Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science

Abstract

This article explores publication patterns across 10 prominent political science journals, documenting a significant gender gap in publication rates for men and women. We present three broad findings. First, we find no evidence that the low percentage of female authors simply mirrors an overall low share of women in the profession. Instead, we find continued underrepresentation of women in many of the discipline’s top journals. Second, we find that women are not benefiting equally in a broad trend across the discipline toward coauthorship. Most published collaborative research in these journals emerges from all-male teams. Third, it appears that the methodological proclivities of the top journals do not fully reflect the kind of work that female scholars are more likely than men to publish in these journals. The underrepresentation of qualitative work in many journals is associated as well with an underrepresentation of female authors.

Gender and the Editorial Process:World Politics, 2007–2017

“…First, we need to ask under what conditions mentorship might not only result in coauthorship but also encourage women to submit their work more frequently for publication. Second, as coauthorship becomes more prominent and prevalent in the field, a trend highlighted by Teele and Thelen (2017), we must also investigate both the conditions fostering greater collaboration as well as if women are equally credited for coauthorship, since these types of evaluations affect decisions about promotion, salary, and leadership. 22 Third, we should further analyze if women scholars tend disproportionately to deploy certain methods that impact their journal submission and publication rates.…”

“…This analysis helps us better understand the publication disproportionality identified by Teele and Thelen (2017), by suggesting that-at least in the case of World Politics-the problem does not appear to be at the stage of editorial or peer review. The summary data, however, does suggest that part of the problem appears to be a pipeline issue at the stage of submission.…”

“…While there is much to be proud of, we are also concerned about the issues raised by Teele and Thelen (2017), who clearly demonstrate that the preponderance of articles published in political science journals are written by men. This is also true of World Politics.…”

Am I a Methodologist? (Asking for a Friend)

“…The demographic lag at the level of senior faculty means that it is easy to glance at identified methodologists and come away with a prototypical image of a senior, male pseudostatistician working at a PhD-granting research university. The composition of published (especially quantitative) research might give a similar impression (see Teele and Thelen, 2017).…”

Research Methodology and Community Participation: A Decade of Indigenous Social Science Research in Canada

“…For example, Indigenous authors with Indigenous given names may also be underrepresented and/or misgendered in the genderize.io database. In a previous study of article author genders, researchers hand-coded or verified the gender predictions of the genderize.io API for more than 1,000 articles and found that only 2 percent of predictions were incorrect, with a tendency to overpredict that a given name was female (Teele and Thelen 2017). To minimize potential errors, we have only coded a given name as belonging to a female author if the genderize.io API returns a probability greater than .7 that a name is female, and it is only coded male if the probability that the given name is female is less than .3.…”