Are Economics Conferences Gender‐Neutral? Evidence from Ireland*
| Published date | 01 February 2024 |
| Author | Margaret Samahita,Kevin Devereux |
| Date | 01 February 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12575 |
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 86, 1 (2024) 0305-9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12575
Are Economics Conferences Gender-Neutral?
Evidence from Ireland*
MARGARET SAMAHITA† and KEVIN DEVEREUX‡
†School of Economics and Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin, Dublin,
Ireland (e-mail: margaret.samahita@ucd.ie)
‡School of Economics, Peking University, Beijing, China (e-mail: kevin.devereux@pku.edu.cn)
Abstract
We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic
Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of
anonymized submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is
observed in organizers’ acceptance decisions, there is an indication of gender difference
favouring the in-group at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give
higher scores to papers with an increasing share of male authors. Evidence suggests that
the difference stems from unconscious stereotyping against lesser known female authors.
Anonymization eliminates the gender gap of male reviewers, but introduces a gender gap
in favour of male authors for female reviewers. We explore differential selection as an
alternative explanation, finding that reviewer experience postblinding could potentially
account for our results.
I. Introduction
Economists are increasingly interested in studying gender disparity in the profession in
an effort to improve gender equality. Studies have documented a gender gap in research
output, partly explained by differences in collaboration networks (Ductor, Goyal, and
Prummer, 2023), seminar invitations (Doleac, Hengel, and Pancotti, 2021) and treatment
during these seminars (Dupas et al., 2021), teaching evaluations (Boring, 2017; Mengel,
Sauermann, and Z¨
olitz, 2019; Boring and Philippe, 2021), recognition for group work
(Sarsons et al., 2021), citations (Koffi, 2021), the publication process (Card et al., 2020;
Hengel and Moon, 2020; Hengel, 2022), as well as evaluations by other economists
in reference letters (Eberhardt, Facchini, and Rueda, 2023; Baltrunaite, Casarico, and
JEL Classification numbers: A1, D83, J16, J71.
*We thank M´
ıde Griffin and Jingran Wang for excellent research assistance and the Irish Economic Association
conference organizers 2016– 22 for generously sharing their submissions data. We also thank Darragh Clancy,
Orla Doyle, Anna Dreber-Almenberg, Helena Fornwagner, Brendan Kennelly, Tara McIndoe-Calder, Noemi
Peter and seminar participants at University College Dublin, NUI Galway, the Central Bank of Ireland, the Irish
Economic Association annual conference and the EEA Congress for helpful comments. This work was supported
by the Irish Economic Association and the Irish Society for Women in Economics.
Open access funding provided by IReL.
101
©2023 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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102 Bulletin
Rizzica, 2022) – all of which may contribute to the underrepresentation of women in
economics, especially at the top of the profession (Bayer and Rouse, 2016; Lundberg and
Stearns, 2019; Ginther and Kahn, 2021).
In this paper, we focus on acceptance into an academic conference to study whether,
and at which stage of the review process, gender difference is detected. Acceptance
to conferences is an important input in the researcher production function as it allows
researchers to disseminate their work to a larger audience and may help with the publication
process. In previous findings, Chari and Goldsmith-Pinkham (2017) find no gender
disparity in NBER conferences, while Hospido and Sanz (2021) find difference against
female authors in three European economic conferences: the Annual Congress of the
European Economic Association (2015– 17), the Annual Meeting of the Spanish Economic
Association (2012– 17) and the Spring Meeting of Young Economists (2018). We
contribute new evidence from Ireland using a novel dataset of all submissions to the Irish
Economic Association (IEA) annual conference from 2016 to 2022. Apart from the Irish
setting, our dataset is unique as it includes a natural experiment with blinded submission.
Across the six years studied (excluding 2020 when the conference was cancelled),
around 61% of papers are accepted. Each submission is sent to one reviewer who assigns
an acceptance score (1– 5) and rates the paper in four components of quality (technical
merit, readability, originality and, from 2017 onward, relevance – collectively referred to
as component scores). Reviewers are also asked to state their level of confidence in the
area (1– 5) from 2017 onwards. While reviewers do not make the acceptance decisions,
these scores are communicated to the conference organizers who take the information into
account but exercise discretion in their final decision, for example, to achieve a balance in
gender, institutions represented or some other dimension.
Prior to 2021, submissions were not blind; organizers and reviewers could infer the
gender of the author(s) from their name(s), enabling us to study whether organizers have
different likelihoods of accepting male- and female-authored papers, and if reviewers
assign acceptance and component scores differently. Our data reveal that conference
organizers are gender-neutral: the proportion of male authors on a paper does not
significantly affect the likelihood of acceptance. Similarly, the acceptance scores given
by reviewers, which may influence organizers’ decisions, are not significantly different
for an increasing share of male co-authors on the paper. Hence, overall, organizers are
successful in achieving gender balance at the conferences.
Since the above finding is based on analyses aggregating all reviewers, we next test
for heterogeneity by gender given that one of the suggested explanations for gender
difference in conference acceptance is male reviewers’ stereotype against female authors
(Hospido and Sanz, 2021). We find consistently sizeable effects indicating that reviewers
indeed display an in-group favouring gender difference: female(male) reviewers give
higher scores to papers submitted by a higher share of female(male) authors.
To explore the possibility that the gender difference is due to imperfect information
driven by less well-known authors, we study several indicators for being well known:
having a higher share of authors who are based at an Irish institution (or one with an
active working paper series which proxies for a larger Irish institution), who have a PhD,
who have a Professor title, as well as the total number of years post-PhD for all authors.
The results are consistent with the imperfect information explanation: when the authors
©2023 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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