Excerpt
2024, Paper: "The economics undergraduate major has traditionally been large and popular at most of the highest-ranked US undergraduate institutions. It has also been predominantly male. In 2013, when the project we will describe was first conceived, there were almost three male economics majors for every female major, relative to overall numbers of male to female bachelor’s degrees across the United States. Yet, female undergraduates had greatly increased as a fraction of all college students; in fact, their numbers exceeded those of male undergraduates around 1980 (in this journal, Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006). Economics was seemingly ignoring the change in student representation and not considering ways to attract more women. At that time, Goldin was the incoming president of the American Economic Association, and she raised the issue in various ways. She was soon persuaded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create a program to encourage more women to major in economics"