Women are under-represented in the economics profession worldwide. This has wide social and material implications, as economists work in banks and government, and have a direct role in policy making. Studies have shown that decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results. While many other fields, including STEM fields, have seen growth in the share of professors and students who are women, economics has stagnated with little improvement at any level in the last 15 years.
Studies
In 2015 Harvard researcher Heather Sarsons published a paper on whether co-authored papers and the gender of the authors might affect tenure. The paper found that there was an 8% increase in the probability of a male economist getting a tenured post with a co-authored paper on their resume, but only 2% for female economists.
In 2017 Alice Wu, an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, published a study which used natural language processing on EconJobRumors.com, an online forum used by academic economists to discuss job openings and candidates. The study showed that when posters on the site discussed female economists they tended to discuss the women's appearance, whereas when discussing male economists they tended to use terms emphasizing their intellectual abilities. She found two main results: first, nine of the top 10 words predictive of a post about a woman are explicitly sexual references, and, second, posts about women contain 43% fewer academic or professional terms and 192% more terms related to personal information or physical attributes.
Most recently, in 2021, the evidence comes from a research study with a systematic attempt at quantitatively measuring the seminar culture within economics. They find that during a seminar, women presenters are asked more questions and the questions asked are more likely to be patronizing or hostile. This paper is the latest addition to a mounting body of evidence of gender discrimination in economics.
Similarly, in academia, where "publish or perish" is still the dominant credo, women are treated more harshly. For example, in an analysis of publications, it has been shown that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of whether they co-author or solo-author. Women, however, become less likely to receive tenure the more they co-author. The result is most pronounced for women co-authoring with men, and less pronounced among women who co-author with other women.
In addition, female-authored papers took six months longer to get published, even though they are more readable than those produced by their male counterparts. This amounts to a significant time tax for female authors, and these higher standards impose a "quantity versus quality trade-off" that affects female academics' careers.
According to The American Economic Association, compared with men, women disproportionately fall off the academic ladder at the time of promotion to tenured associate – a phenomenon that appears to be unique in the economics profession.
Probably due to all of these reasons the research also shows that there is a confidence gap between men and women economists working in top U.S. universities. They find that women are still less confident than men; that women are less likely to give "extreme" answers in which they strongly agree or disagree, and that they are less confident in the accuracy of their own answers.
Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography on research related to women in the economics profession.
Statistics
The number of undergraduate women majoring in economics in the United States peaked in the mid to late 1990s and has decreased ever since. Nationwide there are about three males for every female student majoring in economics, and this ratio has not changed for more than 20 years. Women earn the majority of undergraduate degrees across all subjects in the United States, but in 2016 only 35% of economic majors were women. This is the same percentage as the early 1980s.
In 2016 the share of women in PhD economics programs was 31%. This share has not increased in the last 20 years.
Of the 500 doctorate degrees awarded in economics to US citizens and permanent residents in 2014 in the United States, only 157 were awarded to women.
In the United Kingdom, women make up 57% of all undergraduate students, but only 27% of those studying pure economics.