Four years ago, I took stock of Canada’s international relations field, examining the demographics of the professors who study international relations as well as what they think of Canadian IR institutions. My analysis was based on a 2014 survey done by the Teaching, Research and International Policy [TRIP] project. TRIP surveys academics around the world on a whole suite of questions about every four years and surveys American IR scholars more frequently on public policy issues.

TRIP re-ran the worldwide survey in the spring of 2018, releasing the results to its research teams a few months ago (the results are not yet publicly available online). For the Canadian sub-survey, of the approximately 600 scholars contacted by the project, more than 200 answered, producing a response rate of nearly 33 percent — the best response rate of any country. As I am part of the team of academics who assist with the project, I would like to update Canadians on the state of international relations in this country.

To be clear, only so much can change in a short period. Still, as we can see below, when it comes to the field’s demographics, there have been some modest changes, even progress, in the last few years. In my previous report for OpenCanada, I compared Canada to the United Kingdom and the United States. In this report, I will compare the new results to the 2014 survey.

First, the latest results show that Canadian IR scholarship is still a male-dominated field. (All the results are based on those who filled out the survey — and my analysis here is based on the assumption the respondents are a reflection of those in the field as a whole.)