The small representation of women and minorities among students of economics has been noted for some time. While the proportion of B.A.'s earned by women in psychology rose from 36.7 percent in 1949-1950 to 70.8 percent in 1988-1989, in sociology from 50.6 percent to 68.8 percent, and even in mathematics from 22.6 percent to 46.0 percent, in economics it has increased from only 7.6 percent to 32.5 percent. The share of Ph.D.'s earned by women in 1988-1989 was 56.2 percent in psychology, 50.9 percent in sociology, 26.6 percent in business, 19.4 percent in mathematics, and 19.0 percent in economics. Hence, general sexism in the classroom1 does not appear to be the main culprit, nor do the explanations that mathematics requirements inhibit women's entry into economics or that women are uninterested in business-related fields seem convincing. Instead, one must look to factors specific to economics. Evidence that women students do not perform as well as men in introductory economics courses (John J. Siegfried, 1979; Gordon Anderson, et al., 1994), although they have higher grades overall, further adds to this conclusion. For these reasons there has been considerable interest among feminist economists in the chilly classroom climate, for women and minority students in economics courses. In this paper, the focus is on the small representation of women among economics faculties, the biased subject matter, and the narrow approach of traditional economics. The number of women faculty can only be increased gradually as their representation among graduate students and new faculty hires increases. However, the subject matter can be changed more rapidly, as the consciousness of instructors and authors of textbooks is raised, and the challenge to the traditional economic approach appears to be making more progress than most of us dared to hope only a few short years ago. Thus, in spite of the remaining problems, there is reason to believe that in economics, as in most other disciplines, women's progress will eventually accelerate.

Numerous studies have established that part of the very substantial male-female earnings gap is explained by differences in the amount of human capital workers have accumulated. (See, for example, Jacob Mincer and Haim Ofek, 1983.) Institutional factors have also been found to play a role in determining wages (David Gordon et al., 1982). Occupation further helped to explain the remaining gap, but several researchers have shown that introducing dimensions of work authority by taking into account the individual's position in the work hierarchy explains more of the variation in earnings than does occupation (Martha Hill, 1980). Last, two recent studies (Ferber and Spaeth, 1984; Spaeth, 1985) also included control over monetary resources. This variable added substantially to the explanatory power of earnings regressions, even after human capital variables, institutional factors, and several other measures of work authority had been entered. Like the other studies, Ferber and Spaeth also found that reward structures for men and women are quite different, suggesting the possible existence of discrimination. The question whether women may also be at a disadvantage in achieving control over monetary resources was not investigated. When Hill examined the process of achievement of work authority, she found substantial differences between male and female workers. In this paper we examine whether the same is true for attaining financial control. I. Data and Analysis