The gender gap in economics is growing - here's why we need to close it

Nov 26, 2021

An office pictured with the sun bouncing off the windows.

Northern European countries, which have achieved high levels of female representation at university as a whole, perform rather poorly and have a gender gap in graduation rates from economics undergraduate degrees. Image: Unsplash/ ActionVance

Rigissa Megalokonomou

PhD Candidate, University of Warwick

Duygu Yengin

Director of Gender Equity, University of Adelaide Faculty of Professions

Marian Vidal-Fernandez

Associate Professor, School of Economics, University of Sydney

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how SDG 05: Gender Equality is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

SDG 05: Gender Equality

Eastern European countries have proportionally more women graduating in economics than men Image: VoxEU

Conversion rates in economics, STEM, and business graduates in Europe

the overall conversion rate of women versus men in economics has been stable or decreasing over time and has been around 0.6 on average (except for the UK) Image: VoxEU

Discover

What's the World Economic Forum doing about the gender gap?

Have you read?

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.