What we've found.
A growing body of evidence is showing where women leave economics, why the barriers differ across countries, and which interventions can actually make a difference.
Across seven economies, women are consistently less represented at higher academic ranks — but the point at which the pipeline begins to leak varies sharply by country and career stage.
The evidence
IEA-WE has built the first comparable evidence base tracking women's participation in economics across countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
There is no single story.
Gaps vary sharply by country and by career stage. The pipeline leaks at different points — meaning there is no one-size-fits-all explanation, and no one-size-fits-all fix.
Six countries. Seven economies.
Country evidence from Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, India, Mexico and South Africa is benchmarked against the United States to create a comparable picture of women's participation from undergraduate study to senior faculty.
Entry varies most of all.
Women's share of undergraduate economics enrolment differs substantially across countries — from near parity to persistent underrepresentation.
Women's share of undergraduate economics enrolment
Percentage of undergraduate economics students who are women
Argentina & Mexico
Argentina falls from 43.8% to 37.1%, while Mexico declines from 43.5% to 40% across the available comparison periods.
Ghana & the United States
Both remain at around 35% women's representation at undergraduate level.
The gap widens at the top.
The most robust cross-national finding is the rank gradient: women become a smaller share of the economics profession at every successive academic rank.
7 out of 7 economies show the same pattern.
From undergraduate study to full professorship, women's representation declines as academic rank rises. Colombia shows the sharpest early drop, while Ghana has the lowest representation among full professors.
Women among full professors
Share of full professors of economics who are women
Different countries, different bottlenecks.
The point at which the pipeline breaks differs substantially. That means interventions need to be designed around the constraint each country actually faces.
Undergraduate entry
Enrolment is falling, yet women who persist reach near-parity by the PhD stage.
Postgraduate collapse
Near-parity undergraduate participation gives way to a sharp drop entering master's study.
Pipeline-wide
Women are underrepresented at every stage, with the gap most acute among senior faculty.
PhD → faculty
Strong gains through the PhD stage do not yet translate into equivalent representation among faculty.
Senior researcher tier
Broad participation narrows sharply at the highest SNI researcher ranks.
Senior promotion
The fastest-improving overall, but substantial gaps remain at full-professor level.
From diagnosis to action.
Eleven intervention studies test what actually helps — from mentorship and networks to role models, visibility and curriculum reform.
The headline finding: beliefs move more easily than behaviour.
Across the completed studies, interventions often shifted interest, stated intentions, attitudes and willingness to relocate. But actual behaviour proved much harder to change.
What students think can change.
Interest, stated intention, attitudes and willingness to relocate shifted in several interventions — in one Indian study, effects also extended into conversations at home.
What students do changes less.
Where behaviour did change, it tended to involve actions that were close at hand and relatively inexpensive, such as taking an additional course or staying in an economics major.
Information isn't always the constraint.
Where interventions produced no behavioural change, teams identified constraints including family permission, affordability, distance, credit systems and admission cut-offs.
It may be the decision, not the dose.
The completed studies challenge the assumption that bigger, more elaborate interventions necessarily produce bigger effects. The clearest behavioural result came from the thinnest intervention in the portfolio: four e-books sent to a chat group, with no facilitator or live speaker.
She can act alone.
No admissions committee, family permission or other third party needs to be persuaded.
It costs little.
No major fee, relocation expense or significant forgone earnings are required.
It can be undone.
A course can be dropped next term. Moving to another city is much harder to reverse.
What happens when you change the course itself?
Ten of the eleven projects add something to a student's environment and ask her to act on it. The UCT intervention took a different approach: it replaced the first-year economics curriculum.
No detectable change in the probability that women declared or switched into economics.
The gender gap in introductory microeconomics attainment narrowed by roughly 1–2.5 percentage points, with a similar effect at intermediate level.
Structural reform places the cost of change on the department rather than on the student.
Beyond the numbers.
Quantitative evidence shows where women exit the pipeline. Qualitative research helps us understand the experiences behind those patterns.
Listening to women's experiences.
IEA-WE's qualitative research follows women economists through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, capturing experiences that cannot be observed through administrative data alone.
Connecting evidence to action.
The qualitative and quantitative work were designed together: the country evidence identifies where the pipeline breaks, while women's accounts help explain the obstacles and constraints behind those patterns.
Research findings, heard around the world.
The Amplifying Voices programme brings women economists from Africa, Asia and Latin America into global policy conversations through leading media and podcast platforms.
What we know so far.
The evidence is still growing. But several findings are already clear enough to shape where the project goes next.
The pipeline leaks differently.
Effective interventions need to target the specific bottleneck rather than apply a universal model.
The rank gradient is universal.
Women are a smaller share at every higher academic rank across all seven economies.
Beliefs shift more readily.
Behaviour changes much less often — particularly when decisions are costly, distant or require others' approval.
Structural change can reach what information cannot.
Curriculum reform narrowed an attainment gap that information-based interventions did not address.
Comparable data matters.
Sustained evidence is essential for tracking progress and designing interventions that actually work.
Explore the research.
Read the evidence papers, intervention research and other outputs behind these findings.
Explore research & reports →