The day on Women in Economics and Gender Bias in Research was a real success with the participation of about fifty people from the academic and governmental communities. Organized by the Department of Economics of Université Laval in collaboration with CIRANO, the second edition of the event “Women in Economics” was held in Quebec City in the presence of Julie Gingras, Deputy Minister of Finance of Quebec. 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.

Many thanks to the organizers Catherine Michaud-Leclerc and Maripier Isabelle, both professors in Economics at Université Laval, and their students Hajar El Khoudri, Iris Laugier and Josette Rosine Aniwuvi Gbeto.