TY - JOUR
T1 - Women in Legislative Studies
T2 - Improving Gender Equality
AU - Powell, Eleanor Neff
AU - Schwindt-Bayer, Leslie
AU - Sin, Gisela
N1 - We thank APSA’s Centennial Center William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies, LSQ, the LSS, the National Science Foundation, the Rice University Creative Ventures fund, and our universities for supporting the work of WiLS. We also thank the participants in our survey and everyone involved in WiLS for their assistance and engagement in the initiative, especially our graduate research assistants over the past few years: Emily Elia, Collin Paschall, and Kaitlin Senk. We are especially appreciative of the PS editors and anonymous reviewers, whose comments dramatically improved our article.
WiLS was created from a conversation at a MPSA conference dinner where the authors of this article met for the first time and lamented the minimal representation of women in the subfield. We thought we could do something about it and wrote a short proposal to conduct a survey, host a social hour at the APSA Annual Meeting, and host a research workshop/hackathon. We shared it with the LSS, LSQ, and APSA and received initial funding from those organizations along with a National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop grant. The COVID pandemic interfered with the research workshop, but we held the hackathon online in Fall 2020 with 25 women in the field of legislative studies. The myriad activities that WiLS currently hosts, as well as its volunteers, resulted from that event.
PY - 2023/10/15
Y1 - 2023/10/15
N2 - Representation of women in the field of legislative politics is remarkably small and the absence of women has wide-ranging ramifications. In Fall 2019, we surveyed 361 women that we identified as studying legislative politics within political science to understand why women's representation in legislative studies is so low and what we can do about it. We found that many women study legislatures, but they do not always identify as scholars of legislative studies, often do not join the Legislative Studies Section, and tend to prioritize other journals over Legislative Studies Quarterly, the official journal of the section. In this article, we discuss several solutions to the problem of women's underrepresentation in legislative studies, including the new Women in Legislative Studies initiative.
AB - Representation of women in the field of legislative politics is remarkably small and the absence of women has wide-ranging ramifications. In Fall 2019, we surveyed 361 women that we identified as studying legislative politics within political science to understand why women's representation in legislative studies is so low and what we can do about it. We found that many women study legislatures, but they do not always identify as scholars of legislative studies, often do not join the Legislative Studies Section, and tend to prioritize other journals over Legislative Studies Quarterly, the official journal of the section. In this article, we discuss several solutions to the problem of women's underrepresentation in legislative studies, including the new Women in Legislative Studies initiative.
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U2 - 10.1017/S1049096523000306
DO - 10.1017/S1049096523000306
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85172700377
SN - 1049-0965
VL - 56
SP - 591
EP - 597
JO - PS - Political Science and Politics
JF - PS - Political Science and Politics
IS - 4
ER -