Women Making Slow Progress in Academic Publishing in the Economics Field

A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that women have made some small gains in academic publishing in the economics discipline. However, the progress in academic publishing does not reflect the larger increase in the number of women economists.

The study examined all articles published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993, 2003, and 2011. All told, there were 1,269 peer-reviewed articles written by 1,100 different authors. The research was able to identify the gender of all the authors but one.

The results show that the percentage of all authors who were women increased by a slow but steady pace. In 1963, 4.7 percent of all authors were women. Thirty years later in 1993, 9.3 percent of all authors in these three leading journals were women. In 2011, 12.6 percent of the authors were women.

But the study notes that about 30 percent of all tenure and tenure-track economists in the U.S. academic world are women. So these women economists are not getting published in the leading journals at a rate that is even half of what might be expected.