Rethinking Gender Gaps in Economics: Insights from the GENRECO Project

Economics has long stood out among the social sciences for its persistent gender imbalance. While fields such as sociology, psychology, or political science have moved steadily toward gender parity, economics remains one of the least feminized disciplines. In France, women represent barely 35% of PhD students and around 25% of PhD supervisors, a share that drops even further at full professorship. The United States exhibits the same pattern: according to the 2024 CSWEP Annual Report, only 18% of full professors in economics are women.

Over the decades, the academic literature has documented a wide range of obstacles faced by women in the profession by showing that women experience slower promotion despite similar credentials (McDowell et al., 2001), face steeper barriers to tenure-track advancement even when controlling for productivity (Ginther and Kahn, 2004), and remain underrepresented in high-visibility conferences such as the NBER Summer Institute (Chari and Goldsmith-Pinkham, 2017). Women’s research is more likely to be co-authored, yet they receive less credit for collaborative work, particularly when collaborating with men (Sarsons, 2017). They bear heavier teaching and service loads (Ceci et al., 2014), encounter subtle but well-documented implicit biases in evaluations (Madera et al., 2009), and struggle with limited access to influential networks (Ductor et al., 2018).

These factors matter, and efforts to improve gender balance are ongoing. Yet they do not fully explain why economics remains highly gender‑stratified, which limits the effectiveness of solutions that fail to account for all relevant dimensions.

This is where the GENRECO Project enters the conversation with a new perspective.

Personality, values, and academic culture

Economists have long been studied as a population with unusually distinctive attitudes and behaviours such as stronger beliefs in the efficiency of markets and more conservative political views than the general public (Kearl et al., 1979). Meanwhile, psychology has demonstrated that personality traits like conscientiousness, or openness for example predict productivity, collaboration, and leadership behaviour (Roberts et al., 2007; John, Naumann and Soto 2008; Albmlund et al. 2011). Similarly, value systems, studied most prominently in the Schwartz framework, strongly shape motivation, decision-making, and social interactions (Schwartz, 1992).

Yet the existing studies rarely integrate these psychological dimensions into analyses of gender inequality. Most empirical studies focus on structural and institutional explanations but overlook how the discipline’s culture interacts with the psychological profiles of the individuals who join and remain in it.

GENRECO starts from a simple but powerful idea: the gender gap in economics may stem not only from structural constraints, but also from the ways personality, values, and academic socialization interact with the norms of the field.

This idea resonates with sociological evidence showing that women in highly masculinized environments often distance themselves from stereotypically feminine attributes, sometimes adopting more masculine-coded behaviours as a strategy for professional survival (Ellemers et al., 2004; Faniko et al., 2021). It also echoes earlier debates on whether economics education produces “indoctrination” (Kaiser and Oberrauch, 2010) or whether individuals who enter economics already possess unusually specific traits (Carter and Irons 1991). The reality may involve both mechanisms. But until now, the discipline lacked the data to test these hypotheses rigorously.

What GENRECO can reveal about gender inequality in Economics

Initially, to investigate these questions, we focus on the academic economics community in France which gathers more than 4,500 individuals across 89 universities and 36 business schools, including PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors. Our approach is based on a national survey designed to collect information not only on academic careers but also on psychological traits, value orientations, and professional socialization. By bringing psychological traits and value systems into the conversation, GENRECO can answer questions the profession has long struggled to articulate:

Do women who succeed in economics share similar personality traits and values with their male colleagues, or with women in other disciplines? Does the discipline attract individuals with specific profiles, or does academic socialization gradually reshape their values and traits?Are persistent gender gaps in publication, collaboration, and promotion partly linked to traits that the discipline rewards implicitly? Does the culture of economics amplify broader societal gender differences, or does it generate distinct patterns unique to the field?

The literature already suggests that economics may reward competitiveness, assertiveness, and individualistic values, traits empirically shown to be more common among men in many populations (Borghans et al., 2008; Adams 2021). If the field disproportionately selects or shapes individuals along these lines, gender imbalances may perpetuate themselves even without overt discrimination.

A new understanding of gender gaps

Overall, the ultimate goal of GENRECO is not only analytical but transformative. By uncovering how psychological factors intersect with institutional ones, the project aims to offer a more complete explanation of why economics remains one of the most gender-unequal academic disciplines.

This deeper understanding can help design interventions that go beyond structural reforms, i.e., interventions that recognize how identity, values, and norms shape academic trajectories. It can illuminate why certain women leave the discipline, why others thrive, and how institutions can create environments that support a broader range of personalities and motivations.

Economics prides itself on studying human behaviour. GENRECO reminds us that economists themselves are humans, shaped by norms, values, expectations, and psychological traits. Understanding them more fully may be one of the most important steps toward building a profession that is both more diverse and more intellectually vibrant.

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