Essentially Quantified? Towards a More Feminist Modelling Strategy

Wendy Sigle-Rushton, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Diane Perrons, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

For decades, feminist theorists have made a clear and convincing case against the use of gender as a single analytic category. The treatment of gender as a single category has been robustly criticised for erroneously homogenising the experiences of women and for ignoring other important sources of variation that cut across gender in important and complex ways. Moreover, where multiple aspects of identity have been considered, researchers have been criticised for implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) treating multiple dimensions as additive and separable. Notwithstanding some notable exceptions, feminist demographers and quantitative social scientists continue to employ, often uncritically, methods that fail to address these concerns. This paper argues that feminist researchers need to pay greater attention to the assumptions that underlie their choice of method and the models they estimate. Additionally, the paper suggests the ways in which complexity or “intersectionality” might be better accommodated in gender-sensitive empirical work.