Who has more authority in the eyes of the public – male or female economists? This column uses an information experiment to show that the opinions of visibly senior female economists (professors in top economics departments) carry more weight. A plausible explanation is that credentials (signals of success) may reduce or reverse stereotyped discrimination: women who have made it in male-dominated domains may be seen as being even better than their male counterparts. In line with this, a follow-up experiment finds that the gender gap in favour of female experts disappears when the credentials are removed.
In July 2024, Rachel Reeves became the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, the most senior economics role in UK politics. With an MSc in Economics from the LSE and a spell working at the Bank of England, her background in economics is stronger than any of her ten male predecessors, yet her expertise has continually been challenged, including the cruel nickname, “Rachel from Accounts”.
Is this an example of stereotyped discrimination against female experts (Bohren et al. 2019)? Women are under-represented in junior and senior economic positions in the UK and many other European countries (Auriol et al. 2019, Hanspach et al. 2021). There is growing evidence that female economists face discrimination from above – for example, in the language used in academic reference letters (Baltrunaite et al. 2022, Eberhardt et al. 2023) and in the credit given for co-authored publications (Sarsons et al. 2021) – and also discrimination from below – for example, in student teaching evaluations (Boring 2017, Mengel et al. 2019). Evidence from other fields finds that members of the public discount female expertise – medical patients more often ask for a second opinion when the first opinion comes from a female doctor, and clients are less likely to follow financial advice given by a female advisor (de Vaan and Stuart 2022, Klein et al. 2022). These findings of discrimination are typically attributed to the stereotype of male expertise.
However, as argued by Bohren et al. (2019), stereotyped discrimination may be undone, or even reversed, by signals of women’s expertise. Professional credentials, for example, can lead people to update their beliefs (positively) about women’s expertise. Moreover, if people know that women face stereotyped discrimination, then credentials that show professional success may even signal that a woman is more expert than her male counterparts. In an experimental setting, Ayalew et al. (2021) show that discrimination against female managers is undone when participants see managers’ education credentials, while Mengel et al. (2017) find that the discrimination faced by female academics at junior levels is reversed in the case of professors.
Our study (Sievertsen and Smith 2025) offers new evidence on the authority of senior female versus male economists in the eyes of the public – and on the role of credentials. We ran an information experiment, asking members of the public for their opinion on ten topical issues (financial regulation, net zero, junk food, windfall taxes, regulation of twitter, greedflation, semi-conductors, price gouging, economic policymaking and AI) and showing them the (same) opinion on the issue expressed by a male or female economist. The expert opinions came from the University of Chicago’s Clark Centre Forum’s Economist Expert Panel (henceforth, ‘the panel’). The panel has 43 US-based members, all leading academic economists at highly ranked institutions (Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale). Panel members are regularly asked to give their opinions on topical policy issues. These opinions are collected in a standardised format – experts are asked to say whether they (strongly) agree/disagree with, or are uncertain about, a statement on the issue – and are published online. For the experiment, we constructed a gender- and opinion-balanced sub-panel, consisting of all female experts’ responses on the ten topics, matched with a male expert with the same response. Members of the public see one, randomly drawn (male or female) opinion from this sub-panel.
Figure 1 How the statements and expert opinions were presented in the survey
Notes: These figures show two example treatment variants for statement 1 (out of 10 statements).
We ran the experiment twice. In both experiments, we included the expert’s name and their photo from the panel website. In the first experiment (3,000 respondents), we additionally included their title and institutional affiliation, i.e. respondents were told that the named economist is a professor at, for example, Harvard University (as in Figure 1, Panel a). In the follow-up experiment (2,000 respondents, the public only knew the economist’s name (as in Figure 1, Panel b). Everything else about the two experiments was the same.
Main findings
A first finding is that individual economists are able to persuade members of the public. In previous studies, telling the public what ‘most economists’ think on a topic has little impact (Sapienza and Zingales 2013, Johnston and Ballard 2020). However, exploiting within-topic variation in expert opinion – i.e. comparing the effect on public opinion of seeing different expert opinions on the same topic – we find that the public’s opinion is affected by what expert opinion they see.
Turning to the effect of expert gender identity, the finding from the first experiment (with credentials) is that female experts are more influential. The additional effect of seeing an opinion expressed by a female expert is 20% greater (0.19 for female compared to 0.15 for male experts) than the effect of seeing the same opinion expressed by a male expert, as shown in Figure 2. This finding is robust to including controls for the expert’s institution, age, existing media presence, citations and features of the photo.
Figure 2 The expert economist’s influence on the public opinion
Notes: The chart shows OLS coefficients from a regression of the Likert response of the member of the public (on a 5-point scale) on the Likert response of the expert interacted with the gender of the expert. We include statement and respondent fixed effects. See Sievertsen and Smith (2025) for full details.
We can rule out that the effect is due to homophily: there is no differential effect of opinions expressed by female versus male experts on the views of men and women. We can also rule out experimenter demand effects: when we asked people what they thought we were trying to find out, fewer than 5% mentioned expert gender.
A plausible explanation follows from the fact that female experts tend to be less confident in expressing certain opinions (Sarsons and Xu 2021, Sievertsen and Smith 2024); knowing this, the public may be more convinced when female experts express an opinion and (strongly) agree/disagree. However, counter to this argument, the public is also more likely to ‘match’ with (i.e express the same opinion as) a female expert even when the expert’s opinion is that they are uncertain on an issue.
Instead, the findings from the second experiment provide support for the explanation that credentials reverse stereotyped discrimination. In the second experiment, where the public does not see that the experts are professors at prestigious universities, the authority gap disappears and female economists are no longer more persuasive, as shown on the right in Figure 2. It seems that female economists have more authority only when they are visibly successful.
What are the implications of our findings?
Our findings suggest that credentials matter. One practical takeaway is that, at the junior level, where women face the greatest discrimination, academics should reinforce their credentials and think about asking students to address them using their titles rather than first names. As for Rachel Reeves, our research suggests that the attempts to undermine her economics credentials – for example by saying that she knows very little about economics and questioning whether she worked as an economist at the Bank of England – may be a direct and highly effective way to diminish her expertise.
Source : VOXeu
