Response to Dion, Sumner and Mitchell

The findings of Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell (2018) are striking: female political scientists are cited less frequently than are male political scientists, particularly when men are doing the citing. In addition, these patterns persist, although the gap is lessened, in fields where scholarship by women is more prevalent (such as gender and politics). All of this is troubling: citations are important not just for career outcomes but, more broadly, for determining which scholarship becomes field defining. Put simply, the findings in Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell (2018) imply that female scholars are at a long-term disadvantage in staking out their contributions to knowledge, and the study of politics is worse off for it.