‘Something about the culture of UK schools is nudging young women away from economics’
It’s no secret that women have long faced an uphill battle both to achieve success and be recognised for that success. The Nobel Prizes tell the story as well as anything: 860 people have been awarded prizes (including the unofficial Nobel Memorial Prize in economics) but only 5 per cent of them were women. The imbalance is worse still in stereotypically male subjects: only six Nobels for physics or chemistry have been awarded to women, fewer than 2 per cent of the total. Marie Curie won two of them; her daughter Irène won another.
Economics is another subject with a masculine reputation. It does not seem to be a happier hunting ground. The economics prize in memory of Alfred Nobel was launched in 1969 but it wasn’t until 2009 that Elinor Ostrom became the only woman so far to win it. “I won’t be the last,” was her characteristically practical comment.
Ostrom won the Nobel in economics despite not being an economist — her application to study for a PhD was turned away by UCLA’s economics department because she didn’t have the maths. “I had been advised as a girl against taking any courses beyond algebra and geometry in high school,” she commented. This particular piece of sexism ultimately worked in her favour: she became a political scientist instead and ended up approaching economic problems from a fresh perspective.
Curie faced a more immediate form of discrimination: in 1903 the Nobel physics committee planned to award the prize to her husband Pierre and to Henri Becquerel, overlooking Marie’s central role in studying radiation. Pierre insisted that his wife should receive the credit that she deserved. Not every husband of a brilliant wife has been quite so enlightened.
The two stories show the range of possibilities for discrimination to occur. Ostrom’s career path was shaped by negative stereotypes more than 60 years before she eventually won her prize; Curie nearly had the prize snatched away at the moment of triumph.
These are old wounds, and we have made a great deal of progress since then. But gender imbalances remain. In the US, the National Science Foundation’s survey of earned doctorates is not a bad place to look for the state of play. In 2012 women earned 46 per cent of all doctorates, up from 32 per cent three decades earlier. No great cause for alarm there. And women heavily outnumber men in social sciences such as psychology, sociology and anthropology.
Yet economics is a different beast: more than two-thirds of economics doctorates are awarded to men. (There is a similar story to tell in physics, chemistry, computing and engineering.) Since nobody under the age of 50 has won the Nobel Prize in economics, one can expect this imbalance in economics PhDs today to ripple through the upper echelons of the profession for many years to come.
There are also hopeful signs. The proportion of economics doctorates earned by women has been growing. The John Bates Clark medal, a prestigious award for economists under the age of 40, was exclusively male until Susan Athey won in 2007, but two other women have won the award since then. That is a sharp shift.
Is the lesson that all we need to do to attract more women to economics is wait? That is doubtful. In the UK, the proportion of undergraduate economists who are women is 27 per cent and falling. This isn’t a problem that will fix itself. So what can be done? The answer to that question depends on where we think the source of the imbalance lies — are we facing Marie Curie’s problem, or Lin Ostrom’s, or something else?
The school environment seems as significant today as it was for Ostrom. A recent study by Mirco Tonin and Jackie Wahba of the University of Southampton examines enrolment in undergraduate economics degrees in the UK. The gender imbalance in successful applicants is much more pronounced among UK applicants than those applying to UK universities from overseas. That suggests that something about the culture of UK schools is nudging young women away from economics.
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That something may well be mathematics. This subject, a vital foundation for economics, is studied by more boys than girls at A-Level. Such a gender gap in advanced high-school mathematics disappeared in the United States 20 years ago.
As for women who already have their PhDs and are looking for careers in academia, the situation in the US is not entirely encouraging. A recent detailed study by a team of economists and psychologists (Stephen Ceci, Donna Ginther, Shulamit Kahn and Wendy Williams) looked at women in US academic sciences and concluded that while “gender discrimination was an important cause of women’s under-representation in scientific academic careers, this claim has continued to be invoked after it has ceased being a valid cause of women’s under-representation”. The playing field, they suggest, is much more level than it once was; a modern Marie Curie wouldn’t need her husband to fight her corner.
But Ceci and colleagues note an exception — one maths-intensive subject at which well-qualified and productive women somehow find it hard to win academic promotions. It’s economics. For some reason, the dismal science remains heavy with the scent of testosterone.
Written for and first published at ft.com.