Quickly thrown together thesis for the Gender Macro paper proposal

Not the best writing, but you get the idea of what I'm going after. I'll be using the NSF's SESTAT data:

The science and engineering labor markets have been persistently dominated by men, and although women are making inroads into the life sciences the underutilization of female scientific talent is substantial. New growth theory’s emphasis on endogenously determined research and development as the principle source of economic growth implies that gender disparities in the science and engineering labor market may negatively impact economic growth. This paper will review long-run trends in female higher education across the OECD. It will then estimate R&D production functions for men and women, which will be used to discuss the growth costs of gender disparities. Three sorts of R&D production functions will be considered to triangulate the impact of different policy choices. First, a production function will estimate the expected output of additional female scientists and engineers, with no adjustments in the resources available to those women (i.e., no changes to the provisioning of the average female scientist), and no adjustments in the culture of science (i.e., no adjustment for the assumption that male and female R&D production functions are equal in the absence of gender norms). The second production function will explore the expected output of additional female scientists and engineers conditional on the availability of resources available to the typical male (i.e. – provisioning women with the educational backgrounds, grant resources, etc. that would make them comparable to male scientists). The third approach will estimate expected output of additional female scientists if their R&D production function is identical to that of men. Tying these gendered R&D production functions to economic growth is difficult and will only be discussed generally. For example, it is not clear how much an additional patent or scientific article will boost growth. But this analysis will provide the basis for a discussion of the importance of gender disparities in a new growth theory model.