Charts of the week: Global economic recovery, diversity among university faculty, and the shifting demographics of new homeowners

Click on the links or on the charts to go to the full research.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY IS “SYNCHRONIZED BUT SLUGGISH”

In their latest version of The Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery (TIGER), Brookings experts Eswar Prasad and Karim Foda provide an update on the state of the global economic recovery. The authors identify some growth disparities between countries and regions, but assert that overall “the world economy has settled into a holding pattern, with a broad-based but plodding recovery characterized by weak productivity and investment growth.”

Click here or on the chart below to open the interactive with country-level data.

WOMEN AND MINORITIES ARE UNDERREPRESENTED AS FACULTY IN STEM FIELDS

In a post from the Brown Center on Education Policy, University of Missouri Professor Cory Koedel and Diyi Li examine data from over 40 public universities to explore diversity and wage gaps among the faculty. They found that while women and minorities are typically underrepresented, those differences are largest in STEM fields where black faculty account for just 0.7-2.9 percent of faculty in biology, chemistry, and economics; but 8.8-15.1 percent of faculty in educational leadership/policy, English, and sociology. They also found that women account for just 18.1-31.1 percent of faculty in STEM fields, but 47.1-53.2 percent of faculty in non-STEM fields.

NEW HOMEOWNERS ARE BECOMING OLDER AND MORE DIVERSE

Jenny Schuetz, a Rubenstein Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, analyzed data from the American Housing Survey collected from 2001 to 2015 to explain changes in homeownership rates and demographics in the U.S.. Schueltz found that between 2001 and 2015, the median age of homeowners increased from 34 to 42, and that the share of new owners who were non-Hispanic whites dropped from 71 percent to 67 percent, while the share of Hispanic new owners rose from 11 percent to 16 percent.