Book review: Gender and the Dismal Science

The gender gap in economics is large and persistent (see the links at the end of this post for details). They have also been around since the founding of the discipline. In her 2022 book Gender and the Dismal Science, Ann Mari May documents the gender gap in economics between the founding of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885, and 1948. As May describes it, the book uses:

...novel data sets to offer new information on the proportion of women members in the AEA, their backgrounds, and their limited role in the association's work in its first sixty-three years of existence. At the same time, they provide information on the "old boy network" in publishing - in monographs and in scholarly journals such as the AER and the QJE.

May has exhaustively investigated the women in economics during those early decades of the AEA, and compares them with a sample of randomly selected male economists from the same era. This offers insights into the number of women (compared with men) earning doctorates in economics, joining the AEA, receiving faculty appointments, becoming officeholders in the AEA, as well as co-authorship (within and between genders).

Readers who are familiar with the gender gap in economics will not be surprised at all by the results. However, some aspects of the gap do make for uncomfortable reading. For example, May notes the perniciousness of marriage bar policies and antinepotism rules, which had the effect of limiting the hiring of married women and were used to fire women from existing positions if their marriage was discovered. Unsurprisingly, this meant that successful female economists typically were unmarried. In contrast, nearly all male economists, including successful male economists, were married.

Another result that should be more widely known is that the first woman to serve as president of the AEA was Alice Rivlin, as late as 1986. And similarly, the first woman to serve as editor of the association's premier journal, the American Economic Review (AER), was even later, with Pinelopi Goldberg taking on the role in 2011.

The quantitative analysis in the book is quite descriptive and relatively shallow. Given the small sample size of women in the early years, it would be difficult for it to be otherwise. And to be honest, we don't even need the quantitative analysis to recognise that economics had a real problem in those early years, and that was the genesis of the problems that the discipline faces today. The more qualitative elements of the book, being the stories of the women who were trying to make their mark on economics in the early years of the AEA, stand out as important testimony of the problems. May has done a great job of surfacing and summarising this information, and for anyone interested in gender in economics, this book is an important read.