Gender Bias in International Relations Graduate Education? New Evidence from Syllabi
by Jeff Colgan, Brown University
Gender diversity is good for the study of International Relations (IR) and political science. Graduate training is an opportunity for scholars to affect the demographics of their field and the gendered practices within it. This article presents a first-cut investigation of the degree to which gender bias exists in graduate IR syllabi. It finds that the gender of the instructor for graduate courses matters significantly for what kind of research is taught, in two ways. First, female instructors assign significantly more research by female authors than male instructors do on averageGender Bias in International Relations Graduate Education? New Evidence from Syllabi. Second, female instructors appear to be considerably more reluctant than men are about assigning their own research as required readings. Some but not all of the difference between male- and female-taught courses might be explained by differences in course composition.
PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 50, Issue 2 / April 2017, pp. 456-460