Where are the women?
Upon entrance into an economics lecture in 2022, a great gender disparity is apparent. The ratios one might expect in stereotypically male-dominated fields – take physics or computer science, for example – are easily reproducible in an economics classroom. Whilst more women have been joining STEM degrees in the past two decades, the same is not true for economics: women receive the same amount of higher-level economics degrees as in 1995, at less than a third of graduates.
The lack of women in economics is not a phenomenon noticed in other social sciences, nor is the field’s lack of progress in equality. Not only does this suggest a difficult culture for female undergrads, but the imbalance has rolling effects on research and career prospects.
From a university level, the disparity of male and female participation starts from undergraduate applications: in the UK, only one in four economics applicants are female. This begins an academic culture which is male-dominated and may only be exacerbated, as women leave the field before graduate level. Economics culture at undergrad can be described as laddish, cutthroat, and as an environment symptomatic of Wolf of Wall Street toxicity. Whilst these are one-sided perspectives and highly affected by the individual experience and the university pictured, financial social sciences have a well-known reputation as competitive. Common entry fields, which simultaneously have distinctly high starting salaries, have equivalently tall standards.
In terms of gender equality, the lack of women in economics affects research and corporate decisions. Women are underrepresented in economics textbooks; with 15% of full professors in economics departments being female, it’s natural to assume a lack of research on gender disparities. There is an absence of knowledge on the economic roles of women in domestic work, particularly in less developed areas. It’s expected that by encouraging female applications to economics degrees, and later research for the field, there will be further transparency on these inequalities.
And academia is not the only field in which economics is male dominated: since 1969 only 2 Nobel Prizes have been given to women in the field of economics. In the U.S., less than 20% of the National Bureau of Economic research members are women. Dominant financial corporations are lacking in female executives, and business has a gender ratio nearly unequal as economics.
Admittedly, it is entirely possible female applicants are simply uninterested in the field of economics, and further careers in research and financial industries. But this is irrelevant to the fact economics lacks research on female economic inequalities as a whole; having more women contributing to the field may encourage a wider breadth of research. In the past two decades that gender discrepancies in economics have stagnated, proportions of women in sciences have increased. If there have been cultural and school-led pushes for girls to pursue sciences, the same has not been addressed with economics. Not only does a male-dominated university culture discourage continuation of economics studies for women, but it highlights a knowledge gap for gender-oriented economic research.