CSWEP:Sessions Policy

Regarding Sessions at the American Economic Association and Regional Association Meetings

CSWEP sponsors six sessions of papers at each annual meeting of the American Economic Association. Three paper sessions are usually gender-related and the other three are in a topic area that changes from year to year. Two CSWEP board members, or a CSWEP board member and an outside person, are put in charge of organizing each set of sessions. In addition, CSWEP sponsors two or more sessions at the regional meetings (Eastern, Midwestern, Southern, and Western) each year, in each case to be organized by the CSWEP regional representative (and their committee, if they have one). One of these sessions is generally gender-related and the other is in a subject area of the CSWEP regional representatives' choosing. Sessions generally have three or four papers and two to four discussants.

In each of these cases, CSWEP puts out a general call for abstracts to be submitted. The papers presented in the sessions will normally be selected from the submissions. Sometimes an organizer will solicit additional presenters to strengthen the theme of the session. At least one author must be a member of the association sponsoring the meeting, if so required.

CSWEP's major objective in organizing these sessions is to create an opportunity for junior women to present papers at economics meetings. Another of CSWEP's objectives is to give junior women an opportunity to meet and receive feedback from leading economists in their field. Towards these ends, the presenters at any CSWEP-sponsored session will typically be junior women. The term "junior woman" usually refers to a woman who is untenured, or who has received her Ph.D. less than seven years ago, but could refer to a woman who has not yet presented papers widely. Co-authors may be of either sex and may be junior or senior. Junior men may author papers in the gender-related sessions.

Discussants and chairs at the CSWEP-sponsored sessions will often be senior women or men. Discussants may also be drawn from the pool of submitters who were not chosen for paper presentation slots. The session organizers generally each chair a session. Session chairs are responsible for writing a short report on their session for publication in the CSWEP newsletter.

Two additional objectives of these sessions are to encourage quality research, particularly in the area of gender-related topics, and in general to encourage junior women to publish their research. In direct furtherance of these goals, the organizers of the AEA sessions have the responsibility of choosing a subset of the presented papers for publication in the AEA Papers and Proceedings - generally three papers from the gender-related sessions and three papers from the revolving topic area sessions. Paper presenters are notified of this possibility and must submit a paper of appropriate length by a November deadline in advance of the meetings in order for the paper to be considered.