The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT): A Web-Based Tool for Estimating Gender Balance in Syllabi and Bibliographies

Abstract

This article introduces a web-based tool that scholars can use to assess the gender balance of their syllabi and bibliographies. The citation gap in political science is described briefly as well as why under-citing women relative to men is a problem that should be addressed by the field. The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT) is presented as a way to make assessing gender balance easier with the aim of remedying the gender gap. This is followed by an outline that explains in nontechnical terms how the tool identifies author names and then predicts their gender to produce a single document-level percentage of women authors. Finally, best practices for diversity in syllabi and bibliographies are discussed, and various public sources that can be used to find scholarly work by women, as well as scholars of color, are listed.

The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

“…Recent work has laid out guidelines for responsible citation practices (49), which include consideration of gender imbalance. There also exist tools to probabilistically measure the proportion of women and men within course syllabi and reference lists (50). Various organizations also provide information that can assist researchers in creating representative reference lists.…”

Association Between the Proportion of Women on a Conference Planning Committee and the Proportion of Women Speakers at Medical Conferences

“…Gender was determined using the Gender Balance Assessment Tool. 4 For meetings where this information was not publicly available, committee names or committee composition were requested from the conference administration. Linear regression was used to examine the association between committee composition and speaker composition.…”

How diverse is your reading list? Exploring issues of representation and decolonisation in the UK

“…Subject Benchmark Statements as part of the UK Quality Code for Higher Education). Yet, existing research highlights that published or highly cited works do not necessarily reflect the discipline as a whole (Schucan Bird 2011; Dickersin 2015) and curricula can present a distorted view of a field with a more pronounced tendency to list particular publications, for example, by male, white scholars (Colgan 2017;Hagmann and Biersteker 2014;Romero 2017;Sumner 2018). On a global scale, curricula templates are often exported from North to South (Altbach 2016: 94;Shahjahan et al 2015) and the pool of research from which reading lists are drawn favours the Global North.…”

“…Colgan 2017). Yet, disciplines vary according to how homogenous they have become (Altbach 2016) so descriptive representation may not be desirable in subfields with low diversity or female representation (Sumner 2018). On the other hand, drawing the reading list from the global scholarly community may provide a more holistic picture of the discipline but lack relevance to local scholars and their specialisms.…”