📚 What This Study Looks At

This article maps the gendered division of labor in Brazilian political science by asking two questions: which topics dominate the field’s flagship journals, and how do women’s and men’s authorship patterns distribute across those topics?

🗂️ Data Collected and Where It Came From

• A corpus of 2,363 articles classified as "political science and international relations" by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).
• Articles published in the most prominent Brazilian political science journals between 2005 and 2018.
• Abstracts and bibliographic metadata scraped from the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) platform.

🧭 How Topics and Gender Were Identified

• A topic modeling technique was used on the scraped abstracts to identify the most recurrent topics in the corpus.
• Each article’s identified topic(s) were associated with the gender of the first author to analyze patterns of authorship.
• The analysis evaluated two forms of gendered division of labor:
• Horizontal division: segregation of women and men across different topics.
• Vertical division: whether topics with higher female representation are treated as lower status by journals.

🔍 Key Findings

• Clear horizontal segregation: women and men as first authors tend to cluster around specific topics.
• No evidence of a vertical division in this sample: journals do not appear to systematically devalue or reject work on topics where women are better represented—this contrasts with findings in some international studies.
• Despite the absence of vertical devaluation, men are the majority of first authors across all identified topics, including feminism.

💡 Why This Matters

These results show a gendered pattern of topic specialization within Brazilian political science but not the same publication-status penalty for women-dominated topics observed elsewhere. The persistence of male majorities among first authors across topics highlights continuing representation gaps in the field.