Women’s status in economics: Evidence from Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Reprinted by permission from VoxDev; Berniell, Deshpande, Fernández, Mehta and Tregenna (2026), “Women’s status in economics: Evidence from Africa, Asia, and Latin America”, available here.

Drawing on the first comparable, country-level evidence base from Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, India, Mexico, and South Africa, the IEA documents significant variation in where and how women exit the academic economics pipeline. The findings suggest that effective interventions must be country-specific, targeting the precise bottleneck – whether at postgraduate entry, the PhD-to-faculty transition, or senior promotion – rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series of posts reflecting on how the evidence from VoxDevLits applies to specific contexts, and is published in collaboration with the International Economic Association’s Women in Leadership in Economics initiative.

Economics shapes global policy, yet large gender gaps remain in the profession. This is not a new observation. Research on the US and Europe has long documented persistent barriers that limit women's entry and advancement in the discipline (Ginther and Kahn 2004, Lundberg and Stearns 2019). The most recent data from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) shows that women comprise just 25% of faculty in PhD-granting US economics departments, with their share declining as rank increases – women constitute 34% of assistant professors and only 18% of full professors (Tesar 2024).

But what is the status of women in economics in developing countries, where the historical, social, cultural, and institutional contexts are very different?

Until now, the answer has been largely unknown. Systematic, comparable data on women in economics across Africa, Latin America, and Asia has been scarce. Since gender gaps along a variety of dimensions are larger in developing countries than in the developed (Jayachandran 2015), one might assume that gender gaps in economics in developing countries are larger still – but the actual picture, as we show, is more nuanced.

The International Economic Association's Women in Leadership in Economics initiative (IEA-WE) set out to investigate the current state of gender gaps in economics in the Global South to address this gap in our understanding of the profession. Six independent research teams, working across Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, India, Mexico, and South Africa, produced the first comprehensive, country-level evidence base on women's representation across the academic economics pipeline.

The findings reveal significant variation, indicating that there is no one-size-fits-all explanation to account for global gender gaps in academic economics. We present a comparative picture of our six case studies, starting from the undergraduate level to faculty positions and research, comparing our findings with data from the US economics departments.

The six countries in our sample have vastly different historical backgrounds that have shaped the evolution of their respective university systems. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the tertiary education sector is younger, and on average, more poorly resourced (in Ghana, the first cohort of economics graduates emerged only in 1953). Latin America has a longer history of higher education, which is comparable to the Global North.

The six reports are highly detailed and present a nuanced picture of gender gaps. In this overview article, we present some key results and compare the state of gender gaps in these countries with those in the US, drawing on the 2024 CSWEP annual report.

Table 1: Women’s representation in the economics pipeline

Sources: CSWEP 2024 – US; IEA Evidence Papers – South Africa, Ghana, India, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia.

The pipeline

Undergraduate level

The undergraduate entry point varies more sharply across these six countries than any other dimension.

Colombia is the most striking case among the Latin American countries: the percentage of women enrolled in university-level economics programmes has remained stable at around 50%. Along with India, this is the highest undergraduate female share among all countries reviewed and is even more notable because it sits against a backdrop of master's-level underrepresentation.

Mexico’s female enrolment hovers in the 40–44% band and is declining: female enrolment had a downward trend from 43.5% in 2010 to 40% in 2022. In fact, economics is the only social science that did not reach parity during the study period. Argentina shows the steepest decline in female enrolment: the participation of women among students enrolled in economics programmes suffered a substantial decline from 43.8% in 2012 to 37.1% in 2021, with the gap between male and female participation widening over time.

India is comparable at undergraduate level by institutional average (with many institutions above 60%) but unfortunately has no official national level data. South Africa similarly had over 50% female representation at undergraduate level by 2021. Female enrolment in Ghana hovers in a narrow 33–37% band with minimal progress. The US sits at the same stagnant 35–36%. The low representation of women in the US is more striking when one considers that in Ghana, in contrast with the other countries, men constitute a larger proportion of the entire undergraduate body.

Master's level

Here, Colombia's remarkable inversion emerges. Despite near-parity at undergraduate level, the participation of women in economics master's programmes in Colombia remains relatively stable but low, ranging between 25% and 30%. This is the sharpest undergraduate-to-master's drop-off of any country in the study – a fall of almost half from entry.

In India however, women represent the majority at the master's level (57%). In South Africa, women reached master's-level parity in 2020–21, while women in Argentina remain underrepresented. Representation stalls in Mexico at 39–44% and is even lower in Ghana at master's level – ranging between 19% and 25% – the lowest master's-level representation in the study.

PhD level

Colombia's PhD picture is complicated by small cohort sizes that make year-on-year figures volatile: women constitute less than 40% of those enrolled in economics PhD programmes, and while the proportion of female doctoral graduates has historically remained low, it increased significantly since 2018, reaching approximately 90% in 2022 – a figure almost certainly driven by very small absolute cohort sizes rather than a genuine structural shift. The underlying enrolment figure (under 40%) is the more informative measure.

India has achieved the most genuine PhD-level progress, growing from 35% to nearly 50% female enrolment over a decade. In South Africa, representation sits at 41% enrolled, with 37% graduating. Argentina experiences near-parity in PhD enrolment (approximately 45%), despite its declining undergraduate base – women who persist into doctoral study do so in roughly equal numbers to men. This observation is complicated, however, by the fact that more men than women choose to pursue their PhDs abroad, although unfortunately the exact number is unknown. Ghana has the lowest levels of PhD representation, with the share of women enrolled peaking at 28% in 2017 before falling back to 18%.

In the US, women’s PhD representation fell from 38.4% in 2021 to 36.2% in 2024.

Faculty composition and research metrics

Overall faculty female shares span from 16% (Ghana) to 42% (South Africa). Based on web scraped data, the Colombia report reveals that the female share of economics researchers in academic institutions is approximately 26%.

India reaches 35% overall. Mexico's 34% figure among National System of Researchers (SNI) falls to a 4:1 male ratio at the top SNI tier. In Argentina, the representation of women was 50.8% for assistant professors, 35.5% for associate professors, and 27.7% for full professors in 2022. The US reaches 26% across PhD-granting departments.

Faculty underrepresentation is most acute in Ghana. Evidence from the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) database shows an average share of about 16% for all universities, with only one female full professor in economics recorded in 2023.

Senior ranks and the rank gradient

There are gender gaps in all countries under review, however, the magnitudes differ:

Ghana: 3.7% female full professors (one person)
Argentina: 27.7% are female full professors
Mexico: 4:1 male ratio at top SNI tier
India: 27% female full professors overall
South Africa: 31% female professors (fastest improvement, up from 11% in 2012)
Colombia: Women are underrepresented at all levels in the academic hierarchy, but the pattern is not monotonic. Women are 19% of lecturers level, and close to 32% of associate professors, but 20 and 22% of research and full professors, respectively. 
In comparison, the share of US female full professors is 18.3%.

Research output

All seven countries document a gender gap in output, but with important nuances. Ghana shows the starkest aggregate: the average citation count for women is about 39% of the figure for men, and the h-index and i10-index for female authors are between 53–68% of their male counterparts. In India, this gap is concentrated at junior ranks, with no significant gap at the professor level. The Colombia report documents similar citation, h-index, and i10-index gaps by academic positions (full professor, associate, assistant, lecturer, research professor). The data shows that in private universities, there is male-female citation parity, and in the public sector, women have higher average citations. However, men have a higher h-index.

The Argentina report finds men consistently outperforming women in publications, as men are more likely to publish in higher ranked journals. While in Mexico, women's research production has stalled for Mexico-based authors specifically.

Where the pipeline leaks: Refined country typologies
The most significant points of leakage in the pipeline differ by country, as summarised in Table 2.

Structural patterns and qualitative indicators
Sources: CSWEP 2024 – US; IEA Evidence Papers – South Africa, Ghana, India, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia.

The universality of the rank gradient remains the single most robust cross-national finding in the entire body of evidence: women are a smaller share at every higher academic rank in all seven countries without exception.

What does this mean for policy?
The CSWEP 2024 report notes that “continued progress in representation of women in the twenty-first century has been very slow [in the US]”. In comparison, developing countries – some with distinctly shorter histories of university education – have made uneven but noteworthy progress in most indicators. Gender gaps remain substantial in faculty positions in most countries, but have declined, for the most part, in terms of student enrolment and graduation rates.

The diversity of country patterns uncovered here – from India's PhD-to-faculty bottleneck to Colombia's sharp postgraduate collapse – means that effective interventions must be country-specific: they must operate where the bottleneck or leakage is greatest and design interventions to address them.

These findings make the case for sustained investment in systematic, comparable data on women in economics across the Global South – not only to track whether change is happening, but to design effective interventions. The second half of our IEA-WE project now ongoing is therefore dedicated to investigating possible actions to increase women’s representation in economics across several countries in the Global South.

References

Arceo-Gómez, E O (2025), "Status of women in economics: Mexico," IEA-WE.

Berniell, I, and R Fernández (2026), "Aspirations and interests of economic undergraduates in LAC: Does gender matter? Results from the second WELAC survey," WELAC.

Branson, N, and E Whitelaw (2025), "Women in economics in South Africa," IEA-WE.

Dongre, A, U Das, and K Singhal (2025), "Women in Indian economics academia," IEA-WE.

Ginther, D K, and S Kahn (2004), "Women in economics: Moving up or falling off the academic career ladder?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(3): 193–214.

Jayachandran, S (2015), "The roots of gender inequality in developing countries," Annual Review of Economics, 7: 63–88.

López-Uribe, M del P (2025), "Bridging the gap: Gender disparities in Colombia's economics profession," IEA-WE.

Lundberg, S, and J Stearns (2019), "Women in economics: Stalled progress," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(1): 3–22.

Oduro, A, and G Afful-Mensah (2025), "Evidence papers on women in economics: A case study of Ghana," IEA-WE.

Tesar, L (2024), "The 2024 report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession," CSWEP.

Viollaz, M, M Marchionni, M Edo, and F Pinto (2025), "Examining the situation of women in the economics profession in Argentina," IEA-WE.