King's College London

Though the picture has improved over the last 20 years, academics found that less than a third of international trade scholarship in the most recent period of the study was authored by women, below the proportion of women academics working in the field and significantly below parity.

The findings were revealed in a new paper, Peripheral voices: women in international trade scholarship, co-authored by Dr James Scott, from the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London, and Dr Valbona Muzaka (Uppsala University).

The academics said: “We found that the contribution of women in publishing international trade scholarship has steadily increased, reaching 31.5 per cent in the period 2017–2021. However, this remains below the proportion of women academics in the relevant fields and significantly below parity.

“These disparities suggest the need for future research that elucidates a number of underlying factors that ultimately lead to this result. These include addressing why women are less likely to make the transition to postgraduate research and subsequently to enter academia, and what can be done to address this.”

Data for the study was drawn from a selection of 27 academic journals, with 2,959 articles centred around trade examined. All articles were published in the period between 2002-2021. From the articles, some 4,400 author names were collected and categorised by gender.

The results were then broken down into five-year groupings to measure progress over time. The academics found that in the first time period (2002-2006) about 19 per cent of articles were authored by women scholars. By 2017-2021, that figure had risen to 31.5 per cent.