Are economics conferences gender-neutral? Evidence from Ireland

Margaret Samahita and Kevin Devereux

No 202225, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin

Abstract: We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymised submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in the organisers’ acceptance decisions, there is an indication of in-group gender bias at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give higher scores to male-authored papers. Evidence suggests that the bias stems from unconscious stereotyping against lesser-known female authors. Anonymisation eliminates the in-group bias of male reviewers, but introduces a bias in favour of male authors for female reviewers.

Keywords: Academic conference; Discrimination; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 D83 J16 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2022-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10197/24334 First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ucn:wpaper:202225

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by UCD School of Economics ().