Rejoinder: Women in the Profession? Assuming Gender in the Analysis of the Composition of UK Politics Departments
| Author | Charlotte Heath-Kelly |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920920565 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Gender in the Profession |
correction2020
Special Issue Article
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(1) 37 –38
Rejoinder:
© The Author(s) 2020
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Women in the Profession?
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920920565
DOI: 10.1177/1478929920920565
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Assuming Gender in the
Analysis of the Composition
of UK Politics Departments
‘Women in the Profession’ (Bates et al., 2020) has recently been published in Political
Studies Review and, in many regards, is an excellent analysis of the composition of the
UK’s Politics departments. The authors are clearly committed to advancing the equality
of women in the workplace and have produced data which shed important light on their
continued under-representation. I applaud this, and I am grateful to Political Studies
Review and the authors for considering my reply to their work. However, I hope that we
might open a discussion about the methods used in the research that allows our discipline
to reflect on binary assumptions about sex and gender. I hope that our conversation sheds
light on the unease which some scholars experience when research projects – and even
the Athena Swan initiative – code according to a gender binary, without asking partici-
pants how they identify. In addition, I would like to raise a secondary point about the
processing of personal data in the research without informed consent.
‘Women in the Profession: An Update on the Gendered Composition of the Discipline
and of Political Science Departments in the UK’ (Bates et al., 2020) analyses the under-
representation of women in the profession, using a dataset of 2553 Political Scientists
working in the UK. It finds incremental improvement in the position of women in Political
Science departments since the previous iteration of the study in 2011, but no increase in
the rate of that improvement. The aims of the study, and...
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