Women in Economics: Stalled Progress

Shelly Lundberg and Jenna Stearns

No 11974, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper, we first document trends in the gender composition of academic economists over the past 25 years, the extent to which these trends encompass the most elite departments, and how women's representation across fields of study within economics has changed. We then review the recent literature on other dimensions of women's relative position in the discipline, including research productivity and income, and assess evidence on the barriers that female economists face in publishing, promotion, and tenure. While underlying gender differences can directly affect the relative productivity of men and women, due to either differential constraints or preferences, productivity gaps do not fully explain the gender disparity in promotion rates in economics. Furthermore, the progress of women has stalled relative to that in other disciplines in the past two decades. We propose that differential assessment of men and women is one important factor in explaining this stalled progress, reflected in gendered institutional policies and apparent implicit bias in promotion and editorial review processes.

Keywords: publishing; tenure; promotion; economics; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J21 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-his, nep-hme and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Perpectivesm 2019, 33 (1), 3 - 22

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11974.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Women in Economics: Stalled Progress (2019)
Working Paper: Women in Economics: Stalled Progress (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11974

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().