Economics is an overwhelmingly male field; and the problem is not going away. Less than a third of economics students today are women. A pervasive myth about the missing women students in economics – about 300,000 of them in the US alone by our rough count – is that the problem is their poor maths skills. You know: economics is too maths focused, and women are maths-phobic, right? That must be the problem.
Wrong.
In the US, today, the share of women graduating in mathematics and statistics is higher than in economics. It is not mathematics that’s the problem.
A more likely and more uncomfortable culprit – sexism in economics – has been called out in an audacious undergraduate dissertation written by Alice Wu of the University of California, Berkeley.
https://theconversation.com/300-000-women-are-missing-from-economics-84152
