Small Grant for Exploratory Research: Women's Advancement in Political Science, A Proposed Workshop for 2004 in Washington, DC

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Women have been and continue to be a minority of full-time faculty within politicalscience, and current statistics suggest they will remain below parity with men in thediscipline for the foreseeable future, despite substantial gains in the number of womenpolitical scientists over the last several decades. Women constituted 24% of all full timefaculty in 2001 (APSA 2002) an increase of 6% over 1991 when they made up 18% (Sarkees and McGlen 1999). And while they have made gains at all academic ranks since the early 1970s there is growing evidence that the percentage of women assistant professors has stalled at roughly 35% over the last 5 years. This is real cause for concern, suggesting a stagnant pipeline that will place clear limits on the number of future women political science faculty.There are various possible reasons for women's continuing minority status withinpolitical science but research on this point is far from definitive, in part, becauseresearch on women's progress in the discipline is not as well developed an area ofresearch as in other social sciences. To better understand the factors linked towomen's success within academia, political scientists could benefit from aninformational exchange with researchers in sociology and economics for whom women'sadvancement in academia is an explicit topic of research investigation. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research is to to hold a planning workshop in early 2004 to evaluate the current knowledge base regarding women's advancement in political science, and to identify the major barriers to their numerical increase in the discipline. To foster exchange across social science fields and benefit from evidence obtained by sociologists and economists, the investigators will invite several scholars who have studied women's development in the sciences and social sciences. In addition, invited participants will include political scientists who direct large-scale team-based research projects, hold leadership positions in the field, and/or have an active interest in gender issues and theadvancement of women. The workshop will lay the foundation for a grant proposal to besubmitted to the NSF ADVANCE leadership program.The workshop has the following goals: (1) Clarify the rate of progress of women inpolitical science at all levels of academic rank. (2) Clarify the key advancement problemsconfronted by women in political science; for example, are women having greater difficultyin getting promoted to full professor than in gaining tenure? (3) Explore the origins ofwomen's differential rate of advancement by prestige of the university and bysubfield in political science. (4) Identity the key barriers to women's academic success at different transition points.Broader Social Value: The workshop is intended to improve knowledge of women's progress within academic political science in order to design a program that will improve the recruitment and retention of women in the discipline. This has far reaching implications for the attractiveness of political science as a field of graduate study for women. An increased number of women graduate students should, in turn, increase the pool of women for a wide variety of non-academic careers including elective government office, the diplomatic corps, domestic and international intelligence, polling and elections, and public policy planning, Moreover, an increased number of women political science faculty should increase women's interest in the political process very generally, in part, because womenfaculty are most likely to teach courses that touch on the history and importance ofwomen's political involvement.