While the gender differences aren’t as stark in political science as in the sciences, they are still pretty bad. Take my profession – academic political science, presumably a bastion of political correctness. Our big annual convention is dominated by men. The leading journals prefer quantitative research over qualitative research. And no surprise, men do the quantitative work.
Huh. I wonder why they prefer quantitative research. Could it have anything to do with the fact that if you want to call your profession a science, that it must focus on quantitative research because that is the research to most likely produce reproducible results?
This attitude is precisely why women are often not taken seriously in the sciences. Qualitative research rarely has much lasting value to it. If you want to play with the boys, you have to play the same sport, and that’s not what you’re talking about here.
