Parity Now! Women in Latin American Political Science Departments and Journals

• In Event: Gender & Inclusion: The Profession & Beyond

Abstract

Latin America is the world region with the highest average percentage of women in national legislatures and women there now also make up a disproportionately large percentage of university students. Recent studies in a small subset of Latin American countries suggest, however, that women remain underrepresented in the discipline of political science as graduate students, faculty members, and solo authors of articles in top journals, among other indicators (Rocha 2016; Friedenberg 2018; Mendes and Figueira 2019). Our research examines the question of women’s presence in Latin American political science in both broader and narrower senses. On one hand, we expand the number of Latin American countries examined from the six where political science is most institutionalized as a discipline to all those (14 countries) where we could find data on the number of female professors in political science departments (111 departments). We also expand the number of journals assessed from nine to 64 journals publishing political science research in Latin America and 16 Latin Americanist journals in Canada, the United States, and Europe. On the other hand, our focus is on political science departments and academic journals only, rather than also including graduate students, academic associations, or other indicators. Specifically, following Stegmaier et al (2011) and Palmer et al (2020) on academic journals in the United States, we compare the proportion of female political science faculty members to the proportion of women serving as editors and as members of editorial committees and international advisory committees for relevant academic journals. In addition to assessing this comparison across Latin American countries, we compare Latin America-based journals with those based outside the region as well as evaluate our findings in light of similar studies in the United States.

The broader survey we will employ aims to assess women’s presence in the political science profession in the region as a whole, while the narrower focus on faculty members and journals will facilitate cross-national and cross-regional comparison given data deficiencies in some countries. Our special attention to journal editorial and advisory committees also serves a practical purpose. If our assumption that Latin American-based political science journal committees are disproportionately male is correct, achieving gender parity on such committees is a relatively easy and potentially powerful reform. Gender parity in academic journals could be accomplished much more quickly than reaching gender parity in faculty ranks and it could signal the removal of (some) barriers to women’s advancement in the discipline and thus encourage women to apply for political science doctoral programs and faculty positions. Advances in gender parity, in turn, may help promote theoretical and topical pluralism in the discipline (Rocha 2016; Friedenberg 2018).

While our main goal is to map the gender balance in the political science discipline across the region, we will also test a few pertinent hypotheses based on the scant existing literature:
1) Countries where political science has been institutionalized as a discipline for longer periods of time – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay (Altman 2005) – should have more female faculty members in political science departments and more proportional representation as editors of journals and as members of editorial and advisory boards;
2) No correlation will be observed between the proportion of women serving in congress and the proportion of women in political science departments or academic journals;
3) Latin American political science departments will have a smaller share of women and a smaller percentage of senior female faculty members than political science departments in the United States;
4) Latin American-based political science journals will have fewer women as editors and a smaller proportion of women on editorial and advisory boards compared to Latin Americanist journals based outside of Latin America.
Evidence in support of these hypotheses could point to what might be viewed as a double paradox: women have made more gains towards gender parity in Latin American politics than in Latin American political science, while women in the United States have advanced further towards parity in political science than in politics.

Authors

• Benjamin Goldfrank, Seton Hall University

• Yanina Welp, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute