Would I Do This All Over Again? Mid-Career Voices in Political Science: A Report by the APSA Presidential Task Force on Women’s Advancement in the Profession

Laura van Assendelft, Page Fortna, Claudine Gay, and Kira Sanbonmatsu take a refreshingly different approach to understanding the challenges that women in political science face, and the choices they make. They conduct in-depth interviews with a select cohort of PhD students (men and women alike) who were in three graduate programs in political science in the 1990s and who are currently mid-career and use thematic analysis to identify the key factors shaping choices at critical junctures in women’s careers. The authors portray the constraints informing how women and men experience the profession at all stages–from their initial decisions to pursue a PhD in political science, their experiences in graduate school, on the job market, in their first jobs (whether in or out of the academy), and through tenure and promotion for those who remained.