Is our attitude to men based on substandard research?

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2022-01-15 19:18

Article here. Excerpt:

'Much of our attitude towards men comes from high profile feminist and Gender Studies scholars in academia. There is a strong association between the theorizing amongst such academics and the ideologies expressed in public debate. In fact, it is often the same individuals who write op-eds, scholarly papers, and pamphlets, and engage in political activism. It is only the type of platform that varies. Much of the ideas about male privilege, quotas, “rape culture”, and the patriarchy, for example, began in academic departments. But what is the scientific quality of publications from the world of gender studies?

We were compelled to investigate the quality of gender studies publications after some alluring lectures given at Umeå University, arguing that Gender Studies (GS) outperforms the old-fashioned, bigoted, and boring positivist methods. GS, it was argued, is an alternative and superior kind of science.

This aroused our interest, so we compiled a database of all GS publications we could find in a certain time frame, written by scholars active in Sweden. This Swedish Gender Studies List (SGSL) contains 12,414 cases, and has to date been used in three studies, all published in the journal Scientometrics (Söderlund & Madison, 2015; 2017; Madison & Söderlund, 2018). As they are already reported in detail, we provide only a brief summary of selected results here.'

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Comments

One of the problems is that those in the field believe that things like Gender Studies have anything to do with science. There may be some small areas—somewhere—that utilise the scientific method but sociology is mostly about opinion, ideology and (at best) philosophy combined with statistics, not science.

It is further hounded by the fact that by the time any theory is shown to have been in error (and it has an excellent track record of discredited theories) society has moved on, so that the same theory can be put forward once again for society as it now is, without any fear of its accuracy ever been able to be proved scientifically.

This is not to say that subjects like sociology and gender studies don't have some niche field of usefulness somewhere. But they are not a social science and would do well to acknowledge that.

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Submitted by Douglas on Mon, 2022-01-17 12:55