IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17229.html

Women in European Academia before 1800 - Religion, Marriage, and Human Capital

Author

Listed:
  • De La Croix, David
  • Vitale, Mara

Abstract

We document the participation of women in European academia from the first universities to the eve of the Industrial Revolution. 108 women taught at universities or were members of academies of arts and sciences. Most of them were active in Catholic southern Europe - an unexpected result. We conjecture that Protestantism left less room for women at the top of the distribution of human capital to exercise their talent. The percentage of ever-married female scholars is 79%, but a large fraction of them remained childless. We measure the quality of women in academia through their publications. Comparing them to 52,000 male scholars, we find that they were on average better, suggesting some form of discrimination.

Suggested Citation

  • De La Croix, David & Vitale, Mara, 2022. "Women in European Academia before 1800 - Religion, Marriage, and Human Capital," CEPR Discussion Papers 17229, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17229
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17229
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. David de la Croix & Frédéric Docquier & Alice Fabre & Robert Stelter, 2024. "The Academic Market and The Rise of Universities in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1000–1800)," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 22(4), pages 1541-1589.
    3. Palma, Nuno & Reis, Jaime & Rodrigues, Lisbeth, 2023. "Historical gender discrimination does not explain comparative Western European development: evidence from Portugal, 1300-1900," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    4. David de la Croix & Marc Goñi, 2024. "Nepotism vs. intergenerational transmission of human capital in Academia (1088–1800)," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 29(4), pages 469-514, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • N33 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17229. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.