Since its inception in 2004, Professors Kelly Kadera and Sara Mitchell have mentored 165 women in international relations through the Journeys in World Politics program. The three-day workshops include research presentations by junior scholars and feedback from discussants, oral autobiographies by senior scholars, and career and gender discussion sessions (e.g. networking, balancing family & work, women in the classroom, negotiations). With financial support from the National Science Foundation and the University of Iowa, Kadera and Mitchell have hosted twelve Journeys workshops in Iowa City between 2004 and 2018 (http://saramitchell.org/journeys.html). The motivation for the workshops stems from research showing the benefits of mentoring, especially for women in Political Science and academia more broadly. We track the success of the mentoring program through survey research and through collection of outcomes assessment data. 448 women have applied to the program and 157 (35%) have participated. Additionally, since the first workshop in 2004, 23 senior scholars (in addition to Kadera & Mitchell) have served as mentors to Journeys participants. 

Since 2009, we have maintained a Facebook Group page for Journeys alumnae. We also communicate information about upcoming workshops via email and through the Journeys website (http://saramitchell.org/journeys.html). We maintain information about all alumnae of the Journeys workshop on the site. We also use the hashtag #JourneysWP to tweet Journeys related information.

We evaluate the success of our mentoring program by comparing academic outcomes for Journeys program participants from 2004 to 2010 (treatment group) with applicants who were not selected to participate in Journeys workshops (control group). For women who choose academic careers, the data suggest positive effects for the Journeys mentoring program as these scholars have reached higher academic ranks more quickly than women in the control group. Journeys participants also produce a higher volume of peer reviewed articles, books, and book chapters compared to unaccepted participants. We also find a quicker accumulation of publications over time for Journeys alumnae. In short, our mentoring program helps women achieve more publishing success which helps to plug the leaky pipeline in academia.

We also survey Journeys participants after each workshop and we conducted follow-up surveys as well. These surveys suggest that our program was viewed very favorably by Journeys participants. We also found that advisor gender strongly influences mentoring experiences in graduate school. Journeys alumnae with female advisors report that their advisors treat them with respect more frequently and that their advisors help them meet more scholars of importance in the field. Female advisors also offered to coauthor articles more often than male advisors. Many of our program participants also coauthored research with each other. This demonstrates the importance of substantive representation of women in academia more generally.

PIs Kadera and Mitchell have published a series of articles on topics related to themes discussed at the Journeys workshop including the leaky pipeline, tenure and promotion, climate issues, service to the university and the discipline, parenting as an academic, gender salary gaps, and gender differences in citations to scholarly research. Our journal articles on these topics have been cited over 350 times. We also organized a roundtable on gender and citation patterns at an ISA conference, which was published as part of a special section in International Studies Perspectives in 2013. The papers (Mitchell et al 2013; Kadera 2013) were highlighted in several publications including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, the Washington Post Monkey Cage blog, and the Duck of Minerva blog. Kadera and Mitchell have also served on numerous gender-related professionalization panels at academic conferences across the world, given guest lectures on gendered dimension of the academy at various colleges and universities, and participated in or consulted for other mentoring workshops for female scholars in political science and other disciplines.

In addition to providing mentoring for our program’s participants, the Journeys in World Politics workshop also served as a model for two other mentoring initiatives. One, the Visions in Methodology program (https://visionsinmethodology.org/), provides support for conferences in political methodology to improve female participation in the general field of political methodology. The other, the Pay it Forward Workshop (https://www.isanet.org/Conferences/Special-Convention-Programs/Pay-it-forward), is a pre-conference networking and mentoring experience for junior women attending the International Studies Association's (ISA) annual meeting. This program began in 2014 under Kadera’s leadership and is funded by the ISA's Professional Development Committee and Committee on the Status of Women. We have expanded our mentoring at Journeys in other venues including ISA Midwest’s mentoring café. Kadera and Mitchell have discussed the Journeys in World Politics workshop in various public forums including multiple roundtables at ISA, ISA Midwest, MPSA, and APSA conferences. Our hope is that these programs will help to reduce the leaky pipeline in international relations and political science and create a more inclusive and supporting scholarly network.

Last Modified: 08/11/2020
Modified by: Sara M Mitchell