Friday, July 25, 2008

Finance: 0% Politically Correct

Inside Higher Education just highlighted some research done by Neil Gross, a sociology professor at Harvard, and Solon Simmons, a sociology professor at George Mason University. Here's the "punch line" from the summary:
Humanities and social science fields tend to have higher politically correct rankings, while professional and science disciplines do not. The table that follows is in order of political correctness. Psychology is the only field where a majority of professors are politically correct. Four fields — finance, management information, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering — had no one who was politically correct (emphasis mine).
In addition, the five disciplines next least likely to be politically correct were Biology(2%), Computer Science (3%), Accounting (4%), Marketing (4.5%), and Economics (4.7%). All in all, these numbers aren't surprising: I can't imagine what a politically correct approach tom teaching finance would entail (maybe an NPV of a project that differs based on the race, gender, or class of the project manager?).

Read IHE's summary here, and get the original article here.

HT: Marginal Revolution, who I'm less politically correct than.