Gender and Political Science

~ Laura

Last week, Dan Drezner wrote a light post about a recent study, which found that a man's brain will slow down, after talking to an attractive woman. He then discusses how this finding might explain behavior by world leaders. It was a humorous, Drezner-ish post, which I skimmed in Google Reader last week. Truly, my sexism alarm system did not go off when I read this post.

Laura Sjoberg at Duck of Minerva wasn't too happy about Dan's post. She thought he minimized the role of women in International Affairs. She didn't think it was funny. Dan replied. 

Dan's post was fun. If bloggers aren't funny occasionally, people don't read us. That's part of the game. So, I think Laura was too critical of Dan's post. But she does raise some very serious issues with mainstream writing and academic research on the role of women in international relations. She said that her own work has been marginalized,

I cannot tell you how many times I have been told
that my publication record was excellent, and I'd be perfect for a job
if I just studied something "respectable" or "serious," or that I would
be included in some honor or some governing body if I just "got over
that gender phase" and did "real political science." I've landed on my
feet thanks to some great people who disagree, but I can tell you
that's the prevailing attitude towards gender-based work that I've
encountered.

And she thinks that this is just plain wrong, since the role women in global politics is more important than simply how they lure men to make bad decisions.

Women matter, and have agency, in important ways in
global politics – as leaders, as soldiers, as peacemakers, as
seamstresses, as housewives, as prostitutes, as business executives,
etc.; and where women matter (and even where they do not seem to),
gender matters in the shaping of expectations associated with jobs and
leadership positions, they way people in those positions are treated,
and the way that they treat each other. Again, likely unwittingly,
Dan's post replicates traditional assumptions that women are at once
without agency and to blame for men's mistakes.

So, Laura takes an unfair swipe at Dan, but she also makes a serious and real point about the lack of attention to gender issues by writers, scholars, and bloggers.

Perhaps I can convince someone with more experience in IR than myself to respond.

Published by Laura

21 thoughts on “Gender and Political Science”

  1. Funny. I didn’t even see that link and yet knew I’d need to respond.
    I think the Drezner/Sjoberg discussions touch on issues in theoretical IR more than they do garden variety sexism, which might explain why your alarm system was silent, Laura. IR was my second field and I fall into the more “male” categories in my research in terms of gender politics, so hopefully those (like Sjoberg) more embedded in these debates will correct any misrepresentations on my part.
    Here goes:
    The way IR folks understand state behavior theoretically draws from some arguments made by some scholars (like Hans Morgenthau… and Freud, incidentally) that contend that certain elements of man’s nature leads him to have certain desires and behaviors, for example like power or violence in pursuing that power. Scholars of the age often spoke of man in some sort of generalized “humankind” way (“all men are created equal”), but really, many of the IR folks were talking about MEN specifically. Males. Individuals with the male genitalia.
    As such, as people built scholarship and began to look at state behavior internationally as parallels or the consequences of leaders’ decision-making, they were deriving them from perceived male characteristics. As long as women were not major international decisionmakers, this sort of framework might make sense. (Although there are numerous examples of powerful female international players — Queen Elizabeth I and Cleopatra come to mind. But they were admittedly rare compared to the number of male leaders, clearly). Now, though, the foundations of IR theory, with its specific emphasis on male behavior, has less real applicability. That means that the scholarship that uses these bases for a starting point for assumptions/arguments, etc., should account for discrepancies. Much scholarship does not.
    So when Drezner, a noted IR scholar, engages in this sort of humor without an explicit disclaimer of some sort, I can see why it might rile feathers of people outside the IR mainstream who should be inside it. The postmodern element of the work (as it reasonably could be) also doesn’t help the oeuvre generally, either, given the bias against that approach in many circles.
    I think Drezner’s response to Sjoberg was fair, however. The blog is a great way to give this neglected issue some attention. I am not aware of Sjoberg’s work (this is my fault, not hers — I really read more in comparative), but I imagine the blog forum could do a great deal to translate some of the postmodern speak (if that is what she does, she may not) into more accessible terminology.

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  3. or the consequences of leaders’ decision-making
    Maybe we should all go neo-realist, so we don’t have to look at decision-making at all.

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  4. Because all you really need to know is the number and relative capabilities of the states and you can answer any important question.

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  10. Dyads? Nyads? Dryads? Who let the elves in?
    Also, COW? MOO!
    Also, also, won’t you all be glad when my better half gets back from Germany and I have less time on my hands in the evenings?

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  11. No kidding. I’m not getting any work done, Doug, and it’s all your fault. It’s business hours in NJ.
    (Plus I can’t help but observe that the Euro posts you referenced in the other post on book publishers do not, in fact, address problems of separatism in Russia and Georgia. Although they are indirectly linked to the subject matter.)

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  12. JG, I know. I just have admiration for somebody whose response to the problem of war is, “Let’s build a giant dataset.” (Not sarcasm, merely recognizing similar thinkers.)

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  14. eeks, you’re not making sense to me. So, I’ll post the reference.
    Karremans et al (2009). Interacting with women can impair men’s cognitive functioning. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 45:1041-1044.
    The summary: Experiment: men (dutch undergrads) do a 2-back task (view a stream of letters, say whether each letter matches the one that appeared 2 letters before, a cognitively demanding task, measure reaction times). Stop in middle of task, have men talk to one of two men or one of two women about neutral topics. Have them return to the task. Results: Reaction time: after talking w/ women 1436 ms; after talking w/ men 1255, p<0.02, a 181 ms difference and a weak (r=-0.34) correlation between self-reported attractiveness of the two women and the reaction time). Conclusion: men are slower in the cognitively task after talking to a woman. They then did another study to examine whether that's due to men trying to impress women.

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  15. (oh, and self-reported means that the subjects are reporting the attractiveness, not the women).
    I find this kind of study, which I roughly place in the category of how bias in social interactions among men/women/in/out groups/races/etc. influences behavior, fascinating. I think that we’re terribly unaware of how these “biases” influence our decision making, how we treat people, how we educate children, . . . .

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  18. For BJ:
    COW = Correlates of war, a largish data collection project of militarized disputes, the material capabilities of international actors, and probably some other stuff since they keep adding to it.

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  19. Plus I can’t help but observe that the Euro posts you referenced in the other post on book publishers do not, in fact, address problems of separatism in Russia and Georgia. Although they are indirectly linked to the subject matter.
    It’s a fair cop.
    Besides, I wouldn’t want to stand between Laura and a Call from Palgrave. Though I would surely send away a Person from Porlock.

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  21. It’s a fair cop.
    While you are confessing stuff, you may as well admit you made-up Transnistria to justify a dodgy receipt for your expense account.

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