Why Have Only Two Women Won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences?

In 2019, Esther Duflo became the second female economist to win the Nobel prize in Economic Sciences for her work with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kramer on their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Duflo walked in the footsteps of political economist Elinor Olstrom, who in 2009 was the first woman to win the prize “for her analysis of economic governance.”

To reiterate what seems unbelievable at first, Ostrom and Duflo are the only two women who have won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences since the Nobel committee began awarding an economic prize in 1969. So why do so few women win the coveted award?

In 2017, Göran Hansson, vice-chair of the board of directors of the Nobel Foundation, attempted to answer the question after the gender gap in prizes awarded started to draw scrutiny. And it appears that the trend observed in Economic Sciences is part of a larger one across Nobel prizes, although the number of women laureates has been steadily increasing over the decades, with 11.1% in the 2010s, against 9.2% in the 2000s and 5.4% in the 1900s.

According to Hansson, the prizes tend to recognize work from an era when the representation of women in economics was even lower than it is today.

“Part of it is that we go back in time to identify discoveries,” he said. “We have to wait until they have been verified and validated before we can award the prize. There was an even larger bias against women then. There were far fewer women scientists if you go back 20 or 30 years.”

Per Stromberg, the chair of the committee that gave the prize in economics, agrees with his colleague.

“We are indeed awarding research, where discoveries were made in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, during a time when we had much more of a gender bias in economics as well as in many other sciences,” he said. “It basically means that, as time goes by, the fraction of women Nobel laureates will increase. You can look at some of the prizes given to younger economists, the gender distribution is more even.”

But there is more to the story. To win a Nobel prize, you have to get nominated. And nominating bodies may have a gender bias.

“If you look at the Nobel Prize committees, there are women chairing three of the six committees,” Hansson said. “There are female scientists on all the committees. So I don’t think there is any substantial, er, male chauvinist bias in the committees. But that has started this year [2017] because we are concerned that we may not get enough nominations for female scientists.”

But Hansson refused to disclose the rate at which women are currently nominated, citing the academy’s by-laws — nominations have to remain confidential for 50 years.

If you’re wondering how the process works, winners are chosen by different bodies that form a committee for each prize, who then invite eminent scientists to nominate people, from which they create a shortlist. It’s important to note that in 2020, Eva Mork was the only female economist on the six-person Economic Science Prize Committee.

So, what solutions can the Nobel Foundation consider to encourage parity? One of them is asking nominators to consider diversity in gender and geography, something the Nobel Foundation did in 2019. The foundation requested that the science awarding panels ask nominators to consider their own biases in the thousands of letters they send to solicit Nobel nominations.

“I am eager to see more nominations for women so they can be considered,” Hansson said. “We have written to nominators asking them to make sure they do not miss women or people of other ethnicities or nationalities in their nominations.”

A few years ago, the committees overseen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences also began to deliberately increase the number of women who are eligible to make nominations. Increasing the number of women eligible to make nominations — and women in the prize-giving bodies themselves — could have a positive effect, as women may be more likely to nominate other women.

During a 2018 conference on gender convened by the Nobel committees and the Nobel Foundation board, Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist at Harvard University, proposed another idea — that committees evaluate nominees by comparing them with each other, rather than judging them separately. According to her research, this helps evaluators to focus on quality rather than on demographic characteristics, which can reduce bias.

Curt Rice, president of Oslo Metropolitan University and head of Norway’s Committee on Gender Balance and Diversity in Research, suggested that to maximize the impact of changes already underway, committees should require that scientists make multiple nominations.

One last possible solution to address the Nobel parity issue? Issuing posthumous awards. An idea of Brian Keating, who wrote Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor.

“These measures would go a long way to addressing the injustice that so few of the brilliant women who have contributed so much to science through the years have been overlooked,” he said.

But some say that the issue has much deeper roots and that more has to be done to attract women, especially women of color, to the field. Supporting and mentoring female economists would help widen the pipeline of women entering economics, potentially improving representation at the highest level of the field and becoming role models that will inspire more women to follow in their footsteps.

But making the field less male and white is no easy task.

“Closing those gaps begins with addressing the factors that lead women and people of color to be excluded from the field or overlooked in the first place,” Aljazeera writes.

Education is a great place to start.

In 2019, a study by the Brookings Institute found that women made up just 30 percent of Ph.D. economists at the federal-government level and just 23 percent of economics faculty in academia in the US. And only 24 percent of Ph.D. economists working with the US federal government identified as Black, Hispanic, Asian, or as other minorities.

At the undergraduate university level, the gender gap is already clear: there are nearly three males for every female economics major in the US, according to a 2018 analysis co-authored by Claudia Goldin, Harvard University’s Henry Lee Professor of Economics, and Tatyana Avilova, the project manager for the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge.

The two researchers found that one reason why there was a higher rate of men graduating with an economics degree is that women were more likely to leave the field depending on how they fared from the start. They found that a woman who received a grade of B+ in a “principles” course (a fundamental economics course required for higher-level classes) had a 27 percent chance of going on to major in economics, whereas men had a 41 percent chance of continuing if they received a B+. In addition, Goldin and Avilova found that students do not major in economics “not because of true revealed preferences, but because of lack of adequate information about what economics is, what economics studies and what skills it teaches, and what careers are available to students who major in economics.”

Avilova argues that there are a number of ways for economics departments to keep women in the discipline, including curriculum-based interventions that help students with different learning styles stay engaged, offering counseling and tutoring sessions, and bringing in more diverse faculty members and guest speakers.

“Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and be recognized for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve like every single human being,” Duflo said when she won a Nobel prize.

Let’s find encouragement in her words, work together to build better support systems, and continue to uplift one another so that our accomplishments are finally recognized.

Sources

The Nobel Prize committee explains why women win so few prizes

Nobel problem: Economists want to see their profession diversify

Nobel Prizes still struggle with wide gender disparity

Breaking the glass ceiling: Women win big at Nobel 2020, four female laureates get recognition

Nobel economics prize winner: I want to inspire women

What the Nobels Are—and Aren’t—Doing to Encourage Diversity