Paper #1771

Title:

Gender distribution across topics in Top 5 economics journals: A machine learning approach

Authors:

J. Ignacio Conde-Ruiz, Juan José Ganuza, Manu Garcia and Luis A. Puch

Date:

February 2021

Abstract:

We analyze all the articles published in Top 5 economic journals between 2002 and 2019 in order to find gender differences in their research approach. Using an unsuper vised machine learning algorithm (Structural Topic Model) developed by Roberts et al. (2019) we characterize jointly the set of latent topics that best fits our data (the set of abstracts) and how the documents/abstracts are allocated in each latent topic. This latent topics are mixtures over words were each word has a probability of belonging to a topic after controlling by year and journal. This latent topics may capture research fields but also other more subtle characteristics related to the way in which the articles are written. We find that females are uneven distributed along these latent topics by using only data driven methods. The differences about gender research approaches we found in this paper, are "automatically" generated given the research articles, without an arbitrary allocation to particular categories (as JEL codes, or research areas).

Keywords:

machine learning, structural topic model, gender, research fields

JEL codes:

I20, J16

Area of Research:

Behavioral and Experimental Economics

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