January 17, 2018
From the article:
On Wednesday, members of the international development community expressed outrage after a prominent blogger published a list of 11 top thinkers in the field. Seven were white men. So is the blogger, Duncan Green, and the person who curated the list, the economist Stefan Dercon.
...Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow who specializes in aid, corruption and governance at the Center for Global Development, has been working in development for decades. "The male bias issue is not new," she says. "The profession is very male-dominated."
In the U.S., women head only about 14 percent of the global charities and aid groups with the largest budgets; in the U.K., 27 percent; and in Kenya and South Africa, 15 to 20 percent, according to a 2013 study. And in the field of economics, according to the American Economics Association, only 1 in 5 tenure-track economics professors is a woman.
But Ramachandran says she has seen a growing interest in discussing gender imbalance in the workplace over the past few months, notably in the broader field of economics — the foundational work of many in global development.
She cites a senior thesis by Alice H. Wu, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, about the hostilities that women face in the field of economics. Published in August, it cracked open conversations in universities and research institutions. In response, the American Economics Association last week announced it would draft a code of conduct to end the bias faced by female economists.
Ramachandran hopes to see these types of advances in gender equality for the economists, researchers, academics and analysts who work in global development, too.