Environmental Economics

Kate Bahn ("a doctoral student in economics at the New School for Social Research and a writer and co-editor at LadyEconomist.com) in the Chronicle:

So the problem is really twofold: Women have been discouraged and excluded, and those who make an impact anyway have had their contributions discredited. Add these together, and economics has a long history of being a macho science as well as a dismal one.

So that’s the state of play. That said, women have made huge gains in the field over the past 40 years. According to the American Association of Economics’ Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), 35 percent of new economics Ph.D.’s are women, up from about 7 percent in the 1970s.

Dig a little deeper, though, and the signs are less encouraging. …

A disproportionate number of women remain stuck in certain subfields. In 2006, a study by the UK-based Centre for Economic Policy Research found that there is a great deal of path dependence in economics: Women are drawn to those areas where they are already better represented. So while there are pockets of female economists within certain subfields, there’s still a major disparity across the field as a whole. …

In the coming months, I’ll write more about what this all means, for women and for the field as a whole. For now, I won’t delve too deeply into my experiences as an openly feminist economist and the eye-rolls I get from some of my peers whenever I suggest we hold more lectures and classes on feminist economics. Discussing that subfield just opens up a whole other can of worms, except yuck, girls don’t like worms.

This should be an interesting series. 

Twenty-eight percent of our sample of AERE members are women and there are some gender differences on some of the items (if anyone wants to dig deeper and look at the data for men vs women split, let me know and the data is all yours).

I'm not sure where environmental and resource economics falls in the quant to caring field range. Probably closer to caring? Since we *might* care more about environmental issues than other economists?