Measuring Inclusion: Gender and Coauthorship at the Federal Reserve Board

Relative to diversity, inclusion is much harder to measure. We measure inclusion of women in economics using novel data on coauthoring relationships among Federal Reserve Board economists. Individual coauthoring relationships are voluntary, yet inclusion in coauthoring networks can be central to research productivity and career success. We document gender affinity in coauthoring, with individuals up to 34 percent more likely to have a same-gender coauthor in the data relative to what would be predicted by random assignment. Because women account for under 30 percent of Federal Reserve Board economists, gender affinity in coauthoring relationships may reduce research opportunities for women relative to their men peers. Whereas commonality of research interests is not sufficient to explain observed gender affinity in coauthoring, we find that paper outcomes may encourage gender affinity, in that papers authored by only men are more downloaded and more likely to be published than papers by mixed-gender teams. Gender affinity may contribute to the gender gap in authoring as well: women make up only 23 percent of authors in the later part of our sample, about 4 percentage points below their share of the economist population. We estimate that reducing gender affinity by men could eliminate between 1.5 to 3 percentage points of the gender gap in observed research output by women. Our findings on gender affinity in coauthoring provide an empirical assessment of the state of inclusivity in economics.