Recognising Gender: A Response to Gonzalez Ginocchio,Hindmoor and Stanley

Abstract

A response to Pluralism and Political Studies in the UK: A Pilot Study into Who Gets What in the Discipline by Brenda Gonzalez Ginocchio, Andrew Hindmoor and Liam Stanley.

This response speaks primarily to the status of gender research in political studies, although there is an inevitable link here with the number of women in the discipline, as those researching and teaching in the gender subdiscipline are, as Gonzalez Ginocchio et al. note, overwhelmingly likely to be women. Gonzalez Ginocchio et al.’s findings align with a broad international literature which has found that gender and feminist perspectives have been less readily integrated into political studies than other social science disciplines, despite the major contributions feminist theory has made to understandings of power and political institutions (Baker, 2019). The same literature has uncovered a persistent gender gap in publication patterns and gender bias in citation practices (Costa and Sawer, 2019). Yet sweeping accounts of the ‘state of the discipline’ can overlook how the discipline is constituted in terms of institutions and individual departments, their practices around, for example, recruitment and the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and local ideas about what constitute ‘priority areas’ for teaching and research.

Gonzalez Ginocchio et al. recount the pluralist history of the discipline, with a focus on the Political Studies Association (PSA) and the development of an ‘agree-to-disagree consensus’. Following their findings regarding the composition of the departments surveyed, we might also ask how dynamics at the level of the individual institution or department perpetuate disciplinary hierarchies. This would involve, first, interrogating the impact that the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)/REF status of the departments surveyed has had on their gender and subdisciplinary make-up. We know that gender is implicated in the construction of ‘academic excellence’ (Van den Brink and Benschop, 2011), and we know that REF itself is gendered. Women were much less likely than men to be selected for inclusion in REF 2014 (HEFCE, 2015), including in the Politics and International Studies Unit of Assessment. ¹ Women who were included in REF submissions were less likely to have their outputs rated as 4*. ² It would be interesting to know whether the REF process itself might also play a role in the unequal recognition accorded to different subdisciplines: Are some subdisciplines more REF-able than others? Comparing the departments surveyed by Gonzalez Ginocchio et al. and those less highly ranked in REF may be illuminating: Might it be easier for women and those working in less ‘recognised’ subdisciplines to get a foothold in the latter?

We could also ask about institutional recruitment practices and the impact these have on the subdisciplinary composition of political studies. Many gender and politics researchers will be familiar with the experience of being told ‘you seem like a good candidate, but we already have a gender person’. This phenomenon is obviously bad for early career researchers’ recruitment prospects, but may also contribute to marginalisation within the workplace for those who become the token ‘gender person’. Without a local network of fellow gender researchers, opportunities for collaboration – and therefore publication – are suppressed. My own institution has been somewhat unusual in this regard. In the last few years, there has been considerable support at the level of the Department and Faculty for building a gender profile, allowing us to build a thriving community of gender and politics/international relations (IR) researchers with interdisciplinary participation from across the University. Yet developments such as these are often heavily dependent on having allies in the right places – and as a result can easily be reversed.

How else might we encourage institutions to change? The hidden element here may be teaching. Gender perspectives are currently as marginalised in politics teaching as they are in politics research – if not more so. Less than a third of politics undergraduate programmes in the UK currently offer a module on gender and politics (Evans and Amery, 2016). Broader modules in politics and IR may include a week on gender or feminism, but in the vast majority of cases do not, indicating that gender has not been integrated into core politics teaching either (Foster et al., 2013). This in itself has an impact on recruitment, as departments favour candidates with more ‘mainstream’ teaching interests. Yet, from experience at my own institution and others, demand for teaching on gender and politics has grown massively in the last few years alongside #MeToo and the resurgent feminist movement. Our own Gender and Politics final-year option has swelled to an intake of around 70 students each year. Politics and IR students are certainly now more knowledgeable about and engaged with feminism and gender issues than they were 10 years ago. If departments are paying attention, they might take the hint and recruit more gender specialists.

Even more marginalised in politics teaching than gender perspectives are critical perspectives on race. Yet student demand may also precipitate change here. Students around the country and across academic disciplines are increasingly calling for the decolonisation of curricula, and work towards decolonisation is already well underway in some departments and disciplines. However, Politics departments are currently ill-equipped to deal with the demands of decolonisation, and it has largely been ignored (Emejulu, 2019). Simply adding more optional modules dealing with race and gender will not be enough to address this; decolonisation does not seek to ‘diversify’ the curriculum but rather to transform it, by uncovering and challenging ‘the inherent power relations in the production and dissemination of knowledge’ (Begum and Saini, 2019: 198). This means bringing ‘canonical’ perspectives on politics and IR into a dialogue with those that have historically been marginalised, placing both on an equal footing. If the architects of programmes and modules stop dividing syllabi into ‘the canon’ and ‘the others’, this could have a transformative impact on subdisciplinary hierarchies – and profoundly shape the next generation of politics researchers.