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doi:10.1017/S1049096516002985©AmericanPoliticalScienceAssociation,2017PS•April 2017 433
THE PROFESSION
Gender in the Journals: Publication
Patterns in Political Science
Dawn Langan Teele, University of Pennsylvania
Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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 jour-
nals. 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.
INTRODUCTION
A
dvancement up the academic career ladder is so
heavily tied to evidence of research output that even
outside of the rarified halls of academe the expres-
sion “publish or perish” is well known. Today, pub-
lication is more important than ever: placing one’s
work in top-tier journals is important not just to tenure and pro-
motion decisions but also plays a role in the job market for many
entry-level positions. This article explores publication patterns
across ten prominent political science journals, documenting a
significant gender gap in publication rates for men and women.
Our study takes place in the context of renewed interest in the
role of women in the profession. Although women have made great
strides over the past several decades, they still face important obsta-
cles even beyond the obvious and longstanding challenges many of
them confront in reconciling career and family. Research across
a range of different disciplines has uncovered subtle, and some-
times not-so-subtle biases against women in teaching evaluations
(MacNell, Driscoll, and Hunt 2014), letters of recommendation
(e.g., Trix and Psenka 2003), peer review (Wennerås and Wold
1997), and deliberation and group interactions (Karpowitz and
Mendelberg 2014), among many others.
1
Recent research focusing
specifically on political science has also uncovered important
gender effects. For example, Maliniak et al. (2013) identified a
significant gender citation gap in the field of international rela-
tions.
2
Ongoing work by Karen Alter and colleagues analyzes the
gendered construction of status, examining the underrepresenta-
tion of women both on popular platforms (such as Wikipedia) and
in professional associations associated with high prestige (e.g., the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences).
3
The American Political
Science Association’s (APSA) Committee on the Status of Women
in the Profession has initiated a project to track the advancement
of women through the academic pipeline—collecting data from the
largest PhD-granting institutions in political science in an attempt
to identify where the leaks are occurring.
4
This study is part of these larger efforts. In it, we seek to shine
a light on one area—scholarly publications—that we know to be
enormously important to tenure and advancement in the pro-
fession. It is hard to overstate the importance of publication in
top-tier journals in determining who advances—and who fails to
advance—within our discipline. Scholarly productivity is regu-
larly measured by number of publications, often alongside asso-
ciated citation counts. Moreover, quantity aside, assessments
of the quality of a scholar’s output are powerfully shaped by the
relative prestige associated with particular journals. What consti-
tutes “high quality” research in political science is socially and
politically constructed. Journals and journal editors play a central
Dawn Langan Teele is an assistant professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania. She can be reached at teele.academic@gmail.com.
Kathleen Thelen is the Ford professor of political science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. She can be reached at kthelen@mit.edu.
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434PS•April 2017
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The Profession: Publication Patterns in Political Science
role in that process because, to a very large extent, publication in
the discipline’s premier outlets is itself equated with “research of
the highest quality.”
We are not the first to inquire into gendered patterns of pub-
lication in our field.
5
A 1995 study by Cheryl Young examined
publication rates for women across 15 political science journals
between 1983 and 1994 (Young 1995). At the time, women made up
approximately one quarter of the total membership in the APSA,
after doubling over the previous decade (1995, 525). Against this
backdrop, Young’s finding that about 24% of the nearly 6,000 arti-
cles in her sample included at least one female author seemed
very promising. Still, as she noted, it was hard to overlook the fact
that this figure lagged significantly behind the share of articles in
her sample that had at least one male author (85%).
6
Also striking
in her results was that the work of female scholars was far more
likely to appear in the less prestigious journals in her sample
than in the top national journals (e.g., the APSR). Young optimis-
tically reasoned that this was a function of the relatively recent
arrival of women into the profession. She speculated that women
in the “lower academic tiers may be targeting lower status journals
because they are still learning their craft and may be hesitant to
submit their work to the top ranking journal” (1995, 526), and
she predicted that as women advanced to the “upper tiers of
academe” their work would appear more regularly in the top
journals as well.
Two decades later, our research shows that these optimis-
tic projections have failed to materialize. Women are no longer a
small minority and they are no longer newcomers learning this
craft. For over a decade now, women have accounted for approx-
imately 40% of all new PhDs in political science, according to
the NSF survey of earned doctorates.
7
Women also now make up
40% of graduate student members of the APSA, and a large and
growing share of members in early stages of their careers (39% of
assistant professors and 33% of associate professors). Yet, even as
their presence among PhD graduates and university faculties has
grown, women continue to be underrepresented among authors
in the journals that are typically seen as the discipline’s most
prestigious outlets. Among those whose work was published in the
AJPS, for example, less than 20% were women. Given the impor-
tance of publication to tenure, promotion, and salary decisions,
the gender gap in journals such as AJPS has enormous implica-
tions for women’s advancement in political science.
Our analyses reveal three trends that form part of a gender gap
in publication. First, we find that even as the share of political scien-
tists who are women has grown, there continues to be a pronounced
underrepresentation of women in the pages of many of the top jour-
nals in political science. This suggests that the low percentage of
female authors is not merely a reflection of women’s numbers in the
profession. Second, we find evidence that women are not participat-
ing equally in a broad move across the discipline toward coauthor-
ship. We see signs instead of gendered patterns of exclusion from
the kinds of research teams whose work increasingly populates the
pages of many journals. Third, it appears that the methodological
orientation of many of the top journals does not fully reflect the
kind of work that female scholars are more likely than men to
publish in such journals. The dearth of qualitative work in many
journals may exacerbate the exclusion of women.
We begin by introducing the dataset, and then turn to an anal-
ysis of the patterns we observe.
DATASET ON GENDER IN THE JOURNALS
Our research focuses on ten journals that are widely accepted
as leading forums for high-quality political science research in the
United States, including the APSA’s own two flagship journals,
the American Political Science Review (APSR) and Perspectives
on Politics (POP). The other eight journals in our sample are: the
American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), Comparative Politics (CP),
Comparative Political Studies (CPS), International Organization (IO),
Journal of Conflict Research (JCR), Journal of Politics (JOP), Political
Theory (PT), and World Politics (WP). We sought to include the
“top ranked” journals, though as Giles and Garand (2007) have
noted, there is a wide range of ranking schemes, and different
approaches produce somewhat different rankings. We settled on
a sample of journals that show up regularly, despite differences in
ranking criteria, thus reflecting some consensus in the discipline.
However, we also sought to include at least one journal from each
of the main recognized subfields in political science, as well as
journals associated with different methodological leanings.
8
Our data collection efforts began by acquiring the meta-data
on all articles published in these 10 journals from 2000 to 2015.
Web-scraping techniques allowed us to gather information on
nearly 8,000 articles (7,915), including approximately 6,000 research
articles (5,970). The journals vary in terms of the level of informa-
tion they provide about the nature of each article, but we were
generally able to determine the type of article (whether a research
article, book review, or symposium contribution), the names of all
authors—from which we could calculate the number of authors—and
often the institutional rank of each author (for example, assistant
professor, full professor, etc.). In what follows, we describe the var-
iable generation process for all types of articles in the dataset, but
note that the findings we report stem from an analysis of authorship
for research articles only, and not reviews or symposia.
Using an intelligent guessing technique (compared against a
hand-coding method) we used authors’ first names to code author
gender for all articles in the database. We also hand-coded the
dominant research method employed by each research article.
9
We
were further able to generate women among authors (%) which is
the share of women among all authors published in each jour-
nal, as well as other variables related to the gender composition for
each article, which include information about whether each arti-
cle was written by a man working alone, a woman working alone,
an all-male team, an all-female team, or a co-ed team of authors.
Yet, even as their presence among PhD graduates and university faculties has grown, women
continue to be underrepresented among authors in the journals that are typically seen as the
discipline’s most prestigious outlets.
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Because the convention in political science is generally to display
author names alphabetically, we have not coded categories like “first
author” or “last author” which are important in the natural sciences.
An accurate assessment of an author’s gender is critically impor-
tant for the validity of our analysis. Given the large number of articles
in the sample and the high levels of coauthorship, we automated the
process of assigning a gender to authors. In practice, we are “imput-
ing” gender, because we do not know about authors’ gender iden-
tity.
10
This process involved four steps. First, we employed research
assistants to hand-code the gender of each author for 1,311 articles.
Second, using Python scripts, we used authors’ first names to query
a database of names drawn from user profiles of major online social
networks to guess the likely gender of all authors.
11
Along with
assigning genders to first names, the guessing algorithm provided
a certainty measure from 0 to 1 that recorded its confidence in the
guess. Third, we compared the hand-coded genders with the guessed
values to evaluate the accuracy of the technique. Fourth, we fixed dis-
crepancies and conducted web searches for any author for which the
algorithm produced a certainty score of less than 1.
To assess the accuracy of the gender-guessing algorithm we
compared the 32 cases where the computer-generated guess did
not match our RA’s hand coding in the 1,311 articles coded by both
methods (2%). The algorithm was incorrect in 26 cases (2%), almost
always incorrectly guessing that a scholar was a woman (23 out
of 26). In the six cases where the hand coding was incorrect, the
RAs over-guessed men. Note that of all the cases where the RAs
were incorrect, the algorithm had a very high certainty score of 1.
In cases where the algorithm was incorrect, the average certainty
score was 0.8. Along with fixing the gender assignment of all of the
authors revealed by the comparison, we had a second RA re-check
the assignment for all authors whose certainty score was less than 1.
The RA found an additional 92 mistakes in the 5,510 articles where
gender was only assigned by the algorithm (1.7%), and these were
all fixed. Note that repeat incorrect guesses for the same author
were very common, so we are confident that we have eliminated
most of the incorrect assignments. Note, too, that because the algo-
rithm tended to over-guess women, this would inflate the presence
of women among authors and not undermine our findings.
Table 1 gives an overview of the sample, and also reports the
share of women as a total of all authors in the sample period for
each journal. Figure 1 provides a first look at the share of male
and female authors for each journal over the full time period.
The sections to follow consider a series of possible explanations
for the patterns we observe here.
Is it the Pool?
As a first step, we sought to develop an overview of the share
of women in the profession. This is, of course, a moving tar-
get because, while some attrition is to be expected among both
men and women, research has shown that the career pipeline
in academia is especially leaky for women (e.g., APSA 2005).
We establish three benchmarks that can serve to orient the
discussion—the share of female PhDs in political science, the
share of female members belonging to the APSA, and the
share of women among tenure ladder faculty in the 20 largest
PhD-granting institutions.
Earning a PhD is the crucial first step toward a career as a polit-
ical scientist. Thus, we begin with the female share of all political
Table 1
Database of Gender in the Journals Overview
Sample Starts Sample Ends # Research Articles Rank Available? Percent of Authors who are Women (2000–2015)
AJPS 2000 2015 909 Ye s 18.02
APSR 2000 2015 634 No 23.43
CP 2000 2015 318 Ye s 31.46
CPS 1999 2015 823 No 32.17
IO 2000 2015 349 Ye s 23.64
JCR 2000 2015 372 Some 23.60
JOP 2000 2015 1053 Ye s 22.91
POP 2003 2015 611 Ye s 33.55
PT 1999 2015 629 No 33.74
WP 2000 2015 250 Ye s 24.41
Figure 1
Women and Men as a Share of All Authors
of Research Articles in 10 Political Science
Journals, 2000–2015
Note: Over the entire time period, the share of women among all authors was
highest for Perspectives on Politics and Political Theory (nearly 34%) and lowest
for the AJPS (18%) and the JOP (23%).
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The Profession: Publication Patterns in Political Science
science PhDs, which over the past decade has been steady and
rather high, at around 40% (NSF survey of earned doctorates).
As noted earlier, an alternative measure—also based on NSF data—
that combines earned doctorates in political science and public
administration records an even higher share (47.1% in 2008).
However, we use the more conservative figure in what follows.
We do not have reliable data on the share of women who, after
having earned a PhD, then go on to a career in political science in the
academy. The best surrogate measure we have available is the share
of all members of the APSA who are women. The aggregate figure
(31% in 2014) is lower than the share of women who earned a doc-
torate in that year. However, the corresponding APSA membership
figures for women earlier on in their careers (at the lower ranks of
the tenure track) are significantly higher, and essentially the same as
the PhD share for assistant professors (nearly 40%), dropping some-
what for associate professors (33%). Figure 2 provides a breakdown
of APSA membership by gender and rank.
We know from previous research (e.g., APSA 2005, 4) that
women are relatively more likely than men to wind up in per-
manent lectureships or at teaching institutions and liberal
arts colleges. Hence, a third benchmark is the share of women
in the discipline’s largest PhD-granting departments.
12
Here,
we find that overall, 27% of ladder faculty are female (as of 2015).
However, once again, the share of women rises amongst the
younger cohorts: women make up 38% of untenured ladder fac-
ulty at such institutions.
We note that even though the share of women (both within
the APSA and within the largest PhD-granting departments)
is higher at these lower ranks—which, of course, is precisely
the group whose advancement depends on demonstrating
scholarly productivity—in all that follows, we will refer to the
more conservative (overall) share of women for each of the
three benchmarks.
How well represented are these women in the pages of the
top journals? Are female scholars published in these journals
in approximately the same proportion as their presence in the
discipline? In PhD-granting institutions? In the top-ranked
departments?
13
The answer to almost all of these questions is
“no” for most of the journals in our sample, as figure 3 illustrates.
Figure 3 plots the share of all authors contributing to research
articles (as opposed to review essays) who are women. Journals
higher up on the plot have a higher proportion of women among
authors—for example 33.5% of authors in Perspectives on Politics
are women—while journals lower down have a lower share of
women among their authors; only 18% of authors in the AJPS
over this period are women (similar to the APSR, with 23.4%). The
figure also includes three lines—line A depicts the proportion of
women among tenure-ladder faculty at the largest 20 PhD-granting
departments in 2015 (27%); line B shows the share of women
among all APSA members in 2015 (31%); line C charts the share of
women among newly conferred doctorates (40%). What is striking
is that, compared against these benchmarks, only four journals—
Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory, Comparative Politics, and
Figure 3
Women as Share of All Authors in 10 Political
Science Journals, 2000–2015
Note: Line A represents the share of women in the ladder faculty at the largest
20 PhD-granting departments in the discipline (27%). Line B represents the
share of women among all APSA members (31%). Line C represents the share of
women among all newly minted PhDs as reported in the NSF’s survey of earned
doctorates.
Figure 2
APSA Membership by Gender and
Academic Rank
Source: APSA
Are female scholars published in these journals in approximately the same proportion as their
presence in the discipline? In PhD-granting institutions? In the top-ranked departments?
The answer to almost all of these questions is “no” for most of the journals in our sample,
as figure 3 illustrates.
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Comparative Political Studies—are publishing women at rates con-
sistent with women’s presence in the discipline as a whole.
This mix of journals suggests a hypothesis that we are not
able to fully test with the data available to us. It could be that
publication rates across these journals reflect differences in the
composition of scholars working within specific subfields. For
example, we know that women have traditionally been underrep-
resented among scholars in American politics and international
relations, and better represented among students of comparative
politics (Shames and Wise 2017, figure 2). This could explain
the fact that those journals in our sample that explicitly focus on
comparative politics (CP, CPS) publish, on average, more female
authors than those with a significant international relations empha-
sis (IO, JCR, WP).
However, gendered sorting into subfields would not explain
is the pattern we observe for the four “generalist” journals in our
sample (AJPS, APSR, JOP and POP). These four journals—official
journals either of the national association or one of its regional
affiliates—are all “generalist” outlets, in that their websites indicate
that they are open to submissions across all subfields.
14
Yet,
as figure 3 shows, women are underrepresented, against all three
benchmarks, in three of those four “generalist” journals.
Returning to the full sample, we can use the APSA’s figures
on the share of women at different academic ranks (e.g., graduate
students, post-doctorates, assistant, associate, and full professors)
to examine the gender publication gap at each rank. In figure 4,
equal representation would imply clustering along the 45-degree
line. Instead, we see a significant gender gap for female authors
at nearly every professional rank. For example, although about
23% of full professors are women, only 11% of the full professors
who write for these top journals are women, meaning that there
is a gender gap of 12 points at the full professor level. Thirty-nine
percent of assistant professors are women, but women make up
only 27% of assistant professor authors in the journals, again a
gap of 12 points. In terms of the academic career ladder, the gap
for female assistant professors is especially consequential, as this
is the group most needing publications to advance to tenure.
Summing up the results with respect to our first question
(women as a share of the pool of all authors), we find that
publication rates at all of the journals in our sample are well
below the share of female PhDs. More significantly, with the
notable exceptions of Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory,
Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies, they are
also below the share of women in the APSA. Many of these
journals are, in fact, also publishing a smaller share of female
authors than the share of women on the faculty of the 20 larg-
est PhD-granting departments. Strikingly large gender gaps
exist at almost every academic rank. Relative to their share
among full professors, for example, women publish in the top
journals at far lower rates. Most consequentially of all, female
assistant professors seem to be quite disadvantaged relative
to their male peers when it comes to placing their work in the
top journals.
Coauthorship
Additional factors that could play a role in the gender gap in
publication patterns include changing norms and practices with
respect to coauthorship. A 2005 APSA report on “Advancement
of Women in Academic Political Science in the United States”
emphasized the importance of inclusion in collaborative research
and publication networks (2005, 2, 12 and passim). We know from
previous research (e.g., Fisher et al. 1998) that coauthorship and
scholarship by research teams has been growing in the discipline.
Yet, we find evidence that women are not benefiting equally in
the resulting multi-authored publications in the field’s top jour-
nals (see also Evans and Moulder 2011).
Previous research on coauthorship by Fisher et al. (1998)
focused on three journals (APSR, AJPS, and JOP) over the
period from 1950 to 1996. The authors document an increase in
multi-authored articles over this period, and show that by the
mid-1990s almost half the articles that appeared in these three
journals were co- or multi-authored. The context in which
Fisher et al.’s study took place was one in which the discipline
was just beginning to grapple with the issue of how to evalu-
ate multi-authored work, and so the core question motivating
their research was whether articles authored by women were
more or less likely to be collaborative across the sexes than
articles authored by men. The answer to this was a resounding
yes: women were nearly four times more likely to publish articles
coauthored with men than the other way around (1998, 852).
For Fisher et al., the worry was that if multi-authored work
were underrated, women would not benefit much from their
apparently greater proclivity to collaborate with others, raising
the “issue of how multi-authored articles should be evaluated”
(1998, 854). We return to the issue of how women’s contribution
to collaborative research is evaluated below.
Our core concern at this point, however, is a somewhat different
one, namely whether women have the same opportunities as men
to engage in collaborative research and publication as reflected
in overall publication patterns. Viewed in this light, Fisher et
al.’s data reveal a different pattern. Their figures suggest that
the decline in single-authored work from the 1950s to the
1990s was largely made up by an increase in all-male collab-
orations. Articles published by exclusively male multi-author
groups rose as a percentage of all articles published across all
three journals to 39.2%, while cross-gender collaborations rose
but only to 13.5%.
Figure 4
Representation of Women in the Journals by
Academic Rank
Note: The share of women at a given ladder level is on the x-axis, while their
representation among authors at that rank in the top journals is along the y-axis.
Equal representation would mean that the points fall along the 45-degree line.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096516002985 Published online by Cambridge University Press