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 that increase was only 2% for female economists. In 2017 Alice Wu, an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, published a study which used natural language processing to analyze economics job market rumors, 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; second, posts about women contain 43% fewer academic or professional terms and 192% more terms related to personal information or physical attributes. In 2018 Maria-Carmen Guisan published an article in English at journal Regional and Sectoral Economic Studies (RSES), on Notable Women Economists Researchers in Spain and in the World. The journal is free downloadable at Ideas.Repec and Dialnet. 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, are less likely to give "extreme" answers in which they strongly agree or disagree, and 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. According to a 2026 study in the American Economic Review, which analyzed data covering thousands of seminars, job market talks, and conference presentations, female economists were substantially more likely to be interrupted than male economists, even when controlling for factors such as presenter, paper, and audience. According to the study, "Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone or cut off the presenter mid-sentence increase for women presenters."
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