The following is a summary of the grant proposal used to gain support for the APSA Workshop on Women in the Profession that was held in Washington, D.C., on March 5, 2004.

Summary of Grant Proposal to the National Science Foundation

Small Grant for Exploratory Research:
Women's Advancement in Political Science, A Proposed Workshop

Michael Brintnall & Linda Lopez (American Political Science Association)
Leonie Huddy (Stony Brook University)
Susan Clarke (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Women have been and continue to be a minority of full-time faculty within political science, and current statistics suggest they will remain below parity with men in the discipline for the foreseeable future, despite substantial gains in the number of women political scientists over the last several decades. Women constituted 24% of all full time faculty in 2001 (APSA 2002) an increase of 6% over 1991 when they made up 18% (Sarkees and McGlen 1999). And while they have made gains at all academic ranks since the early 1970s there is growing evidence that the percentage of women assistant professors has stalled at roughly 35% over the last 5 years. This is real cause for concern, suggesting a stagnant pipeline that will place clear limits on the number of future women political science faculty.

There are various possible reasons for women's continuing minority status within political science but research on this point is far from definitive, in part, because research on women's progress in the discipline is not as well developed an area of research as in other social sciences. To better understand the factors linked to women's success within academia, political scientists could benefit from an informational exchange with researchers in sociology and economics for whom women's advancement in academia is an explicit topic of research investigation.

We request funds to hold a planning workshop in early 2004 to evaluate the current knowledge base regarding women's advancement in political science, and to identify the major barriers to their numerical increase in the discipline. To foster exchange across social science fields and benefit from evidence obtained by sociologists and economists, we plan to invite several scholars who have studied women's development in the sciences and social sciences. In addition, invited participants will include political scientists who direct large-scale team-based research projects, hold leadership positions in the field, and/or have an active interest in gender issues and the advancement of women. The workshop will lay the foundation for a grant proposal to be submitted to the NSF ADVANCE leadership program.

The workshop has the following goals:

1. Clarify the rate of progress of women in political science at all levels of academic rank.
2. Clarify the key advancement problems confronted by women in political science; for example, are women having greater difficulty in getting promoted to full professor than in gaining tenure?
3. Explore the origins of women's differential rate of advancement by prestige of the university and by subfield in political science.
4. Identity the key barriers to women's academic success at different transition points.

The workshop is intended to improve knowledge of women's progress within academic political science in order to design a program that will improve the recruitment and retention of women in the discipline. This has far reaching implications for the attractiveness of political science as a field of graduate study for women. An increased number of women graduate students should, in turn, increase the pool of women for a wide variety of non-academic careers including elective government office, the diplomatic corps, domestic and international intelligence, polling and elections, and public policy planning. Moreover, an increased number of women political science faculty should increase women's interest in the political process very generally, in part, because women faculty are most likely to teach courses that touch on the history and importance of women's political involvement.

For more information about the ADVANCE Program at the National Science Foundation, including proceedings from its National Conference, visit its website.