A Historical Portrait of Female Economists' Coauthorship Networks

Abstract

This article describes how women have contributed to the research published in influential general interest journals between 1940 and 2019. The share of women published in these journals follows a U-shaped curve that troughs in the late 1970s—a decline possibly related to an increase in the number of papers being published as well as a rise in coauthoring. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the share of women began increasing again, largely thanks to a rise in mixed-gendered papers. Coauthorship between women, on the other hand, was almost nonexistent until around 2010. A decade-by-decade comparison of men's and women's coauthorship networks suggests female-female networks in the most recent decade in our data (2010–19) roughly resemble male networks from earlier decades (1940–69) and highlight the key role prominent individuals play in network formation. We hypothesize that the recent growth in papers by female teams may signal that research by women collaborating with other women is receiving greater recognition in the field.