The economics website is filled with racist and sexist rhetoric.

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WASHINGTON (AP) Anonymous comments with racist, sexist and abusive messages that have been posted for years on an employment-related website for economists came from many top US universities, according to a study released Thursday.

Some economists have long condemned the website, Economics Job Market Rumors, for its toxic content. The site, known by its acronym EJMR, is run by an anonymous person and is not linked to any university or other institution. This fact had fueled speculation that those posting hate messages there were mostly online lunatics who might not be economists.

Still, the new research indicates that the website’s users include people at top colleges and universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago, and many others.

Our analysis reveals that users who publish on EJMR are primarily economists, including those working in the upper echelons of academia, government and the private sector, the paper concludes. It was written by Florian Ederer, professor of management at Boston University, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, and Kyle Jensen, associate dean at Yale.

A Harvard spokeswoman declined to comment. Stanford and the University of Chicago did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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. It’s very, very common. And the toxicity is widespread.

The revelations have sparked a social media debate among economists about privacy, free speech and online abuse. Some economists, particularly women who have been attacked on the site, say they hope the revelations will cause colleges and universities to investigate the publications. Others expressed concern that the research could lead to a witch hunt among those who posted on the site.

Speaking in an interview with The Associated Press, Goldsmith-Pinkham sought to allay those concerns, saying the band did not plan to release anything identifying individuals.

Nearly 2,000 people watched a live broadcast of the paper’s presentation on Thursday on YouTube. That was well over the hundred who watched other NBER presentations on the same day, suggesting widespread interest in the topic among academic economists.

The website’s bigoted content often makes women and nonwhite economists feel unwelcome in a profession that’s already struggling to diversify, Goldsmith-Pinkham said. Black Americans, for example, are more likely to earn a doctorate. in mathematics or other social sciences than in economics.

The idea that in an anonymous space people behave that way, that’s a pretty poor reflection of the profession, Goldsmith-Pinkham said.

The researchers used publicly available data to determine the Internet addresses of around two-thirds of the more than 7 million posts that have been posted on the site since 2010. They classified around 10% of these posts as “toxic” because of their racist or sexist content. These messages included the use of racial slurs and claims that women have smaller brains than men.

About 11% of publications on the EJMR, the researchers found, came from several hundred universities, including those they ranked among the top 25 research universities. On average, 13% of university positions were considered toxic.

Things were MUCH better when women focused on raising children and feeding their husbands, a paper highlighted by the researchers said.

America’s greatest enemies are: Blks, read another.

The site has drawn criticism since at least 2017, when Alice Wu, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an article pointing out the sexist nature of many of the posts on the site.

In response to his post, Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and professor emeritus of economics at MIT, called the website a cesspool. Blanchard added that the site had become a breeding ground for abusive-type personal attacks.

Anya Samek, an economics professor who was first attacked on the site in 2009, said it persisted because there was no way to hold the site accountable. She said she hoped the universities identified as the sources of some of the messages would take steps to prevent future abuse.

I would like universities to take steps to ensure that there is no online hate speech coming from their own offices,” Samek said.

Samek was the target of threatening messages on the EJMR website after being hired in 2009 by the University of Chicago’s top economics department. She had obtained her doctorate. from Purdue University, which she said some posters on EJMR might not have considered prestigious enough.

She was then the subject of false accusations on the site in 2022, after giving a presentation at an economics conference.

It was a really horrible experience, she said.

Samek has since started a petition urging the American Economic Association to consider legal action against the threatening and defamatory messages.

The economic association has launched its own job site to provide an alternative to the EJMR, although it has not been widely used so far.

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