How women economists expand orientations and perspectives that can transform economics into a pluralistic, critically engaged, and socially responsive discipline.
Attention to gender discrimination in economics surged in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which reshaped public debate around power, accountability, and systemic gender-based discrimination and harm. Around the same time, the economics profession faced its own reckoning when a paper by then-undergraduate Alice Wu (2018) was described as “a very disturbing report,” revealing a “toxic environment for women in economics.”
Her findings quickly captured media attention and ignited scrutiny of the profession’s entrenched “gender problem.” Major outlets—including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, BBC News, and Bloomberg— spotlighted Wu’s findings. As economist Janet Currie noted, Wu had quantified “something most female economists already know” revealing “attitudes that persist in dark corners of the profession.” The coverage shifted the conversation from isolated misconduct to deeper structural and cultural dynamics, revealing a masculinized and exclusionary professional culture in economics.
In response, the issue of gender diversity in economics gained renewed urgency. However, much of this attention has remained on surface-level metrics, counting women’s statistical representation in programs, faculty ranks, leadership positions, and top mainstream journals. My recent research moves beyond these headcounts to examine how women’s inclusion may reshape the discipline in more substantive ways. Drawing on original international survey data, it explores how gendered experiences and perspectives influence economists’ views, and what this means for the discipline’s capacity to become more pluralistic, critically engaged, and socially responsive.
Statistical representation, such as the percentage of women in different academic ranks or in top journals, can serve as useful indicators of progress toward gender inclusion. Yet they offer only a partial, and at times misleading, picture by conflating presence with influence. Such metrics reveal little about whether inclusion translates into pluralistic diversity: a state in which diverse perspectives, assumptions, and ways of knowing are actively integrated and shape how economists interpret, evaluate, and theorize the world.
The distinction between diversity and plurality is crucial. Demographic diversity treats gender as a statistic, while intellectual plurality recognizes gender diversity as a source of experiences, insights, and ways of knowing that can enrich economic discourse. Without a commitment to plurality, efforts at gender diversity risk becoming superficial, expanding women’s presence without challenging the entrenched, often male-dominated structures that define economics’ intellectual environment. Feminist economists have long warned of this “conformity trap,” where mainstream economics, shaped by masculinized assumptions that privilege quantitative, competitive, and market-centered approaches, sidelines perspectives on equity, care, and collaboration. Focusing only on statistical representation therefore fails to address the deeper structural issues that limit genuine transformation.
My recent research contributes to broader efforts to understand how gender shapes the intellectual terrain of economics. Drawing on an original international survey of more than 2,400 economists across 19 countries, it systematically examines gender differences in views across a wide range of issues. The findings shed light on how gender diversity can translate into intellectual diversity within the discipline. Such insight is vital for building a pluralistic economics, one where diversity is not reduced to numbers but embraced as a way to broaden perspectives and challenge dominant frameworks and narratives. This need is especially urgent given long-standing critiques of mainstream economics as intellectually insular, methodologically rigid, and resistant to alternative perspectives.
Findings:
The survey results show that women economists consistently expressed views that placed greater emphasis on equity, social justice, and structural critique than their male counterparts. They were more likely to support government intervention, acknowledge the harms of rising income inequality and corporate power, and recognize structural barriers to success. Women economists also appeared more inclined to question the core assumptions of mainstream economics and to endorse pluralistic approaches to economic inquiry. Across a set of 15 normative statements—many of which challenged neoclassical orthodoxy or highlighted issues of inequality—women economists reported substantially higher levels of agreement. These patterns reflect not only differences in policy preferences, but deeper divergences in how economic problems are understood and evaluated. Notably, the largest gender gap appeared on economics’ own “gender problem,” with women far more likely to affirm that “economics has made little progress in closing its gender gap” and that “the hurdles that women face in economics are very real.”[1]
Another key contribution of the study is its systematic analysis of how gender and political ideology intersect in shaping economists’ perspectives. Ideology operates alongside gendered experiences—reflecting distinct patterns of socialization, lived experience, and structural positioning. Examining these intersections makes it possible to capture the deeper dynamics behind observed gender differences and to assess whether they are driven by broader ideological divides or by perspectives that cut across them.
The findings reveal that political ideology plays a powerful mediating role. Gender differences in views remain largely intact after accounting for personal and professional characteristics, but they diminish once political ideology is taken into account, underscoring its importance as a mediating factor. This pattern aligns with the stark gender differences in political ideology found among economists, which persist even after controlling for other characteristics. Women were 77 percent more likely than men to identify as far left and 10 percent more likely to identify as left, while men were 80 percent more likely to align with the right and more than twice as likely to identify as far right.
Importantly, political ideology also influences economists’ views differently by gender. While moving rightward on the political spectrum is consistently associated with weaker support for progressive and equity-oriented positions, the decline is less steep among women. In several cases—particularly among right- and far-right-leaning economists—women remained more supportive of positions emphasizing inequality, structural disadvantage, and concern about corporate power. This suggests that gender not only shapes the distribution of political ideology within the profession but also conditions how ideological commitments translate into views on critical socioeconomic issues.
Conclusion
To fully grasp the implications of greater gender diversity in economics, and to imagine their full significance, we must look beyond questions of statistical representation and ask how the inclusion of women can shape the discipline in more fundamental ways, fostering a more pluralistic, critically engaged, and socially responsive economics. My analysis highlights how gendered patterns of lived experience, socialization, and structural positioning inform economists’ normative and epistemological orientations. These differences reveal gender as a key axis through which economic ideas are formed, contested, and reimagined. Gender is not merely a demographic variable; it is a lens through which the world is seen, interpreted, and acted upon. Ensuring that this lens is reflected in economic discourse is not only a matter of equity but of epistemic integrity.
The findings underscore an essential insight: gender diversity in economics carries the potential to generate intellectual diversity. But this potential can only be realized if the profession creates space for dissenting perspectives to be heard, engaged, and legitimized. For gender diversity to be transformative, it requires dismantling entrenched hierarchies that often devalue perspectives deemed “outside the mainstream,” such as feminist economics, and making room for critical and heterodox alternatives. Without such change, inclusion risks becoming performative, reinforcing conformity rather than fostering genuine plurality.
The stakes extend well beyond academia. Economists wield significant influence over public policy, shaping how societies understand and address critical issues such as inequality, care, and social vulnerability. If the discipline continues to be dominated by a homogenous group and skewed along gendered lines, the resulting policy frameworks risk overlooking critical dimensions of social and economic life. Greater gender diversity, when paired with openness to different perspectives, can catalyze a more pluralistic economics, diverse not only in demographics but also in values, assumptions, and methods.
Ultimately, the imperative is clear: if economics is to be relevant and responsive to real-world challenges, it must embrace a more pluralistic intellectual environment—one that actively values the diversity that comes with lived experience, social position, and ideological variations. Fostering pluralism is not about diluting rigor but about expanding the field’s analytical reach, enabling economics to grapple with the complexities of human lives, social structures, and global challenges. Gender, as a structuring force of both experience and thought, is central to this transformation.
[1] See Statement 5 in our online appendix.
