CAWP Research Grants Information

About

For five decades, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University has been committed to promoting greater knowledge and understanding about the role of women in American politics, enhancing women's influence in public life, and expanding the diversity of women in politics and government. While we have celebrated much progress over the past 50 years, women remain significantly underrepresented across all levels of U.S. politics and continue to confront barriers distinct from men. CAWP tracks data and conducts scholarly research about women’s political participation in the United States to better understand and address these dynamics. We are also committed to amplifying and promoting translation of others’ gender and politics research to yield progress for women in politics.

As part of this effort, CAWP offered both small and large research grants in 2020 and 2021 to investigate and illuminate barriers and opportunities to increasing women’s political power in the United States. This research is made possible thanks to the generosity and commitment of Pivotal, a Melinda French Gates company.

In our request for proposals, we prioritized research projects that would:

• Advance our understanding of the distinct realities that women of color navigate in U.S. politics;
• Identify and assess steps for translating research into action to increase women’s political power, including effective interventions to disrupt gender and/or intersectional biases in U.S. political institutions;
• Challenge one-size-fits-all assessments of barriers or opportunities to women in U.S. politics; and
• Expand the sites for research focus to non-electoral positions of political power and/or to sub-national levels of political representation.

While our preference was for research proposals related to one or more of the priority areas and related questions, researchers were welcome to propose research projects that fell outside, but were related to, these areas.

Priority Areas

Priority 1: Leading with Intersectionality  

While much scholarship and practice focuses on identifying and addressing barriers and opportunities to women’s political power, there remains a dearth of work that adopts and integrates intersectionality as a key framework for research and analysis. We sought proposals that would both expand and enrich existing scholarship to interrogate the following questions with particular attention to the distinct realities for Black women, Latinas, Asian or Pacific Islander women, Native American, and multiracial women.

• In what ways do media, money, and/or parties act as help or hindrance to women candidate emergence and/or success?
• What are the effects of gender, race, and party on candidate evaluation? How do (or should) differences in candidate evaluation influence electoral strategy and/or success?
• What are the social, political, policy, structural, and/or institutional effects of gender and racial (in)equality in the distribution of political power in U.S. politics?

Priority 2: Expanding Research Focus

We sought research proposals that would address neglected barriers to and opportunities for women’s political power in the United States. More specifically:

• What are the levels of, barriers to, and influence of women’s political power in unelected roles (e.g. staff, practitioners, appointees, activists) in U.S. politics? How might political power be expanded for women in and through these roles?
• What are the levels of, barriers to, and influence of women’s political power in local offices across the U.S.?
• What evidence exists for increasing women’s political power by changing rules and/or processes in U.S. political institutions? How do these changes affect women of different groups (e.g. racial/ethnic, age, party, sexual orientation, gender identity), at different levels, and in different political roles?
• How does the online harassment of women candidates and elected officials harm women's political involvement? What can be done to combat this harassment?

Priority 3: Meeting the Moment

There is no separating the U.S. political environment from the current cultural, economic, and health crises. Research projects were assessed for their ability to both meet and assess this moment in which proposals were sought, with specific attention to how the COVID-19 pandemic recovery and reckoning with systemic racism, including a rise in anti-Asian hate, affected or were affected by women’s political engagement and leadership. Research proposals could address the following sets of questions.

• The concurrent health and economic crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have had a disproportionate impact on women. What role does women’s political engagement and/or activism play in pandemic recovery efforts? And, more specifically, how have women, as community leaders and public officials, shaped the public response to COVID-19? What does the pandemic teach us about women's leadership and the consequences of women's political underrepresentation?
• The activism of #BlackLivesMatter and broader anti-racist movements, including Asian American activism, is altering the political landscape. What role do women play within these movements and in what ways do these movements alter interest in or access to elective office, particularly local office, for women who are members of historically marginalized racial groups?

Eligibility

Proposals were evaluated and awards granted among two pools of eligible applicants:

• Doctoral Students: Applicants were required to be advanced doctoral students who completed course work but who had not received the Ph.D. by December of the application year.
• Faculty/Post-Graduates: Applicants were required to hold a Ph.D. and be working as a post-doctoral fellow or scholar at any rank with an academic affiliation.

Collaborative projects between scholars, as well as those between scholars and practitioners, were welcome. However, doctoral student proposals were required to be solo-authored or co-authored with other graduate students. Faculty/post-graduate proposals could include doctoral students as co-investigators, but faculty/post-graduates were required to be the lead investigator.

Finally, any single individual was only permitted to be named in one submission. Additionally, CAWP grant recipients from prior years were not eligible for future rounds of grants.

CAWP welcomed projects that reflected a wide range of methodological approaches and strongly encouraged applications from scholars who are from groups that are underrepresented in the academy.

FAQs

The FAQs below were provided to grant applicants in CAWP's request for research proposals.