Gender Issues in the Ivory Tower of Brazilian IR

Abstract

What is the status of women in the discipline of International Relations (IR) in Brazil? This study provides a pioneering map of gender issues in Brazilian IR, focusing on inequality, discrimination and harassment. It includes a literature review as well as the findings of two sets of research: the first a survey of personal and professional issues faced by academic staff in Brazilian IR, and the second a report on the staffing of IR and related departments at private and public academic institutions in Brazil. Our research shows that despite the specificities of the Brazilian higher education system, Brazilian IR academics conform to international trends in respect of gender issues, facing monetary and/or familial inequalities and gender discrimination in their careers. It also shows that 25% of female academics have experienced undesired sexual contact at least once, and that there is a gap between male and female understandings of what constitutes sexual harassment.

Relações Internacionais e interseccionalidade

“…Desde o surgimento das Relações Internacionais enquanto campo específico do saber, as mulheres estiveram subrepresentadas. Essa é uma tendência comum em diversas áreas do conhecimento que desde sua constituição tiveram por séculos restrições de participação das mulheres no ensino formal e no mercado de trabalho -com algumas persistindo até hoje em distintos lugares (LETA, 2003;LIMA, 2008;BELTRÃO;ALVES, 2009;SILVA;RIBEIRO, 2014;BACCARINI;MINILLO;ALVES, 2019). Tendo como foco inicial de seus debates o tema da guerra e as possibilidades de paz no início do século XX, até a década de 1980 esteve ausente nas RI discussões sobre as questões de gênero.…”

Marriage of convenience, love at first sight? A brief manual for teaching international relations in Brazil and beyond

“…Databases such as Gender Stats (https://genderstats.org/) may help in this sense.13 On female underrepresentation in IR see, for instance:Maliniak et al 2013;Colgan et al 2017;Baccarini et al 2019; Scola et al 2020 14 https://opensyllabus.org/ 15 Project Pericles. https://www.projectpericles.org/course-syllabi-database.html16 See, for instance, the syllabus collection of the Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights -https://genderandsecurity.org/ projects-resources/syllabus-collection.…”