Disbanding the Old Boys’ Club: Strategies for Departmental Gender Equity

Abstract

awareness of gender disparities has begun (it is hoped) to lead to meaningful changes in the institutions and practices of our discipline. Our description of a series of innovations made to the hiring process—designed to counteract institutional and behavioral dynamics that work to decrease the representation of women in the discipline—is an example of these changes. Our review of that process suggests that a few relatively simple changes can contribute to greater gender balance in the field. Moreover, these changes are relatively simple and costless to adopt. These are practices that can (and, we think, should) be implemented by anyone conducting a search in political science. However, given the historical and (resulting) demographic composition of most political science departments, it is likely that most department chairs/heads and most search committee chairs are male (Mitchell and Hesli 2013). Of course, this is particularly likely to be the case in fields that historically have been male dominated (Charlesworth and Banaji 2019). Within political science, this includes the subfields of quantitative methodology, formal theory, normative political theory, and international relations. Indeed, the Society for Political Methodology’s diversity report recently noted that “themajority of the positions of (formal and informal) power in our field are occupied by non-minority men” (Hidalgo et al. 2018, 12). To the extent that such changes are implemented by primarily male faculty and administrators, their effectiveness offers the potential for multiplier effects because higher numbers of female faculty in turn may be empowered to assume these roles.