“Missing” Women in Economics Academia in India

Abstract

Existing literature has established that a diverse workforce is more creative and productive, with academia being no exception. Research on gender diversity in academia, especially economics academia so far has focused on the developed world. This article examines gender diversity in economics academia in India by analyzing the share of women in faculty positions, journal publications, and participation in a conference held annually since 2004. Unlike some developed countries, women students actually constitute the majority at the Master’s level in India. Yet, evidence suggests that women’s presence in economics academia is less than one-third in all three dimensions. Through interviews and further data analysis, the study explores factors that impinge on women’s presence in economics academia. It concludes with specific suggestions on what Indian institutions can do to ensure that women not only join and survive, but also thrive in academia.

HIGHLIGHTS

• In India, only one-third of faculty, conference participants, and published researchers in economics are women.

• The drop in the representation of women occurs mainly at the doctoral and faculty levels.

• Norms around marriage age and desire for financial freedom affect women’s pursuit of doctoral programs.

• Biases in recruitment and the “two-body” problem impact women’s presence in faculty positions.

• Indian institutions must invest in faculty mentoring, promotion transparency, and childcare availability to foster academic success of students and faculty.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• women
• economics
• gender

JEL Codes:

• J08
• J16
• J44

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Anindya Chakrabarty, Manasa Gade, Maitreesh Ghatak, Anish Gupta, Reetika Khera, Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, Jeevant Rampal, Kavitha Ranganathan, Ankur Sarin, Amit Thorat, Avanindra Nath Thakur, Jeemol Unni, and Nisha Vernekar for discussions and helpful comments. We also thank the Editor and the anonymous referees whose feedback improved the manuscript considerably. Vamsi Antyakula, Sai Shruthi Balaji, Nawaz NM, Ananya Pimpley, Ishika Saha, Anandita Saxena, and Soham Shevde provided excellent research assistance. Finally, we would like to thank all the individual respondents for their valuable time and insightful conversations.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2024.2322951.

Notes

1 Emmanuelle Auriol et al. (2022) also use RePEc in their work on analyzing the share of women in economics academia in European institutions. The list of institutions is available here: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.india.html.

2 The list of institution in each of the four categories is available on request. These institutions are spread across multiple states in India (Table A2 in the Online Appendix). Some of these are established and primarily funded by the federal governments. Some institutions have been established and funded by the respective state governments, while some are established and funded through the private sources. Some of these are full-fledged universities offering degrees in various disciplines, while some are much smaller institutions focusing on specific disciplines. The institutions also differ in terms of their recruitment policies. Those which are primarily financed by federal or state governments have to recruit faculty without violating the affirmative action policies. As per these policies, certain fraction of faculty positions is to be reserved for individuals belonging to specific social groups. There is no reservation for women.

3 We did not include Economic & Political Weekly (EPW). It is an inter-disciplinary journal. Only small fraction of published articles in EPW are peer-reviewed. The Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics was another journal that we had hoped to include in our analysis. But we couldn’t gather information about 36.5 percent authors (including their gender).

4 See Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Rouse (2016) and Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn, and Jessica McCloskey (2017) for the first approach. See David Card et al. (2019), Auriol et al. (2022), and Erin Hengel (2022) for the second approach. We also compared our gender assignment with gender mentioned in faculty profiles on the website irins.org. This website is a part of larger effort by the Indian higher education regulatory agency to encourage scholarly communication and collaboration. The faculty profiles are created based on the information submitted by the institution. Unfortunately, not many institutions are yet part of this, and hence its faculty coverage is quite limited.

5 Reports are available at: http://aishe.nic.in/aishe/home. Reports for the years before 2011–2 could not be located.

6 https://www.isical.ac.in/~deanweb/ALU_YEAR.HTM.

7 We obtained the approval from the Institutional Review Board of Indian institute of Management. The approval number is IIMA IRB2021-28.

8 The need for this approach was reinforced by the fact that many requests for interviews that we sent went unanswered despite repeated follow-ups.

9 We reached out to thirty-one faculty members, of which twenty-two agreed to participate.

10 The difference between private universities and rest of the institution together is statistically significant (using bootstrapped standard errors).

11 We could not obtain similar information for the Master’s program offered by other institutions such as Centre for Economic Studies & Planning (JNU), School of Economics at University of Hyderabad, Madras School of Economics, Department of Economics at University of Burdwan, and Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (Pune).

12 The share of women was more than 50 percent in the institutions mentioned in endnote above (Source: Conversations with faculty).

13 We would like to thank Prof. Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay for this suggestion.

14 This is consistent with the evidence on social norms which do not approve of women working after marriage. For example, Diane Coffey et al. (2018) show majority of men and a substantial fraction of women were not in favor of women working when husband earns a good living. Diva Dhar (2022) show that women who would like to work after marriage are less likely to receive positive responses on matrimonial websites.

15 This is prevalent across disciplines. For example, see this quote from Kondaiah, Mahadev, and Wahlang (2017: 75) in the context of sciences: “A sense of semi-professional, friendly relationship exists between male supervisors and their male students. On the contrary, women are always kept at a distance from this boys’ club.” Also see Namrata Gupta (2007: 520) who quotes a respondent woman doctoral student in her sample, “They (Boys) can approach him (the Advisor) at any time. I have to think twice not because of the supervisor but because of my sex.” 

16 Maitreyi Bordia Das and Ieva Žumbytė (2017), using large survey data, show that even though the childbearing burden has gone down for urban Indian women, the burden of caregiving has increased, resulting in fall in mother’s employment. This is also consistent with Ravinder Kaur (2021) who examines parental strategies aimed at raising educationally successful children who can compete in elite globalized labor markets. These strategies essentially rely on “enormous and disproportionate labor that highly educated but stay-at-home mothers put into producing educationally successful children” (Kaur 2021: 579). The IAS-NIAS Research Report (Kurup et al. 2010) which had focused on Science, Engineering, and Medicine disciplines mentions that care for children or elderly is the most important reason for a break in the career of a woman scientist.

17 This quote suggests that discrimination as the reason for lower presence of women faculty could be an important explanation. Unfortunately, experimental research on discrimination in faculty evaluation and recruitment is limited, and findings are mixed. Steinpreis, Anders, and Dawn (1999), in their study, found that applicants for post-doc and tenure-track positions in Psychology were rated more hirable if they were male, even though the male and female CVs were identical. On the other hand, Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci (2015), in a much larger experimental study that covers multiple disciplines, suggest no discrimination. Thus, to what extent a low share of female faculty is driven by discrimination remains an open question. But bias can manifest through a number of channels as well. We have already mentioned how recommendation letters by the faculty advisors can tip the balance against their female advisee. Other indicators of applicant productivity and “quality” such as publications, citations, grants obtained, and teaching evaluations are not completely free from biases. Holly O. Witteman et al. (2019) document a gender gap in funding by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, and suggest that these gaps can be attributed to less favorable assessment of women as Principal Investigators, and not due to quality of their proposed research. Friederike Mengel, Jan Sauermann, and Ulf Zölitz (2019) show that, in a context where students are assigned randomly to a male or a female faculty, women receive systematically lower evaluations as compared to their male colleagues. The effect is driven by male students, it is more severe when it comes to junior women faculty, and courses which have substantial math content. In the endnote below, we briefly discuss bias in publications and citations. This suggests that it is quite possible for an equally capable and productive female applicant to be judged unfavorably by the evaluators, and be denied the position.

18 De Leon and McQuillin (2018) illustrate the importance of conferences on the research being cited in the context of political science academia in the US. Literature also indicates that conference attendance among women academics can be limited due to various factors other than household responsibilities. These include limited access to information, difficulties in obtaining leave and financial support, and conferences not being “family friendly” (Bos, Sweet-Cushman, and Schneider 2019; Sabharwal, Henderson, and Joseph 2019). In addition to the challenges in being able to publish that the respondents have mentioned, the role of institutions where faculty are employed, the role of conference organizers, that of journal editors, and that of the wider scholar community cannot be ignored. Consider journal publications. Hengel (2022) shows that women are held to higher standards in the peer-review process. Studies have also shown that women economists receive less credit in co-authored works as compared to men, and as a consequence, women are less likely to tenure the more they co-author (Sarsons 2017; Sarsons et al. 2021). Additionally, papers authored by women have been found to have a higher likelihood of being omitted from references than papers authored by men (Koffi 2021).

19 Experiences at the conference can also be different for women. According to the Climate Survey conducted by the American Economic Association (AEA), 47 percent female respondents reported not presenting their question, idea, or view to avoid possible harassment, discrimination, or disrespectful treatment. For men, the same fraction was 24 percent.

20 Respondents who had exposure to the US or Europe commented on much better quality of childcare facilities and, in general, better infrastructure and other support for would-be mothers and working parents.

21 See Joshi and Malghan (2017) and Sana Irshad and Gaurav Kalyani (2021) who provide overall (not discipline-wise) figures.

22 Discussion that follows is largely based on Ashwini Deshpande and Katherine S. Newman (2010), Aarushi Kalra (2019), and Aditi Priya (2021) who have highlighted a number of issues in the context of the Master’s program in economics at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE).

23 Our calculations, based on annual reports of the DSE suggest that the drop-out rates are higher for SC women compared to SC men. In fact, the number of SC and ST women were in single digits in 2016–7 and 2017–8, and less than fifteen in 2018–9.

24 The Report of the Committee to Enquire into the Allegation of Differential Treatment of SC/ST Students in All India Institute of Medical Sciences (2007), popularly known as Thorat Committee Report, had highlighted a number of these aspects. Also see Dnyanda Lad and Ajay Rahulwad (2019), Aarushi Punia (2021), and Johanna Deeksha (2022).

25 This is not specific to economics but prevails across disciplines. See data compiled by Ambedkar Phule Periyar Study Cirle (APPSC) on at https://casteoncampus.wordpress.com/.

26 See discussion in KerryAnn O’Meara, Dawn Culpepper, and Lindsey L. Templeton (2020) for a thorough discussion and literature review on how bias can enter in various stages of faculty recruitment, and what can be done to minimize it. Vipin P. Veetil (2021) uses a similar framework to comment on the ways in which marginalized sections are deprived from faculty positions in elite Indian institutions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ambrish Dongre

Ambrish Dongre is faculty at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. His primary research interests are development economics, education, and health with special focus on India.

Karan Singhal

Karan Singhal is a doctoral student at University of Luxembourg and the Luxembourg Institute of Socioeconomic Research (LISER). He was previously associated with Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad as a Research Officer where he led projects on topics in urban governance, education, and early childhood.

Upasak Das

Upasak Das is Presidential Fellow in Economics of Poverty Reduction at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. He is also an affiliate in the Centre for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research interests include development economics, health, education, social norms, and social protection programs.