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Beyond the Gender Citation Gap: Comments on Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell

Our comments on Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell (DSM) (2018) stem from our experience as journal coeditors—of Politics, Groups and Identities ( PGI ; Brown) and Comparative Political Studies ( CPS ; Samuels)—as well as from our work as cochairs of the Working Group on Publications of the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on the Status of Women in the Profession. We have focused our work on attempting to explain Teele and Thelen’s (2017) finding of a gender “publication gap,” that women are under-represented in top-ranked political science journals, in many cases well below their raw numbers in the discipline or the relevant subfield. DSM show that the gender “citation gap” narrows when more women enter a subfield. They also find that a gender citation gap does not exist in papers written by women. These results echo Teele and Thelen’s finding that women are more likely to appear in journals that publish research that engage more women. In short, the gender citation gap and the gender publication gap are flip sides of the same coin. DSM suggest that the gender citation gap is likely not due to deliberate discrimination but rather due to implicit biases and a lack of senior female scholars. In attempting to explain the gender publication gap, our own findings echo DSM’s conclusion that such “sociological” factors are important.