Cultural Change Through Writing Style: Gendered Pronoun Use in the Economics Profession

Through their writing, people often reflect their values. Since the 1970s, academic economists have gradually changed their third-person pronoun choices, from using the masculine form to incorporating feminine and plural forms. We document this transition empirically, and examine the role of social interactions among economists in driving the cultural change reflected in these choices. Our analysis relies on a model where writing style depends on the influence of academic peers, the implicit negotiation between co-authors, and individual authors’ preferences for expressing gender equality values in their writing. We directly measure peer influence relying on time-varying academic connections between economists, and propose a methodology that uses a homophily-based model of co-authoring decisions to isolate the effect of peer influence from unobserved personal preferences. The model allows us to decompose the observed changes in writing style over the last 50 years into generational shifts, the increasing prevalence of co-authorship in the profession, the increasing share of female economists, and peer influence. Generational changes and the growing share of women in the profession play a minor role. Early on, contrarian economists accelerated the pace of change in writing styles by moving away from their peers’ behavior. The large fraction of conformists and the overall homophily in co-authoring, in contrast, slowed the adoption of innovative writing styles by restricting economists’ exposure to peers with different gender-attitude signaling preferences.