Do top economics journals hold women authors to higher standards than men?

A new front has opened up in the world of economics, mostly in the US and the UK. It falls under the broad rubric of ‘women in economics.’

It seems there aren’t enough of them in it and the question being asked is if men are discriminating against them.

So far men don’t seem very bothered. However, a recent research paper could make them pay a bit more attention.

Written by Erin Hengel and Eunyoung Moon of Liverpool University, the paper says that top economics journals hold women to higher standards than men. Submissions by women also take longer to get published and are peer reviewed more intensively.

This may hurt, but it seems to have a positive effect as well. They are of better quality than papers by men.

It also turns out that since 1990, women comprise “only 11 per cent of all authors published in top economic journals” even though they make up between 20-30 per cent of the total number of economists. But the number has been steadily rising and is now at 14 per cent.

Even so there is hardly any change in the number of papers authored solely by women or with other women. Indeed, there is no change in the number of papers where the senior author is a woman.

They also say that if a man co-authors a paper with a woman his citations by other economists rise but when a woman co-authors with a man her citations fall.

The authors say, “These results are based on an analysis of gender differences in citations in over 11,000 full-length articles published in a “top-five” economics journal -- American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Review of Economic Studies.

There’s a lot of data and graphs and so on in the paper. It is available here.

The economics business

The paper shines a small light on a corner of the economics business which is crucial to economists but has been neglected in research. It is crucial because your rating as an economist depends not only on how much you have published, but also where.

Here the intellectual prejudices of reviewers can play an important part in whether or not a paper gets accepted and therefore what happens to your prospects in the profession.

I have always been amazed at how the economics profession has adopted a criterion for selection of teachers. This system places massive power in the hands of a few editors of journals.

They make the difference between selection and rejection because the selection committees prefer quantity over quality. And quality can quite often lie in the eyes of the beholder.

However, what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. In 2007, Glenn Ellison, an economist at MIT had documented a strange trends. (Is Peer Review in Decline? NBER Working Paper No. 13272, July 2007).

This was the decline in the number of peer-reviewed papers in top economics journals written by economists from the highest-ranked economics departments. Why? Because, said Ellison, ";... the internet improves the ability of high-profile authors to disseminate their research without going through the traditional peer-

review process."; in other words, top economists from the best departments are publishing less in peer-reviewed journals.

Ellison also wrote, "The citation benefit to publishing in a top general-interest journal appears to be fairly small for top-department authors now...Harvard authors appear to be quite successful in garnering citations to papers that are not published in top journals."

In other words, the big boys had started breaking the rules of the game while insisting that the smaller fry observe them.