The Department of Economics of Université Laval, in collaboration with CIRANO, held the second edition of the event "Women in Economics". The event took place on May 5, 2023, in the presence of Julie Gingras, Deputy Minister of Finance. Ms. Gingras stressed the importance of this type of event, an occasion that led her to reflect on the role she wishes to play with women who aspire to a rewarding professional life.
Hajar El Khoudri, a doctoral student in economics at Université Laval, presented her work on how public policy, and in particular childcare reform in Quebec, has reduced gender conformity and impacted on income sharing within couples. The excellence of her presentation was noted.
Marlène Koffi, PhD in Economics from the Université de Montréal and now a professor at the University of Toronto, showed how deep learning and AI techniques can be applied to economic studies and public policy in the areas of innovation and gender inequality. She presented key findings from her article published in the American Economic Review in which she examines gender biases in research based on a dataset she constructed using bibliographic data from articles published in top journals in economics and granular information on the articles that cite them. She finds that female-authored papers in top economic journals are (i) more likely to be cited outside economics, (ii) less likely to be cited by top-tier journals, and (iii) less likely to be cited by men. I conclude with a discussion on those results and their implications for females in economics.
