Are Economics Conferences Gender‐Neutral? Evidence from Ireland*
利用爱尔兰经济学会2016-2022年会议数据，研究盲审对会议论文接受中性别差异的影响，发现盲审消除了男性评审者的性别偏见，但女性评审者却出现了对男性作者的偏好。
We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymized submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in organizers' acceptance decisions, there is an indication of gender difference favouring the in‐group at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give higher scores to papers with an increasing share of male authors. Evidence suggests that the difference stems from unconscious stereotyping against lesser known female authors. Anonymization eliminates the gender gap of male reviewers, but introduces a gender gap in favour of male authors for female reviewers. We explore differential selection as an alternative explanation, finding that reviewer experience postblinding could potentially account for our results.