Why Economics Still Struggles with Gender Balance in the UK
Summary
- Women remain under-represented at every stage of the economics pipeline in the UK, from undergraduate study to professorship.
- In 2018, women made up 32% of undergraduates, 39% of PhD students, and only 26% of academic economists.
- Representation declines sharply with seniority: only 15% of professors are women.
- Progress has been uneven and, in some areas, has stalled or even reversed, particularly among UK-domiciled students.
- Gender gaps intersect with ethnicity: no Black female professors of economics were recorded in the UK between 2012–2018
A recurring question in the economics profession is whether its lack of diversity reflects a pipeline problem or a set of barriers that emerge later in careers. This report, produced by the Royal Economic Society, suggests that the answer is not one or the other, but both. Drawing on administrative data covering students and academic staff, it documents a persistent and multi-layered gender imbalance across the UK economics profession.
At the entry stage, the pipeline is already narrow. Women account for less than one-third of undergraduate economics students, and this share has shown little improvement over time—particularly among UK-domiciled students, where the gender gap has in some cases widened. While gender balance improves at the master’s level, this is largely driven by international students. By the PhD stage and into academic careers, the imbalance reasserts itself. Only around a quarter of academic economists are women, and their representation declines sharply with seniority, reaching just 15% at the professorial level. In this sense, the report points to a profession where both entry and progression contribute to the observed imbalance.
The structure of academic employment further reinforces these disparities. Women are more likely to be concentrated in lower academic ranks and in teaching-only or research-only roles, rather than in positions that combine both and typically offer clearer paths to advancement. At the same time, the report highlights an important intersection: gender inequality is compounded by ethnic disparities. The absence of Black female professors over the period studied is not simply a statistic, but an indication of how multiple dimensions of under-representation interact within the profession.
Taken together, the findings suggest that the lack of gender balance in economics cannot be attributed to a single stage of the career ladder. Instead, it reflects a combination of a “small pipeline” at entry and a “leaky pipeline” as careers progress. Improvements over the past decades are real, but partial—and in some cases, fragile. The broader implication is that addressing inequality in the profession requires attention not only to who enters economics, but also to how academic careers are structured and sustained.
Bateman, V., Gamage, D.K., Hengel, E. and Liu, X., 2021. The gender imbalance in UK economics. Royal Economics Society (RES) Silver Anniversary of Women’s Committee Report.
Full paper link: https://res.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/res_assets/assets/575c241a-fbff-4ef4-97e7066fcb7597e0/women-in-academic-economics-report-FINAL.pdf
