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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Sexism in Political Science: Fact or Fact?

There is a discussion on PSR about sexism in political science, with most folks concurring that it is still an issue with some deniers pointing out that support groups for women are exclusive, too.  Um, yeah.  How to address such discussions?  I go to my standard operating procedure: what have I seen over the years?  The answer: a heap of sexism which has not gone away.

First, there is the repeated myth that jobs are gamed for women and minorities, which explains why white men don't get jobs.  Of course, this defines all women and minorities who do get jobs as less qualified.  The problem with this myth is that it is not true.  I cannot speak for the other subfields, but my work with the TRIP data indicates that IR scholars are mostly white (80*%) and mostly male (70%), and that these numbers have only changed modestly since they started doing TRIP surveys ten years ago.  You would think that if most of the jobs were going to women and minorities, the numbers would have swung.  I also would not have much in the way of male friends in the business that are my age or younger if women were always or mostly beating the men.
      In my career, I have lost many job competitions and I cannot think of one where an inferior woman beat me out.  I have mostly lost to males, including some I consider superior to me, some that are my equals and a few that I would consider to have inferior records at the time.   Indeed, most of the job searches I remember, I was competing against other men, including my first and second tenure-track/tenured jobs.
     The repetition of this myth helps to foster sexism by allowing the men who share it to consider the women (and minorities) as inferiors who did not earn their jobs.  Indeed, I originally came out on PSR as myself to de-myth a job search my department was running--that we were only looking for females for a particular job search. 

Second, while sitting in various departments, I have seen plenty of sexism.  At my first tenure track job:
  • one faculty member was sleeping with multiple female grad students, creating a very hostile work environment for all;  I was told  that one of the perks of the job was "they let you screw the students here." 
  • one faculty member said at a job search meeting that a female candidate did not need the job because her husband had a job;
  • every sexual harassment workshop for the department was trivialized by some of the older males.  
      At my next job, there was a serial sexual harasser.  I had heard about him before I got there, and then another incident happened.  Because it was all covered in confidentiality, only a few faculty (and all of the grad students at the time) learned of it.  There was a concerted effort to make sure this guy would not serve as adviser to any grad students and especially females.  That effort has apparently dissipated as I recently learned that he is serving as an adviser to female grad students again.  Somewhat less problematic was that we had a speaker series that seemed to invite only males with the occasional token female sprinkled in.  The one year I ran it, I found several female scholars who presented excellent talks and one token male who did great as well.

Third, almost always when I see a list of a person's favorite books recommended on some blog, it has somewhere between zero and one females.  Which is why I wrote this post a while back which took little time to write since most of my favorite books are by women.  Similarly, we see plenty of panels and workshops that have few, if any, women, such as the most recent Aspen Forum.

Fourth, we actually have some IR scholars lamenting the end of the Old Boy's Network.  Note Boy's and not Girls or Kids or whatever.  These folks sit in powerful positions.

Fifth, I also see my female friends be far more burdened by service (there was a recent graph flying around the internet demonstrating that women and minorities do far more service than white men).  Since there are relatively fewer women and minorities who are tenured or Full, they tend to get hit with lots of requests as people want a balance or representation on committees, among letter-writers, whatever.  Good intentions that lead to bad outcomes since service goes unrewarded.

Sixth, I have seen far more attacks at PSR on women for their looks, for their relationships, for daring to beat a man out in a job competition and more.  I don't think that PSR is representative of the discipline, but it does shape attitudes and perceptions.  I don't think the profession is as hostile to women as it used to be, but PSR often makes the case that not much has changed (the evidence would be more obvious if the moderators didn't delete many of the offending posts and threads).

Seventh, women get paid less, promoted less despite/because of doing more service, and get less research money.  Thanks to Page Fortna for reminding me of this (in the comments). 

I am sure there is plenty of sexism that I didn't observe as it did not affect me directly, and I tend to be oblivious.  The reality is that path dependence is a bastard--making it harder to compensate for the sins of the past.  Of course, there are still plenty of sinners still around as I have discovered in my academic travels.  There has been progress, as there are more women who are successful and have gotten tenure, but there are still plenty of impediments and enough men with lousy attitudes/beliefs.  Which is why we need some vigilance when people put forth the old BS.

12 comments:

  1. Solid Post.

    To Point 1. You are talking about jobs being acquired now but measured against the total number of professors (many of whom retain tenure) and have been in place for years -which is quite the heuristic. To get an accurate read on sexism 'now' you would need to cite the data of new hires OR compare the 80% white and 70% male data and see if (as sad as it may be) that actually is improvement over the last 20, 30, 40 years...

    To point 2. Holy shit that's scary and I hope those anecdotes are not wide spread.

    To Point 3. That's disappointing given the amount of great female writers (particularly in the 17th and 18th century), but you would also expect it to be roughly proportional to the number of writers across all time which were mostly men (albeit largely because of other oppressive conditions).

    To point 4. Sad. No one should lament more equality.

    To point 5. I wonder if they were not asked to chair those committees if the argument instead would be that the committees themselves are unbalanced and sexist - catch 22. Oh well, another one of these problems that will only be solved by the hiring of more women.

    To point 6. What's PSR?

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  2. 1: Sure, but I have been hearing that myth for over twenty years--if it was at all true, there would have been far more change in the balance since then. But yes, real numbers would have been helpful. My semi-spew is not always well researched.

    2: The anecdotes are the tip of the iceberg. I forgot to mention a couple of others, and, as a man, I don't observe as much.

    3: Lists of great RECENT books should not be 90-100% male.

    4: Yep.

    5: Yep, catch 22 plus path dependence--not good.

    6: Political Science Rumors, a website where folks can mostly anonymously post about the profession.

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  3. In a bit of shameless self-promotion, I have a paper on what I think is a too-often trivialized element of sexism in the profession, bias in student evaluations of teaching. It's a serious issue, especially in large classes and especially in departments that put heavy emphasis on these evaluations in promotion and award decisions. https://faculty.polisci.wisc.edu/llmartin3/research/working-papers/

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  4. Thanks for posting. Will check out once I get down from the high seeing "Inside Out."

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  5. Excellent movie! Dragged my 14-year old daughter and a couple of her friends to it. I liked it more than they did, though.

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  6. Probably hit a bit too close to home ;) Not sure it is my favorite pixar, but Drezner was right about how much feels it has.

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  7. You can add to the list discrepancies between men and women in salaries and research money. Lots of causes for both (less mobility for women on average because of partners' jobs, less forceful negotiating, implicit bias, etc.).

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  8. Thanks. I probably also should have mentioned the leaky pipeline.

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  9. Just an anecdote in response to Page's comment: A male colleague of mine was being recruited by another university. Another colleague tried to reassure me that they were only going after him instead of me because I "made too much money." This wasn't very reassuring because he made substantially more than I did, in spite of being junior to me.

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  10. Not great.

    I could have included an anecdote about how I learned/revealed of an attempt to exclude a female colleague from a post-dissertation defence celebration. A student was defending his dissertation at a place after I had moved on, and in the conference call, I asked my female former colleague to pay for the guy's beer for me, and it quickly became she had been excluded from the planned festivities. After the department had been through so much, including receivership, it was sad to see a younger generation of men repeat the sins of the past.

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  11. The evidence you cite in point 1 does not back your contention at all. ( it doesn't argue against it either, it is just irrelevant.)

    The link you offer as evidence for point four is complete BS: you must of been hoping that no one would actually click on it.

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  12. That post has been clicked on more than 2000 times, which is far more than my average spew. Plus the re-posting elsewhere got heaps of hits.

    Some powerful senior male scholars are critical of professionalization and publicly lament the decline of the Old Boys Network. What kind of signal does that send? You may think it is complete BS, but it is funny I only hear from men and not women that it is BS. Oh, and there is more to it than that part of that post. That is just shorthand for the pile of stories over the years.

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