World Economic Forum has faced criticism in the past that the summit, attended by more than 2,500 people including global leaders and policy makers, lacked female representation. This resulted in "Davos Man," a catch-all term with negative undertones used to refer to elite, wealthy men that attend the event.

Bias creeps into the most popular introductory economics textbooks, which refer to men four times as often as they do women. Ninety percent of the economists cited in those textbooks are men, Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist, told the panel on gender issues in economics, based on a paper she is about to complete. When women are mentioned in textbook examples, they are more likely to be shopping or cleaning than running a company or making public policy.

Papers by women scored, on average, higher than those by men. That was true for both first drafts and final, published versions. But the trajectories of men’s and women’s writing styles diverged.The draft of the very first paper published by a female author was just as readable as the draft of a man’s first paper. Women’s papers, however, became more readable as their careers progressed. No such trends were seen for men. Women, it seems, had to improve their drafts to get their research published, whereas men did not.

“When I go to seminars in other disciplines, the tenor of the seminars tends to be a lot less about scoring points and…nail[ing] the speaker to the blackboard,” she said in an interview published this month on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. In economics, she says, presenting your latest findings can feel more like a testimony in front of a firing squad than a collaborative space where other experts help you sharpen your research. One of the problems with this kind of culture, Case believes, is “women oftentimes don’t respond as well to that as men do.”

Economics has a woman problem. Women are under-represented at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Following scandalous research that laid bare the “cesspool of misogyny” on the popular Economics Job Market Rumors website, the profession has done a fair amount of self-reflection about how it can be more welcoming to women. Economics attempts to explain how the world works, after all, so more diverse representation in the field is important to gain a more complete view of the economy.

Data I’ve collected and worked with during my PhD shows that women are also less central in the social network of informal collaboration. This refers to the process among academics of providing feedback and helping other authors to improve their work through comments and engagements. Such networks enable the global flow of knowledge, which is crucial for research.

There are more studies — ones that suggest that female economists’ papers take six months longer to get a peer review in a top journal, and that even when women do get tenured faculty jobs in economics, they get paid less. And then, even if a woman makes it to the front of a lecture hall — there might be no men listening to them.

The loss of industry over the last half century has taken with it a vital signifier of identity for many men. And in their reconstruction of who they are, their football club is sometimes the last remaining bastion.

A pervasive myth about the missing women students in economics – about 300,000 of them in the US alone by our rough count – is that the problem is their poor maths skills. You know: economics is too maths focused, and women are maths-phobic, right? That must be the problem. Wrong.

It is just as bad to have mainly male economic research and policy advice as it is to test medicines mainly on men. The results will fail at least half the population.