Work (still) in progress: Establishing the value of gendered innovations in the social sciences

Abstract

The extensive significance of feminist and gender research clearly does not need demonstrating to the audience of this specific journal; yet such recognition of its importance is far from being universal. Feminist economics belongs to a class of approaches stigmatized by the mainstream neoclassical discipline as ‘heterodox’. Feminist philosophy, like feminist economics, is largely published outside the discipline's most prestigious journals, and is produced almost exclusively by women. Political science and international relations, likewise, are disciplines that in their mainstream incarnation, seem barely to have begun to engage with gender as a fundamental aspect of all political relations. Although in these disciplines, as across the social sciences, we see vibrant sub-fields, where feminist approaches and gendered analysis are the norm, the degree of gender segregation that often marks such scholarship in terms of practice, impact and citation, is cause for concern. In present institutional contexts, where perceptions of the ‘excellence’ of research shape funding decisions and career paths, and where many disciplinary fields continue to construct images of the social, economic and political world that are at best indifferent to questions of gender and at worst perpetuate ways of thinking intimately bound up with the preservation of gender inequality and subordination, it may be timely to reflect upon and construct accounts precisely of why gender matters in these fields