Abstract
While some 40 per cent of the students undertaking political science degrees in the UK are women, about three-quarters of those teaching them are men. This article examines why female undergraduates are less likely to go into graduate work in politics, utilising focus groups conducted with groups of male and female students and interviews with the female students in four large UK universities. The research identifies eight key factors that impacted upon our respondents' decisions to undertake further study. The first four affected both men and women, although there were subtle, yet important, differences in how the women spoke about these issues, and can be somewhat loosely categorised as: money; making a difference; lack of information; and self-confidence. The other four factors influenced the women's, but not the men's, views about graduate work and the profession: stereotyping; role models; family commitments, and time constraints. On the basis of our research, we suggest how national political science associations and individual departments might increase the number of women undertaking graduate work.
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Notes
The University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) is the UK central organisation through which applications are processed for entry to higher education. Its figures for 2004 show that 39 per cent of those accepted to politics degree courses were women; this has remained broadly the same since 1996 (the first year for which figures are available) when it was 40 per cent.
The Political Studies Association's (PSA) 2003 survey of the profession indicates that only 25 per cent were women.
An analysis of the PSA's 2005 Directory indicates that only 50 out of the 439 professors in UK politics departments, that is 11 per cent, are women.
We would like to thank both the Political Studies Association and the Sociology, Anthropology, Politics (C-SAP) Network for the funding of this research project, and also the university departments that participated in the project for contacting students on our behalf and arranging room bookings.
Civic universities were usually established in the large UK cities at the start of the twentieth century. They are usually large, in UK terms, and deliver across the broad range of university subjects.
Indeed, few students gain Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) awards without a first-class degree.
State funding of graduate work in the UK is channelled through the ESRC. The majority of the funding takes the form of a four-year grant. The first year of the grant funds a one-year Masters course in research methods (the 1), while the next three years of the grant fund a PhD (the +3).
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Akhtar, P., Fawcett, P., Legrand, T. et al. women in the political science profession. Eur Polit Sci 4, 242–255 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210039
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210039