Book Review: Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession

The hostile environment facing women in economics is once again headline news after numerous women posted sexual harassment allegations against several male economists on social media following the announcement of the 2022 Nobel Prize winners (Kuimelis 2022). Yet, despite multiple gender reckonings in economics (Chassonnery-Zaïgouche et al., 2019), the discipline’s “gender problem” is far from resolved. Ann Mari May traces the problem back to the early days of economics as an academic discipline in her new book, Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession. The book charts the experiences of women economists in the US from 1885 to 1948, weaving in the history of the rise of the discipline’s foremost professional organization, the American Economic Association (AEA). In particular, May highlights that the barriers women faced were not inevitable, but rather forms of institutional discrimination purposefully constructed by the discipline. Her main argument is that “the drive toward professionalization interacted with gender in ways that often undermined women academics, allowing the profession to overlook a natural constituency and postponing the inclusion of women in this important field of inquiry” (p. 15).

May supports her argument in each of the ten chapters that follow the typical trajectory of an economist: higher education and graduate school, networking and the AEA, the publication and peer-review process, and the academic job market. In each chapter, May expertly intertwines empirical evidence spanning 60-plus years with anecdotes about individual women’s experiences to show how the economics discipline ended up with too few women economists. May highlights not only the cultural norms and legal institutions in the US that restricted women’s access to the economics discipline in its early years, but also the ways in which women were purposefully excluded via discriminatory practices such as lack of access to the “old boy network” and underrepresentation in the AEA. Although her narrative centers on the experiences of American economists, the underrepresentation of women in economics is not unique to the US (as described by Auriol et al., 2022). Notably, May’s definition of the “gender problem” focuses specifically on the lack of women in the discipline. A second interpretation of the gender problem, however, focuses on the content in economics, a topic upon which May only briefly touches.

The novelty of May’s work comes from her research in the AEA archives where she compiled historical datasets on a variety of topics, including the first 302 American women economists and all authors published in the earliest decades of the Economic Bulletin, American Economic Review (AER), and Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE). May primarily compiles and presents her evidence as summary statistics which show the lack of representation of women economists in graduate school, in positions of power at the AEA, as authors, and ultimately, in academic careers. May bolsters her case in the chapters in which she uses regression analysis to empirically estimate the effect that gender had on outcomes such as the likelihood of coauthoring or finding an academic job after graduation. Despite the detailed discussion of regression results, Gender and the Dismal Science is still a quick and lively read, facilitated by May’s inclusion of stories about the women economists themselves and her decision to move the minutia to the extensive chapter notes. For a book written for economists, however, the decision to also move the regression models to the end notes and not include the results in table format to accompany her discussion and interpretation in the text seemed to me to be an odd choice.

May finds that, despite many barriers, women were able to gain a toehold in graduate economics programs primarily via the Seven Sisters colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley). About one in three women who earned doctorate degrees in economics between 1890 and 1948 received their undergraduate degrees from one of these women’s colleges. Although the number of women with doctorates rose over this period, May foreshadows what’s to come in future chapters: relative to men, these women economists were less likely to join the AEA and less likely to have access to networks, publications, and job offers. Compared to a random sample of men who earned doctorates during the same time, May finds another discrepancy—while 96% of the men in her sample were married at some point, only 57% of the women were married, a finding which highlights the incompatibility of marriage and work for women during this time. Consistent with her approach throughout Gender and the Dismal Science, May complements this statistic with the story of Elizabeth Paschel who received her doctorate in economics in 1933 and subsequently made the decision to turn down marriage to continue her work as an economist.

Not all women were welcome in higher education, however. Only seven Black women were on the rosters of all graduating classes from the Seven Sisters in the 19th century. Three of them were admitted only because the colleges did not know they were Black. May describes the case of the first known Black woman to graduate from Vassar, Anita Florence Hemmings, who kept her racial identity a secret and was almost kicked out when administrators discovered her race. May emphasizes that the prejudice and discrimination that Black women faced went beyond just getting into college: Although some schools allowed Black women to enroll, these women faced other barriers that limited their ability to participate in educational activities. For example, many, such as Otelia Cromwell, the first Black woman to graduate from Smith College before going on to earn a doctorate from Yale, were not allowed to live on campus. In several other chapters, although not all, May emphasizes that whatever challenges white women faced, Black women’s hurdles where higher and more persistent.

The AEA was open to women members since its inception in 1885. May finds, however, that for the first 33 years, the organization had no women officers. There were no women on the editorial board of the organization’s journal, the AER, until 1937. May argues that although the AEA engaged in multiple membership drives in the early years to expand their membership, they ignored initiatives that would have brought in more women members to focus instead on soliciting businessmen. She uses evidence from correspondences and annual gender-disaggregated membership data to argue that the AEA’s intention was to protect the professional reputation of the organization and relieve its financial burden. Businessmen were seen as a source of both status and money for the organization. Women economists were also conspicuously absent as authors. Although women’s authorship of monographs increased from 1908 to 1948, only eight percent of the nearly 37,000 authors of books highlighted in the “New Books” section of the Economic Bulletin and AER were women. Women represented an even smaller percentage of journal article authors during this time; 6% of the 980 articles published in the AER and 3% of the 1,534 articles published in the QJE were authored by a woman.

May also finds that women were more likely to coauthor than men. She argues that this was most likely a result of the gendered nature of the profession at the time. Since women were less likely to have an institutional affiliation, coauthorship with a man may have been more critical as a “mechanism for building academic connections and authority” (p. 99) and as “a means of access to a professional network” (p. 99). About 25% of women who coauthored with a man did so with one they had a close familial relationship with. May speculates that many published with their spouse due to the fact that married women were generally excluded from academia as many colleges enforced marriage bars. The importance of networking, and specifically, the role of the “old boy network” are consistent themes in Gender and the Dismal Science. May demonstrates the importance of networking by estimating the correlation between one’s credentials and institutional relationships (as proxies for networks) and publishing multiple articles in the AER and/or QJE. Due to the limited number of women, May’s results primarily illustrate the importance of these relationships for male authors, but she argues that the results still shed light on the importance of the “old boy network.” And indeed, networking matters. For male authors, being located at the same institution as an editor increased the chances of publication. This path was denied to women who had restricted opportunities for study and academic appointments.

May complements this empirical analysis by devoting an entire chapter to the book review saga between Lucile Eaves and Ira Brown Cross, two early career scholars similar in many respects except for their gender. May tells the story of Cross’s review of Eaves’s manuscript on labor legislation in California in the inaugural issue of the AER in March 1911. May reconstructs the events with archival research on editorial correspondences between Eaves, Cross, their advisors, and Davis R. Dewey, then AER editor. She uncovers that the senior scholars prioritized protecting Cross’s career despite their acknowledgment that his review and criticisms were “‘fairly trivial’ and ‘picayunish’” (p. 117) and that it took 25 years for him to publish his own work on the topic. May argues that this is another illustration of the ways in which men’s careers in economics were prioritized and protected via the “old boy network.” This prioritization ultimately affected who ended up in economics departments. In the penultimate chapter, May presents the occupational outcomes of the first 302 women to earn doctorates in economics. They were less likely than their men counterparts to work in academia (63% of women relative to 83% of men). Those who did find academic employment found it outside of economics departments or in women’s colleges, which came with higher teaching loads, additional job responsibilities, lower pay, and less access to graduate students and editors. The career paths of Eaves and Cross are illustrative: Although Eaves stayed in academia, her affiliations were in sociology and social work while Cross went on to become a full professor of economics at the University of California.

Gender and the Dismal Science concludes by highlighting the irony that for a discipline that in general celebrates free markets and choice, the labor market for early women economists was anything but free. The continued absence of women as professors of economics most likely contributed to women’s lack of interest in (or access to) graduate school and limited ability to publish in journals that were dominated by male editors and editorial boards. The economics profession did not formally acknowledge the lack of women in the discipline until 1971, when the AEA created the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), charged with a “charter to monitor the position of women in the profession and undertake professional activities to improve that position” (CSWEP, n.d.).

Gender and the Dismal Science contributes extensive empirical evidence to our understanding of the gendered nature of the early years of the economics profession in the US. In many ways, May helps her reader understand the climate for women in economics prior to the work of CSWEP, which has published annual reports on the number of women graduate students and faculty since 1972. And, there is probably no one better suited to write this book than Ann Mari May. She has been writing about gender issues in US economic history, political economy, and higher education since her own graduate training. She has also made history as a woman in economics, as a founding member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and for most of her career, as one of only two tenure-track women in the Economics Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

May also shines in her ability to connect data to the people behind them by highlighting the adverse impacts of institutional practices on individual women in the early years of the economics discipline. But there are stories of small triumphs in the book as well. For example, although women found little welcome in academic spaces such as conferences during this time (26 of the 36 AEA conferences from 1899 to 1934 had zero women speakers or discussants) it didn’t stop them from demanding access. Although the events occur after May’s primary focus, she recounts the story of Phyllis Ann Wallace, a Black woman economist, who wrote to Solomon Fabricant, a member of the AEA Executive Committee, in 1958 to describe the challenges of participating in annual meetings that were held in segregationist states. May recounts how Fabricant responded by “indicating that ‘Nobody on the Executive Committee wants to hold the meetings in a city that will make it unpleasant for any of our members’” (p. 44) and indeed, the annual meetings were not held in New Orleans until years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Although May acknowledges that women are not a homogenous group and recognizes that Black and white women economists face different barriers, Gender and the Dismal Science only addresses the compounding barriers Black women economists confronted in the few chapters that focus on access to higher education. Her empirical chapters don’t include statistical data on race. May acknowledges this gap in the preface explaining that the barriers Black women faced in terms of obtaining higher education “resulted in a lack of sufficient numbers for separate empirical analysis” (p. x). In an interview, May explains that part of her motivation to include stories is to make sure Black women economists’ voices and experiences are represented despite the lack of statistical survey data (Kuiper & May, 2022). Many, however, will find the individual stories insufficient at completely capturing the institutional barriers facing Black women. Sharpe (2020) points out that “gender operates differently for Black women” (p. 31). For example, Banks (2022) highlights in her examination of the writings of Sadie Alexander, the first Black woman to earn an economics PhD, that the progressive era (1890s–1920s) was one of diverging circumstances for Black and white women workers. She argues that Black women faced increasingly worse circumstances in the early decades of the 20^th century. Gender and the Dismal Science fails to fully capture these diverging experiences within the economics discipline.

May briefly mentions that high achieving women, those with multiple publications in the QJE and AER, were more likely to include gender in their research than other women publishing in those journals. I would have liked to have read more on the ways in which gender diversity intersected with the diversity of ideas in the early years. Late in the book, May alludes to this point, stating that the “marginalization [of women] has had lasting effects on the production of knowledge” (p. 165) but the argument is never fully developed. Given her role in the founding of IAFFE, I also would have liked to hear more about that and other professional organizations such as the Union for Radical Political Economics’ Women’s Caucus that sought to not only support women in the discipline (as CSWEP does) but also provide space for research that challenged mainstream theories and methodologies that had previously been “marginalized because of sexism in the discipline” (Orozco Espinel & Gomez Betancourt, 2022, p. 166).

As the economics profession continues to grapple with its lack of diversity, Gender and the Dismal Science is a timely reminder that in order to move forward we must sometimes look back. May thoroughly documents the entrenched structural and institutional barriers within economics, including male networks, that continue to exclude women at all levels of the profession. As a woman economist, I found the book to be equal parts affirming and infuriating. I’m frustrated that not only are these problems not new, but also that many can be traced back to the rise of the discipline and the AEA itself. Although it was empowering to read about early women economists succeeding against the odds, this is not a “lean in” story; it is clear the economics discipline needs to change. Gender and the Dismal Science, however, is not a call to action—May provides no strategy or easy solution for increasing diversity in economics. Rather, Gender and the Dismal Science provides historical perspective on the current crisis of lack of diversity by painstakingly documenting how the profession was purposefully structured in a way that made it less inclusive. That many of May’s arguments feel salient today supports her thesis. For example, informal discussions on social media that express more concern for alleged assailants’ careers than those of the victims of sexual assault themselves showcase that men’s careers continue to be prioritized and protected. Women’s ability to safely and fully participate in academic spaces continues to be limited. Sixty-five years after Wallace’s letter to Fabricant, I’m sure many of my colleagues were hoping for a similar response from the AEA regarding the location of the 2023 annual ASSA meetings which were held in New Orleans, despite abortion bans in the state that put women’s health and safety at risk. Every economist would benefit from reading Gender and the Dismal Science. As May documents, it is no accident that we find ourselves in the situation that we do and solving it will also not happen accidentally; it will require purposeful action to dismantle the institutional barriers and rebuild a more inclusive economics discipline.