Challenging the gender citation gap: what journals can do

In recent years, debates about institutional inequities, discrimination, and routine racism and sexism in the academy have picked up speed in the field of IR. It is increasingly recognized that academia can be a hostile environment for women and members of minority groups. We focus in this piece on the issue of gender bias, but there is increasing evidence that significant bias against authors from minority groups, and authors writing from ‘diverse’ perspectives, also exists in the field. An awareness of intersectionality would suggest that the disadvantages to female scholars discussed below are more severe for non-white women, although we are not currently aware of academic analysis that investigates this.