Achieving 50:50 in 2020: lessons from our progress on gender parity
Leah de Haan
In celebration of International Women’s Day, I am so pleased to share with you that 54 per cent of International Affairs’ article authors in 2020 identified as women. Thank you so much to all our authors, peer reviewers, boards, supporters and contacts for making this happen!
We will be reporting on this more thoroughly, aiming at a similar report to the International Affairs gender balance report 2020, but the main message for today is: yes, we met our 50:50 challenge. This largely held steady across all International Affairs’ contributors: 55 per cent of authors on this blog were women, 65 per cent of contributors to our expanded webinar series were women and 100 per cent of our contributors to review essays were women.
The only place we slipped is our book reviews section, with 72 per cent of reviewers identifying as men. In 2017–2019, 77 per cent of book reviewers identified as men so, while this is an improvement, our 50:50 challenge remains outstanding for our book reviews section. This mainly involves finding more book reviewers, so if you are interested find out more about how to get in touch (and remember, you get to keep the book!).
The 50:50 in 2020 challenge, beyond helping us reach this specific target, has permanently changed International Affairs. Our networks have expanded, our editorial processes have become more focused on inclusion, and we are getting to publish debates and perspectives that may not previously have seemed to fit in International Affairs. In doing so, I thought we would share some of our key lessons from this process.
1. There are always women available
On every International Relations topic you can imagine, there are brilliant women who are experts, leading the development of new ideas and who would be amazing contributors to your event, publication or policy research. ‘There are no women writing on this’ was never a very good excuse — but let’s just agree in 2021 that we scrap it.
Might it take more time to find a woman who is an expert on a topic? Yes, she probably has had a harder time getting people to pay attention to her work and expertise. But then all good research takes a lot of effort — and in this case at least you get the guarantee of a beneficial outcome: you will have enriched your network… which helpfully brings me to my next point.
2. It is all about networking
When it comes to the discrimination and under representation women experience in International Relations, I think the greatest medicine individuals have to counter this is networking. Too often when it comes to reaching out to a potential co-author, adding a reading to your course, including a reference in your article or suggesting a speaker for an event, people simply go with their first thought: likely a man. We need to get better at reaching out beyond our smaller groups and making sure that we are better connected to all people in our subfields.
3. Gender is not enough
Where networking has been the best approach, our keenest lesson as an editorial team has been that looking solely at gender and women’s experiences in the discipline is not enough. If you were able to join our consultation on next steps for International Affairs’ diversity priorities (more on that coming soon, I promise), you will know that our first realization was that if you just talk about gender you are primarily talking about white, cis-gendered, non-disabled, middle-class women located in the Global North.
So yes, 50 per cent of all journal authors should be women — but don’t forget to interrogate which women you are including and, for that matter, which men? We are planning to take up this challenge next.
4. If we can do it, so can you!
When I started at International Affairs, I wrote a blogpost on finding diverse experts and wrote that:
‘As a young woman working in the discipline of International Relations, I don’t think it is unfair to say that the world can seem a little bleak.’
Working with a journal that is almost 100 years old it naturally takes time to change course. Looking back over the journal’s extensive archive, you learn incredible lessons from incredible people, but you also witness the systematic exclusion of women from International Relations.
This same journal has, thanks to our amazing contributors, achieved our 50:50 in 2020 target. So all I can say is: your journal, or edited volume or special issue, can do this too. Make sure to take up the 50:50 challenge — and please get in touch so that we can learn from your approach!
Leah de Haan is Project Manager and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Chair at Chatham House. Last year she led the International Affairs 50:50 in 2020 initiative.
You can read her full gender balance report published in the September 2021 issue of International Affairs here.
This blogpost is part of the ‘Women, Gender and Representation in IR’ series International Affairs is curating as part of the 50:50 initiative. If you are interested in engaging with this initiative or want to write a blogpost for this series, please email International Affairs’ Editorial Assistant Joseph Hills at jhills@chathamhouse.org.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
