The world’s most powerful economist is a woman — but chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen doesn’t have a great deal of female company at the economic top table. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, it is true — although she is a lawyer. But the president of the European Central Bank has never been a woman, nor the president of the German Bundesbank, nor the governor of the Bank of England. The US Treasury secretary has never been a woman, nor has the UK chancellor of the exchequer, nor the president of the World Bank.

全世界最有影响力的经济学家是一名女性——但在经济学的贵宾席上，美联储(Fed)主席珍妮特耶伦(Janet Yellen)并没有多少女性同伴。的确，克里斯蒂娜拉加德(Christine Lagarde)领导着国际货币基金组织(IMF)——但她是一名律师。从来没有女性担任过欧洲央行(ECB)、德国央行(Bundesbank)，或者英国央行(Bank of England)的行长。女性也从未登上美国财政部长、英国财政大臣或者世界银行(World Bank)行长的位置。

To some extent this reflects the well-known fact that women are under-represented in positions of power. But beyond that it suggests that economics itself is a curiously male-dominated discipline. There has still only been one female winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: Elinor Ostrom in 2009 (she shared the prize with Oliver E Williamson), and she was not a mainstream economist herself.

某种程度上，这反映出一个众所周知的事实：女性在掌管大权的职位上代表性不足。但除此之外，这还表明经济学是一个由男性主导的学科，这很奇怪。目前为止获得诺贝尔经济学奖的女性依然只有一位：埃莉诺攠斯特罗姆(Elinor Ostrom)（她在2009年和奥利弗威廉姆森(Oliver Williamson)分享了这个奖项），但她本人也不是一个主流经济学家。

Quite why economics is so testosterone-laden is unclear. The situation at the top of the profession now is partly a reflection of the state of economics education decades ago. Ostrom’s desire to study economics was set back by the fact that she was discouraged from studying mathematics at school because she was a girl. We cannot travel back in time to give her a more enlightened maths teacher.

经济学这个学科充满雄性激素的原因还相当不明确。这个行业顶端的现状部分反映了数十年前经济学教育的情况。奥斯特罗姆学习经济学的愿望曾经受挫——她的老师曾经劝阻她学习数学，理由是她是个女孩。我们没办法回到过去给她安排一位更开明的数学老师。

In the younger echelons of the profession there is more cause for cheer. The John Bates Clark medal, for example, is awarded to economists based in America under the age of 40; it is a prestigious award and in many cases a precursor to the Nobel Prize. Until 2007 it had been an exclusively male preserve but it has since been won by three women.

看一看这个专业领域更年轻的梯队，我们有更多欢呼的理由。比如，约翰贝茨克拉克(John Bates Clark)奖章是一项授予美国40岁以下的经济学家的奖项；该奖项享有盛誉，曾多次成为诺贝尔奖的先兆。直到2007年，该奖项一直是男性专属，但此后已经有了3名女性获奖者。

Another hopeful development is the blossoming of psychological realism in economics, in the form of behavioural economics. Behavioural economics doesn’t have all the answers but it is certainly asking some good questions. Since psychology is as popular among female undergraduates as economics is unpopular, it seems plausible that behavioural economics will make the dismal science more appealing to women.

另一个充满希望的苗头是心理现实主义(psychological realism)在经济学领域开花结果——以行为经济学的形式。行为经济学并不能提供一切答案，但其的确提出了一些好问题。既然心理学在女大学生中受欢迎的程度堪比经济学的不受欢迎程度，行为经济学应会增强这个乏味的学科对女性的吸引力，这听起来似乎合情合理。

Perhaps we should simply wait, then, and the women will break through? That seems doubtful. The American Economic Association publishes a regular newsletter from the “Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession”, and two summers ago the newsletter pondered a depressing trend — or rather a depressing lack of a trend.

那么，或许我们该做的就是等待，然后女性会取得突破？这似乎不大可能。美国经济学会(American Economic Association)发表“经济学专业女性地位委员会”(CSWEP)的定期简报。两个夏天以前，这份简报探讨了一种令人沮丧的趋势——或者更不如说是一种令人沮丧的没有趋势。

“The fraction of all bachelor of arts candidates majoring in economics has not budged much over the past decade,” wrote Cecilia Conrad of the MacArthur Foundation, co-editor of the newsletter. There are two or three male undergraduate economists for every female undergraduate economist. That is not good — but at least the ratio isn’t getting worse. In the UK, the ratio is similar but has shown a marked decline between 2002 and 2013. The basic explanation is lack of demand: too few women wish to study economics.

“在所有能拿到文学士学位的学生中，经济学专业的学生的比例在过去十年没有多大变化，”简报联合主编、来自麦克阿瑟基金会(MacArthur Foundation)的塞西利亚康拉德(Cecilia Conrad)表示。经济学男性本科生和女性本科生的比例是2比1到3比1。有些糟糕——但至少这个比例没有恶化。英国的比例与此类似，但2002年到2013年间出现过显著下降。基本的解释是需求匮乏：想要学习经济学的女性太少了。

Tempting as it might be to blame the financial crisis for this trend, the sharpest movement occurred a decade ago, before the crisis hit. The downward trend in the percentage of women enrolled in UK undergraduate economics courses has continued since then but much more slowly.

尽管人们或许会忍不住把这一趋势归因于金融危机，但最剧烈的变化出现在10年前，也就是金融危机之前。英国攻读本科经济学课程的女性比例的下行趋势此后一直持续，但放缓了许多。

One possible explanation is that unconscious sexism is depriving young women of role models in the profession. Justin Wolfers, an economist and New York Times contributor, recently complained that when journalists wrote about economics research with both male and female authors, journalists routinely quoted the man or cited the paper as though the man were the senior author.

一个可能的解释是，无意识的性别歧视让年轻女性在这个专业领域找不到榜样。经济学家、《纽约时报》(New York Times)撰稿人贾斯汀茠尔弗斯(Justin Wolfers)最近抱怨，当记者写到由男性和女性作者共同撰写的经济学研究论文时，总会习惯性地引用这名男性的名字或者把男性当做第一作者来引用这篇文章。

(My own confession: I once committed the same sin in demoting Wolfers’ co-author Betsey Stevenson when she should have been cited first. And another confession: one indignant reviewer on Amazon pointed out that my first book, The Undercover Economist, habitually uses “he”, “his” and “him” in situations where female pronouns would have been perfectly proper. These days I try to do better.)

（我先自己忏悔一下：我曾经对沃尔弗斯的合著者贝齐史蒂文森(Betsey Stevenson)犯下同样的罪过，她本应作为第一作者被引用。还有，一位愤怒的评论者在亚马逊(Amazon)网站上指出，我的第一本著作《卧底经济学家》(The Undercover Economist)在使用女性代词也完全合适的情况下习惯使用“他”和“他的”。最近我尝试改进这一点。）

Unconscious sexism is hardly the exclusive preserve of economics, though, so what else is going on? Diane Coyle, an economist and FT contributor, wonders if mathematics is the problem, since girls are less likely than boys to study mathematics at A-level. She recently sounded a call to arms on her blog: “Girls, women, brush up on the maths a bit if you need to, but above all come and study economics!”

不过，很难说无意识的性别歧视是经济学独有的现象，那么还有什么原因呢？经济学家、英国《金融时报》撰稿人黛安科尔(Diane Coyle)怀疑数学是否是问题所在，因为比起男孩，女孩学习A-Level数学课程的可能性更低。她最近在自己的博客上发出了战斗号令：“姑娘们，女人们，如果需要的话就再温习一下你的数学吧，但最重要的是，来学习经济学吧！”

I can’t disagree with that but we cannot just blame imbalances in mathematics. A recent study by Mirco Tonin and Jackie Wahba of the University of Southampton found that even among A-level maths students, girls were less likely than boys to choose economics. And in the United States, where economics degrees are just as male-dominated as in the UK, girls have long since achieved gender parity in advanced high-school maths.

这一点我同意，但我们不能把不平衡都推到数学身上。南安普顿大学(University of Southampton)的米尔科堠腢(Mirco Tonin)和杰姬茠歬拜(Jackie Wahba)最近的研究发现，即使是在学习A-level数学课程的学生中，女孩选择经济学的几率也比男孩低。美国和英国一样，经济学学位基本由男性主导，但美国的女孩们早就在高等水平的高中数学课程上实现了性别平等。

The sad truth is that economics just does not seem to be terribly attractive to young women. That is a shame, and it has financial consequences, since economics graduates tend to be well paid. But the real loss is to economics. If we cannot make the subject relevant to half the world, we have a problem.

可悲的事实是，对于年轻女性来说，经济学似乎的确不是那么有吸引力。这是件令人遗憾的事情，而且还伴随着经济后果，因为经济学毕业生的收入一般都不错。但真正蒙受损失的是经济学本身。如果我们无法使世界上一半的人和这门学科建立关系，我们就有麻烦了。