The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT): A Web-Based Tool for Estimating Gender Balance in Syllabi and Bibliographies
by Jane Lawrence Sumner, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
This article presents a tool intended to help researchers and instructors assess the gender-balance of their bibliographies and syllabi. It provides a brief overview of the gender gap in citations, then presents the tool, explains how it works (in two stages, by detecting names and then predicting gender), and provides resources for scholars seeking to diversify the pool of scholars they cite and assign. The aim is to make the process of evaluation very easy so that more researchers and instructors will assess and reflect upon whose work they assign and why, but the ease comes at the cost of being slightly less accurate than hand-coding, a shortcoming which is also discussed.
PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 51 / Issue 2 / April 2018