For foreign policy-focused think tanks, we considered each public event they listed on their websites in 2018. Our hypothesis was that think tanks that are more gender-balanced in terms of scholars would also be more gender-balanced in terms of panel composition. Another interesting finding is that there were only a few think tanks that would do an event around a single woman (such as a global leader), or a single female scholar, while there was an abundance of events revolving around one single male leader or scholar.įrom a methodological point of view, we started from the mentioned WIIS report and selected the top 20 institutions it cited. It should also be mentioned that several of the women-only panels were either held on International Women’s Day or focused on topics like sexual violence or civil suffering. At CATO, the Heritage Foundation, Aspen Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, one third or more of the events were all-male, yet they did not organize one single all-women panel. At CATO, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, half or more of the panels were all-male. In other words, in 27 percent of the cases, the organizers were apparently unable-or unwilling-to put at least one woman on stage. For the rest, out of 967 foreign policy panels, 217 were manels. Only the Center for American Progress completely avoided organizing one-gendered panels. Institute for Peace (USIP), the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and the Stimson Center, all of whose panels consisted of 40 percent or more women. RAND exceeded gender parity on panels, closely followed by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for American Progress, the U.S. Mimosa Giamanco is Research Assistant for the Foreign Policy Initiative at the Institute of Women Policy Research. The majority of the research assigned in IR graduate courses is written by men. Men also out-publish women by a ratio of two to one. Women IR scholars’ work is not as well-recognized as that of male IR scholars-a problem for the whole of political science, as women are significantly underrepresented on the list of the 400 most frequently-cited political scientists and are cited less often than their male colleagues.
Women also tend to be more junior and less likely to hold tenure than their male colleagues and just a minority achieve senior positions such as Full Chair.
They are also less likely to work at research universities: more women IR scholars (48 percent) teach at liberal arts colleges or universities without Ph.D. Discrimination continues to occur throughout one’s career: despite women constituting half of the graduate population in political science, they constitute only 40 percent of IR faculty.
The discrimination begins early in one’s career: for instance, among PhDs at the country’s top institution, Harvard, 5 percent of males are in IR as opposed to two percent of women. These findings are consistent with the numbers in academia, where women scholars in International Relations are still a minority: 70 percent of International Relations (IR) faculty is male.