Are economics conferences gender-neutral? Evidence from Ireland

We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymised submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in the organisers’ acceptance decisions, there is an indication of in-group gender bias at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give higher scores to male-authored papers. Evidence suggests that the bias stems from unconscious stereotyping against lesser-known female authors. Anonymisation eliminates the in-group bias of male reviewers, but introduces a bias in favour of male authors for female reviewers.