Gender Bias in the Study of Politics

Until recently, the study of politics did not deal with gender. Politics was described and analyzed by social scientists and other "experts" who were virtually all male, and presented as objective (scientific), value-free, and gender-neutral. However, as women's & gender studies began to proliferate, and as more women have entered such fields as political science and sociology, as well as politics itself, they began to question the absence of "gender" as a factor in the study of politics.

Feminist scholars, in particular, have pointed out and documented that gender acts as a lens or filter through which people view, understand, analyze and critique the world and thus both the absence and presence of women and men in politics itself and the study of politics is a very important aspect of consideration.

1. Understanding Gender as a System of Power and Inequality
The term "gender" is typically distinguished today in the social & political sciences from "sex." While sex refers to the biological bases for differentiating females and males, gender refers to the characteristics and behaviors prescribed for a particular sex by a given society and learned through socialization. Thus, we speak of gender being "socially constructed" in the sense that we not only learn what masculinity and femininity mean from the social groups in which we live, but also that we ourselves contribute to and actively re-create gender boundaries by performing the behaviors that we associate with being a male or a female.


Probably the most powerful evidence that we have for the assertion that gender is a social construct is that the behavior and characteristics associated with males and females are not universal or timeless; what is considered appropriate behavior for women and men varies from society to society, and from time to time, and very much depends on the context within which it is observed and the interpretations of behavior that are culturally associated with sex differences. Example: In the U.S., during WWII, women were encouraged to work in factories for the war effort and were presented by the news media as strong and capable of physical labor; after the war, when the men came back and needed their jobs again, many women were pushed out of the labor force, presented as too weak and incapable of doing "men's jobs," and encouraged to assume their dependent roles as housewives. (Similar situation today in post-socialist states.)

Every culture has a set of characteristics and behaviors that it deems appropriate for the two sexes. In the U.S. the dominant gender stereotypes (i.e., attributions of certain characteristics to entire groups of people) are that:

  • men ( or masculinity) entail being strong, aggressive, ambitious, competitive, rational, independent, intelligent/smart, rough
  • women (or femininity) are the opposite of what it means to be male; thus, women are weak, passive, not ambitious, cooperative, emotional, dependent, not intelligent/dumb, gentle/caring


Question: To what extent are these stereotypes present in your cultures? Are there other or different characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity?

No matter what the specific stereotypes may be, they are set up as a dichotomy: there are only two genders, and each is what the other is not; that is, the two genders are directly opposite and mutually exclusive. Moreover, in most of the world, the characteristics associated with men and masculinity are more highly valued, dominant or privileged over the characteristics that are associated with women and femininity.

Thus, as V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan have recently pointed ou, "the social construction of gender is actually a system of power that not only divides men and women as masculine and feminine but typically also places men and masculinity above women and femininity." Hence the activities and identities associated with men and women are typically unequal. Gender stereotypes and the gender dichotomy are not a unique example of polar opposites in western thought. In fact, traditional western thought abounds with images of two, mutually exclusive choices or non-relational categories.

What this kind of thinking does is not only posit two choices, denying any commonality between the terms or concepts and excluding any third or other possibilities, but also establishes an androcentric (male centered) hierarchy privileging one of the options over the other. The side of the dichotomy associated with men and masculinity is seen as superior. Reason, order, mind, culture and action are associated with men and masculinity and are privileged over emotion, uncertainty, body, nature and passivity.

The dichotomies and how they are used exemplify the concept that Peterson & Runyan call masculinism, which refers to perspectives, practices, and institutions which are masculine in orientation (i.e., embody and privilege masculine traits) and thus produce and reinforce gender inequality.

Another mechanism that helps to maintain the gender system of unequal power are gender ideologies, which are systems of belief that include ideas about human nature and social life that distort reality and make hierarchies appear "natural." For example, the belief that men are by nature aggressive and sexually demanding and women are passive and submissive legitimizes the sexual abuse of women.

A combination of gender stereotypes, dichotomies, hierarchies, and ideologies affects our understanding of the world, including views and studies of politics. Because even today many people, including most social and political scientists, do not question the dualism of male-female, they do not see how the androcentric hierarchy affects our understanding of what is political and how we study it.

In sum, understanding how gender as a system of unequal power operates as a lens on how we view the world is an important first step toward improving our knowledge and the study of politics.

Part of helping to improve our knowledge and understanding of politics, is a recognition and bringing to light the actual gender biases in the practice and study of politics.


2. Different Forms of Gender Bias in the Study of Politics

(a) Typical or common definition of politics: the exercise of power in governments and related public institutions.

This definition is androcentric as it focuses on the activities of mostly men who have dominated (and still largely continue to do so) as government elites, officials, party leaders, etc. Moreover, the dichotomy of public/private has associated men with public activity and privileged it over private sphere associated with women.

When our notion of "politics" is limited to electoral activities, then politics becomes associated with men and masculinity and women are viewed as not political and largely absent from politics.

Women worldwide still comprise a small minority of political representatives (in 1997, women comprised only 10 % of membership of upper houses of national legislatures and 12 percent of lower houses; there were only 4 female heads of governments and 5 female heads of state, 10 female foreign ministers, and 10 female UN ambassadors; between 1988 and 1997, the number of women in parliaments worldwide declined 3 percent, from 15 to 12 %).

(b) Modern political thought has emphasized universal citizenship (i.e., the extension of rights to political participation to everyone), but the notion of citizenship is derived from masculine experience.

While modern citizenship has been presented as having universal norms and values, these are masculine militarist norms of honor and fraternity, competition and bargaining among independent agents, and discourse based on dispassionate rationality.

As Iris Marion Young indicates in her article, the generality of the public associated with citizenship has depended on excluding women. The public realm of citizenship has no place for emotion, sentiment and bodily needs which are associated with women, family and the private sphere. On this basis, western social thinkers like Rousseau excluded women from the public sphere of citizenship and many still continue to do so, seeing women as simply not fit naturally for public leadership.

(c) There has also been, and continues to be, a great deal of sexism in political theory.

Some social thinkers, like Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson, associated women with sexuality--a dangerous sexuality linked to desire and emotion which must be tamed and dominated. Thus women had to be kept out of politics. They are too emotional, not rational enough to make the important decisions.

Women outside of domestic sphere were especially feared. They were seen as greedy and insatiable, not moral or civilized enough to govern (same views were held of other groups, the poor, working class, non-whites).

Another perspective on women that many political scientists have perpetuated is that women are not political, not interested in politics (e.g., after women got the vote in many countries they did not vote in numbers equal to men).

Or, women have been presented as politically conservative, e.g., voting conservatively to preserve the status quo (this sometimes is attributed to women being more religious than men).

(d) Conventional social science theories and methodologies overlook the effects of gender and minimize women's political participation.

Most of the research in social and political sciences is done by positivists who see gender only as an empirical, observable category, a variable such as male/female heads of state, political representatives, voters, etc. They do not accept the idea that gender (defined as social roles and power differentials) affects how we think and see the world; i.e., they are unable to see gender as a theoretical (conceptual, analytical) construct or category.

Hence they only discuss and analyze the position of women and men in politics, where women are relative to men, usually pointing out that women comprise a small minority of those involved in politics and typically positing sexist/masculinist explanations for the relative absence of women.

3. How Feminist Scholars Have Changed the Study of Politics

Feminist perspectives focus on women and gender as primary categories of analysis, whether the field of study is literature, history, philosophy, science, or politics.

There is no single meaning of feminism; rather there are a number of feminist perspectives.
I would like to briefly discuss 5 of these perspectives: liberal, radical, socialist, post-colonial, and postmodern, and also introduce my own which I call "transformational."

Liberal feminism

  • Based on the notion that women's oppression and gender inequality are the result of sexism and discrimination, i.e., lack of equal opportunity or the existence of barriers to equal competition with men.
  • Gender inequality can be redressed by changing laws, policies, and attitudes; emphasis on women's rights, women should have the same rights as men.
  • Does not seek to change society fundamentally, but to reform institutions.
  • Applied to politics, liberal feminists promote equal representation of women in existing political institutions; increasingly, however, they link women's exclusion from political power to the undervaluing of women's responsibilities in the home and recognize that simply "adding women" to formal power structures is insufficient to change male-dominated political institutions.

Radical feminism

  • Views the oppression of women as the most fundamental oppression from which stem other oppressions, and sees the root of women's oppression to be the patriarchal system.
  • Radical feminists expose how experiences and activities associated with women and the female body are devalued, and how sexual violence is a form of social control of women under patriarchy.
  • Gender inequality has to be redressed by fundamental change in society; such change can be accomplished by development of alternatives outside the patriarchal system or by changing the system from within.
  • Whereas liberal feminists tend to emphasize equal opportunities for women to secure male-defined privileges, radical feminists argue for women's autonomy and freedom from male-defined norms and male sexual violence.
  • In politics, radical feminists emphasize the need for women to transform political institutions fundamentally by bringing in female values and behaviors.

Socialist feminism

  • Draws upon various Marxist or critical schools of thought as well as upon radical feminist insights.
  • Socialist feminists emphasize economic forces, revealing how capitalism and patriarchal gender relations interact to disadvantage women in the workplace and in the home.
  • They thus advocate collective responsibility in all spheres of life, including in the family.
  • Socialist feminists support changes that encourage co-parenting and shared household responsibility since such changes would allow women greater participation in the spheres of paid work and politics.

Postcolonial or Women of Color Feminisms

  • Emerge from the experiences of women of color; also known as anti-racist or anti-imperialist feminisms.
  • They typically draw on economic critiques but are especially distinguished by an emphasis on the interaction of oppressive forces, particularly racial and ethnic oppression. They analyze how gender, race, class, nationalist and imperialist hierarchies are interrelated in ways that particularly undermine the lives of Third World women.
  • This systematic oppression is implicated in a variety of global crises, such as for instance the continued and intensified exploitation of Third World women and girls in sweat shops set up by multinational corporations in developing countries.

Postmodern Feminism

  • Postmodern feminists take the power of gender, women's oppression, and women's struggles seriously, but are concerned that we avoid reducing both gender and women to simplistic, homogeneous and essential categories.
  • Every person is more than just a man or a woman; we each have a race, class, cultural heritage, age, and many other social identifiers that help to construct our identities; women and men differ along these and many other dimensions.
  • Thus to talk about e.g., "women" influencing politics as women, is a great oversimplification because any group of women will be diverse.
  • From this perspective, women in politics can't speak with one voice and any unity among women will have to recognize their differences.

In practice, feminist perspectives are not so distinct. Many feminist scholars combine a number of them, or draw on several simultaneously.

  • In my own work I draw on all of these perspectives and rather than using any of these labels I prefer to call myself a "transformational" feminist.
  • Applied to the study and practice of politics, this perspective acknowledges the positive value of both separation and integration; of both unity and difference i.e., that women as a distinct group from men have certain shared realities and interests that unify them (based on oppression and constructions of the feminine) and thus need to organize into autonomous groups that can articulate these commonalities and independently push for change.
  • On the other hand, women also have to join male-dominated institutions and try to change them from within, simultaneously working with women's groups outside the system, and even building coalitions with supportive men.
  • And while women may recognize their commonalities, they cannot do so until they also acknowledge their differences, including differences of power and privilege.

In any case, the application of feminist perspectives to the study of politics has resulted in some important transformations in how politics is viewed and analyzed and the role of gender in politics.

(a) Feminist scholars studying politics have recognized that by limiting the definition of politics to electoral activities and offices, women seem less political than they actually are. If the definition of politics is broadened to include women's involvement in social movements and protests, women are a lot more political than they appear to be. For instance, women have a long history as key players in antiwar and peace movements, revolutionary movements, and economic movements

The breakdown of the public/private dichotomy especially by radical feminist thinkers and activists has led to a re-definition of politics to include everyday struggles and power relations and has reclaimed women as politically active rather than not political. Women's political activity is especially evident in local communities, at the grassroots level. For example, my book, Women Transforming Politics, documents non-traditional political strategies that women have used to become empowered:

  • interpersonal networking, grassroots economic development projects, protests, using traditional women=s activities such as sewing or cooking in national liberation struggles, and involvement in non-governmental and informal women's groups and organizations.

(b) Feminist thinkers have also challenged the idea of universal or generalized citizenship that assumes the citizen to be a masculine individual and reflects the general point of view of the privileged, and have proposed alternative notions of citizenship.

Iris Marion Young and Carole Pateman, for instance, have proposed the idea of a differentiated citizenship where group differences are publicly recognized and acknowledged, yet mechanisms exist for communication across differences.

(c) Further, feminist scholars have refuted the often sexist explanations provided by political scientists for why there are so few women in formal politics.

They have illuminated the structural or systemic obstacles and barriers to women's political representation (e.g., electoral rules or party politics). They also have shown that women usually are not conservative voters or support conservative policies (e.g., women are more likely than men to vote for left-wing parties and are more liberal when it comes to social issues such as welfare, environmental protection, and peace).

(d) Finally, feminists have challenged positivist epistemology and methodology that only views and uses gender as an empirical category and have employed gender as an analytical category. They thus have shown how the subordinated position of women in politics is tied to gender as a value and a system of power that affects the understanding, practice and study of politics.
This has meant, among other things, that feminist critique of the study of politics has exhorted political scientists to critically examine their social locations and values that stem from these locations.

Peterson & Runyan provide some examples of how feminist analyses of gender in International Relations (IR) or the study of world politics, have begun to transform the field. For instance, challenging the conventional definition of security and economic growth from a focus on militarization and profit-making above all else (as defined by elite men), to the needs of people, sustainable economic development, defense of environment, and generally sustaining and celebrating life on the planet instead of creating death. Redefining power from "power over" (that emphasizes competition and separation) to power as a relationship (among actors, resources, meaning) and a resource or ability to get something done.

Leslie Vaughan (NWSA Journal) who reviewed three books based on studies of women's political participation points out how each of the authors found the methods & models of conventional political science to be inadequate to understand the complexity of women's political involvement.

Provides very clear examples of the biases I have been talking about and how feminist scholars have been both questioning and challenging the traditional assumptions and methods of the study of politics as well as developing new ideas and ways of incorporating women and gender into that study. Thus, they redefine and broaden the notion of politics itself to include activities that conventional political science has excluded, they employ gender as a system of power and show how political institutions and social practices are gendered or privilege men over women (and especially disadvantage non-white and poor women), and demonstrate how patterns of recruitment to political office are not gender neutral.

The readings I provided for you are just a tiny sample of the kind of work that feminist scholars who study politics are currently doing. Collectively, they represent a kind of vision for how the study of politics can be transformed:

That to understand how gender structures political activity, new frameworks and perspectives are necessary to replace the ones that are dominant in political science, and social sciences in general. To obtain a better understanding of politics we must incorporate gender and draw on women's activities, as well as men's, and the ways they have influenced and shaped politics.