We all know that economics is a male-dominated discipline on average. But how does the representation of women look across different journals? Armed with Academic Sequitur* article metadata (going back to around 2000), I determined the genders of 82% of all authors in the data and calculated the prevalence of male authors by journal for 50 top-ranked journals in economics.** To see how things have changed over time, I also repeated this exercise with articles that were published in 2018-2019.
Just to set some expectations: in the gender-matched dataset, 82% of author-article observations are male (80% when restricted to 2018-2019). So if a journal has, say, 75% male authors, it’s doing better than average. With that, here are the top 10 male-dominated journals, ranked by share of male authors over the entire data period.*** To be super-duper scientific, 95 percent confidence intervals are also shown, and I added a vertical line at 82.1% for easy benchmarking to the average.
So three of the top five journals (Econometrica, QJE, and ReStud) have also been the three most male-dominated journals, at least historically, with 90%, 89%, and 88% male authors, respectively. A fourth (Journal of Political Economy) also barely made the top ten, with 87% male authors. These numbers also illustrate that there’s not much difference between the #1 and #10 male-dominated journal.
Encouragingly, there are some improvements as well. The share of male authors in QJE was almost 9 percentage points lower in 2018-2019 compared to the whole sample period. JPE‘s share decreased by 7 percentage points, putting these journals in the top 5 most improved. If ranked based on 2018-2019 shares, Econometrica would be #6, ReStud would be #11, QJE would be #24, and JPE would be #28, just barely in the bottom half.
The Journal of Finance, by contrast, has taken a small but statistically significant step backwards, with a 3 percentage point increase in the share of male authors. If ranked by the 2018-2019 male ratio, it would be number 1.
Here are the least male-dominated journals (rank 41-50). Economics of Education Review and JHR are both about 66% male. Surprisingly, both applied AEJs are in the least male-dominated group (AEJ: Applied is 71% male; AEJ: Policy is 74%). This may be because they are newer, though it is worth noting that their overall average is below the 2018-2019 average of 80%.
Here’s the rest of the pack. First, here are journals ranked 31-40 on the male-dominated scale (i.e., next 10 least male-dominated), ordered by share male in the overall sample. AER and ReStat are in this group, with 80% and 81% male, respectively. Thus, AER has historically been an outlier among the top five on this dimension (using 2018-2019 shares, it would rank #19, right in the middle of the other top five journals).
Here’s rank 21-30, all in the low-to-mid 80’s.
And here’s rank 11-20. AER: Insights is 84% male. The other two AEJs are in this group, with males representing about 85% of all author-article observations.
These patterns do not necessarily reflect discrimination: the representation of women in a particular field will obviously make a difference here (as evidenced by the positions of macro and theory journals). I leave it up to you, the reader, to interpret the numbers.****
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* Academic Sequitur is a tool I developed to help researchers keep up with new literature. You tell us what you want to follow, we send you weekly (or daily!) emails with article abstracts matching your criteria.
** Close to 1.5 percent of the initial observations are dropped because only the initials of the author are available. About 16.5 percent of the observations cannot be mapped to a name for which the gender is known. This includes a lot of Chinese names, for which it is very difficult to determine gender, according to my brief internet research. Names which can be both male and female are assigned a gender based on the relative probability of the name being male.
*** Each observation in the sample is an article-author, so those who publish in a journal multiple times will contribute relatively more to its average. Each coefficient is from a journal-specific regression. Confidence intervals are based on heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors.
**** If you want the numbers underlying these graphs, you can download the csv file here.