In the second webinar on Representivity, Diversity, and Gender in Economics in South Africa, Siobhan Hitchcock shares her research on gender bias in the field of economics in South African Academia. In recent years there has been a growing focus internationally on the low participation of females in Economics, both in academia and business. While female enrolment in higher education, including other maths-based subjects, has grown substantially, this has not been the case for Economics. Economics, particularly as one progresses through postgraduate studies to doctoral degrees now stands out as an outlier. A number of reasons have been advanced for this, including the nature of the subject, the type of people it attracts and the lack of female role models. This research analyses gender compositions of staff and students at South African Higher Education Institutes. National data are obtained from government publications and data relating to four specific South African universities was obtained directly from the universities. While there are drop offs in the overall female representation of students at the Masters and Doctoral levels in South Africa, this share is gradually increasing. Additionally, Economics seems to perform better than what is depicted in the US, and in comparison to some STEM subjects in South Africa. The environment within the field of academic economics for both female students and staff seems to be more positive than what the international literature depicts for the US. But there are nonetheless different levels of satisfaction between male and female academic economists. Siobhan Hitchcock studied a B.Comm at Rhodes University with majors in Economics and Management and continued to do her Honours and Masters degree in Economics, also at Rhodes. Her research at both the Honours and Masters levels was focused on Gender Economics, and more specifically gender bias is academia.
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