How To Get More Women To Study Economics

By Ben Casselman of The Wall Street Journal

How can we get more women to study economics? Try hiring more female economics professors.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The study’s authors—Galina Hale of the San Francisco Fed and Tali Regev of Tel Aviv University—looked at the gender makeup of 10 top economics PhD programs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found a strong correlation between the number of female students and the number of female professors. Programs with the most female professors, such as UC-Berkeley and, more recently, MIT, also tended to have the highest percentage of female PhD candidates. Universities with male-dominated faculties, such as the University of Chicago and UPenn, also had few female graduate students.

“Our results provide market-based evidence that a larger share of women on the economics faculty of top universities has led to more female students entering economics PhD programs,” the authors write. “It is no surprise that academic disciplines with very few women on faculty of top universities attract fewer women into their academic programs.”

The good news: Women’s participation in economics has generally been rising, among both professors and students (Only Penn showed a decline in the percentage of female faculty members). But women are still underrepresented. From 1983 to 2007, women made up just 8.4% of the economics faculty at the 10 schools studied. Only UCLA ever had a fifth or more of its professorships filled by women, and then only in 2004 and 2005.

The authors don’t give a definitive explanation for the link between student and faculty demographics, but they say the results hold up even when they control for factors such as the gender makeup of the broader university. That suggests “that gender segregation across disciplines is likely to be persistent,” the authors write in their conclusion.

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