About this project

The field of economics suffers from a “leaky pipeline” with women under-represented at every stage of academia. While 55% of undergraduate students are women, as of 2022, only 36% of economics majors are women. The female share of assistant professors (33% in 2022) has increased only marginally over time.

To better understand the leaky pipeline, this project is making data on different aspects of the field of economics more accessible.

This project is ongoing so stay tuned for updates.

Journals – Top 30 so far

Data and Methods

Current variables

variable: calculation [what’s an observation]

% authors female: female authors/all authors*100 [an observation is an author]
% papers with female first author: female first authors/all first authors*100 [an observation is a first author; all other authors are ignored. So you can also think of this as the percentage of papers with a female first author]
% papers all male: papers with all male authors/all papers*100 [an observation is a paper; with % papers all female and % papers mixed gender this sums to 100%]
% papers all female: papers with all female authors/all papers*100 [an observation is a paper; with % papers all male and % papers mixed gender this sums to 100%]
% papers mixed gender: papers with mixed gender authorship/all papers*100 [an observation is a paper; with % papers all female and % papers all male this sums to 100%]

Where are the data from?

Data are from Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) which covers, as of 2023, “about 4.5 million research items from 4,000 journals and 5,500 working paper series.” Analyses are starting with the top 30 journals. Expansion to additional journals is underway. You too can download the entire RePEc database.

*Be warned, you literally download the database when you follow these directions, pdfs, .mov files and all. Here’s the code I used, modified from what was provided, to capture .rdf and .redif bibliographic files:

rsync -va –delete –include “*/”  –include=”*.rdf” –include=”*.redif” –exclude=”*” rsync://rsync.repec.org/RePEc-ReDIF/ RePEc

Deepest appreciation to the RePEc team for making this data available.

Statistics on the female share of PhDs, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors are from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession annual reports.

How did you identify gender of authors?

This STATA .do file takes the (many, many) RePEc bibliographic records and manipulates them into something analyzable. As part of the workflow, first names of each author were fished out and classified by gender using genderize.io. Gender estimates of “unknown” (8%) were treated as missing.

The results were summarized by year and journal and visualized in the interactive Rshiny app above. You can download that app (with associated .rds data and files) in a zip here.

You can download the current version of the data being graphed as an Excel .xlsx file here or as a STATA .dta file here.