Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science

Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science

by Dawn Langan, University of Pennsylvania Teele and Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Gender in the Journals,” by Dawn Teele and Kathleen Thelen examines publication patterns across ten prominent political science journals between 2000 and 2015, documenting a significant gap in publication rates for men and women. Using as benchmarks two conservative measures of women’s presence in the field as a whole, the authors document a striking underrepresentation of women in the discipline’s top journals. They show that the gap is most pronounced in some of the official flagship journals of the regional and national political science associations. The study further finds that in flagship journals, women are not participating equally in a broad trend toward co-authorship.  The most common form of authorship over the past 15 years continues to be men writing alone. Within co-authored research, most published collaborative research is by all-male teams.  Finally, the authors suggest that the methodological orientation of many of the top journals may be exacerbating the gender publication gap.  They show that the journals that are most heavily tilted toward publishing quantitative – as opposed to qualitative – research are also those that publish the fewest female authors.

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PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 50, Issue / Published online: 31 March 2017