The Gender Gap and Academic Publishing in Political Science: Evidence from Canada

ABSTRACT

The underrepresentation of women-authored scholarship in political science journals remains a persistent issue. Studies confirm that a gender gap exists in many leading American and European journals and that a key contributing factor is the lack of supply from women authors. To what extent is this gap present in the Canadian Journal of Political Science (CJPS), given the Canadian Political Science Association’s efforts to promote gender equality? To answer this question, we analyze an original dataset of CJPS submissions from 2008 to 2022. We find that a modest gender gap does exist; women tend to submit fewer manuscripts and publish fewer articles in the CJPS relative to men. On the other hand, we find no evidence of bias against women authors during the review process. In fact, they fare as well or better than men across editorial teams and regardless of the handling editor’s gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender gap
• academic publishing
• political science

Acknowledgments

With the exception of Cynthia Huo, the authors of this article served as the editorial team of the Canadian Journal of Political Science from 2020-2023. They would like to thank the ARCS editors and the reviewers for offering helpful advice and suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

We did indicate a potential conflict of interest in the acknowledgments section in that four of the five authors were part of the editorial team of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2020-2023.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2024.2349432.

Notes

1. The issue of an absence of women in the higher ranks of the discipline has also been described as a “game of Academic Chutes and Ladders” to reflect the reality that the path to full professorship is neither linear nor presupposed, as a “leaky pipeline” suggests; rather, the challenges disproportionately faced by women resemble “chutes” that prevent them from moving up the academic ladder while allowing men to progress in their careers without encountering the same barriers (Windsor, Crawford, and Breuning 2021).

2. Following Bittner and Goodyear-Grant (2017), we recognize that “gender” and “sex” are different concepts. For the purposes of this paper, however, we treat them interchangeably given the nature of our dataset and to be consistent with the existing literature on academic publishing.

3. In our dataset, there are 52 First Decision Accepts. As a scholarly journal with rigorous peer review and editorial processes, it should be noted that almost all these accept decisions come from a Special Issue on COVID-19 and Currents manuscripts, which were both designed to ensure rapid editorial decisions through peer review. For a robustness check of our results, we replicated all our analyses in two ways. First, we removed the COVID-19 special issue submissions and ran our models on the remaining submissions. Second, we ran our models with only the COVID-19 submissions. In both instances, results are virtually identical to that reported in the article.

4. We recognize that this starting point might seem arbitrary to some readers given that there is likely a selection bias on the characteristics of scholars who choose to publish in the CJPS. We acknowledge Everitt’s work (2021), which suggests that some feminist, Indigenous, and critical scholars may have chosen not to submit their work to the CJPS due to perceived biases about the journal toward particular kinds of research.

5. Indeed, our analysis of submission patterns by editorial team lends some support to this argument. Of the four editorials teams that administered the CJPS in our dataset, the highest proportion of women authors occurred during the editorship of the Calgary team, which happened to be the only team prior to 2022 where the English co-editor was a woman. The Western team’s submissions were also higher than Concordia’s and Toronto’s, which may be a legacy effect from the Calgary team or could reflect the fact that one of the assistant editors on the Western team was a woman of color and the other a man of color. See Table A.9 in the online Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Alcantara

Megan Payler completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario (UWO). Cynthia Huo is Politics PhD student at Princeton University. Cameron Anderson is a Professor and Graduate Chair in Political Science at UWO. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy is an Associate Professor at UWO. Chris Alcantara is a Professor of Political Science at UWO.