Building and Sustaining an Academic Pipeline by the Sponsorship of Women of Color Political Scientists

Building and Sustaining an Academic Pipeline by the Sponsorship of Women of Color Political Scientists

By Taneisha N. Means, Vassar College, and Kimberly Fields, University of Virginia

The discipline of political science is majority white and male, and women of color comprise less than 5% of all faculty in the profession and remain underrepresented across the subfields (American Political Science Association 2008; Reid and Curry 2019). Persisting underrepresentation of political scientists of color leads some scholars to ask, “Where do we begin?” to increase and sustain diversity and to ensure the well-being, success, and survivability of political scientists of color (Garcia and Hancock Alfaro 2021; Lavariega Monforti 2012; Mershon and Walsh 2016).