An increasing number of studies, mainly focused on the Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly on North America, found that women, despite the discrimination they faced, significantly contributed to economics. Some historians (Forget 2011) developed statistical analyses of the frequency and topics of women's contributions, especially in journal articles and in PhD theses. Others, Kirsten (2002) and Dimand et al. (2000), collected bibliographies and selections of writings by women economists who were important, either because they made a substantive contribution to the field or because they were historically the first woman in a particular country to contribute to the discipline.
The project aims both at shedding light on the contributions by Italian women economists from the recent past (1940s) and at highlighting how an appropriate consideration for women's contribution can help clarifying some passages in the development of economic thought in Italy. In order to deny the Baumol's (1995) idea that a few women were contributing to the economic literature, we propose a gender analysis of authors of Italian economic journals and academic production from the '40s.
The activities to be undertaken within the project are divided into two main strands that aims at:
(i) filling the substantial ignorance about who were the women pioneers in the economics profession in Italy;
(ii) identifying gender differences in the academic economic production and trends in the segregation of women authors by subject areas in the main Italian economic journals from the 1940s to nowadays.
Among women economists internationally identified as determinant in the evolution of the economic thought (Dimand et al. 2000) only two are Italian: Vera Cao Pinna and Costanza Costantino. This project will provide evidence to infer that there were not just two women economists in Italy's recent past.
The main impact of the project is an innovative, critical analysis, with gender lenses, of the evolution of the recent history of economic thought in Italy in order to increase knowledge about women¿s contributions to economic ideas beyond the USA and the UK.
The creation of an innovative dataset of Italian women¿s economic production form the 1940s will be on open source. Materials will be available to browse across different subject fields, and searches can be refined by content type, subject, region, period, organisation, contributor and notable figure. Users can conduct a free search across, essays and journals and view an overview of each item.
Moreover. to increase the visibility of Italian women economists we will create Wikipedia pages for each women economists identified, where biographical notes and description of the contribution to the economic thought will be available.
The results of the project will also help to understand the barriers to a fuller recognition of women¿s contribution to the economics profession. Specifically the results of the project will be scrutinized with the aim to find relevant implications for research evaluation, increasingly crucial in the promotion of the role of women in research. In particular in Italy, bibliometrics is often assumed to be neutral and objective, while it reproduces negative consequences mainly in terms of equality and diversity. In fact, a study on the evolution of scientific production of Italian academic economists (Zacchia, 2017) found a recent tendency to women¿s ¿homologation¿ to their male colleagues, i.e. a gradual convergence on the same research fields. A historical approach is needed to understand the determinants of these recent developments, as well as what was the prior situation. Finally, we plan to liaise with the ¿Gender Commission¿ of SIE (the Italian Economic Association), with the aim to report the main results of the project and analyze their possible use to help both understanding the determinants of the glass ceiling effect in the economic profession in Italy and stimulating a lively debate on responsible metrics in research evaluation that could account for diversity and reflexivity in order to anticipate the systemic and potential effects of indicators and updating them in response.