The RePEc Blog

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.

The number of authors registered with the RePEc Author Service has surpassed 60’000. We take this opportunity to take a look at some of the characteristics of this group.

For starters, one has to realize that this is a really large group. While anybody can register (for example to exploit some of personalized RePEc services like MyIDEAS), the 60’000 are those who have any sort of publication listed in RePEc. This group of published economists is much larger than the body of economists who are members of the three largest associations in the profession: The American Economic Association, the European Economics Association, and the Econometric Society. They have a total membership of about 25’000, including individuals who are members of several societies. Does this mean that RePEc is comprehensive? One indicator is to compare those registered to some other listing of economists. For example, a ranking of the top 1000 economists computed in 2000 shows now that about 91% have a RePEc account. Of course, we would welcome a more recent analysis, and RePEc membership is likely “top-heavy,” yet we hope you are impressed as us.

How did we get to 60’000? Here is a short-time line:

Then, what is the composition of those 60’000? 25.5% are female, 1% are known to be deceased, another 2.5% have been lost, that is, their email address is bouncing and may have moved or died (update welcome!). In terms of geographic representation, we find economists in 167 countries and territories:

Defining our authors by field is more tricky. They do not declare a field upon registration. We cannot use JEL codes as the coverage in the publisher-contributed data is lacking. We infer fields from the proportion of working papers announced in particular NEP reports. There are eligibility criteria in terms of number of works in a field to be counted. Measured that way for the 46% that qualify, the top fields are (an author may be in several fields, 100% is all qualifying authors):

Thanks to the ranking of female authors in RePEc, we have long known the share of women in the RePEc sample of more than 50K authors: 19%. We now know also the shares of women economists by country, US state, field of study and PhD cohort. The following table shows for the largest countries their relative size and the proportion of women in each. European countries are doing better than the world average, especially Latin and Eastern European countries, while Anglo-Saxons are the most masculine (is it that relatively higher salaries for the profession in Anglo-Saxon universities attract the most competitive men?). Latin America is generally below average (except for Colombia and Argentina) while Asia has very low shaes of female economists, with less than 6% in Japan, China and India, and 9% in Pakistan (you can sort by column in the link).

The figures by cohort year of doctoral students in economics do not allow much optimism for the future, as shown in the graph below. In terms of fields of study, women are more present than before in all disciplines, but there are more masculine fields than others: finance (10.9% of women), time series (11.4%), sports economics (12.2%)… The most feminine: demography (37.7%), tourism (34%), Eastern economies (33.4%, likely due to the higher share of females in those countries).

IDEAS also lists the RePEc economists active on Twitter (over 1000 registered). While women represent 19% of the RePEc authors, they are only 14% in the Twitter subsample. Looking at the Top 25% of this list of RePEc/Twitter economists by number of followers (3rd row), the proportion of women falls to less than 13%. In fact, the total audience of these women among the top 25% is a little over 3%. The table also provides the names of the most followed female economists on Twitter: only eight are ranked among the top 100. The lack of women at the top is also apparent in the rankings based on the quality of publications and citations that RePEc releases: only two appear among the world’s top 100, Carmen Reinhart and since recently Asli Demirguc-Kunt. The following figure gives some statistics about the top economists in some of the countries with the most registered economists. Again, European countries outperform Anglo-Saxon ones in terms of women among the top 100.

There is a lot of literature documenting this gender bias in the economics profession. These latest RePEc data complement what is well known, allowing international, thematic and temporal comparisons. See also the nice interactive representation of the RePEc network that Christian Mongeau makes by gender.

In a Project Syndicate column, Federico Fubini makes the argument that the intellectual leaders in economics from ten years ago are still the leaders of today, and this despite the fact that we have had a financial crisis that was not predicted by the profession. I do not agree with this column on several fronts. As the argument was made using RePEc data, I feel obligated to set the record straight.

One may discuss whether the economics profession has really not seen the crisis coming. But even if this crisis was unforeseen, it is wrong to argue on principle that the best economists from ten years ago should not be considered to be the best today. Indeed, it is not the case that the whole profession is focussed on predicting financial or economic crises. Economics has much more to offer, just see the list of recent Nobel Prize winners or the large variety of fields covered by NEP, RePEc’s research alert service. Most of those fields have nothing to do with crises. For example, the leaders in auction theory from ten years ago are likely to be leaders now, the same applies to development economics, empirical labor economics, or environmental economics. Ten years is short in the evolution of scientists.

But beyond this mischaracterization of what the economics profession does, there is the issue with the use of the data to prove the point. Fubini uses the ranking of economists provided by IDEAS/RePEc, taking the December 2006 and the September 2015 rankings. But before looking at them, one has to understand what they measure. They are an aggregation of 23 (2006) or 35 (2015) criteria, almost all of which pertain to the lifetime output of the economists. Those that are not are four looking at readership statistics for the last months, and in the recent rankings six criteria discounting citations by their age. Basically, the accumulated research and citations that were considered in 2006 are also considered in 2015. There is obviously going to be high persistence among the best economists. And keep in mind that critiquing someone will earn him a citation.

What you want to do is using two datasets that do not overlap, one that considers publications until 2006, and one since that year. One can get very close by using another ranking, the one that considers only the publications from the last 10 years. In the following I will use the one that was published today and pertains to December 2015. We have thus only one year of overlap in the publication dates. And the results look quite different (I did this in a couple of hours, I cannot vouch the numbers are totally correct).

The rest of the arguments in the Fubini column also change quite a bit once you look at better data.

You must not be an economist. In fact, Lucas and Fama both moved up in the RePEc rankings during the period I examined, from 30 to nine and from 23 to 17, respectively. And the persistence at the top is striking across the board. Among the top ten economists in September 2015, six were already there in December 2006, and another two were ranked 11 and 13.

Lucas (Robert E. Jr.) and Fama actually dropped, Lucas from 30 to 33, Fama from 23 to … not being ranked in the top 10%. And in the top ten for December 2015, only three where there in 2006, another two ranked 11 and 13 in 2006 (the same).

Mobility in the RePEc rankings remains subdued even after widening the sample. For example, of the top 100 economists in September 2015, only 14 were absent from the much wider top 5% in 2006, and only two others had advanced more than 200 spots over the previous decade. Among those recently ranked from 101 to 200, just 24 were not in the top 5% in 2006, and only ten others had moved up by more than 200 places. The rate of renewal among the 200 most influential economists was as low as 25% – and just 16% among the top 100 – during a decade in which the explanatory power of prevailing economic theory had been found severely wanting.

Again with better data, this looks different. From the 2015 top 100, 41 were absent from the top 5% in 2006. Nine advanced more than 200 spots. For 101 to 200, 45 were not in the top 5%, and seven moved up more than 200 spots. Using Fubini’s definitions, the renewal rate is thus 51% in the top 200 and 50% in the top 100. Hardly a stagnation.

In the rankings of economists, by contrast, criteria such as gender or geographic origin confirm the overall inertia. Only four women made the RePEc top 200 in September 2015, compared to three in December 2006, and two were included on both lists. Likewise, emerging countries – which represent more than 90% of the world’s population, three-quarters of global GDP growth over the last decade, and nearly half of total income in current dollar terms – supplied just 11 of the top 200 economists in September 2015, up from ten in December 2006. And ten of those 11 – three Iranians, four Indians, two Turks, and one Chinese – have lived and worked in the US or the United Kingdom since their student days.

With better data, this changes as well. There are now seven women. Still too few, though. There are 18 economists from emerging countries: two Turks, one Egyptian, seven Indians, two Iranians, two Pakistani, one from Cameroun, two Chinese, one Bangladeshi. Eight of them live in an emerging economy.

I’ll let the reader judge whether there is still a “closed market place for ideas in economics.” But the picture certainly looks different from what Fubini seems to imply.