VoxEU Video
Education
Gender
Who's in the books?
Betsey Stevenson discusses the findings of the textual analysis of the leading principles of economics textbooks that she conducted with Hanna Zlotnik, in which they recorded whether each person mentioned was male, female, or gender ambiguous and also what that person was doing or the role they were playing. The vast majority of the policy-makers, business leaders, economists, etc. in the textbooks are male, even when the research mentioned is recent. The concern is that this paints a picture of economics as a field that represents the lives of men and doesn’t represent the lives of more diverse groups
