On the occasion of the International Women’s Days on 8 March 2022, we take the opportunity to present all that RePEc is doing to highlight the work of female economists.
The first step is to identify them. When authors register with the RePEc Author Service, they are not asked for their gender. Hence, we need an additional step. This is performed based on the analysis of their names. We leverage NamSor, which uses an algorithm that includes guesses on the ethnicity to make more accurate gender attributions. Checks on the data revealed that this works well except for Chinese and Korean names, for which volunteers complement manually the assessments. Authors can also adjust their attribution from a link that is sent in their monthly email updates from RePEc.
The second step is to use the collected data. This page documents the proportion of females in the profession overall and by country, US state, research field and year of graduation. These statistics are updated every month. This page lists all the female economists who registered their Twitter handle with RePEc. This tool allows to identify female economists in some geographic areas and/or research fields, for example for a speaking in a research seminar. Finally, we have the ability to identify the best female economists, based on all their publications or on the last 10 years.
Use of this data is not limited to RePEc. It is available through the RePEc API and has already been leveraged for some research and has been presented numerous times in symposia.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 