“Mentions of Gender in Comparative Education Review, 1957-2016”

How has the Comparative Education Review (CER) — and the field of comparative education more broadly — changed over its first 50 or so years? To what extent do the journal’s contributions and its contributors reflect broader social and cultural transformations of the last half-century? To answer these descriptive questions, we designed this research around the analysis of a random sample of ca. 900 articles published in the Comparative Education Review, 1957-2016. We also found that the ratio of articles with women authors increased by 611% percent (.09 to .55), with most articles published in CER now having at least one women author. We also find that, especially in the most recent periods (i.e., 2005-2016), there are more women than men as first authors. Altogether, we interpret these findings as indicators of comparative education’s expansion—expansion of its contributions to knowledge about the role of education in society, as well as of the diversity of its contributors as compared to when the journal first began, with the diversity in contributions itself closely associated with diversity in contributors. We further interpret these findings to reflect broader cultural processes of scientization, which entail the heightened incorporation and empowerment of individuals to participate in science as well as the elaboration of domains and subdomains that can and should be investigated. We conclude that these cultural processes offer more opportunities for diverse scientists to contribute in the field of comparative education.