Introduction
In this essay we use a basic feminist analytical tool, intersectionality, to understand why we do not see more women across the spectrum and at all levels in the international relations field in the United States. Our intersectional analysis reveals that to understand why women are underrepresented in IR, we should not look harder at women in IR but rather at IR as a discipline.
Intersectionality—an analytical tool developed to study the imbrications of race and gender oppression in U.S. politics—can be used to analyze any context of intersecting systems of oppression. In this article, we focus on the intersection of gender, nation, and discipline in IR. Of course, feminists have given us other important intersections to consider. These intersections, particularly race and postcolonialism, are important subtexts and contexts of our argument. In fact, our argument reveals that in the essay “Women in International Relations” (this issue), the same move that renders women visibly underrepresented in the field of IR also renders race and postcolonial position invisible, even though minorities and people from the decolonizing global South are possibly overrepresented in the category “Other.” We choose to interrogate the intersection of gender, nation, and discipline because it is not the intersection to which most U.S. scholars attend. With this focus, we can make use of some of the data collected by the Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) study (which does not offer data on race or postcoloniality except as they may be included in “Other” categories), and because in so doing we invite critical engagement from feminist and nonfeminist scholars.
One does not need to be a feminist to observe sex-disaggregated findings. However, without gender and intersectional analysis, attempts to learn anything from gender-disaggregated data are incomplete. Intersectional analysis of gender-disaggregated data tells us not only about women and men but also, and more importantly, about the lived practice of gender in academic IR. In order to achieve gender equality, including both integration of gender perspectives and the recognition of women scholars in IR, the U.S. IR discipline needs to become more theoretically diverse and pluralistic, including more reflective of the global community of scholars. An intersectional analysis shows us why: Gender and “Other” are inextricably linked.
American Exceptionalism in the Study of IR?
In their 2006 survey of 1,112 international relations scholars in the United States and 275 IR scholars in Canada and in the study widely circulated in the discipline and available on the website www.wm.edu/trip, Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Petersen, and Michael Tierney show some trends in U.S. IR scholarship between 2004 and 2006 and some differences between U.S. and Canadian scholars. They do not report sex-disaggregated data (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007).
Sex-disaggregated data from the United States–based scholars are discussed in “Women in International Relations” by the same authors. These data reveal some statistically significant differences between women and men IR scholars in the United States. But the U.S. focus of the essay does not allow a comparison between the United States and Canada, which, we argue, would be useful in understanding the data on women in U.S. IR.
Our argument is that there are national and disciplinary patterns to scholars' affinities to a particular paradigm (realism, liberalism, Marxism, constructivism, feminism, other), areas of research (foreign policy, security, human rights, etc.), area of the world studied, epistemological perspective (positivist, nonpositivist, postpositivist), and methodology of choice (quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, formal modeling, experimental, counterfactual analysis, pure theory, legal and ethical analysis). In other work, we spend some time reflecting on what these terms mean. For the purpose of this essay, we let the categories of choice offered in the TRIP questionnaire define the meaning of the terms paradigm, epistemology, and methodology.
Maliniak and his colleagues find that in the United States, the work of women does not have the same status in the profession as that of men. More interestingly, the survey shows that women are, on average, 10 times less likely than men to identify the United States as their major area of international relations study and that they are more likely than men to research and teach the study of international organizations, transnational actors, nongovernmental organizations, and the politics of developing countries and regions. Compared with men, women also teach a greater range of theoretical perspectives on international relations, including feminist and other critical theoretical perspectives, even when they do not individually espouse them. Further, whereas men list only one woman among their list of the top 10 leading IR scholars, women's reference group of leading IR scholars is gender-balanced, consisting of five women and five men.
These are interesting findings indeed, but they are difficult to interpret if we do not want to be led down a path of generalizing about all women scholars based on their gender alone. As “Women in International Relations” notes, “both male and female IR specialists overwhelmingly describe their research as positivist and qualitative. … Large percentages of both men and women also report subscribing to liberal IR theory” (p. 123). The sex-disaggregated TRIP data are politically salient, not merely for what they reveal about gender differences, but also for what they reveal about the implications of the dominance of positivist approaches in U.S. IR for the field as a whole.
Interestingly and perhaps unexpectedly, analysis of nation and discipline can help us make sense of such gendered patterns. As we will show, gender differences are a manifestation of other patterns of recognition in the field. In order to reveal these patterns, in this section we discuss national differences, and in the next section we discuss disciplinary differences.
Beginning with Stanley Hoffman's 1977 article, “Is International Relations an American Social Science?” several notable scholars have claimed that the international relations discipline developed in the postwar era to serve the international interests of the superpower. As a result, the issues examined in the field—U.S. foreign policy and international security more than transnational actors, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America—reflect the extent to which they have relevance to U.S. policymakers and academia (Hoffman Reference Hoffman1977; Holsti Reference Holsti1987). While the TRIP study shows that the substantive interests of IR scholars have broadened since Hoffman to include more regional questions, the United States is still a dominant focus of inquiry (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 37, question 49). Moreover, it is not obvious that such broadening reflects a move away from U.S. hegemony but, rather, a better understanding on the part of U.S. policymakers and academics about the boundaries of U.S. interests.
While areas of inquiry may be broadening, paradigmatic and epistemological shifts are slower. Steve Smith, one of two non–North American former International Studies Association presidents, has decried the dominance of the American research community in IR:
In the name of explanation it has recreated the hegemony of U.S. power and U.S. interests; in the name of legitimate social science it has supported narrow versions of the agenda of international relations, and in the name of objectivity it has self-consciously avoided normative or moral stances. (2004, 509).
Similarly, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, an American IR scholar, contends that U.S. scholars are unaware of how “their theories reflect and justify particular normative programs and social contexts” and “replicate partial often national and cultural conceptions of the world” (Reference Sterling-Folker, James, Freyberg-Inan and Harrison2008 forthcoming).
Since considerably more American women IR scholars describe themselves as “constructivists” (who study normative change) (29%; cf. 16% men) or as “postpositivists” (21%; cf. 12% men) (“Women,” p. 133), the dominance of positivism in the American research community has an impact on them that might be best understood as an interaction of gender and epistemology, or gender and “paradigm.” In the TRIP study, in answer to “what is the principle divide among international relations scholars?” Canadians characterize epistemological differences as most significant (51%), followed by paradigms (21%) and methodology (17%). U.S. scholars characterize methodological divides as dominant (36%), followed by paradigms (27%) and epistemology (22%) (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 28). In short, the male bias in U.S. IR scholarship and academic culture enters through paradigmatic, epistemological, and methodological biases. If intellectual hegemony is interpreted as gender discrimination, these biases successfully conceal a politics of epistemology by renaming it “gender differences.”
The tendency for one way of studying the world to dominate the international relations discipline clearly disadvantages a group of men, too, namely, those scholars of IR who use “Other” paradigms (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 34, questions 42 and 44). Interestingly, the greatest shift among those making paradigm shifts is to “Other” paradigms. Such movement may indicate that while those scholars working in historically marginalized paradigms are few and continue to be marginalized by most U.S. IR scholars, they are at the leading edge of IR and may come to be recognized as such. Rather than wondering what is wrong with them, we interpret the TRIP study to be suggesting that even the U.S. field will increasingly read and discuss their work. One illustration of this is that the International Studies Association theme panels increasingly include paradigmatic diversity in the sponsored panels.
By contrast with American IR, British, European, Australasian, and Canadian IR are already more pluralist with respect to theoretical and methodological orientation, utilizing a diversity of philosophical traditions and approaches (Crawford and Jarvis Reference Crawford and Jarvis2001; Healey and Neufeld Reference Healey and Neufeld1997; Jarvis Reference Jarvis2000; S. Smith Reference Smith2000; Waever Reference Waever1998). Ole Waever has observed that
[t]he internal intellectual structure of American IR explains both the recurring great debates and why American IR generates global leadership. It has a hierarchy centered on theoretical journals, and scholars must compete for access to these. This they have not had to do in Europe, where power historically rested either in subfields or in local universities, not in a disciplinary elite. … American IR is heading for national professionalization, but since it happens on the basis of a liberal ontology through rational choice methods, it will not be easily exportable and therefore entails a de-Americanization of IR elsewhere (1998, 726).
The professionalization of the IR field in the United States has created intellectual patterns that Waever predicts will not be mimicked within research communities in Europe, in Australasia, and in non-Western regions. Many gender and IR scholars now come from the global South, although they may study or reside in the global North. They are simultaneously drawing on and transforming knowledge produced in Western contexts to illuminate postcolonial contexts and multiple local and global intersections of social differentiation and oppression (Agathangelou and Ling Reference Agathangelou and Ling2004; Anand Reference Anand2007; D'Costa Reference D'Costa, Ackerly, Stern and True2006).
The TRIP data tentatively support this analysis, even though focusing on a comparison only between the United States and Canada (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 6, 17, 34). Canadians read and admire the work of a more eclectic group of scholars than their U.S. counterparts. Robert Cox, Susan Strange, R. B. J. Walker, Cynthia Enloe, David Campbell, J. Ann Tickner, Steve Smith, Martha Finnemore, James Der Derian, Karl Deutsch, Martin Wight, Michael Doyle, and Michael Walzer all appear much higher on the Canadian list of the 25 most influential scholars in the field (question 14). Other scholars who have had a profound impact on the thinking of researchers at Canadian schools, but who have had a relatively smaller impact on U.S. scholars include: Michel Foucault, Raymond Aron, Cynthia Enloe, David Haglund, Emmanuel Adler, Immanuel Wallerstein, John Rawls, and Stephen Gill (question 16) (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 6). Respondents from Canada also report greater paradigmatic diversity than those from the United States.
The framing of paradigm as a “committed” choice in the TRIP study itself reflects an epistemological view of theory as a paradigmatic commitment, rather than theory as dynamically generating hypotheses and being informed by scholarship. Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes (Reference Squires and Weldes2007) argue that the British gender and international relations subfield characterizes itself neither as a subfield nor as marginal from the mainstream of IR, because gendered analysis increasingly takes place as part of the field. The implication is that feminism as an IR approach may not be separated out from other approaches, such as constructivism, Marxism, liberalism, or even realism, as it is in the TRIP survey. In the United Kingdom, best doctoral dissertation and best published article prizes go to scholars of gender and international relations, many Ph.D.s are produced in the subfield, and scholars go on to take up regular positions in major British universities. Substantively, “gendered analysis fundamentally alters the empirical and theoretical boundaries of IR, thus irrevocably transforming its legitimate purview” in the British academic context (2007, 190). It is accepted, for example, that part of understanding IR is analyzing how hegemonic constructions of masculinity motivate men and women soldiers to fight and protect, and how these gendered identities legitimate war and national security policies. In British IR where, arguably, no one theoretical, epistemological, or methodological approach is dominant and a diversity of approaches is embraced, there is more room for integrating gender perspectives within the discipline. Undoubtedly, men have achieved higher-status positions than women in the British IR field as in the American discipline, in part, because the entry of more women into the field was also relatively recent. The distinctive difference between British and U.S. national contexts is that in the former, gendered analysis is essential to doing good IR research within a range of theoretical perspectives (Ackerly and True forthcoming), whereas in the latter, this is not yet the case. Ironically for international relations, national locations of studying international relations are relatively strong predictors of theoretical perspective and methodological approach.
Curiously, of those scholars who have reflected on the American dominance of international relations, only Smith Reference Smith(2004) has commented on the gendered nature of the American discipline, and none have considered the implications of the increasing gender and ethnic diversity, that is, more women and people of color graduates and professors of IR, for the social construction of the American discipline. Yet both of the two women—J. Ann Tickner and Kathryn Sikkink—who appear in the survey's list of the top 25 scholars whose work has had the greatest impact on the field of IR in the last 20 years do not use positivist methodologies, and each is informed by a range of theoretical work while also being associated with feminism and constructivism, respectively. Even more intriguing is the finding that women scholars name equal numbers of men and women in their list of the top 10 scholars producing “the most interesting work.” We hypothesize that the majority of the top five women in the women IR scholars list were also non- or postpositivists. In e-mail correspondence, Oakes provided the rankings of “greatest impact on the field.” Only two of the five are positivists, confirming our hypothesis. We argue, therefore, that gender is functioning in “Women in International Relations” as a proxy for postpositivism and nonpositivism combined.
To test further our hypothesis, both epistemology and gender would need to be included in the model. Following our gender-informed theory of American hegemony in IR, we hypothesize that postpositivist and nonpositivist men and women are relatively more likely to appear on the lists of postpositivist and nonpositivist men and women (than on the lists of positivists), and that by contrast, few women of whatever epistemological persuasion are likely to appear on the lists of positivist men. E-mail correspondence with Maliniak confirms this hypothesis. In the rankings by positivist men, only one woman, Sikkink, makes the top 25 scholars having “the largest impact on the field over the past 20 years.” Interestingly, in the rankings by nonpositivist and postpositivist men, women do not fair much better: only two, Tickner and Sikkink. Likewise, in the rankings of positivist women, there is more paradigmatic pluralism displayed, but only two women make the top 25, Helen Milner and Martha Finnemore. While there is not much more gender diversity in the nonpositivist and postpositivist men's lists, there is more epistemological diversity.
The TRIP data on country differences in attitudes toward positivism suggest that we should expect a significant finding. From the United States, 70% of scholars characterize their work as epistemologically positivist, whereas only 48% of Canadian IR scholars do (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 37). To study further the correlation of country with epistemology would require a global, cross-national sample. The “Women in International Relations” study suggests that age is also a factor in the likelihood of including a woman in one's list of scholars whose work is “most interesting.” We could further study the correlation of epistemology, respect for pluralism, and gender with longitudinal data.
Using gender analysis, in this section we have argued that theoretical and methodological pluralism intersects with gender to make visible some sex differences in international relations. We have used the data from TRIP (2007) and “Women in International Relations” to show how feminists might analyze the TRIP data and gather additional data in order to ask questions about the gender construction of women and men in IR. In the next section, we explore the U.S. dimensions of our hypothesis.
The Gendered Construction of a Discipline in the United States
In the last section we saw that recognition of women scholars was highly correlated with openness to theoretical and methodological pluralism and sought to test this claim globally. In this section, we ask questions not just about women in IR but also about IR as a discipline in U.S. academe, a field whose boundaries and professional norms for publication are set by those in the field—peers of insiders, would-be peers of outsiders. Comparative institutional analysis across the disciplines might help us to understand better and to explain the gender differences in U.S. IR. However, as we make broad-brush observations about the structural nature of the sociology of the disciplines of sociology, political science, and economics, we acknowledge that given the importance of understanding the relationship between individual actions and the disciplines, there is much more sociological work to be done on each discipline. Contexts, such as particular openness to feminist questions by particular advisors, cross-disciplinary methodology reading groups, connections to women's movements, and methodological pluralism within a given department, may all influence the development of individual scholars and therefore of the field overall.
Feminist scholars argue that gender differences are significantly influenced by context. Patterns of gender inequality exist at every level of state and global politics, yet the degree of gender inequality differs across states and regions (see Gray, Kittleson, and Sandholtz Reference Gray, Kittleson and Sandholtz2006, 294). Since they are socially constructed, patterns of gender difference and their significance should vary across disciplinary context. The TRIP study reports that 23% of U.S. IR faculty are women in 2006 (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 32). By comparison, the American Sociological Association reports that 38% of tenured and tenure-tracked sociology faculty at Ph.D.-granting departments are women in 2000/2001.Footnote 1 In economics, 15% of tenured and tenure-tracked faculty at Ph.D.-granting departments were women in 2001.Footnote 2 Rather than focusing on numbers of women in the disciplines, in this section we focus on an historical analysis of the introduction of women, gender, and feminist questions into some social science disciplines.
Not all women scholars are feminist researchers, but most feminist researchers are women, and so the plight of feminist research is relevant for understanding the patterns of gender difference and inequality in academic disciplines. Women have achieved greater parity of status with men in those social science disciplines where some women have adopted field-dominant positivist approaches—even when introducing feminist and gender perspectives—while others have taken a more critical stance toward disciplinary norms. The combination opens up more intellectual terrain for respectful engagement with women's scholarship. Whether or not scholars have adopted positivist, nonpositivist, or postpositivist perspectives when asking questions about women and gender has to do with the overall development of different disciplines and the historical juncture at which women scholars entered these disciplines in greater numbers, as well as with how questions about women and gender became visible inquiries within each discipline.
In the United States, many women entered sociology in the 1970s, and at that time much research on women and gender used the prevailing positivist, often quantitative, research methods to explore empirical questions. As nonpositivist and postpositivist critical perspectives informed sociology, they informed the range of study of women and gender as well. Consequently, we see the study of women and gender reflecting a range of theoretical perspectives in U.S. sociology, and the study of women and gender itself is not necessarily associated with methodological distinctiveness, though feminist sociologists have been at the forefront of developing feminist methods (Cancian Reference Cancian1992; Fonow and Cook Reference Fonow and Cook1991; Naples Reference Naples2003; Reinharz Reference Reinharz1992; D. Smith Reference Smith1987).
The pattern of women entering political science varies by subfield (Ritter and Mellow Reference Ritter and Mellow2000). Women entered the American politics subfield about the same time they entered sociology. The sociology of the study of gender and politics is similar to that of gender and society. While some have used the insights from feminist theory to challenge the bases of familiar lines of research, in general the subfield has accepted gender and women as variables and as research subjects, but not engaged in the potentially field-transforming reflection that feminism makes possible (Ritter and Mellow Reference Ritter and Mellow2000; Staudt and Weaver Reference Staudt and Weaver1997).
Also within political science, feminist political theory was being published long before contemporary feminist theory began to be published in the late 1970s. Contemporary feminist theory has achieved significant legitimacy as a school of inquiry with its own debates. Departments advertise that they are looking for specifically feminist scholars, just as they might seek an ancient or modern scholar. The context of this development also reflects particular institutional contexts, such as other feminist colleagues within political science, philosophy, and women's studies. Feminist theory has been part of the major debates in political theory, including critiques from critical, postmodern, and postcolonial perspectives.
Like feminist political theory, feminist economics predates contemporary feminist scholarship as well, but contemporary feminist economic writing began in the 1980s and included the study of women in the economy and the field of economics as a discipline (Strober Reference Strober1994). Like the other disciplines, feminist economists work within a range of feminist and economics perspectives. The success of feminists at getting well-being considered an important outcome for economists to pay attention to has had an influence on global development policy (See for example the United Nations Development Reports produced annually by the United Nations Development Programme).
By contrast, women's entry en masse into U.S. IR was somewhat later (late 1980s and early 1990s), coinciding with the end of the Cold War and the interparadigm debates that challenged the epistemological and theoretical certainties of the IR discipline. The similarities between the two dominant theoretical paradigms of American IR (realism and liberalism), especially with respect to epistemology, opened the way for new normative approaches and interpretative methods in the 1990s. These approaches included feminism and constructivism, and they arrived on the scene just as departments were opening their doors to more women students and faculty. Feminists argued, as Laura Sjoberg does in her essay in this issue, that women are not outside of the discipline of international relations but that as a discipline international relations “is laced with gender subordination” (see p. 178). Feminism in the late 1980s through today has made incredible theoretical developments. These include engagement with the connection between theory and practice (praxis), empirical attention to marginalized groups, and theoretical attention to the ways in which disciplinary and other sources of authority condition epistemology and thus exert a power of knowledge of which we are sometimes, but not always, aware and to which we are often unable to attend. Feminism's engagement with international relations is not monovocal and may not be easy to understand from within conventional epistemological comfort zones.
Though retaining a positivist core, the disciplines of sociology and psychology have arguably been more willing to adapt their methodologies, revisit their epistemological norms, and learn from feminist challenges than fields such as economics and U.S. international relations, which have been less pluralist in their approaches. Political science, sociology, and psychology had journals that focused on women and/or gender perspectives by the 1980s (Women and Politics, 1980; Gender and Society, 1987; Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1975); whereas economics and international relations have only established feminist subfield journals in the last decade, although it is interesting to note that unlike their political science, sociology, and psychology counterparts, they both have “feminist” in their titles (Feminist Economics, 1995; International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1999).
We might read this admittedly superficial history of these social science disciplines, however, as suggesting that the greatest impact on changing disciplinary norms has been in economics, where the examination of women's well-being has won a Nobel Prize in the case of Amartya Sen (Sen Reference Sen1999). Moreover, this history might suggest that because international relations is the last discipline to engage feminist criticism, the form of feminist theory with which it engages is the most complex to date, increasingly able to consider the theoretical complexity raised by attention to that which has previously been unobservable or incomprehensible.
On the basis of a series of field essays reviewing the state of feminist research across the social sciences, however, Christine Williams concludes that “feminism has had the strongest impact in the fields that are theoretically-eclectic and open to interdisciplinary research” (Reference Williams2000, 8): anthropology and communication studies more than political science (including international relations) and economics. In a forthcoming Hypatia essay, Sally Haslinger argues that this analysis holds in the humanities as well (see Jaschik Reference Jaschik2007). Our evidence supports this second hypothesis. As we saw at the beginning of this section, there are few women economists on the tenure track. Following our analysis from the preceding section, we would not expect increases in women in economics until that field becomes more methodologically pluralistic. Our review of disciplinary differences with regard to the relative success of women across the social science disciplines suggests that women's success is strongly associated with the success of feminist inquiry in their disciplines.
This is not because all women academics are feminists or because all feminists are women, but rather because with feminism's success in a field comes a shift in the social construction of the field. Such shifts include recognition of subfield journals as top-tier field-specific journals, increased avenues for mentorship, transparent hiring and promotion practices that do not rely on old boy networks, and other shifts that may be best observed at the department level by those located in those departments (such as responsiveness to complaints of sexual harassment, fair distribution of work load, etc.).
What Is to Be Done? Beyond Gender in International Relations
We have observed the paradigmatic dominance and the forms of marginalization at work in the American IR discipline affecting not only women but many men scholars, too. But what can be done to redress this situation? How can we transcend the structural limitations of the U.S. field and expand the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological pathways available to all scholars, women and men, feminist and nonfeminist?
The recognition of women IR scholars in the United States is closely linked to the U.S. academy's recognition of the global study of international relations, its theoretical pluralism, and the diverse community of its scholars. A survey of U.S. scholars does tell us important information about U.S. IR scholars, but it is not representative of the field of international relations. In the professional organization most associated with the IR discipline, the North American International Studies Association (ISA), approximately 40% of members are from outside North America. Among ISA members, we see an impressive range of subfields and theoretical engagements thriving in the discipline. Within the ISA, the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section has a growing membership, ranking tenth out of 23 research sections. It has more members than the Scientific Study of International Processes that is associated with positivism and neorealism, and considerably more members than Diplomatic Studies and the English School sections, although it has fewer members than the Foreign Policy Analysis and International Security sections. At the 2008 ISA annual convention, there are nine linked panels on the topic of gender and international security alone, not to mention the many other panels with feminist themes or including feminist perspectives. Looking only at the U.S. TRIP survey, we would have underrated the significance of feminist perspectives on international relations given that just 1% of scholars listed feminism as the paradigm to which they were primarily committed.
The point we make here is not that ISA membership by research section is a better indicator of patterns in U.S. IR than the TRIP survey, but rather that feminism and a range of other perspectives on international relations that are marginal to the TRIP survey clearly fare better in the global discipline than in the US institutional context. Given this, we believe that women scholars in the Unites States, many of whom subscribe to nondominant perspectives other than liberalism and realism, survive or thrive in the field by immersing themselves in global networks and linking their careers to the rich, multidiscipline, worldwide international studies scholarly community, rather than by internalizing the narrower, paradigmatic boundaries of the U.S. IR field.
Feminists have been very active in doing precisely this. They have banded together across borders to produce critical scholarship that reaches beyond the confines of the IR discipline and embraces multi- and cross-disciplinary research and thinking. This has increased the audience for feminist international relations as well as the community of scholars actively associated with this movement. For example, the establishment of the International Journal of Feminist Politics in 1999 by feminist scholars of international relations has built a broad constituency for feminist work across the terrain of international studies. These days, thanks to the power of the Internet and online communities, journals and publications can be circulated and shared throughout much of the globe. Of course, how “shared” this global world seems varies significantly by country, Internet infrastructure, political openness, and other such factors. We believe this global connectivity represents a dynamic resource for bolstering the status of women in traditional academic fields. It is crucial that women IR scholars and IR feminist scholars, in particular, cite and make use of each other's scholarship even in other subfields, recognizing that we are a growing scholarly constituency that can increasingly shape the overall constitution of the international relations discipline.
We argue that the dynamism of international relations as a discipline, which continues to attract the best and brightest young women and men students to its ranks, depends on its intellectual diversity and the capacity of IR scholars to engage in cross-cutting dialogue to understand better the nature of their disagreements. For feminist scholars of international relations, this means making our arguments using language and reference points in ways that connect our work to mainstream literatures and encourage others to think outside their paradigm. It also means publishing in mainstream journals and collections where we can demonstrate the value of feminist perspectives and methodologies. This value lies not only in introducing new knowledge and research agendas to the IR field but also in critically scrutinizing nonfeminist IR and improving its rigor in the process (Ackerly, Stern, and True Reference Ackerly, Stern and True2006). As Sjoberg (this issue) argues, addressing what counts as quality international relations scholarship with a dynamic and inclusive understanding of objectivity, rather than the gender-subordinating lens of tradition, would go a long way to addressing the comparatively low status of women in IR.
Both women and men scholars participate in the social construction of academic practice in the international relations profession. By continuing to do innovative IR research and teaching inspired by feminist theoretical perspectives and methodologies, we will every day be redressing the subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination against women in the field. Greater recognition of individual women and feminist scholars will only come with greater recognition of the importance of intellectual diversity, disagreement, and dialogue in the IR field as a whole, and of the collective contribution of feminism, constructivism, postcolonialism and “Other” currently nondominant perspectives on international relations. We can start every day, as do many IR scholars already, by building this multiperspectival knowledge and conversation with our students—the future International Relations scholars—in the classroom.
Conclusions
In sum, the construction of IR as an American social science, the disciplinary constructions of IR relative to other disciplines within the U.S. academy, and the sometimes myopic gaze from within the United States on a global discipline are three parts of the gender construction and comprehension of women's presences in U.S. IR.
One of the key tools of feminist scholarship is intersectionality (see the June 2007 issue of this journal). We have shown gender, nationality, and discipline to be predictors of theoretical openness and epistemological perspective. Further study of the intersection of gender, nationality, and discipline is necessary in order to understand their affect on direct and indirect forms of discrimination against women and on the epistemological and paradigmatic marginalization of male and female nonpositivist scholars. Studying the intersection of gender, nationality, and discipline in a feminist and postcolonial way requires attending to power in political and institutional context and understanding that context as multiple (gender, nation, discipline, department). In academe, certain theoretical paradigms, epistemological perspectives, and methodologies have the power to include or exclude.
One test of good feminist scholarship is whether it leads us to ask additional questions, especially questions about power, marginalization, and exclusion (Ackerly, Stern, and True Reference Ackerly, Stern and True2006). Asking the question about why feminism is a mutually exclusive paradigm from Marxism or constructivism makes us notice that IR feminisms' other close intellectual partners, postmodernism and postcolonialism, are missing from the menu of paradigm options in the TRIP study. Critical perspectives may be included in “Marxism,” but those attending to race may struggle to find a paradigmatic home in the menu presented by the survey (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney2007, 34). This is but one explanation for why 21% of U.S. scholars and 27% of Canadian scholars selected “Other”—for Canadians more than any other category—as the “paradigm” of choice. In the TRIP study, the “Other” category is suspiciously large. Although we do not know the statistical significance of the differences between the percentages listed for each theoretical paradigm, a feminist is interested in what information is concealed by lumping the range of responses that do not conform to the disciplining menu of five offered in the survey into one undefinable view.
Though not the authors' intent, the TRIP survey is more an instrument of epistemological authority than a tool for measuring the effects of epistemology on disciplinary authority. The data suggest that the greatest exercise of power in the social construction of the U.S. international relations field is not gender but the disciplining of IR inquiry into limited paradigmatic and epistemological categories. These reflect not just gender and paradigm but also race, ethnicity, postcoloniality, and so on at a particular historical juncture. Our intersectional study of gender, nationality, and discipline in IR is good feminist scholarship because it leads us to ask questions about the marginalization of some male scholars, not only women scholars, and some intellectual perspectives, not merely feminist ones.
The comparison of the United States to Canada suggests that there is a case to be made for American exceptionalism with respect to gender and the penchant for positivism. The politics of knowledge is a dominant current in feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, and critical scholarship. These theoretical perspectives should inform analysis about women in international relations. Likewise, the analytical tools of gender analysis, attention to invisibility, and attention to marginalization should inform the study of women in the field. Not to do so is itself further evidence for our argument. The particular construction of U.S. international relations renders invisible not only women but also the tools necessary for understanding why the ideas of more women are not having “the greatest impact on the field of international relations” as viewed by most members of the discipline. Until we disaggregate gender and paradigm and analyze the intersection of gender and theoretical pluralism, of epistemological pluralism and national location, and of national location and gender, the marginal position of women within international relations will remain a puzzle, and gender will function as a variable among many, rather than as a powerful tool for greater understanding of the field.
