Abstract
‘Women in the Profession’ (Bates et al., 2020) has recently been published in Political Studies Review and, in many regards, is an excellent analysis of the composition of the UK’s Politics departments. The authors are clearly committed to advancing the equality of women in the workplace and have produced data which shed important light on their continued under-representation. I applaud this, and I am grateful to Political Studies Review and the authors for considering my reply to their work. However, I hope that we might open a discussion about the methods used in the research that allows our discipline to reflect on binary assumptions about sex and gender. I hope that our conversation sheds light on the unease which some scholars experience when research projects – and even the Athena Swan initiative – code according to a gender binary, without asking participants how they identify. In addition, I would like to raise a secondary point about the processing of personal data in the research without informed consent.
‘Women in the Profession: An Update on the Gendered Composition of the Discipline and of Political Science Departments in the UK’ (Bates et al., 2020) analyses the under-representation of women in the profession, using a dataset of 2553 Political Scientists working in the UK. It finds incremental improvement in the position of women in Political Science departments since the previous iteration of the study in 2011, but no increase in the rate of that improvement. The aims of the study, and the analysis of the data, are laudable and I commend the authors for their work.
I would like to offer some critical, yet constructive, commentary on the data collection methods used to construct the dataset used in the research. The ‘Methods’ section (Bates et al., 2020) explains how the researchers collected their data by visiting departmental websites – not by conducting a survey with Political Scientists, or having any other form of contact with them. The name and profile picture of each Political Scientist was used as the basis for coding individuals as male or female. The article provides no specifics on how name or physical appearance led to an attribution of gender. From this data collection method, the assumption was then made that 916 individuals (of the 2553) were female.
But, is this correct? Political Scientists working in UK Political Science departments were not asked to confirm whether the assumption made about their gender was correct. The issue I would like to raise for discussion concerns the appropriateness of applying a gender binary to the composition of UK Political Science departments without the consent or input of those being studied.
An assumption has been made that the M/F binary encapsulates all experiences within Political Science departments. Specifically, I am concerned about the erasure of non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans people from the research, and – building upon this – the non-consensual coding of them as M/F.
Methodologically, I am concerned that departmental websites (which often present academic profiles without chosen pronouns) have been used to code Political Scientists on a presumed M/F binary. Ethically, I am concerned that a heteronormative framework has been applied as if it is naturalised and unproblematic. The erasure of non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans persons feels violent: first, because of the erasure, and second, because individuals are coded – without consent – to an alien gender identity which does not represent them. There are alternative methods of data collection which would have enabled the researchers to conduct an analysis of women’s representation in Political Science departments, while asking them how they identify and obtaining consent. For example, the data collection method could have involved the distribution of a survey to Political Scientists where they could indicate their gender. This would provide more accurate data on the position of women, and others, in Political Science departments. Importantly, this would avoid the hurt caused by non-consensual allocation to a binary which does not reflect everyone’s experience of the world.
My second point of concern relates to informed consent for the data collection. The dataset used in the research was built from personally identifiable data, scraped from the websites of Political Science departments across the UK. The data were then processed and coded for (presumed) gender, seniority and workplace. To my knowledge, no data subject was asked for their consent for this processing of personal data. If this is the case, then I am unclear how the research complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An alternative method of data collection – such as distributing a questionnaire – would have provided an opportunity for informed consent to be obtained by data subjects.
It is time for Political Science to think more deeply about gender and informed consent. We need to address questions to broader initiatives designed to further gender equality in the UK, whose methodologies perpetuate binary assumptions about identity. Political Science departments across the UK submit staff data to Athena Swan which is coded around an M/F binary so that the representation of women can be analysed. The same questions could be posed of departmental submissions to Athena Swan, as I have posed here. Are Political Scientists asked to consent to the use of their personal data, when it is sent by departments to Athena Swan? How many departments ask their staff to confirm the gender identity allocated to them on such submissions? These are questions we need to ask if we are serious about gender equality in the profession.
