Can Increasing Awareness of Gender Gaps in International Relations Help Close Them? Evidence from a Scholar Ranking Experiment

Abstract

We report the results of a survey of international relations (IR) scholars on the use of an increasingly common policy designed to close recognition gaps in IR: gender balance in citation (GBC) statements. GBC statements remind and encourage authors submitting work to peer-reviewed outlets to consider the gender balance among the works they cite. We find that these policies enjoyed wide support among IR scholars in our sample countries soon after journals began instituting the policies, but women were more supportive than men of the policies. We also report the results of a question-order experiment that allows us to study how raising awareness of gender gaps in the IR discipline affects the proportion of women that scholars list among the most influential IR scholars in the last 20 years. The effects of exposure to the gender treatment vary, however, by respondents’ gender and whether respondents teach in the United States. The treatment effects were much larger for women than for men in the United States, but the reverse was true outside the United States.