The world’s most powerful economist is a woman — but chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen doesn’t have a great deal of female company at the economic top table. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, it is true — although she is a lawyer. But the president of the European Central Bank has never been a woman, nor the president of the German Bundesbank, nor the governor of the Bank of England. The US Treasury secretary has never been a woman, nor has the UK chancellor of the exchequer, nor the president of the World Bank.
To some extent this reflects the well-known fact that women are under-represented in positions of power. But beyond that it suggests that economics itself is a curiously male-dominated discipline. There has still only been one female winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: Elinor Ostrom in 2009 (she shared the prize with Oliver E Williamson), and she was not a mainstream economist herself.
Quite why economics is so testosterone-laden is unclear. The situation at the top of the profession now is partly a reflection of the state of economics education decades ago. Ostrom’s desire to study economics was set back by the fact that she was discouraged from studying mathematics at school because she was a girl. We cannot travel back in time to give her a more enlightened maths teacher.