Abstract
Research on the gender gap in scholarly output within the economics profession has focused almost exclusively on work done at research institutions. In that context, studies consistently find fewer publications from women than men. We examine gender patterns in research production among economists working at liberal arts colleges (LACs). To do so, we collect longitudinal reports of ECONLIT-indexed publications for scholars who earned PhDs from 1983 to 2012. While we find fewer publications per female scholar among those earning PhDs from 1983 to 2005, more recent cohorts show no gender gap. The gap seen among LAC economists earning degrees between 1983 and 1994 largely reflects differences among macroeconomists. Furthermore, while coauthorship has increased persistently across male PhD cohorts, it has leveled off among women in the most recent cohort.
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Notes
The only exception is Bodenhorn (1997), although gender is not the main focus of that work.
Of note, the lead article in the inaugural issue of The American Economic Review was authored by Katharine Coman, who taught economics and history at Wellesley College. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.1.36.
The data are available through ICPSR (Bourne et al. n.d.).
We use the 10-year H index as reported by IDEAS on April 9, 2021. As explained by that source, H represents “the number of articles or papers [in the journal] with at least [H] citations.”
While we emailed all members of the population asking them to indicate their gender, the response rate was only one-in-six, too low to use for the study. However, of the 109 faculty members who reported their gender, our coding process matched in 108 cases.
Figures sum to greater than 100 percent due to rounding.
We note that our study analyzes the entire population—not a sample. As such, here and below we do not report confidence intervals or standard errors because the work involves no estimation or inference.
These percentages were calculated from Table 1 of Dolado et al.
One example of positive institutional change at LACs is the establishment in 2005 of the annual Workshop in Macroeconomic Research at Liberal Arts Colleges.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jackson Wahl for exceptional research assistance and to Robert Lemke, Deborah DeGraff, Andrew Jalil, participants in the Carleton College Economics Seminar, and anonymous referees for thoughtful feedback that improved the paper. Work in this project was reviewed and approved by Carleton College’s Institutional Review Board (IRB 19-20 063).
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Bourne, J., Grawe, N.D., Hemesath, M. et al. The Disappearing Gender Gap in Scholarly Publication of Economists at Liberal Arts Colleges. Eastern Econ J 50, 117–134 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-023-00261-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-023-00261-2