I am thrilled to begin my term as lead editor of Politics & Gender, effective July 2022, together with a larger team of associate editors and graduate assistants at Rutgers University. Although past editorial teams have included scholars from multiple institutions, Rutgers occupies a unique place in the study of women, gender, and politics in the United States. Our Women & Politics Ph.D. Program is the first and still the only program of its kind in the world. Since 1986, it has graduated more than 70 doctoral candidates across all subfields of political science. Rutgers is also home to two nationally- and internationally-renowned institutions: the Center for American Women and Politics, the premier source of data on women and U.S. elections, and the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, which coordinates the global campaign on 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.
I was a graduate student attending my first ever American Political Science Association (APSA) meeting in 2003, when the APSA Women and Politics Section (now the Women, Gender, and Politics Section) decided to launch Politics & Gender as its official journal. Over the last 20 years, I have personally witnessed it grow into the leading national and international outlet for research on women, gender, and politics. Since 2005, Politics & Gender has expanded knowledge on how politics is gendered and how gender is political, contributing to broader institutionalization of this research within political science. Its Critical Perspectives section, further, has provided a vital and productive space for spurring new conversations on gender and politics, both in academia and across the nexus of theory and practice.
I am deeply grateful to all the past editors for their work on building and expanding the journal’s reputation and impact: Karen Beckwith and Lisa Baldez (2004-2007); Kathleen Dolan and Aili Mari Tripp (2007-2010); Jennifer Lawless (2010-2013); Jill A. Irvine and Cindy Simon Rosenthal (2013-2016); Mary Caputi (2016-2019); and Susan Franceschet and Christina Wolbrecht (2019-2022). I want to thank the immediate past editors, Franceschet and Wolbrecht, in particular, for their service to the journal and the section over the last three years. During their tenure, Politics & Gender continued to solidify its place in the field through a strong rise in the number of manuscript submissions and a substantial jump in the journal’s impact factor. The editors’ timely call for papers on gender, politics, and COVID-19 showed, once again, that adequate analysis of political phenomena requires a gendered lens. Available open-access on the journal’s website, these articles continue to be among our most-read and most-cited content. The team also increased the visibility of Politics & Gender by creating a Twitter account (@PoliticsGenderJ) and curating a series of virtual special issues, making selections of previously-published content available open-access for a limited time.
The Rutgers editorial team seeks to build on this solid foundation while also expanding the reach of the journal in new ways. In the years since Politics & Gender was established, the community of gender and politics scholars has grown rapidly, both in the United States and around the world. This expansion is driven by a new generation of younger scholars interested in questions of gender, as well as the growing ‘discovery’ of gender by more established political scientists. These changes can be seen, for example, in the rising number of participants in the European Conference on Politics and Gender, the premier global gathering of gender and politics researchers, which has seen record numbers of attendees in every iteration of the conference since 2009. Political developments around the world in recent years have also raised the salience of gender in all aspects of politics, inspiring research on traditional and new topics in the field.
At the same time, the landscape of competitor journals has changed significantly since 2005. When Politics & Gender was established, only two other gender and politics journals existed: the Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy (the successor journal to Women and Politics) and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. However, the Western Political Science Association began publishing Politics, Groups, and Identities in 2013 and, in 2018, the ECPR Standing Group on Gender and Politics launched the European Journal of Politics and Gender. During the same period, several ‘general’ political science journals began publishing more work by gender and politics scholars, including the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science, whose editorial teams include past editors of Politics & Gender. While these are welcome developments, these changes require Politics & Gender to keep pace in attracting high-quality manuscripts.
To keep the journal moving forward in new ways, we are pursuing four interrelated and mutually reinforcing initiatives, coinciding with the fact that, as of the March 2023 issue, Politics & Gender will be published online-only. First, we aim to create a more expansive social media presence for the journal. To date, @PoliticsGenderJ has announced new articles and special curated collections of articles on different topics. We seek to use the account to highlight past and forthcoming pieces useful for understanding current events, as well as to promote new pieces as they appear on First View and in published issues. In recognition of the turn to new social media platforms, we have also created a complementary account at @PoliticsGenderJ@mastodon.world.
Second, we are committed to increasingly the accessibility of Politics & Gender. In recent years, Cambridge University Press has vastly increased opportunities to publish articles open-access, at no cost to authors, through a growing number of institutional agreements with universities around the world. A tool is available on the website help authors check if they might be eligible: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/waivers-discounts.
For those based at institutions without such agreements, a second option is the Cambridge Core sharing tool. Anyone who has access to the journal through a subscription (i.e., through a university or through membership in the section) can generate and share full-text links to all journal content. Simply login to the journal website with your institutional details, find the article, click on the ‘share’ button, and click ‘share content,’ which will generate a shareable link. While readers will not be able to download or print, this method gets around the paywall and will enable readers to see the fully formatted article online. We will always use these links to promote published articles on social media, unless the article is already available open-access.
Third, we seek to further expand the reach of the journal to international authors and audiences. Because Politics & Gender is a journal based in the United States, and is a key outlet for American scholars, a perception exists (whether accurate or not) among many foreign scholars that the journal’s focus is mainly American and quantitative in nature. Although qualitative articles are common in the journal, it is true that the vast majority of pieces have been in the subfields of American Politics and Comparative Politics. We believe that, as the section’s official journal, the content of Politics & Gender should reflect the diversity of authors, methods, and topics found across the broader gender and politics research community. We therefore strongly encourage submissions from scholars based outside the U.S., as well as from those specializing in International Relations and Political Theory, who in the past might not have thought about submitting to our journal.
Fourth, we are interested in developing more coordinated outreach to gender and politics practitioners, who are an obvious but under-served constituency of Politics & Gender. This initiative would also align with recent efforts by APSA as an organization, and the section more specifically, to recognize the importance of engagement with actors outside academia. To this end, we created a new article type, entitled ‘Notes from the Field’ (NFF). The aim of these short pieces (maximum 2,000 words) is to create opportunities for exchange across the boundaries of theory and practice, for example by highlighting the public engagement activities of gender and politics scholars, or by introducing new publications by practitioners that might inform and advance scholarly research. Our first NFF article, authored by the section’s 2022 Public Engagement Award winner, Julieta Suárez-Cao, appears in this issue. Prospective authors should email us at pag@apsanet.org.
To help us achieve these ambitious goals, we have recruited a dynamic and diverse editorial team and board. Our Rutgers-based team spans seniority, subfield, topic specialization, and research methods. My faculty colleagues, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, Kelly Dittmar, Elena Gambino, Summer Lindsey, and Kira Sanbonmatsu, are associate editors, while two of our graduate students, Brit Anlar and Michelle Irving, serve as the book review assistant and graduate editorial assistant, respectively. In putting together our editorial board, we have also sought to reflect, as far as possible, the full and growing community of gender and politics scholars. Members include a mix of very senior to very junior academics, with a wide variety of research interests and active at a broad range of institutions: American and foreign, research- and teaching-oriented, and public and private. Reflecting the central place of intersectionality in gender and politics research, they also encompass researchers working on race and ethnicity, as well as those doing pioneering research on sexuality, age, and disability.
In closing, I also want to highlight some ways that our readers can support the work of Politics & Gender. First, encourage submissions, especially from junior scholars, who are often the ones doing the most cutting-edge work in the field. Second, read and cite work in Politics & Gender. In addition to expanding knowledge on gender and politics, adding our articles to your reference lists can help increase our impact factor, a metric that is based solely on citation counts. Third, amplify the voices of our authors. Post about your favorite articles, re-tweet our posts and threads, generate and share Cambridge Core links, and assign our articles and Critical Perspectives sections in your classes. Broadening our authorship and readership expands our community, and I am honored to work with you in bringing a new generation of research into the world.
