Has the Feminist Economics Intellectual Project Lost its Way? An Analysis of the Journal’s Evolution

Abstract

This article analyzes the methodologies, scope, and impact of manuscripts submitted to and published in Feminist Economics from 1995 to 2019. The analysis finds that in addition to becoming increasingly empirical, Feminist Economics publications have also become increasingly intersectional. However, quantitative empirical submissions, relative to other methodological approaches, are more likely to be desk rejected and less likely to be eventually published if they proceed to peer review. The increasing attention to gender in the mainstream of the economics discipline, proxied by the prevalence of gender analyses in the discipline’s top thirty journals, is also associated with increased desk rejection, reflecting a rise in submissions that take a mainstream “add gender and stir” approach. Ultimately, this study aims to understand how feminist economics has evolved since the inception of the journal and to spark conversation about how to continue to make the journal and economics more feminist in the future.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Publications in Feminist Economics have become increasingly intersectional.

• Non-empirical work has been favored in the publication process.

• Special issue articles garner more citations on average.

• Intersectional articles garner fewer citations on average.

• More “gender” papers lacking feminist engagement have been submitted over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist economics
• citation analysis
• journal metrics
• philosophy of economics
• economic methodology

JEL Codes:

• B54
• A14
• B4

ACKNOWELDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the associate editor, anonymous reviewers, participants in the 2021 and 2022 IAFFE conferences, participants in the 2022 Eastern Economics Association Conference, and participants in the University of Utah inequality research workshop for their feedback on earlier versions of this work.

Notes

1 Founding associate editors include Bina Agarwal, Barbara Bergmann, Diane Elson, Marianne Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Michèle Pujol, Janet Seiz, Jean Shackelford, Myra Strober, and Rhonda Williams.

2 In light of these methodological debates, Feminist Economics itself launched inquiry into the use of feminist research methods in economics. A special issue on “Exploring the Methodological Boundaries in Economics” included articles that discussed how qualitative methods might help to expose and remedy the limitations of quantitative analyses (Pujol 1997; Strassmann 1997). Special issues are partly intended to expand into new intellectual boundaries, and this issue may have encouraged scholars to submit more qualitative analyses to the journal.

3 In order to avoid confounding changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic (that is, special issues on COVID-19 and an increasing mainstream interest in care economics), we focus our analysis on articles submitted to the journal in 2019 and earlier.

4 Even reframing typical dummy variables in which, for example, poor women of color are the reference group rather than wealthy white men, allows us to draw attention to the privileges of dominant groups.

5 We also exclude withdrawn submissions, of which there were only seven.

6 Woolley (2005) used indices garnered from Web of Science in her citation analysis, which faced some criticism due to the exclusion of many heterodox journals from Web of Science (Lee 2008). However, because our main interest in this paper is to garner an understanding of how Feminist Economics publications have penetrated the mainstream, we intentionally focus on Web of Science citation counts. Future work might compare citation analyses using other metrics (for example, Google Scholar citations).

7 See Appendix A.

8 David Card et al. (2020) have found that economics journal editors treat women authors more favorably in desk rejection decisions, but because we do not observe the gender of authors in our data, we cannot confirm whether this is true for Feminist Economics.

9 Note that Feminist Economics’ editorial team has a policy of mentoring rejections, where some manuscripts that have high potential or that are written by systematically disadvantaged authors are assigned an associate editor mentor or are given substantial feedback so that the manuscript can be majorly improved and resubmitted even after a rejection.

10 See Appendix A.

11 As shown in Appendix C, coauthored publications were more likely to be empirical and qualitative compared to solo-authored works, which were more commonly theoretical or used qualitative/mixed methods.

12 Presented in Appendix B.

13 Manuscript Central also allows us to observe the countries from which corresponding authors submit, but we recognize several weaknesses in this data. First, only the author submitting the manuscript to the online platform is visible in the data: we are unable to observe the country of residence for coauthors of papers which were not ultimately published. Second, the data reflect the country of an author’s residence, not their country of origin. For instance, a scholar from the Global South now working at an institution located in the Global North will not be observed as an individual from the Global South. Ideally, we would like to know much more information about the authors, including other social locations or identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, caste, and class. These would help us better understand positionalities or biases in submissions and publications. We are currently working on constructing such a database for publications, and future work will focus on the role of authorship in determining the trends explored in this paper.

14 The outlying data point from 2003, which indicates that nearly 70 percent of published articles that year were theoretical, is driven by papers published in a special issue on Amartya Sen’s work and ideas (Volume 9, Issue 2–3; 2003). We discuss the role of special issues in more detail below.

15 Again, recall that articles can be in more than one intersectional category, so the sum of papers in Table 2 will be greater than 567.

16 We include a list of special issues, symposia, and explorations in Appendix D.

17 Recall that our submission data does not cover the lifespan of the journal. The manuscripts included in econometric analyses of acceptance for publication are therefore limited to 2004–19.

18 For example, if AER has 3/50 articles per year which include a discussion of gender in their abstracts, the share of gender-related articles is 6 percent for AER in year t. We do this calculation for each of the top thirty journals for each year, and then calculate the mean share per year, giving equal weight to each journal. The top thirty economics journals were determined using five-year impact factors for 2020. We include a list of these thirty journals in Appendix E.

19 Many of the top-cited publications in the journal are related to the special issues on Sen’s capabilities approach and have a theoretical emphasis. The top-cited publications from 1998–2019, according to Web of Science data, are: 1. 688 citations: Nussbaum (2003). 2. 379 citations: Robeyns (2003). 3. 276 citations: Sen (2004). 4. 269 citations: Bettio and Plantenga (2004). 5. 168 citations: Rankin (2002). Because many of the top-cited publications have come from special issues, we reconducted our regression analysis from Equation 2 excluding papers published in the Sen special issue, and then again excluding papers published in any special issue. The results are not meaningfully different from those presented in Table 6.

20 Calculated as $e^{{\text{β}}_6}=e^{0.549}=1.732$.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah F. Small

Sarah F. Small is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Utah. She earned her PhD in economics from Colorado State University and recently held research positions at Rutgers University and Duke University. Her scholarship focuses on a variety of topics including intrahousehold bargaining, the care economy, the occupational crowding hypothesis, and history of feminist economic thought.

Elissa Braunstein

Elissa Braunstein is Professor in the Department of Economics at Colorado State University and the editor of Feminist Economics. She was recently Senior Economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and has done consulting work for a number of international development institutions, including the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development, and UN Women. Her work focuses on the international and macroeconomic aspects of development, with particular emphasis on economic growth, macro policy, social reproduction, and gender. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.