Since its establishment in 1979, the Women’s Caucus of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) has served an important networking, mentoring and advocacy role for women political scientists. While small and informal in its early days, over time the Caucus has become increasingly more formalized and structured in the support it provides to women within the discipline. Drawing on CPSA documents, scholarship on women in the discipline and interviews with several caucus participants, this article identifies the factors leading to the establishment of the CPSA’s Women’s Caucus and traces its development and history over the past five decades. It identifies four distinct periods within the Caucus’s history (1970–1979, 1980–1992, 1993–2005 and 2006 to the present) and argues that as women’s role in the academy has changed, the Caucus has taken on a wider range of priorities and tasks, reflecting the changing composition of the discipline.
