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The Status of Women As Students and Professionals in Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

Philip E. Converse  and
Jean M. Converse
Philip E. Converse
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Jean M. Converse
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

What unique problems currently confront women eager to pursue careers in the discipline of political science? This question was a central one for the Association's Committee on the Status of Women, organized two years ago. As a major part of its fact-finding activities, the Committee conducted a mail survey of graduate students and post-graduate professionals in the discipline during the spring of 1970.

It is obvious that the development of all careers present obstacles. But the Committee survey was designed to arrive at some balanced and realistic view of those points at which women in particular encounter difficulties that are less prevalent for men in comparable situations.

In the background stood the obvious fact, well documented elsewhere, that in the progress over career development hurdles from undergraduate majors in political science through to active roles as adult professionals in the discipline, women show much more marked rates of attrition than men. Clearly a substantial proportion of the extra attrition arises because of a choice on the part of the female at one point or another in favor of a conventional sex role within the family, with a consequent abandonment of career aspirations. However, increasing numbers of women would like to maintain a mix of family and career roles, and there is reason to believe that the current structure of opportunities raises artificial obstacles to such professional participation, and loses important talent to the profession.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , Summer 1971 , pp. 328 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1971

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References

1 Schuck, Victoria, “Femina Studens rei Publicae: Notes on her Professional Achievement,” P.S., Vol. III, No. 4 (Fall, 1970), p. 262.Google Scholar

2 The qualitative materials involving possible solutions to the problems of women have been reviewed in a separate report by Jewel Prestage.

3 One clear symptom of this distinction is the fact that 30% of our professional women have never been married or have current plans for marriage. On the other hand, while our graduate women are very much younger (80% are under 30), only 30% have not been married or lack immediate plans for marriage.

4 In addition, a small sample of women administrators in governmental agencies, purposively selected to cover people with political science backgrounds, but who had not necessarily maintained Association membership, was surveyed through the efforts of Irene Tinker. This additional sample was given the female professional questionnaire, fortified with a number of extra questions designed specifically for the administrative situation. The results of this supplemental survey are provided by Tinker in a separate portion of the Committee Report.

5 Moreover, the nature of the data is such that Pearson correlation coefficients would run visibly higher still.

6 It would have been useful for the purposes of this study to have had available ratings of the specific quality of various departments of political science. When in this report we refer to “school quality”, however, we refer to overall ratings of universities and colleges based on a combination of A.A.U.P. data on levels of faculty salary, and assessments of the “demonstrated academic potential of the student body, as provided by Cass, James and Birnbaum, Max in The Comparative Guide to American Colleges (Harper and Row, 4th Edition, 1969).Google Scholar

7 Again, it would be unwise to take these figures for doctorate completion as representative of abiding sex differences. The proportion of our female professional sample which was thirty years of age or less at the time of the study is about 10% greater than is true of the male professional sample. Thus when these younger cohorts have run their course a little longer, the differences in proportion of completions is likely to narrow at least somewhat.

8 All of our average salary figures are estimated from data originally grouped in nine income classes.

9 In view of the fact that we had earlier discarded about 20% of our female sample not in academic positions, the further discard of women who are part-time or whose time fraction was not ascertained sharply reduces our field of view to about half of the women in the original sample.

10 Victoria Schuck, op. cit.

11 This includes some factors we have not mentioned, which were examined but discarded because they failed to account for much sex differentiation. People with undergraduate honors (Phi Beta Kappa) tend to receive better placements and draw higher incomes, other things equal. However, among full-time academics the sex differences in such past honors are trivial. Similarly, it is true that women tend to teach at smaller academic institutions, a factor that might seem to account for lower salaries. However, among the set of full-time males there is remarkably little correlation between institution size and salary.