I want to discuss an important issue in the fields of
international relations and political science: the leaky pipeline. In both
academic and government positions related to the field of international
relations, we observe a pattern whereby women constitute a smaller percentage
of the workforce as we move up the seniority career ladder. If you take classes from older faculty at the
University of Iowa, you will notice that they are much more likely to be men.
Yet if we look at the gender distribution in the IR and political science
classrooms, we see close to a 50-50 percentage breakdown of male and female
students.
A 2009 survey[1]
of Political Science PhDs shows the following leaky pipeline patterns for men
and women in academic positions (listed from lowest to highest rank). Among female respondents (N = 342), 3 percent
are lecturers, 42 percent are assistant professors, 26 percent are associate
professors, and 29 percent are full professors.
This compares to 2 percent lecturers, 26 percent assistant professors, 28
percent associate professors, and 44 percent full professors among male
respondents (N = 963). This leaky pipeline is observed in academia even if we
control for other factors such as years of experience, research productivity,
and race (Toutkoushian
1999; Perna 2001). We see similar patterns in government and business sector
jobs where women are underrepresented in foreign policy and executive branch
bureaucratic positions (Dolan 2000), especially in the upper management
positions. Women also comprise a small percentage (4%) of the CEOs of the
largest companies in the world.[2]
Why does this leaky pipeline exist? First, the years in
which women can have children often overlap with the years of their career
trajectories.[3] The APSA survey shows that women who obtain
PhDs in political science have significantly fewer children than men with
PhDs. Second, male dominated fields like
international relations may be less appealing to female scholars due to both a
lack of descriptive representation (you don’t seem someone like yourself in the
classroom or office) and a negative reaction to male dominated perspectives on
the topic (e.g. realism). Third, women may face other barriers to success such
as having their work cited by others less frequently than men (Ferber and Brun
2011), being burdened with a much higher service load than their male peers (Mitchell
and Hesli, forthcoming), or feeling like their institutional workplace is less
supportive of women in their career. Finally, many couples work in the same
field and women might find themselves more often on the side making sacrifices
for the team.
What can be done to address this important issue? First, it
is important for senior women to mentor undergraduate students, graduate
students, and young women in their professions.
Many students show positive effects of mentoring on female success rates
(Bennion 2004). Second, we need to
expand the ontological scope of international relations to make our topic more
appealing to women. Some IR topics have more female scholars working on them
(e.g. international law, human rights, non-governmental organizations), thus we
would be wise to expand these areas of international relations both in terms of
the content and offering of our courses and in the pages of IR journals and
books. Third, universities and businesses need to do a better job promoting
family friendly policies.[4] Finally, institutions like the University of
Iowa can play a significant role in improving upon the leaky pipeline by
recruiting women to all positions and developing policies that will help women
employees balance career and family issues more effectively.
References
Bennion,
Elizabeth A. 2004. “The Importance of Peer Mentoring for Facilitating
Professional
and Personal Development.” PS:
Political Science and Politics 37(1):
111-113.
Dolan, Julie. 2000. “The
Senior Executive Service: Gender, Attitudes, and Representative
Bureaucracy.”
Journal of Public Administration Research
and Theory 10(3): 513-530.
Ferber,
Marianne A. and Michael Brun. 2011. “The Gender Gap in Citations: Does it
Persist?”
Feminist Economics 17(1): 151-158.
Mitchell, Sara McLaughlin and
Vicki L. Hesli. “Women Don’t Ask? Women Don’t Say No?
Bargaining and
Service in the Political Science Profession.” Forthcoming, PS: Political
Science & Politics.
Perna, Laura W. 2001. “Sex and Race Differences in Faculty
Tenure and Promotion.” Research
in
Higher Education 42(5): 541-567.
Toutkoushian, Robert K. 1999. “The Status of Academic Women
in the 1990s: No Longer
Outsiders, but not yet Equals.” Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 39(5):
679-
698.
[1] This
survey was funded by the American Political Science Association and designed by
Professor Vicki Hesli, Michael Brintnall, and other members of the APSA
Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession.
[3] See Professor
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent discussion of these trade-offs at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/
[4] To see
variation in family friendly policies in the top fifty political science
programs, see data that I compiled at http://www.saramitchell.org/.
nice post
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