Gender inequality in academia has long been a central issue in higher education and a sustained field of inquiry. Yet, despite the growing international literature on the topic, Italian political science has largely neglected it. With few exceptions, analyses of the discipline’s development have seldom addressed gender, while research on the academic gender gap has been mostly carried out by sociologists, with little specific attention to political science. This special issue seeks to gauge the dimensions of this long-standing neglect. It analyses women’s underrepresentation in political science, reviews the discipline’s en-gagement with gender, and brings to light the good practices of inclusion developed within national and international academic communities. In so doing, through the contributions collected here, it aims to open a long-overdue space for reflection and to reconnect Italian political science to an international debate in which gender is recognized as a central dimension of academic life.