SBP: Gender Representation in Political Science Graduate Training

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary Articles and books authored by female scholars remain underrepresented in the syllabi of graduate coursework despite an increase in women's participation in the sciences. In political science, recent studies have demonstrated that scholars cite women less frequently than men in publications. Citations matter because they shape hiring and promotion decisions. Given that the citation gap may begin in graduate coursework, the PIs investigate gender representation in the domain of graduate training. What graduate students are required to read shapes their understanding of who are the leading scholars and what scholarship is considered important. By increasing public awareness of women's representation in graduate training, this project will lead to more scholars considering gender diversity as they prepare their syllabi. The project will produce a database and software that scholars can use to diversify their syllabi. The project aims to have a long-term impact on gender equality in the sciences. Increasing understanding of women scholars' representation in graduate training cultivates an inclusive science and engineering workforce. Technical Summary This project will investigate the representation of male and female scholars in the training of political science doctoral students. Graduate syllabi and comprehensive exam reading lists will be collected in order to establish an original, publicly-available database of works assigned to political science doctoral students from across the subfields of political science. The database will be used to examine two questions: (1) To what extent are female scholars represented in assigned works? (2) What factors affect variation in gender representation in the works that faculty and graduate programs assign?. Factors hypothesized to affect rates of assigning female authors include instructor gender, age, race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, academic rank and years in the profession. The project will also produce free, open-source software to convert syllabi text into a CSV formatted list and to code the genders of authors.