We're a little over a week away from the announcement of the 2025 Nobel laureate/s in economics. The award has been around since 1969, but of the 93 laureates so far, only three have been women (Elinor Ostrom in 2009; Esther Duflo in 2019; and Claudia Goldin in 2023). That clearly isn't because women haven't made many Nobel-worthy contributions to economics. Many economists agree that Joan Robinson, Anna Schwartz, and/or Edith Penrose should have received the award (although all have sadly passed away and are ineligible). There are plenty of worthy female economists who may be in the running this year, including (but not limited to) Janet Yellen and Carmen Reinhart [*].
However, there have been many women who have contributed to the success of other Nobel laureates. One that immediately springs to mind is Anna Schwartz, who co-wrote A Monetary History of the United States with Milton Friedman, but also made many other contributions to monetary economics. Most women who contributed to the success of male economists are not as visible as Schwartz, though. Who were these women?
That is the question that this new article by Darwyyn Deyo (San Jose State University), published in the European Journal of Political Economy (ungated earlier version here), attempts to answer. Deyo collates a database of all of the citations and acknowledgements of women in Nobel Prize lectures from 1969 to 2009 (when Elinor Ostrom was awarded the prize), as well as from the Nobel Prize lectures of Ostrom, Duflo, and Goldin. From this, Deyo identified:
...163 unique women in economics and 198 unique citations from 1969 to 2009. Among these, I identified 98 women in economics cited as authors of 136 unique works from 1969 to 2008, and 28 women cited as authors of 29 unique works in Ostrom’s 2009 lecture. I also identified 22 women cited as editors of 27 citations from 1969 to 2008, and 7 women cited as editors of 7 citations in Ostrom’s 2009 lecture. I also identify 20 women who also made significant contributions in drafting and revising work by the laureates, as recognized in prize lecture acknowledgments. These include 14 names that do not appear elsewhere in the database of cited works.
Unsurprisingly, there is a sharp contrast between the citations before 2009, and those in Ostrom's lecture:
On average, from 1969 to 2008, the last year before Ostrom won the prize, 2.6 women were cited per Nobel lecture, with an average of 3.1 citations per lecture, representing on average 3.4% of lecture citations...
Ostrom included 186 citations in her Nobel lecture, 15.6% of which were citations of women. These include 28 unique women with 29 unique citations, not including Ostrom.
The differences by subfield are quite striking, but again unsurprising:
Laureates who cited the most women, as a share of total citations, were in microeconomics (13%), economic history (11%), and econometric theory (8%). International trade laureates cited no women, but general theory, that is, awards that bridged microeconomics and macroeconomics, cited the next smallest share at 1%, followed by game theory (2%) and macroeconomics (2%).
The greatest value in Deyo's descriptive work, though, is the listing of which women were cited. For example, in the early years:
The citations for the first 10 years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1969–78) also provide a window into the active research of women during the mid-20th century. Five women were cited by four laureates in the first 10 years of the prize... Jan Tinbergen cited two women in a single citation in the very first year of the prize: Irma Adelman, a Romanian-American development economist who held positions at several prestigious universities and the World Bank, and Cynthia Taft Morris, an American development economist who worked on the Marshall Plan at the World Bank with Adelman (Adelman and Morris 1967). John Hicks cited Joan Robinson (Robinson 1954), known to most economists; F. A. Hayek critically cited Donella H. Meadows (Meadows et al. 1972), an American environmental scientist; and Milton Friedman cited his student Jo Anna Gray (Gray 1976).
And women who were acknowledged:
Twenty women were recognized in the Nobel-lecture acknowledgments between 1969 and 2008, including 5 women who were also cited as authors in the dataset: Rose Director Friedman (thanked by Milton Friedman and cited by Franco Modigliani); Ellen McGrattan (thanked and cited by Edward C. Prescott); Joan Robinson (thanked by Hicks and cited by John Hicks, George Akerlof, and Joseph Stiglitz); Anna J. Schwartz (thanked by Milton Friedman and cited by Robert Lucas); and Janet Yellen (thanked by George Akerlof and cited by both George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz)...
Deyo's work is a valuable resource for anyone who is looking to identify and follow up on some of the key female contributors to economic thought, whose important contributions might otherwise have been missed.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
*****
[*] Susan Athey is one of my picks for the 2025 award (along with Erik Brynjolfsson and Hal Varian), in the annual Economics Discussion Group poll.
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