Elisha Cohen awarded 2022 Best Poster Award by the American Political Science Association
The CDS Faculty Fellow’s Research Quantifies Gender Bias in US House Elections
CDS Faculty Fellow Elisha Cohen recently received the 2022 APSA Best Poster Award, an honor given annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to recognize the best poster at the APSA Annual Meeting by a graduate student or early career scholar. Elisha’s poster “Measuring Gender Bias in U.S. House Elections: An Outcome Test Approach,” was recognized as making a “groundbreaking contribution” to the study of candidate gender in the United States.
Elisha’s research proposes a new approach to quantifying gender bias in US House elections by taking into consideration how bias at one stage can conceal bias in subsequent stages. As stated in Political Science Today, Elisha’s approach “quantifies the percentage of successful men at each stage (emergence, nomination, and general election) who would have failed had they been women.”
Elisha joined CDS this fall after graduating in 2022 with a PhD in political science from Emory University, studying political methodology with a focus on gender, race, and inequality in the United States. At CDS, Elisha continues to explore her research areas of political methodology, discriminatory selection processes, politics, and inequality. Amid developing methodological approaches for assessing fairness in political institutions and finding the best coffee in New York City, we caught up with Elisha to ask her about her research.
Congratulations on the 2022 APSA Best Poster Award! What initially sparked your interest in measuring gender bias in US House elections?
I have always been interested in women and politics and descriptive representation in general. I work on developing statistical methods for assessing bias in selection processes. Measuring the bias women face in getting elected to the US House is an important application well suited to these statistical methods.
Your work is at the intersection of social science, applied statistics, and data science. What do you find most compelling about the way these research fields overlap and inform each other?
I think social science ultimately wants to answer questions about people and society. People are complicated so understanding them is complicated. Innovations from the fields of statistics and data science help us to answer these challenging questions by building on theory developed in the social sciences that we couldn’t test or evaluate.
What impact do you hope your work will have on the future of data science?
I think there are so many important questions that will not just benefit from, but require, an interdisciplinary approach. I hope my work will show one path that is available in data science and encourage others to apply their statistical and data science skills to questions in the social sciences.
For more information on Elisha, read our introduction “Meet the Fellow: Elisha Cohen” on the CDS blog.
By Meryl Phair
