What if Women in Economics did win the Nobel?

There have been 4.5 times the number of “Roberts” to win the Nobel Prize in Economics than women. There have been two women, Elinor Ostorm and Esther Duflo, to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science since its inception in 1969 compared to nine men named “Robert”.

In the days before the prize is awarded each year, a guessing game of who will win is played among economists, students and especially on #EconTwitter. Over the last few years, many women have been mentioned as deserving recipients but have not received the prize, yet.?

So what if these women did win? Thinking about the great contributions each woman has made we’ve created five potential awards to reflect their accomplishments. These names were not randomly pulled out of a hat. These women have been mentioned as worthy recipients from a number of sources and their research has already been widely recognized as foundational contributions to the field's principles.?

Here are our proposed prizes:

• Claudia Goldin, Mariannne Bertrand and Francine Blau “for making visible the importance of gender in labour market outcomes”. Goldin “for her groundbreaking historical findings on the place of women in the labour force”.
• Bertrand “for her work on discrimiation in the labour market”
• Blau “for her continued effort to address the gender pay gap”?
• Carmen Reinhart and Christina Romer for their work on “navigating financial markets and institutions around crisis”. Reinhart “for documenting and analysing the factors around financial crisis”. Romer “for her historical work on understanding the Great Depression.”
• Janet Currie and Amy Finklestein “for their work on how to improve poverty and citizen well-being through government intervention”: Currie “for her research on how to alleviate poverty from the perspective of children and well-being”.?Finkelstein “for her research on the effectiveness of government intervention in health care systems”.
• Susan Athey “for her work in modelling uncertainty”?
• Melissa Dell and Naila Kabeer “for their out of the box thinking to understanding development”?: Dell “for her inclusion of environmental factors and historical institutions in assessing development economics”. Kabeer “for providing a means to show the dimension of gender in Development Policy.

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Twitter user @a_peterman suggested this comparison.

Sources have included Ideas/RePEc, “Top 10% Female Economists, as of August 2022”; winners of the John Bates Clark medal; #EconTwitter; Thomas Hirst, “Top 10 women in economics,” World Economic Forum, 2015; Clarivate Citation Laureates; and our peer circles at the Women in Economics Initiative.