Incorporating Gender Politics into Introduction to US Government Curriculum

Abstract

Women are underrepresented among American legislators and political science majors. One explanation is that gender imbalances propagate through space and time. In this paper, we introduce a paired experiment aimed to assess the downstream attitudinal effects of priming the issue of women’s representation. At one predominantly male university and one gender-balanced university we randomly assigned Introduction to American Politics classes to complete a reading, written reflection, and in-class group activity on either gender representation or general representation in Congress. As expected, students who were assigned to read the gender representation treatment article were more likely to discuss gender issues during the in-class activity than students who read the general representation control article. However, contrary to our theoretical expectations, the treatment was ineffective in changing lasting student attitudes on gender representation in politics. In sum, there were minimal differences in treatment effects between the two disparate experimental settings. Our results suggest that single-shot lessons on women’s representation in political science classrooms is insufficient to change perceptions, attitudes, and motivations underlying near ubiquitous political gender imbalances and and instructors should strive to mainstream gender into American politics curricula.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2021.1950603

Keywords:

• American politics
• active learning
• gender

Notes

1 At the gender-balanced university, there were six sections spread evenly across three days. The two sections for each of the three days occur sequentially, i.e. 2-3pm and 3-4pm. Random assignment of sections is stratified by day to control for enrollment differences by day-of-section. At the predominantly male university, the two sections were held sequentially on the same day.

2 Articles are in the Online Appendix.

3 The survey is in the Online Appendix.

4 Differences between the two universities for mentions of race and class are likely attributed to the gender-balanced university being more racially and economically diverse than the predominately male university.