Women earn 40% of new PhDs in political science; however, once they enter the profession, they have strikingly different experiences than their male counterparts—particularly in the small but influential field of political methodology. For several years, the Society for Political Methodology, with support from the National Science Foundation, has attempted to address this gender gap through the Visions in Methodology (VIM) program. VIM features an annual conference that brings women together to present and discuss their research and to participate in professional-development sessions. Do programs like VIM have the desired impact? Using an original survey of political scientists, this study provides insights into the ways that bringing women together in small-group settings like VIM might facilitate networking and enhance productivity. In particular, the study finds that women who attend the VIM conference are better networked and more productive in terms of publication.

Despite some stakeholders’ concerns about the practical value of an undergraduate degree in political science, our graduates actually do quite well in the labor market. Based on analysis of a sample of 3.4 million college graduates (including 86,000 in political science) from the 2009–2014 American Community Surveys, our majors earn two-thirds more than demographically similar high school graduates if they stop with bachelor’s degrees, but they are among the most likely to obtain graduate degrees, especially in law. Only engineering, economics, computer science, and health science majors make at least 10% more than our graduates, who make nearly as much as those who major in business and 10% to 25% more than those who major in most other social sciences and humanities. Political science majors have relatively high unemployment rates in their 20s, however, and may end up in very different occupations than they imagined when they chose political science.

Despite the increasing urgency of many environmental problems, environmental politics remains at the margins of the discipline. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, this article identifies a puzzle: the majority of international relations (IR) scholars find climate change among the top three most important policy issues today, yet fewer than 4% identify the environment as their primary area of research. Moreover, environmental research is rarely published in top IR journals, although there has been a recent surge in work focused on climate change. The authors argue that greater attention to environmental issues—including those beyond climate change—in IR can bring significant benefits to the discipline, and they discuss three lines of research to correct this imbalance.

This study examines the scholarly practice of “knowledge sharing” and the extent to which it is rewarded by prevailing faculty-incentive structures. Following recent calls for greater connectivity between the academic and practitioner communities in both political science and public administration, there is a need for greater empirical evidence regarding the extent to which these practices are being employed across the discipline and how their use varies across institutional settings. Focusing on “knowledge sharing” as a specific dimension of “engaged scholarship,” this article reports the findings from a recent survey of public affairs and administration program leaders regarding current standards for earning tenure and promotion. Relevant scholarly practices are discussed and the reported value of these practices for earning tenure and promotion is presented. Institutional types are compared and recommendations are made for improving the dissemination of scholarly knowledge to the public administration practitioner community.

Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed. In this article, we share the origins of our project, the effect we are already having on media utilization of women experts, and plans for how to expand that success within the discipline of political science. We also share our personal reflections on the project.