Dawn Teele, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor who studies gender and politics, has been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2025. The 26 scholars selected this year will each receive $200,000 for research aimed at understanding political polarization in the United States.
Teele, who has spent the last 15 years studying gender inequity, will explore whether the differences between men’s and women’s political preferences are an unrecognized driver of polarization in the United States.
“People have studied how race resentment, perceptions of unfairness, and class resentment have contributed to the political divide,” said Teele, an associate professor at the university’s SNF Agora Institute. “One of my intuitions is that some of the tensions that are emerging are deeply rooted in our gender identities and our understanding of our social roles.”
“Helping to tease out the role gender plays in U.S. politics could pave the way for developing new strategies to combat polarization in the U.S. electorate and strengthen democracy.”
Dawn Teele
Johns Hopkins political scientist
Founded in 2015, the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program annually supports cutting-edge work in the humanities and social sciences to address issues facing society. Scholars are expected to publish a book or major study based on their work.
“We are delighted to congratulate Dawn Teele on being named a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellow,” said Hahrie Han, director of the SNF Agora Institute and a professor of political science. “Her research on the gender gap and partisan polarization addresses some of democracy’s most pressing challenges and exemplifies our commitment to using rigorous scholarship to improve democracy.”
Teele wants to understand how feelings of animosity have become a gendered part of modern politics. Take, for example, the “manosphere,” the collection of men in popular culture who espouse a return to “traditional” gender roles and villainize women who flout them. Their rhetoric and political ascendance leading up to the 2024 election didn’t arise in a vacuum, she said. In the past decades, men have seen dramatic declines in employment opportunities, economic security, and educational performance as women have gained greater stature.
Teele plans to trace how the gender gap emerged through history, determine whether political institutions and systems exacerbate that gender gap, and look to other countries to see whether their political systems have sustained a gender gap without leading to political polarization.
“Helping to tease out the role gender plays in U.S. politics could pave the way for developing new strategies to combat polarization in the U.S. electorate and strengthen democracy,” Teele said.
This is the second year of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program’s three-year commitment to fund research focused on political polarization.
“Through these fellowships, Carnegie is harnessing the unrivaled brainpower of our universities to help us to understand how our society has become so polarized,” said Carnegie President Dame Louise Richardson. “Our future grantmaking will be informed by what we learn from these scholars as we seek to mitigate the pernicious effects of political polarization.”
