Political science publishing remains male-dominated: a random political science journal article is roughly twice as likely to be written by a man. Many questions about where women are present or absent in the discipline remain unanswered—across journal prestige, coauthorship patterns, and subfields.
📚 What Was Counted
- An original dataset drawn from the International Political Science Abstracts (2022).
- More than 7,000 articles and over 13,000 authors from political science around the world were analyzed.
- Comparisons made across journal rank, single- versus multi-authorship, and subfields.
🔎 Key Findings
- Overall gender balance: roughly a two-to-one chance that a randomly selected article is authored by a man (male-dominated authorship).
- Journal prestige: no detectable difference in the percentage of female authors between higher-ranked and lower-ranked journals.
- Authorship patterns: women show a slightly higher propensity to publish in teams rather than as single authors.
- Subfield variation: women are especially underrepresented in political theory, where they account for only 21.6% of published articles—about a 12 percentage-point deficit relative to the overall average.
⚖️ Why It Matters
- The findings show that gender gaps in knowledge production are not simply a matter of exclusion from top journals; instead, they vary by subfield and coauthorship patterns.
- Underrepresentation in specific subfields like political theory could shape disciplinary agendas, citation patterns, and whose questions are prioritized.
- Understanding where gaps appear helps target interventions aimed at improving gender equity in scholarly production.
