By Justin Esarey
Sara Mitchell has published an interesting piece in The Washington Post about female participation in conferences and gender bias in the citations of published work. It’s of particular interest to the methodology community because Political Analysis and the annual meeting of the Society of Political Methodology are featured as particular cases.
I’ve reprinted one of the key figures from the article below:
(Graph by Sara Mitchell, originally printed in The Washington Post)
Quoting from the article, “The figure above shows gender differences in paper or poster presentations at the organizations’ annual conferences, revealing an 11 percent gender gap across these groups. The State Politics and Policy emphasis on substantive issues in American politics attracts a higher percentage of female presenters than conferences focused on methodological issues in the field (Polmeth).”
There is an upward, but slow, trend for greater participation by women in the conference shown in another graph from the article, again shown below:
(Graph by Sara Mitchell, originally printed in The Washington Post)
Disappointingly, the trend in female participation at Methods seems to be somewhat static at around 15% since the turn of the 21st century; participation at Peace Science and SP&P both start higher, and seem to be moving upward faster.
Finally, only 2.9% of citations in Political Analysis were to work produced by women, compared to 6% for journals of the Peace Science Society.
How should the methods community respond to these findings? I hope we can begin to discuss the question in comments and in future contributions to The Political Methodologist.