Gender Gaps in Academic Careers Evidence from Economics in Argentina

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of gender disparities in academic economics in Argentina, and one of the few systematic studies on this topic in developing countries. Using newly collected and harmonized data from administrative records, university sources, web scraping, and ad-hoc surveys, we document women’s representation across stages of economics education and academic careers. We identify a leaky pipeline: a small gender gap at the undergraduate level widens in later stages, including research activity, faculty positions, publications, rankings, and leadership roles. Exploring potential drivers—such as academic performance, aspirations, exposure to role models, coauthorship, networking, funding, service—we find that women and men exhibit similar performance and comparable aspirations to pursue academic careers, yet their trajectories diverge. Although descriptive, our results suggest that gender disparities are unlikely to reflect differences in ability or preferences, and instead arise from a complex interaction of structural conditions and individual choices.