Abstract
This paper analyzes the gender distribution of research fields in economics based on a new dataset of almost 1,900 researchers affiliated to top-50 economics departments in 2005, as ranked by Econphd.net website. We document that women are unevenly distributed across fields and test some behavioral implications from theories underlying such disparities. Our main findings are that the probability that a woman works on a given field is positively related to the share of women already working on that field (path-dependence), and that this phenomenon is better explained by women avoiding male-dominated fields than by men avoiding female dominated fields. This pattern, however, is weaker for younger female researchers who spread more evenly across fields.
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We thank the Editor and three referees for constructive criticisms on previous versions of the paper. We are also grateful to Manuel Arellano, Jorge Durán, Andrew Oswald, and participants at several seminars and conferences for many helpful comments. Andrea Cerasa and Sandro Díez-Amigo provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from the European Commission under the project The Economics of Education and Education Policy in Europe (MRTN-CT-2003-50496), the Spanish Ministry of Education (grant Consolider-Ingenio 2010) and Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid (grant Excelecon) is gratefully acknowledged.
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Dolado, J.J., Felgueroso, F. & Almunia, M. Are men and women-economists evenly distributed across research fields? Some new empirical evidence. SERIEs 3, 367–393 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-011-0065-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-011-0065-4