This article is one of a series on women's contributions to different subfields of economics.2 In this article I take a different approach than in the rest of the series. Rather than enumerating the questions asked in the discipline of public economics and noting the papers written by women on these questions, I look at statistics which measure the degree to which women have achieved stature in the field. For example, I look at the number of editorial board members of major public economics journals who are women. Furthermore, I generate hypotheses regarding the patterns I observe. I hope this approach to looking at women's contributions will help generate an action agenda that can lead to a greater role for women in the field of public economics in the future.
The research methodology was straightforward. It involved identifying public finance texts, journals, and papers and counting the number of women and men, respectively. This task was made more difficult by two phenomenon. One is that it was difficult to determine whether certain individuals were male or female from their first names. The other is that certain publications have the custom of using initials rather than first names.
Public economics is the new name for the traditional field of public finance. At the core of the field are microeconomic questions involving the spending and taxing activities of governments. I follow the classification system of the American Economic Association (AEA) according to which public economics includes these subtopics: structure and scope of government; taxation and subsidies; fiscal policies and behavior of economic agents; publicly provided goods; national government expenditures and related policies; national budget, deficit, and debt; and state and local government and intergovernmental relations. A broader definition of public economics than the one I have used here might include the related fields of urban, health, and corporate finance.
How many women economists are in public economics and what proportion of public finance economists are women? It turns out that this is not a simple question to answer. First, the membership of the AEA excludes a large number of economists--probably 40 percent of professors at four-year colleges and universities alone (Siegfried 1998: 217). Furthermore, although the AEA membership questionnaire asks respondents to identify both their fields of specialization and their sex, only 61% of members identified their sex for the 1997 directory.3 My examination of the 2,007 names listed under the subfield of public economics in the 1997 AEA Membership Directory leads me to conclude that there are between 265 and 592 women in the AEA specializing in public economics, or that from 13 to 29 percent of public finance economists in the AEA are women. The AEA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) keeps a roster of women in the economics profession by field. According to the 1997 roster, there were 326 women economists in public economics.4 The CSWEP roster is by design a more comprehensive list of women economists than the AEA directory, but even this list will leave out female public finance economists who choose not to belong to either the AEA or CSWEP.
How visible are women at the highest levels of the field of public economics? A search of the Web pages of the top twenty economics departments in the country shows that senior women in public economics are very rare. Current information points to only two senior women in public economics in those top departments--Anne Case, a Professor at Princeton and Michelle White, a Professor at the University of Michigan. This is not surprising since senior women in the top twenty economics departments are rare in any field. The 1997 CSWEP Annual Departmental Questionnaire reported only 30 senior women in these economics departments (meaning full professors or associate professors with tenure). The CSWEP questionnaire also found that only 6 percent of the professors and 16 percent of the tenured associate professors in the top 20 economics departments were women5.
None of the top three public economics journals--Journal of Public Economics, Public Finance Review, and National Tax Journal--has an editor or co-editor who is female. If one looks at the editorial boards of these journals, only 5 women, or 6 percent of the membership, is female. Julie Collins, Jane Gravelle, and Therese McGuire serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of the National Tax Journal and Suzanne Scotchmer is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Economics. Ann Friedlander is the only woman listed as a member of the Editorial Board of the May 1998 issue of Public Finance Review,, but she passed away several years ago.
Other measures of the degree of women's academic stature or visibility at the highest levels include the following. None of the authors of articles in the prestigious Handbook of Public Economics is a woman6. The 1998 National Bureau of Economic Research "Family List" of affiliates in the public economics field included only 9 women, which constituted 12 percent of the list. These women are Anne Case, Julie Cullen, Nada Eissa, Leora Friedberg, Caroline Hoxby, Hilary Hoynes, Brigitte Madrian, Hilary Sigman, and Ann Witte. Of 15 public finance texts published since 1987, four are co-authored by women and a male co-author; only one (a readings book) is authored by a woman, Eleanor Brown. The women co-authors are Jacquelene Browning, Catherine Elliot, Marilyn Flowers, and Peggy Musgrave.
Not all female public economics professors work in economics departments. Highly visible senior women in academia with positions outside traditional economics departments include Helen Ladd, Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University; Therese McGuire, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois; Olivia Mitchell, Wharton School, U niversity of Pennsylvania; Janet Pack, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan Rose-Ackerman, School of Law, Yale University. Janet Pack is Editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, an interdisciplinary journal which publishes a lot of applied public economics research.
There are a number of highly ranked senior women working in nonacademic public economics positions, many of them in Washington, DC. The most eminent is Alice Rivlin, Vice Chair, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Others include Geraldine Gerardi, Director of Business Taxation Division, U.S. Department of the Treasury; Jane Gravelle, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress; Rosemary Marcuss, Deputy Director, Bureau of Economic Analysis; Marilyn Moon, Senior Fellow, The Urban Institute; June O'Neill, Director of the Congressional Budget Office; and Christine Wallich, Country Director, The World Bank. Alicia Munnell, now a professor at Boston College, recently served as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisors. Senior women in public finance outside of Washington, DC include Katherine Bradbury, Vice President, Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Yolanda Kodrzycki, Assistant Vice President, Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
What about female-authored public economics working papers and articles, and the presence of women in public economics sessions at professional meetings? Turning first to articles published in the most visible public economics journals over the last three and a half years we find that 15 percent of National Tax Journalauthors, 10 percent of Public Finance Quarterly/Public Finance Reviewauthors, and 10 percent of Journal of Public Economics authors were women. The more applied and interdisciplinary Journal of Policy Analysis and Management had 24 percent of its authors who were female over the same time period. A search for public economics articles in three prestigious journals was also conducted. Over the last three and a half years, there were many more public economics articles published in the American Economic Review than in the Journal of Political Economy or the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Eleven percent of the authors of public economics articles in the American Economic Review over this time period were women. We found no female authors of public economics articles in the Journal of Political Economy and the Quarterly Journal of Economics over the last three and a half years.
An often-cited series of working papers in economics is that of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). From 1995 through mid-year 1998, 10 percent of the NBER working paper series authors in the field of public economics were women. Public economics sessions at the annual meetings of the AEA had a greater proportion of participants who were women. Nineteen percent of all the participants of public economics sessions at the 1996, 1997 and 1998 AEA meetings were women. Female representation was less for AEA sponsored sessions (15 percent) than for sessions sponsored by the Society for Government Economists (28 percent). Women are more well represented at the annual meetings of the National Tax Association (23 percent of the participants at the 1997 meeting were women) and at the annual meetings of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Managment (35 percent of the participants at the 1998 meeting will be women).
What are we to make of the apparent gender gap in the field of public economics? That such a gender gap exists can hardly be surprising given the statistics presented on the academic economics profession as a whole in the annual CSWEP Departmental Questionnaire and elsewhere (Kahn 1995 ). However, some of the patterns in the gender gap are illuminating. There is a fair amount of serendipity in the patterns of representation by gender. Women have apparently been able to have greater involvement in meetings of the NBER than on the editorial board of the Public Finance Review for example. Furthermore, it appears that the so-called glass ceiling is more constraining in top economics departments than in top departments outside of economics, and that the opportunities for advancement for women in public economics are greater in government than in academia. What actions might be taken in light of the statistics presented here? It seems that certain journal editors should be encouraged to be more inclusive in their invitations to potential editorial board members. In addition, any efforts to restrict sessions offered at the annual AEA meetings should be monitored. A decision to restrict the number of sessions offered by the Society of Government Economists, for example, would appear to have a particularly deleterious effect on women's opportunities to participate in the meetings.
Albelda, Randy, Economics and Feminism: Disturbances in the Field. New York: Twayne Publishers, Prentice Hall International, 1997.
Kahn, Shulamit. "Women in the Economics Profession." Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1995: 9:4, pp. 193-205.
Siegfried, John J. "Who Is a Member of the AEA?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998: 12:2, p. 221.