This piece kicks off a short forum on mentoring in academic careers in international affairs, written to honor Kathleen R. McNamara.
This piece kicks off a short forum on mentoring in academic careers in international affairs, written to honor Kathleen R. McNamara.
The following is a guest post by Leah C. Windsor and Kerry F. Crawford. Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis. Crawford is...
Layna Mosley is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research investigates the politics of sovereign debt, and the effects of global supply chains...
It's time. I'm signing off as permanent member of the Duck of Minerva after seven (7!?!) years of blogging. The experience has helped shape me as a professional, writer, and member of the IR and...
The following is a guest post by Rachel Merriman-Goldring, Susan Nelson, Hannah S. Petrie at William and Mary's Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations. For decades, survey research has suggested that women lack confidence in their answers, responding ‘don’t know’ or ‘maybe’ at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Initially, this trend on political surveys was attributed to topic-specific political knowledge gaps between men and women. However, recent research, including a study on the confidence gap between male and female economists,...
Sorry, faithful Duck readers, for the radio silence – I’ve been traveling for much of the last month and then – ugh – just started teaching a daily undergrad class. I promise – real blog posts are coming! In the meantime, I wanted to fill you in on some information I’ve been digesting in the last month. The information should be enough for all of us to “rant” about. A few weeks ago, I was at the Vision in Methodology conference – a wonderful conference for women in political science that are interested in all aspects of political methodology. One of the sessions was on implicit bias – a...
It’s that time of year again: the magical time when my 10 page undergraduate research proposal deadline is enough to cause a health scare among the geriatric population of mid-Missouri. As the semester comes to a close, my office is typically filled with both undergrads and grads coming to tell me a plethora of problems and stories. Many times, these problems preface a request for an extension of some sort. Can I please have an extra week? An extra day? An extra 20 minutes? Some of the problems that appear at my office door are to be expected: a replication file can’t be found, an...
Academics are generally pretty lucky when it comes to parental leave- at least on paper. Many universities provide more leave than the minimum required by governments (so more than nothing in the US), yet there are several aspects of our careers that cause parental leave erosion. I should say from the outset that I had a generally supportive and positive experience while on leave last year, but I've also found several sources of leave erosion. *I acknowledge that there are many different types of parents taking parental leave, and I'm mainly drawing on my experience, or those of close...
Like any good protestant preacher, I’ve decided to start a multi-week series where we can examine a topic in depth from multiple angles.[1] My chosen topic: women in academia. This is a topic that has been written on extensively in peer-reviewed articles and on the blogosphere (see The Monkey Cage's wonderful discussion for a recent summary). However, to my knowledge, most of those writing on the topic have been senior: the perspective of a woman “in the trenches” (ie junior) has been somewhat missing in the discussion. I want to add my two-cents to the discussion and I’ve purposely...
As I post this today, senior faculty in my department are voting on my tenure case. I don’t really know how to describe what I’m feeling at the moment. It’s a combination of zen-like calm that I’m finally at this juncture in my career and a feeling of total and utter panic at the small-but-ever-present chance that things could go wrong. The odd thing: it’s not that I’m oscillating between these two states -I feel both at the same time. In a very real way, I’m Schrödinger’s cat: although I can’t be both tenured and denied at this university - at this very moment - I’m both. How did it come...
This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. In my previous post, I discussed some problems women face when networking in political science. Here I focus on the progress we have made. As a quantitative conflict scholar, I spend a great deal of time networking in several male-dominated research communities, including the Peace Science Society, the ISA SSIP section, the APSA Conflict Processes section, and the Society for Political Methodology. I first presented at a Peace Science meeting in 1996, being one...
I keep seeing this article pop around websites this morning: "Rule No. 1 for Female Academics: Don’t Have a Baby." I'm happy to see all the family friendly policies mentioned concerning assistant professors. But, as the article points out, the "baby penalty" is also a concern for graduate students who are parents. My question: do you know of any family friendly policies for grad students?