The Gendered Division of Labor in Brazilian Political Science Journals

Abstract

This article analyzes the gendered division of labor in Brazilian political science. We seek to answer two questions: what are the predominant topics in political science that are being published in the discipline's journals? How are women and men's authorship distributed in these journals? The methodology involved three stages. First, we built a corpus with 2,363 articles that were classified as 'political science and international relations' by the Coordination for the Improvement for Higher Education Personnel (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior -CAPES) and published in the most prominent Brazilian journals between 2005 and 2018. Next, we scraped abstracts and other bibliographic information from publications in the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) platform and used a topic modeling technique to identify the most recurrent topics. Finally, we associated the identified topics with the authors' gender. The data was examined based on two specific types of the gendered division of labor: the 'horizontal' and the 'vertical'. Our results show that women and men as first authors tend to cluster around specific topics (horizontal division), but we did not find a tendency in journals to reject works on the topics in which women are better represented. In other words, differently from what was found by the international literature, the Brazilian journals in our sample do not seem to grant a lower status to these topics (vertical division). It is noteworthy, however, that men are the majority of first authors in all topics, including feminism.

Editorial: Revista de Sociologia e Política, 30 anos depois

“…Ainda que os "autores permaneçam sem conhecer a identidade de seus avaliadores, estes poderão […] acessar a autoria do trabalho avaliado. Não sabemos, portanto, se essa avaliação atenderá parâmetros mínimos de ética científica ou se ela afetará a imparcialidade da avaliação" (Campos, 2021).…”

“…A mesma situação pode também ser encontrada na América Latina (Rocha Carpiuc, 2016). Um achado importante neste tópico é que um levantamento sistemático da produção em periódicos no Brasil compreendendo mais de 2 mil artigos revelou que não apenas homens eram a maioria dos primeiros autores em quaisquer temáticas de Ciência Política, mas eram maioria também em estudos sobre feminismo (Candido et al, 2021).…”

Philosophical Research in Brazil: A Structural Topic Modeling Approach with a focus on Temporal and Gender Trends

“…STM has been applied in a variety of contexts and to different document types. Recent applications include analyzing the structure of scientific disciplines through abstracts or articles (Carvalho 2021;Candido 2021;Mostafa 2023), identifying the primary reactions of social media users to specific events or services based on posts or reviews (Hu 2019;Taecharungroj 2023), and assessing the responses of subjects to open-ended questionnaires in the social sciences (Roberts et al 2014;Lindstedt 2019).…”

Inequalities Among Political Scientists: Race and Gender Relations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The lack of female representation in leadership roles is evident in academic settings across various regions, including North America (American Political Science Association 2004); South America (Carpiuc 2016; Fernández 2006); Europe (Abels and Woods 2015; Bates, Jenkins, and Pflaeger 2012; Kantola 2008, 2015); and Asia and Oceania (Abu-Laban, Sawer, and St-Laurent 2018; Curtin 2013). 1 There are numerous types of gender asymmetries, such as in the metrics of career progressions (Akhtar et al 2005; American Political Science Association 2004); authorship of articles (Campos and Candido 2022; Teele and Thelen 2017; Williams et al 2015) and books (Samuels and Teele 2021); citations received (Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell 2018); distribution of thematic areas (Candido, Campos, and Feres Júnior 2021; Key and Sumner 2019); and evaluation of professors (Chávez and Mitchell 2020). Racial diversity indicators are less frequent but tend to demonstrate that disparities between white and Black scholars are even more extreme (Ards and Woodard 1992; Candido, Feres Júnior, and Campos 2019).…”