Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science

Abstract

Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women's underrepresentation, to ensure that women's expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the "Women Also Know Stuff" initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed. In this article, we share the origins of our project, the effect we are already having on media utilization of women experts, and plans for how to expand that success within the discipline of political science. We also share our personal reflections on the project. W e are political scientists. We are women. We know stuff. And we are deeply concerned about the implicit bias in our profession that minimizes and marginalizes the voices of women. More than a decade ago, the American Political Science Association (APSA) noted the problem of underrepresentation of women in the professoriate, created by (1) a leaking pipeline, (2) a chronological crunch, (3) a hostile institutional climate, and (4) insufficient opportunity and support in the culture of research (American Political Science Association 2004). That report highlighted the various factors contributing to the lack of gender parity in the profession, with the result that men outnumber women in political science, especially at higher rungs of the academic ladder. This problem is particularly true for women of color, who are even less well represented than women overall. Yet, even taking into account the imbalance in the number of men and

The gender gap in commenting: Women are less likely than men to comment on (men’s) published research

“…Men are more likely to collaborate with men than with women and women are given less credit when collaborating with men [1][2][3]. Women are less likely to be the first or last author on articles published in prestigious journals [4,5], women's research is less likely to be read, shared, and cited [4,6,7] for alternative perspectives, please see [8,9], women are held to higher peer review standards and hence female-authored papers take half a year longer to publish [10], women are less likely to be invited to submit papers for journals and to act as reviewers [11][12][13], men are less likely to respond to requests by women editors to review papers [14,15], and women's research is less likely to receive media coverage [16,17]. These differences matter-their combined effect make it harder for women scholars to get jobs, advance in their careers, and ultimately, to attain scientific eminence [18][19][20][21][22][23] for alternative perspectives, see [24][25][26].…”

Is Political Science Relevant? The Decline of Critical Scholarly Engagement in the Neoliberal Era

“…The journal even has numerous subsections devoted to broader questions within the discipline and to providing teaching resources for professors. 8 But I am more concerned with dominant trends in the discipline, rather than with the efforts of specific individuals or journals, which, despite their best efforts, have been unable to reverse the harmful developments I discuss in this essay. Many of the criticisms in this essay echo those offered in the "Perestroika" movement of the early 2000s, which occurred prior to my entrance as a scholar into political science, and which related to the discipline's problems with methodological narrowness, lack of critical analysis, and disengagement from practical politics.…”

Improving Women’s Advancement in Political Science: What We Know About What Works

“…This will allow long-term causal evaluation of mentoring effects in political science (APSA Presidential Task Force on Women's Advancement in the Profession 2019). Furthermore, recent case studies (without a comparison group) show potential for building on these mechanisms using virtual peermentoring and networking opportunities, such as writing groups (Cassese and Holman 2018) and Women Also Know Stuff (Beaulieu et al 2017).…”