what I read. The most important constraint on what I read is what I see. And therefore it matters where I’m looking. If I’m going to accept the mantle of amplifying certain ideas, then I bear responsibility for carefully choosing what I’m looking at.
So what am I amplifying?
….
Back in 2019, Maria May of the Gates Foundation--who had been a guest faiV editor when she was at BRAC--asked me to start tracking what sources I was linking to. Specifically, whether I was including the work of developing world researchers/institutions or mainly work from well-established researchers in North America and Europe; and how much I was including the work of women.
Since taking over writing the faiV each week, I had adopted a specific practice when it came to female economists: if there was a woman author or co-author, I would use first and last names of all authors (unless it was completely impractical because of the number of authors); if it was an all-male authorship group, I would only use last names or omit the names. The intent was to make it obvious, especially to young women but to everyone else too, that there were women economists at the leading edge of research. I didn’t follow the rule strictly, but I considered it my small contribution to advancing gender equality in the economics profession.
But I had never done anything systematic like tracking the authorship of papers or other sources. And I’d never put much thought into the location or nationality of authors or the institutions where they worked.
To answer the questions that Maria posed, I asked Michelle Kempis (at the time a student worker, now full time Research Associate at FAI) to go back to a random selection of faiV’s to create a baseline and then start tracking the faiV on an ongoing basis (now being continued by Rhea Almeida).
We ran into some challenges right away. Exactly what were we going to track? The location of authors or the location of institutions? Whether a paper has any developing world authors or female authors, or the absolute proportion of each? The trickiest one for me, because of (well-founded empirical) personal beliefs about the net good of migration, is how to quantify authors: e.g. should we classify Yale University’s Mushfiq Mobarak as a Bangladeshi author or a North American author?²
Here’s where we ended up, with the specific caveat that I don’t think we’ve got the metrics right, we took plenty of shortcuts and we changed our methodology over time (e.g. how we began tracking not just author’s nationality, but the location of their institution of publication).
First, here’s a breakdown of the geographic area of focus, by region, of items in the faiV, for context:
Now here’s the nationality of the authors of items I linked to, again grouped regionally and excluding the “theory” category:
While it makes sense to group country of focus by region, the regional grouping of authors obscures some important facts. Specifically, “Europe” means the UK, and North America means the US. Here’s a look at the nationality of authors by country:
Here’s the same data with nationality grouped by (present-day) income levels:
And finally, here’s a look at authors, by gender:
Of note, is that we are not tracking the relative proportion of men and women in co-authored items—the 29% includes both items with 5 male and 1 female author, and 2 female and 1 male authors, for instance.
We can also look at the faiV over the time we’ve been tracking and see any changes. After all, what gets measured gets managed, right?
It turns out, at least so far, that measuring isn’t producing an obvious change.
When we set out to track the faiV, we’d only done a couple of faiVLive’s. That’s accelerated recently so it’s worth noting metrics specifically for who has been a guest speaker for a faiVLive, even though it’s a much smaller sample:
Location of participants (at time of participation):
60% United States
14% Latin America
10% South Asia
7% Sub-Saharan Africa
7% Europe
Gender of Participants
39% Male
61% Female
Now comes the important question of what we do with this data. Is our diversity sufficient, or sorely lacking? What targets should we have?
My first conclusion after reviewing this data and thinking about the implications is that I do need to put more effort into regularly looking for and highlighting work coming from institutions in the Global South. There is more than enough high-quality research coming from a wide range of sources; the main barrier is the extra time needed to search out materials rather than just relying on sources that are well-established and widely-distributed. (By the way, you can be part of the solution here. If you care enough about the faiV to read this far, I’d love your help in alerting me to things I should be reading coming from such institutions.)
My second conclusion is that I’m still not sure how much I should care where a researcher is from, or where they are currently living. Clearly the answer isn’t “not at all.” There are important insights to be gained from deep local knowledge. But most work that features in the faiV is not “Africa: the View from Cambridge”³ regardless of the national origin or location of the authors. And there are important insights to be gained from being an outsider, or being able to effectively view a situation from multiple contexts. In fact, a core aim of the faiV is making connections across contexts, geographic and topical.
My third conclusion is that continuing to track and publish our metrics is important, and we’ll devote the resources necessary to do so. Expect an annual summer faiV metrics post from here on out. But also expect our metrics and how we measure to change as we think harder about the issues.
Finally, Maria’s nudge on paying attention to diversity in the faiV forced me to wrestle with the thorny question of what we can do about the broader, underlying problem of diversity and representation in the field (e.g. Subramanian and Kapur’s noting that just 2 of the 79 co-editors and associate editors of the Journal of Development Economics are based in a developing country). So here’s a short report on FAI’s diversity based on our current projects:
Small Firm Diaries
Three implementation partners, two woman-led
Seven academic research partners, four women, two partners at Global South institutions
Six local partner institutions, four woman-led, five led by people from the Global South⁴
Sentinel Project
Nine partners, six women, three at local institutions
South Asia Remittances
Four co-PIs, two women, three from region (one at a US institution, one at a UK institution, one at South Asian institution)
Compton Basic Income
Five co-PI’s, three women
And truly finally, I am very interested in other perspectives on what you’ve read here and what you see in the faiV. Don’t be afraid to weigh in--send us an email, tweet, etc. If we get good insights and comments I will devote a special issue of the faiV to responses and follow-up. But perhaps most importantly, I’d love for Maria’s nudge to me to multiply. If you are doing anything like the faiV institutionally or personally, keep track of what you are sharing. And if you don’t, keep track of what you read, and who you read. I still haven’t made up my mind on what the right targets are or how to get there, but I am convinced that more people keeping track of and reporting data on these dimensions is an important part of figuring out how to get this right.
Graphics designed by Gordon Schuit.
¹ For those who aren’t rabid followers, the ambiguous pronunciation of the faiV is a feature, not a bug. It was supposed to be equally “the fave” and “the five”. We call it “the five” but I love it when a reader calls it “the fave”.
² I use Mushfiq as an example because he is particularly engaged in policy questions in Bangladesh, but also because of his work on the benefits of migration.
³ For those not as embedded in the Development Economics Industrial Complex, there is a large body of development economics papers prior to the 1990s that are number crunching on high-level national and regional statistics by authors who never left their desks (in Cambridge). There really is an “empirical/experimental turn in development economics”, though it yields plenty of the other types of papers in Pam Jakiela’s joke.
⁴ Note that this is in no small part because of BMGF funding for and support in bringing in local partners.