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The Professional Status of Women Political Scientists: Some Current Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

Ada W. Finifter
Ada W. Finifter*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

For the past few years, women political scientists have been working for measures to improve their professional status and increase opportunities available to them in the discipline. The national and regional political science associations have demonstrated their willingness to explore existing situations disadvantageous to women by the appointment of Committees on the Status of Women (CsSW). The regional committees have recently collected a variety of information on the employment status of political scientists in each of three regions. The availability of their reports prompted the Editor of PS to ask me to prepare a summary statement on the current status of women in the profession. In order to provide a more comprehensive discussion I have also assembled some additional data and indicators and the APSA national office kindly provided some data from the 1972–73 Department Chairmen's questionnaire.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , Fall 1973 , pp. 406 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1973

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References

1. Schuck, Victoria, “Women in Political Science: Some Preliminary Observations,” PS, II, 4 (Fall 1969), 642–653 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Table 1. The trend is rather irregular.

2. Cited, from figures of the National Research Council, in Thomas E. Mann, “Employment of Political Scientists in the 1970's: Problems and Prospects,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, May 3–5, 1973, Table 10.

3. Schuck, Victoria, “Some Comparative Statistics on Women in Political Science and Other Social Sciences,” PS, III, 3 (Summer 1970), 357–361, at 357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Schuck, “Women in Political Science,” op. cit., Table 4a. The percentage was the same in public and private coeducational universities, rises to 26.3% for private women's colleges and decreases to 3.0% in private men's colleges and none in public men's colleges.

5. Mann, op. cit., Table 1.

6. The response rates for the 1972–73 department chairmen's questionnaire (distributed in February 1973) are: Ph.D. departments, 83%; M.A. departments, 79%; undergraduate political science departments, 57%; undergraduate social science and combined departments, 35%. The overall response rate was 54%.

7. Mann, op. cit., p. 32.

8. The report of the CSW of the Midwest Political Science Association is contained in Leila Fraser, Virginia Gray, and JoAnn Paine, “A Preliminary Report on the Status of Women in Political Science in the Midwest,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 27–29, 1972; the report of the Southern region CSW is contained in Dorothy McBride Stetson, “Report on the Status of Women: Southern Political Science Association,” mimeo; the most recent report of the Western region CSW is in memo form from the CSW-WPSA to the Western Association, “Report on the 1973 Survey on Status of Women in Political Science.” This committee was chaired by Mary M. Lepper. The Midwest report cites a response rate of 48% of the 404 departments in that region. The Southern report cites a response rate of 38% of 103 departments. The 1973 Western report includes responses from 81 departments but no response rate is cited. Unless otherwise indicated, data presented below as having been collected by the regional CsSW come directly from these reports.

9. I have used the 1970 Roose report, which rated departments according to the quality of their doctoral programs. The top 22 were individually ranked. Of these, chairmen's questionnaires were returned by eighteen. For a description of the rating system and the schools in each category, see Roose, Kenneth D., A Rating of Graduate Programs, Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970.Google Scholar Of the seven leading departments with no women, five are at private institutions; of the remaining eleven departments, five are private. The two smallest of the leading departments are among the seven schools with no women; one has 13 full-time faculty members and the other has 14. The mean number of faculty for all 18 departments is 26.

10. The national data presented in Table 1 indicate a much larger proportion of part-time faculty in tenure line than other experience and data suggest is the case (see section on part-time employment below). One reason is that chairmen were instructed to define faculty with joint appointments in a political science department and some other department as “part-time.”

11. Schuck, “Women in Political Science,” op. cit., recalculated from data in Table 6.

12. Converse, Philip E. and Converse, Jean M., “The Status of Women as Students and Professionals in Political Science,” PS, IV, 3 (Summer 1971), 328–348, at 346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Converses reported response rates of between 36% and 42% for groups of male and female graduate students and professionals (p. 330).

13. Ibid., pp. 333–334.

14. Converse and Converse, op. cit., p. 342.

15. Stetson, op. cit., p. 10.

16. Fraser, et al., op. cit., pp. 9–10.

17. See Mann, op. cit., for a recent comprehensive report on the employment situation in political science.

18. Converse and Converse, op. cit., Table 1.

19. Judith Stiehm and Ruth Scott, “A Comparative Study of Placement of Male and Female Ph.D.s in Political Science,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1972. This paper includes an interesting discussion of attitudes and structural conditions which lead to discrimination in the placement of women. Also see Stiehm's, letter in PS, VI, 1 (Winter 1973), p. 85.Google Scholar

20. Mann, Thomas E., “Placement of Political Scientists in 1972: A Report on a Survey of Ph.D. Department Placement Directors,” PS, V, 4 (Fall 1972), 463–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Additional figures are presented in a communication in PS, VI, 1 (Winter 1973), p. 85.

21. Converse and Converse, op. cit., p. 336, report that 70% were currently or had been married.

22. The primacy of the husband's position has, in fact, a legal basis in the domicile laws of many states. These generally require that a married woman live with her husband at the residence of his choice. If she refuses, he has a cause of action; generally, this is a desertion charge. The legal obligation is not reciprocal. I am grateful to Nancy Hammond for bringing this to my attention.

23. Stiehm and Scott, op. cit., p. 15.

* Some relevant data were reported by the Hitlins after this paper was completed. In a study of satisfaction with new jobs among users of the APSA Personnel Service, women tended to be slightly less satisfied than men with their rank and salary but somewhat more satisfied with location. On an item asking for overall satisfaction, women were more polarized than men: a larger proportion of women than men felt more satisfied and also a larger proportion of women than men felt less satisfied. The authors concluded that no significant differences in job satisfaction by sex were apparent. However, further questions can be raised, particularly by the interesting bi-modal pattern of overall satisfaction among women. Perhaps, for example, the women seeking part-time jobs (many of whom might have feared they wouldn't find any position) tended to find them, and therefore reported themselves as being more satisfied than expected, while the women seeking full-time jobs tended not to find them and therefore reported themselves as being less satisfied than expected. Unless men also exhibited this pattern, such a finding would cast a different light on the aggregate level of satisfaction among women. This is obviously just speculation and it does not challenge the Hitlins' conclusion of little overall aggregate differences by sex. But the likelihood that many women have different job needs and wishes than men suggests that we ought to investigate the content of expectations and see whether women with different aspirations are equally satisfied. See Hitlin, Rona B. and Hitlin, Robert A., “Report on the 1972 APSA Personnel Service Survey,” PS, VI, 3 (Summer 1973), pp. 344–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. I have calculated these estimates from figures presented in the Fraser and Stetson reports, op. cit.

25. Rossi, Alice, “Report of Committee W, 1972–73,” AAUP Bulletin, Summer 1973, p. 173.Google Scholar

26. Sigworth, Heather, “The Legal Status of Antinepotism Regulations,” AAUP Bulletin, March 1972, pp. 31–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 33.

28. Attwood, Cynthia, “Women in Fellowship and Training Programs,” Washington: Association of American Colleges, p. 3.Google Scholar

29. Attwood, op. cit., p. 5.

30. Committee on Political Behavior, 1949–1963; Committee on Governmental and Legal Processes, 1964–1972: A Report on the Activities of the Committees. New York: Social Science Research Council, August 1973, pp. xxiii–xxiv, 46, 52.

31. Converse and Converse, op. cit., p. 345.

32. Ibid., pp. 343–344.

33. Ibid., pp. 343–345.

34. Schuck, Victoria, “Femina Studens rei Publicae: Notes on her Professional Achievement,” PS, III, 4 (Fall 1970), 622–628, Table 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. The CSW-WPSA was also the earliest of the CsSW to survey schools in their region and produce reports on the surveys. The current 1973 survey is their third, while the Midwestern and Southern committees have produced one report each. As this is being written a CSW has just been appointed in the Northeastern region.

36. Nelson Polsby has commented on this problem in several recent issues of the APSR. See, for example, his “Editorial Comment,” The American Political Science Review, LXVII, 2 (June 1973), 579–580.

37. See, for example, Homer, Matina S., “Toward an Understanding of Achievement-Related Conflicts in Women,” Journal of Social Issues, 28, 2 (1972), pp. 157–175.Google Scholar It would probably be a mistake to assume that because a woman is a professional then, a fortiori, she does not have conflicts about success. Horner finds that the “motive to avoid success” occurs most often among women of high ability and high achievement orientation. For others, the prospect of success is presumably not relevant enough to arouse conflicts with the female sex role and a consequent motive to avoid success. Assuming that most women political scientists are highly capable and achievement oriented, many may therefore actually have the “motive to avoid success.” It then becomes relevant to inquire into the conditions under which this motive is aroused, since the presence of these conditions, by arousing the motive to avoid success, would be counterproductive to professional achievement. Homer finds that among women who are motivated to avoid success, the motive is aroused under certain conflict-producing situations; an important one is a situation of interpersonal competition in which male competitors are involved. A typical political science department is probably a fairly good example of this type of situation. Increasing the professional achievement of women political scientists may therefore be partially dependent on broad social change which reduces role conflict of women professionals.