WHAT IS THE cost of discrimination? Lisa Cook, the first black woman (and only second black person) to sit on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, has built a career on finding empirical answers to that question. More than a century since Sadie Alexander became the first black American woman to earn a PhD in economics, a large majority of economists are still white men. Black people make up 14% of America’s population, but gained less than 5% of economics degrees in 2023—a share that has shrunk since the mid-1990s, according to the American Economic Association, a professional body. “If economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to black women,” Ms Cook wrote in an essay in 2019.