A MESSAGE FROM THE GUEST EDITORS

• Published in: PS, political science & politics political science & politics, 2020-04, Vol.53 (2), p.299-300
• Main Authors: Harbridge-Yong, Laurel, Sin, Gisela
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Community Relations; Conferences (Gatherings); Course Descriptions; Females; Gender; Graduate students; Grants; Intellectuals; Legislatures; Males; Mentoring; Mentors; Opportunities; Political gridlock; Politics; Presidents; Scholars; Teaching; Undergraduate students; Women; Writers
• ISSN: 1049-0965; 1537-5935
• DOI: 10.1017/S1049096519002038

The articles in this spotlight of “From the Sections” are drawn from the recent issue of the Legislative Studies Section (LSS) newsletter, The Legislative Scholar. As coeditors for the past three years, we have revamped the newsletter to focus on using it to provide opportunities for mentoring and community building, as well as a venue to highlight research in this area. In the three years since we took over in 2016, we have published newsletters on the past, present, and future of the LSS; teaching, mentoring, and training graduate and undergraduate students; advice on sabbaticals, grants, and research opportunities; a retrospective on the contributions of Keith Poole; and insights on legislative gridlock. We also highlighted the visions of legislative scholars on contemporary political events and multiple datasets developed by scholars in our field. Our final issue of the newsletter and the material included herein focuses on women in the LSS. It is not news that women are underrepresented in the field. In an article reporting the percentage of women in the 43 different APSA sections, LSS was the third lowest (22%), above only Political Methodology (21%) and Presidents and Executive Politics (22%) (Roberts 2018). This gender breakdown also was evident at the last LSS business meeting, when only about 15 were women of the approximate 60 people present. There also are gender gaps in publication in Legislative Studies Quarterly (LSQ) (as in most of the top journals); however, we have no evidence that this gap is any different in publications than in submissions. In fact, after publication of this issue of the newsletter, LSQ Executive Editor Brian Crisp undertook an analysis of submissions since 2016 (Crisp, forthcoming). He reports that in the past three years, 26% of all authors who submitted to the journal and 27% of those whose work was accepted for publication were women. Among solo-authored papers, women submitted 28% of manuscripts and received acceptances 10% of the time. This acceptance rate is similar to male single-authored papers (11%). Crisp also emphasizes that the editorial board of the journal is near parity on gender and that two of the three current coeditors are women. For 2018, Crisp also provides the gender breakdown of reviewers, which indicates that female scholars comprise 25% of LSQ’s reviewer pool. Recognizing that there likely are many reasons for this gender breakdown—in both the pipeline leading scholars to various fields and th