When I was an undergraduate studying economics in the 1980s, I got an early lesson in how men view women in the workforce. I was writing a thesis about the well-known phenomenon of women being paid less than men for the same jobs. One of my professors challenged the basic premise that bias was a possible reason for the wage gap. If women really did get paid less for the same work, he argued, a smart company would hire all women and undercut its competitors.
No female professor would have made such a zealous claim. But I was never taught by a female economics professor. It is no surprise since economics has traditionally been the social science with the lowest share of women. Even today, less than 15 percent of full professors in economics at universities are women.
A remarkable new paper by a female student at Berkeley showed this summer that the problem in economics is so deep that it borders on misogyny. The study explores the terms used most frequently in posts about women and men from an online forum designed to share job information among economics graduate students. Posts about women include words like “hotter”, “lesbian”, “bb”, and “tits”. In contrast, posts about men are more neutral, using terms like “advisor” or “Wharton,” the name of a leading business school.
While the website is known to be crude, and represents only a tiny fraction of economists, it is raising awareness about the treatment of women in economics. Women rarely glimpse such direct hostility—the more common and related manifestation is being excluded from the meetings and social gatherings, where research partnerships are made and promotions are decided. read more
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
no kidding? economists are far worse than real science in regard to women? Surprize.
i have dropped several comments about the contribution of women home makers to the economy when they were unpaid housewives. Someone ought to look at how much of the growth of the economy relates to the shift in women from unpaid to paid work from the 70’s forward. But if a woman did that it would be trivialized. And clearly this blog does not do all that much better than the un-real world economist blogs do.
This write-up mentions the what, but not the why. There is a lot of “interesting” behavior in economics and the why is critical. I have found that personal characteristics of extreme arrogance, jealousy and clubby-ness seem over-represented in this profession. Perhaps that alienates some. Not sure. As I think I’ve pointed out before, there is a lot going on in this profession that has nothing to do with being correct or can be defended as a search for the truth.
If a science, the goal of economics is to investigate, describe, and make known the actions and relations of economic actors. This means humans as well as the many non-humans actors involved. Women are economic actors, as are men. Currently, I don’t see either male or female economists taking up this challenge. But if they did they might be able to overcome the religious, political, and natural science ideas that have created the ten millennia-long division of human males from females, and the placement of the latter in a perpetually subordinate position to the former.