Gender inequality and paradigms in the social sciences

Abstract

The article is based on a survey of 788 Danish researchers, mainly from the social sciences, and analyses differences between female and male researchers concerning cognitive styles and cognitive convictions. Sandra Harding's portrait of modern science as androcentric and characterized by a set of gender-related dualisms is taken as a point of departure, and the results by and large show gender differences which can be related to this picture. Male researchers give more importance to methodological ideals taken from natural science, objectivity, mathematical methods, rationality, universality and cumulative results, etc., than female researchers do. These differences are shown to be correlated with the degree of power orientation of research topics.