Women in International Relations

Women now receive political science degrees in record numbers, but female representation among political science faculty still lags behind that of many other disciplines. Only 26% of the 13,000 political science professors in the United States today are women (Sedowski and Brintall 2007). According to our recent survey of international relations faculty in the United States — the 2006 Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) Survey — women comprise an even smaller proportion of IR scholars: 77% of the IR faculty respondents are men, while only 23% are women.1 Even more than their counterparts in the wider field of political science, women in IR tend to be more junior and less likely to hold tenure than their male colleagues. Women comprise a minority at every level of the profession, but they are most scarce at the full professor level: Only 17% of political science professors and 14% of IR professors are women (Maliniak et al. 2007c; Sedowski and Brintall 2007). Women may be underrepresented in the profession and trail their male colleagues because they see the world differently; they may see the world differently because of their minority status within the discipline; or the causal arrow may run in both directions. Many feminist scholars contend that gender subordination explains significant differences in worldview between men and women. Other scholars suggest that the content of women’s scholarship contributes to their marginalization within the profession: Female political scientists adopt methods and choose topics that are not considered to be the best or most rigorous types of research by the editors of leading journals.2 As a result, “women’s publishing opportunities may be restricted, or ghettoized, to specific and gendered domains” (Mathews and Anderson 2001).