Politics and International Relations: A Gendered Discipline
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920956863 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Gender in the Profession |
956863PSW0010.1177/1478929920956863Political Studies ReviewThomson and Kenny
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(1) 3 –11
Politics and International
© The Author(s) 2020
Relations: A Gendered
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Discipline
DOI: 10.1177/1478929920956863
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Jennifer Thomson1 and Meryl Kenny2
Abstract
This introduction provides an overview of the gendered nature of politics and international
relations, before a brief summary of the articles that make-up this special issue.
Keywords
gender, politics, international relations, representation
Accepted: 17 August 2020
In 1961, members of the Political Studies Association (PSA), the major professional body
promoting the study of politics in the UK, were invited to a dinner at the Reform Club in
London. One of their numbers, Margherita Rendel, was refused entry to the Club because
at the time they did not admit women. She subsequently wrote about her treatment to the
then Secretary of the PSA, John Day, who replied, ‘I must confess that it never occurred
to me that you would be excluded from the Reform Club, although I have heard such
clubs were masculine institutions’ (cited in Grant, 2010).
Almost 60 years after its occurrence, this anecdote still has much to tell us about the
status of women in Politics and IR (PIR) in the UK. That women might be excluded from
the main event is unsurprising; that it would ‘never have occurred’ to John Day that there
might be an issue with a woman’s presence is equally to be expected. This special issue
explores the contemporary gendered make-up of Politics academia in the UK. Like
Rendel’s apparently solitary presence, we know that there is a continued underrepresenta-
tion of women in the discipline, including a paucity of women (and particularly women
of colour; Rollock, 2019) in senior positions, and an overrepresentation at the lower end
of the professional scale (see Bates et al; Briscoe-Palmer and Mattocks; and Akram and
Pflaeger-Young, all this volume). As the articles in this special issue illustrate, it is dispro-
portionately women who are often to be found at the helm in terms of tackling these
issues across institutions, and leading on initiatives such Athena Swan and Race Equality
1Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK
2Department of Politics and International Relations, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Thomson, PoLIS, Claverton Down Campus, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: j.thomson@bath.ac.uk
4
Political Studies Review 19(1)
Table 1. PSA Membership by Gender, 2015–2018 (%, Rounded).
Gender
2015
2016
2017
January 2018
Male
69
63
69
67
Female
30
28
31
32
Prefer not to say
1
2
1
1
Source: Political Studies Association membership report, March 2018.
Charter submissions (Tzanakou and Pearce, 2019: 12–15; see also Caffrey et al., 2016),
as well as calling out day-to-day gendered discrepancies in teaching and welfare
provision.
For women within the discipline, there therefore remains the dual task of both bringing
these problems to light, and then fighting to better them. This special issue brings together
four articles which map the gendered terrain of the contemporary disciplines of Politics
and International Relations in the UK; take stock of existing and new research on gender
and the profession; and point us in the direction of strategies for change.
Where are Women in PIR Academia in the UK?
The continuing numerical underrepresentation of women in the profession has been well-
documented, including in this special issue (Bates et al., in particular). As a result, we
focus less on that here in our introduction. However, we would like to draw attention to
the gendered make-up of one of the major professional organisations in our discipline in
the UK, and the one which publishes this journal – the PSA.1
As Table 1 and Figure 1 show, women remain a minority within the contemporary
membership of the PSA, and are best represented in the category of early career research-
ers (ECRs). However, as can be seen in Table 1, numbers of women do appear to be hold-
ing steady, although they continue to make-up less than a third of the overall membership
(and these data have not been consistently collected by the PSA over time). While the data
on race and ethnicity are only partial, the percentage of members who identify as Black,
Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) is around 4% (PSA Membership Statistics report,
January 2018).2
As outlined in Rosie Campbell and Sarah Childs’ (2014) collection Deeds and
Words (ECPR Press), women in the PSA – as chairs, trustees, specialist group leaders
and ordinary members – were and have been feminist institution builders within the
discipline. They have created links and networks not only within the PSA, but also
across Europe and internationally, and many of the early pioneers in the discipline
were (and still are) heavily invested in mentoring a second and third generation of
women PIR scholars.
Much of this early work happened through the long-standing PSA Women and
Politics Specialist Group. The group was established at the 1977 PSA Annual
Conference with the aims of promoting research on women, gender and politics, while
also seeking to combat sexism in the profession. It included among its founder mem-
bers pioneering feminist political scientists like Joni Lovenduski, Judith Evans, Jean
Wooddall and Vicky Randall. ‘Sympathetic males’ were also welcomed to attend
(Grant, 2010). In addition to creating spaces for women within the discipline, these
pioneers also worked through ‘mainstream’ bodies – with Joni Lovenduski joining the
Thomson and Kenny
5
Figure 1. Gender Across Membership Categories in the PSA, January 2018.
Source: PSA membership statistics report, January 2018.
PSA Executive Committee in 1978, along with Vicky Randall as Secretary. In 1981, in
a paper prepared for the PSA Executive drawing on a survey she had done of the pro-
fession, Joni Lovenduski cited the low presence of women in PIR, who were at that
time only 11% of the profession (Grant, 2010). She also highlighted systemic patterns
of disadvantage involving higher teaching and service loads for women, gendered
publication patterns, lower earnings, leaky pipelines, gendered paths to promotion,
and the continuing masculine biases of the subject itself – which as Lovenduski
observed was still largely ‘concerned with the study of men rather than of persons’ and
biased towards...
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