Frauen in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften -- Wie geschlechtsspezifisch ist die Wissenschaftssprache?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Guido Friebel
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566624073

In many realms of society, especially, in key positions such as top management, politics, and science, women are under-represented. Economics as a research field specifically has received much attention in research on gender equality and quality media. Lacking gender equality among academic economists attracts much interest not only because of the policy relevance, but also because this job is quite typical for many competitive environments. To understand the status of women in economics on a global, rather than national, scale, Auriol, Friebel, Weinberger, Wilhelm (2022, PNAS) created and analyzed a web-scraped dataset on economics research. By investigating regional and cross-country differences, we showed that Europe seems to be more gender-equal than the United States. In the global sample of 238 universities and business schools, only 25% of senior researchers and 37% of junior researchers are women. This does not only underline the fact that women are underrepresented, but also provides further evidence on the leaky-pipeline phenomenon, i.e., the percentage of women decreases along the academic hierarchy. In Europe, women account for 27% of senior positions, it is only 20% in the United States. Higher-ranked institutions (in terms of research output) also have fewer women compared to lower-ranked institutions on all levels. A potentially important determinant of lacking gender equality is stereotypes. Stereotypes are hard to measure and so is their effect on people’s careers. We undertake a novel, text-based approach to doing so. We will use the universe of papers available for economics on the repository of publications in economics in JSTOR and the large corpus of their full texts to measure the role of stereotypes in economics. First, we plan to measure the extent of stereotypes in economics over a large period of time and within different fields and journals. Second, we will take an organizational perspective and investigate determinants of stereotypes using heterogeneity over research fields, time, and institutions. Third, we aim to study the implications of these stereotypes for women’s careers. To achieve these goals, this project will construct a panel of academics, their research output, and their affiliations over time alongside lexical stereotypes of writers which we can relate to career outcomes and other research department characteristics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Emmanuelle Auriol; Professor Daniel Chen, Ph.D.