When Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economics, in 2009, she quipped: “I won’t be the last.” Although she has since been proved right, it was nonetheless astonishingly late in the day for such a landmark. Adding to the awkwardness, Ostrom, who died in 2012, won despite being outside the mainstream of economics. So does economics have a problem with women? And do women have a problem with economics?
Earlier in the summer, the Royal Economic Society published a report surveying the gender imbalance in economics in the UK. (I used to serve on the RES Council, the group which oversees the Society’s activities.) The picture is not encouraging. Academic economics remains a largely male activity, and the more senior the job grade, the more male-dominated it is.
Women make up 32 per cent of economics undergraduate students (up from 27 per cent in 1996) and 26 per cent of academic economists (up from 18 per cent in 1996). Over a quarter of a century, this pace of progress is not inspiring. It’s also bad news for economics. The economist Diane Coyle, professor of public policy at Cambridge, puts it succinctly: “It’s not possible to do good social science if you are so unrepresentative of society.”