Amy Atchison, Ph.D.
amy.atchison@mtsu.edu
Full Professor
Middle Tennessee State University
Year of PhD: 2010
Phone: 615-898-5656
Address: 1301 East Main Street, MTSU Box 29
City: Murfreesboro, Tennessee - 37132
Country: United States
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Comparative Political Institutions
European Politics
International Law & Organization
Women Leaders Cabinets
Elder Care Policy
Work-family Policies
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Atchison, A. L., & Down, I. (2019). The Effects of Women Officeholders on Environmental Policy. Review of Policy Research. Studies show that women and girls consistently demonstrate higher levels of concern for the environment than men and boys. Separately, research also indicates that women officeholders pay particular attention to the issues prioritized by their female constituents. Interestingly, despite the consistency of the gender gap in attitudes to environmental issues the literature has paid scant attention to the role of women officeholders in the adoption of environmental policy. The goal of this paper was to start to address that lacuna. Using pooled cross‐sectional time series analyses of environmental standards in 18 Western parliamentary democracies (1990–2012), our initial findings indicate women officeholders are associated with the adoption of higher environmental standards.
Atchison, A. L. (2018). Towards the good profession: improving the status of women in political science. European Journal of Politics and Gender, 1(1-2), 279-298. Although women have made considerable inroads into political science, they still comprise only about one third of the profession. Women political scientists are concentrated at lower ranks and less prestigious institutions, less likely to be published in the discipline's top journals, and cited less frequently than men. There are indicators that women's marginalisation is related to exclusion from predominantly male networks in the discipline; thus, I propose a research agenda to map the extent of women's marginalisation in political science. In turn, I hope that this body of knowledge will push political scientists to address the structural inequalities embedded in the field.
Professional associations like the American Political Science Association (APSA) are intended to represent the interests of all of the members of the profession. The APSA has worked diligently to increase diversity in its leadership, successfully bringing more women and minorities into APSA governance. However, there has not been a corresponding effort to ensure that members from diverse institution types have a seat at the table. This is important because different institution types have different professional issues and interests. In this research note, I explore the extent to which APSA's leadership is reflective of the range of institution types in higher education. I find that the APSA's leadership is disproportionately comprised of members from large doctoral-granting universities and elite graduate programs. I conclude with potential ramifications and suggestions for further research.
Open-access (OA) advocates have long promoted OA as an egalitarian alternative to traditional subscription-based academic publishing. The argument is simple: OA gives everyone access to high-quality research at no cost. In turn, this should benefit individual researchers by increasing the number of people reading and citing academic articles. As the OA movement gains traction in the academy, scholars are investing considerable research energy to determine whether there is an OA citation advantage—that is, does OA increase an article’s citation counts? Research indicates that it does. Scholars also explored patterns of gender bias in academic publishing and found that women are cited at lower rates in many disciplines. Indeed, in many disciplines, men enjoy a significant and positive gender citation effect (GCE) compared to their female colleagues. This article combines these research areas to determine whether the OA citation advantage varies by gender. Using Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) tests, the nonparametric analog to the independent samples T-test, I conclude that OA benefits male and female political scientists at similar rates. Thus, OA negates the gender citation advantage that typically accrues to male political scientists.
Atchison, A. L. (2017). Where Are the Women? An Analysis of Gender Mainstreaming in Introductory Political Science Textbooks. Journal of Political Science Education, 13(2), 185-199. Textbook content is a powerful indicator of what is and is not considered important in a given discipline. Textbooks shape both curriculum and students’ thinking about a subject. The extant literature indicates that gender is not well represented in American government textbooks, thus signaling to students that women and gender are not part of the mainstream in political science. I contribute to this literature by using quantitative and qualitative content analysis to examine gender mainstreaming in 10 introductory political science textbooks. I find that the quantity of gendered content is small, and the quality of that content varies considerably from text to text.
All political science students benefit from expo-sure to the gendered ways in which political sys-tems operate. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which I bring these issues into Introduction to Political Science, a general education course typically taken by non-political science majors. The challenge is that introductory texts tend not to incorporate gender as an analytic construct. 1 I overcome this obstacle by including gender-related supplementary readings and classroom activities. In this paper, I focus on providing concrete examples of ways in which I have introduced intersectionality, the gender gap, and women in post-war rebuilding.
Abstract The literature indicates that the representation of women in legislatures is positively associated with the passage of female-friendly social policy (e.g., child care or family leave). However, there is little corresponding research concerning the effects of women in cabinet on female-friendly social policy. I argue that this gap must be addressed, because most of the advanced industrial democracies are parliamentary democracies in which policies typically originate at the cabinet level, and governments typically enjoy substantial control over the legislative process. Thus, women in cabinet positions should be ideally placed to promote female-friendly policies; indeed, they are likely to be in a better position to promote these policies than their legislative counterparts. The purpose of this study is to analyze the role of female cabinet ministers in the adoption of female-friendly policies, thus addressing this gap in the gender and politics literature. It should be noted that the influence of female officeholders on female-friendly policy may differ by policy. To assess female officeholders’ effect on female friendly policy in general, I create an index measure using 17 variables related to these policy areas. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, I find that female ministers have a significant effect on the adoption of policies that help to create a more female-friendly working environment.