Gender and equality in economics and finance journals

Abstract

Using (asinh) citations as a proxy for quality, we show that female-authored papers published in a wide array of economics and finance journals are, on average, higher quality than male-authored papers; however, we find no evidence that women’s manuscripts are accepted at higher rates. Conditional on publishing in the very top journals, we also find that men’s and women’s papers are higher quality when they co-author with women instead of men: for example, the same senior male economist receives almost 80 log points more citations when he co-authors with a junior woman as opposed to a junior man. Under strong—but we believe reasonable—assumptions, we argue that these findings imply that economics and finance journals hold female-authored papers to higher standards and, consequently, do not publish the highest quality research. They also suggest that popular proxies of academic impact discount women’s contributions, and that existing co-authoring relationships in economics under-exploit the capacity of female researchers.