Understanding Feminist Research Methods
Understanding Feminist Research Methods
Other Entries
The debate about feminist methods emerged within Western academia in the 1970s in the context of
feminist critiques of science. The discovery of androcentric biases at the heart of scientific and social
scientific research undermined its claim to objectivity and led feminists to explore “feminist methods” of
producing knowledge as alternatives to traditional positivist science and social science. A key question that
has dominated these debates is whether there is a distinctive feminist method of inquiry. Sandra Harding
(1987) noted the difficulty in answering this question because of confusion over the term feminist method,
and its use to refer to epistemology—“a theory of knowledge” (Harding, 1987, p. 3), methodology—“a
theory of how research is done or should proceed” (Harding, 1987, p. 3), and method—“a technique
for (or way of proceeding in) gathering evidence” (Harding, 1987, p. 2). Harding (1986, 1987) argues
that while there are no distinctive feminist methods or techniques, there are feminist epistemologies and
methodologies. She identified three feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint, and
feminist postmodernism. She also suggested that feminist methodologies were characterised by three key
features: using women’s experiences as empirical and theoretical resources, producing knowledge with
emancipatory purposes, and locating the researcher in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter.
Harding’s tripartite classification, and her definitions of these terms, have remained key conceptual reference
points for discussions about feminist ways of producing knowledge.
The debate about feminist methods per se has focused on the question of whether feminist epistemologies
and methodologies demand specific and distinctive feminist techniques for gathering, producing, and
analysing data. Initially, these discussions polarised quantitative and qualitative research. For many feminists,
the critique of positivist science translated into antipathy towards quantitative methods. Starting in the
1970s, feminist sociologists, for example, began to criticise positivism as a philosophical framework and its
quantitative methods for their practice of detached and objective scientific research and the objectification of
the research subject. By the early 1980s, feminists argued that qualitative methods were more compatible
with the goals and principles of feminist research, with the in-depth interview becoming the paradigmatic
feminist method. Qualitative methods were seen as necessary for understanding women’s lives on their own
terms and for developing reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationships between researchers and respondents
conducive to generating open and honest accounts. Within a decade, these assumptions were being
challenged. Feminists pointed out that qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods were equally productive
for achieving feminist goals and for exposing and evidencing discrimination and inequalities in relation to
women and other marginalised social groups—a view that has largely endured. A consensus has emerged
that feminist research is not characterised by distinctive methods of inquiry but rather by its epistemological
and methodological commitments, which challenge positivism and its emphasis on objectivity and value-
neutrality.
This entry highlights the emergence of feminist critiques of science before assessing the development of
alternative feminist epistemologies and methodologies. The entry concludes by considering how the early
21st-century emergence of digital technologies, and theoretical developments associated with a cross-
disciplinary “material turn,” are giving rise to new frontiers for feminist methods, albeit ones that are indebted
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Drawing on their own studies of women’s lives, feminist social scientists critiqued mainstream research on
several grounds. They pointed to the neglect of women as subjects of inquiry, an omission that was justified
on the grounds that women were either too complicated to study or were unreliable sources of information.
Studies were based almost exclusively on male samples, activities, and concerns, yet made claims to
represent human experiences. Where women were studied, the research tended to use male theories that
valued characteristics associated with men and masculinity within Western cultures (e.g., reason, rationality,
autonomy, independence), with women generally viewed as deviant and deficient in relation to these male
norms (Gilligan, 1982; Millman & Kanter, 1975; Smith, 1987). Feminists argued that dominant theories
reflected cultural attitudes towards women and their inferior status and portrayed gender differences and sex
roles as natural, essential, biological, and universal. Not only was science, and its sexist theories, producing
partial and distorted knowledge of women’s lives, it was also being used as a means of representing and
legitimising gender hierarchies as objective facts and universal truths. Feminists contended that the sciences
and social sciences were complicit in the exercise of power: They were part of a patriarchal, and colonial
(Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), apparatus used to dominate and oppress women and other marginalised groups.
Carol Gilligan (1982), for example, argued that supposedly neutral and objective psychological theories
and methods carried gender biases and assumptions that systematically devalued women’s psychological
development compared to that of men. Mainstream psychology, she suggested, helped naturalise patriarchy
and its gender binary and hierarchy.
Feminist Epistemologies
The identification of science as a value-laden enterprise—biased towards male, White, middle class, Western
perspectives, and interests—undermined its claim to objectivity, value-neutrality, truth, and universality.
Feminists explored ways of producing knowledge that would avoid these omissions, biases,
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misrepresentations, and distortions, whilst also recognising that values played a role in science and social
science. They developed alternative feminist epistemologies, the three most widely cited being feminist
empiricism, feminist standpoint, and feminist postmodernism, each of which comprises a constellation of
ideas rather than a unified theoretical stance.
Feminist Empiricism
Some feminist scientists and social scientists located the problem of androcentric science within poor
scientific practice or “bad science” (Harding, 1986). This position, which Harding labelled “feminist
empiricism,” maintained that sexism in social science research could, in principle, be fixed by removing
sexist and other values and ensuring stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms. In particular,
objectivity could be restored by increasing the diversity of scientific communities through the inclusion of
more women and other social groups. These heretofore marginalised sectors would be able to identify
and correct androcentric (and other) biases in science and generate questions, theories, and methods not
previously considered (Millman & Kanter, 1975). Feminist empiricists also include feminist philosophers of
science—such as Lorraine Code, Helen Longino, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson—who maintain a commitment
to empiricism (sensory-based observation) but seek to revise it in light of feminist critiques of androcentrism
in science and its positivist epistemology that acts to conceal this bias. They argue that knowers are socially
situated and embedded within social relations and communities, science is a social and communal process
and practice, and knowledge is shaped by the specificity of the knower, their social context, and the values
associated with these. Feminist empiricism locates the problem of bias within the practice and practitioners
of science. Feminist standpoint and feminist postmodernism, on the other hand, take issue with what Harding
(1986) termed “science-as-usual.”
Feminist Standpoint
Feminist standpoint epistemology takes its inspiration from Hegelian and Marxist theories about the
relationship between the master and the slave, and the notion that the oppressed must develop a dual
perspective on the world—that of both master and slave—in order to survive, while the oppressor relies
on a single vision. The feminist standpoint argument is that, in a social world organised around gender
differences and hierarchies, men have a partial and perverse understanding of reality while women, because
of their subjugated position, have clearer and more comprehensive insights. Standpoint is understood as
an achievement based on one’s position in the social order that confers epistemic privilege and authority.
Feminists working within several disciplines—such as Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, Sandra
Harding, Alison Jaggar, and Patricia Hill Collins—insist on an epistemology that takes women’s diverse
experiences, rather than men’s, as a point of departure for creating knowledge.
Feminist Postmodernism
Feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint seek to install women as viable subjects in their capacities
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as both subjects of knowledge and knowing subjects. Their claim to legitimacy relies on what Joan Scott
(1991) calls “the authority of experience”—the direct experiences of women and the experiences of the
female researchers who recount the experiences of others—which provides the grounds for a more complete
picture of the world, one that corrects omissions resulting from inaccurate or incomplete vision. Feminist
postmodern epistemologies critique the idea that there are foundational truths—such as “experience”—that
act as uncontestable evidence and as originary points of explanation. Feminists such as Judith Butler, Jane
Flax, and Linda Nicholson criticise feminist claims made about the oppression of women founded in a notion
of shared experience and identity for essentialising gender identities by treating them as fixed, given, and
ahistorical. Feminist postmodernists call for theoretical and empirical investigations of how subjects, identities,
and experiences are linguistically, discursively, and historically constituted. Scott (1991), for example, argues
that we need to attend to the “historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their
experiences” (p. 779). On this account, experience becomes the object of knowledge, that which needs to be
explained, rather than the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known. For Scott,
this entails historicizing experience, and the identities it produces, and developing histories and genealogies
of taken-for-granted foundationalist concepts and explanatory categories such as “experience” and “identity.”
Feminist Methodologies
Positivism’s underpinning methodological principle of objectivity has been a significant target in feminist
critiques of science. Feminist scholars note that despite claiming methodological objectivity, value-neutrality,
and impartiality, positivist science has been blind to its own gender biases, its exclusion of female and other
marginalised populations, and its sexist theories and methods. Not only do feminists observe that science falls
short of its own methodological standards, they furthermore question the epistemic value and ethics of the
principle of objectivity. Feminists take exception with the strict, and indeed hierarchical, separation between
researcher and researched whereby the former is privileged as the knowing party and placed on a higher
plane than the latter. They have proposed alternative methodological priorities and reconceptualised notions
of objectivity and value-neutrality. They have developed a set of methodological principles, characterised by
distinctive epistemic and ethical commitments, which shape their research and seek to align it with feminist
ideals.
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be to “address women’s lives and experience in their own terms, to create theory grounded in the actual
experience and language of women” (Du Bois, 1983, p. 108). Many feminists have argued that women’s
experiences are more reliable sources for the production of complete and undistorted social research
(Harding, 1987).
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on researchers to be “reflexive” by recognising how their subjectivity, social locations, biographical histories,
worldviews, and conceptual frameworks shape and influence the inquiry process and resultant knowledge
(Fonow & Cook, 1991; Mies, 1983; Stanley & Wise, 1983). Harding (1987), for example, argued that feminist
inquiries insist that the knower “be placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter” and that their
beliefs and behaviours be included as part of the empirical evidence supporting knowledge claims (p. 9). For
some feminists, recognising values is seen to increase the objectivity of research because it avoids producing
knowledge that is distorted by unexamined beliefs and assumptions. In her book, Whose Science? Whose
Knowledge?, Harding proposes the notion of “strong reflexivity,” which requires researchers to be cognizant of
how their positionality can serve as both a hindrance and a resource for knowledge production. She suggests
that strong reflexivity results in “strong objectivity” because social research directed by acknowledged values
can be more objective and representative of women’s experiences than research that claims value-neutrality.
Other feminists relinquish the idea of truth and universality in favour of what Haraway (1988) calls “situated
knowledge.” Haraway (1988) takes issue with classical objectivity understood as the “god trick of seeing
everything from nowhere” (p. 581). In contrast to notions of transcendental and disembodied knowledge, and
the splitting of subject and object, Haraway proposes (1988) “embodied, therefore accountable, objectivity”
as a means of conceptualizing the situated, partial, and locatable nature of knowledge production—its
particularity, specificity, and noninnocence (p. 588). Haraway is not simply arguing that situated knowledges
and embodied objectivity provide new epistemological ways of understanding the construction of knowledge.
She is making a much stronger ontological claim that embodied objectivity and situated knowledges are
practices that produce not only knowledge of the world but also its very substance—its ontological nature and
form. In Haraway’s work, it is not simply the case that the human knower is accountable for the knowledge
that is produced and must reflexively position her or himself. Rather, there is a more complex causality at work
here whereby the human knower is both implicated in, and a relational and performative effect of, knowledge
production practices.
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emphasis on taking both women’s perspectives and researchers’ subjectivity into account has led many
feminists to suggest that knowledge is an intersubjective coproduction between researcher and researched.
Feminist Methods
Feminist Critiques of Quantitative Methods
The debate about feminist methods has focused on the question of whether feminist epistemologies and
methodologies demand specific and distinctive feminist techniques for gathering, producing, and analysing
data. Feminist social science emerged in the 1970s within a methodologically pluralist environment, with
some feminists arguing that quantitative methods were useful for understanding women’s lives and advancing
feminist causes. T. E. Jayaratne (1983), for example, suggested that the objectivity of quantitative
measurements could be used to counter criticisms that feminist research was biased and to provide evidence
of discrimination against women. She claimed that quantitative methods could be aligned with feminist
principles and that qualitative and quantitative methods were not mutually exclusive. For most feminists,
however, the critique of science extended into antipathy towards quantitative approaches that were seen as
embodying masculine norms and values. Feminists criticised quantitative research for neglecting women and
devaluing issues of importance to them, for being reductionist and decontextualizing social realities, and for
its inability to convey in-depth insights into, or empathic understandings of, the people being studied (Mies,
1983; Smith, 1987; Stanley & Wise, 1983). They also observed that quantitative studies either ignored sex
differences or investigated them superficially and simplistically by attributing sex differences to “inherent”
characteristics of men and women. Feminists further argued that quantitative research operated on the basis
of exploitative relationships among staff, and between researchers and respondents, with the latter seen as
“objects” of study deceived and manipulated for the benefit of the research product. Feminists maintained
that quantitative methods denied the personal and social character of the research process, implying that it
involves the following of rules, which preserve objectivity on the part of a neutral and uninvolved researcher
(Oakley, 1981; Reinharz, 1992). Overall, there was a perception amongst many feminists that quantitative
methods were inherently antithetical to the epistemic, methodological, ethical, and political principles and
goals of feminism.
Oakley’s (1981) influential piece, “Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms?” came to epitomise the
feminist critique of quantitative methods. Oakley dissected the model of survey interviewing outlined in the
social science textbooks of the time, arguing that emphasis on objectivity, distance, and detachment, and the
need to view the interview purely as a data extraction tool, set up a hierarchical relation and suggested a
masculinist mechanistic view that treated the social character of the interviewer–interviewee relationship as a
source of bias and contamination, and potential obstacle to the generation of pure “facts.” Furthermore, the
structured survey interview also sought out information from the perspective of the researcher who was seen
as being in control of the research context and situation—a point later reiterated by Hilary Graham (1983) in
her classic contribution, “Do Her Answers Fit His Questions?”
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Second, the notion that qualitative methods, and interviews in particular, represent nonexploitative practices
based on shared gender subordination has been criticised for exaggerating similarities in the position of
interviewers and interviewees and failing to acknowledge the complexity of the interview process, especially
in relation to the dynamics of power and social divisions between women. As Ann Phoenix (1994) observes,
notions about feminist interviewing as a “cosy enterprise” based on shared gender understandings ignore
differences between women in terms of race, class, status, sexual orientation, politics, age, and so forth—an
observation echoed by feminists such as Pamela Cotterill, Rosalind Edwards, Catherine Riessman, and Ning
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Tang. As Judith Stacey noted in her 1988 contribution, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” power
differentials are unavoidable and the balance of power tends to lie with the researchers who largely remain
in control of the terms of engagement with research participants and have responsibility for the writing up of
research.
The emergence of feminist “new materialist” philosophies of science at the turn of the 21st century has
opened up new possibilities for the project of feminist science and social science—including “feminist
methods.” In response to the linguistic turn, and the observation that “Language has been granted too
much power” (Barad, 2003, p. 801), new materialist philosophies re-engage matter, endowing it with its
own agency independent of human intentionality or cultural inscription. These distinctive understandings of
materiality call forth ontological questions largely eclipsed by the dominant focus of feminist (and normative)
philosophy on epistemology. They make possible new feminist “onto-epistemologies” (Barad, 2003) that
refuse the separation between ontology and epistemology, matter from meaning, world and word, nature and
culture. They furthermore propose a “diffractive” methodology as a replacement for reflexivity, which involves
research (rather than simply researchers) holding itself ethically and politically accountable for its ontological
consequences.
New materialist philosophies also open up alternative ways of understanding the nature and role of research
methods in the production of knowledge. They challenge technical conceptualisations of methods as
objective, neutral, and value-free instruments and suggest instead that methods are physical–conceptual
apparatuses that embody concepts in their material arrangements (Barad, 2003). Rather than Harding’s
evidence-gathering techniques, methods become philosophical practices by virtue of the concepts—such as
experience, the self, identity, and voice—they embed and enact, and that provide the conditions of possibility
for the objects of study they “measure” and bring into being (Mauthner, 2016). Feminist new materialist
understandings of research methods invite new ways of conducting research by treating methods as an
inherent part of the object of study and exploring their constitutive role in the making of realities. The
distinctive aspects of feminist research—where feminists have been seen to bring their specific epistemic,
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ethical, and political goals and values—have been seen to lie within its epistemological and methodological
commitments, rather than its methods. New materialist philosophies open up possibilities for feminist
explorations of the values—or ethico-politico-onto-epistemological commitments—that are embedded in
methods, and for rethinking the tripartite distinction between epistemology, methodology, and method that has
dominated debates and discussions about “feminist methods” of inquiry and their distinctive contributions to
knowledge projects.
Further Readings
Alcoff, L., & Potter, E. (1993). Feminist epistemologies. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bowles, G., & Klein, R. D. (1983). Theories of women’s studies. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Harding, S., & Norberg, K. (2005). New feminist approaches to social science methodologies [Special issue].
Signs, 30. doi:10.1086/428420
Hesse-Biber, S. N. (Ed.). (2014). Feminist research practice: A primer (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
Hesse-Biber, S. N. (Ed.). (2012). Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis. Los Angeles, CA:
SAGE. doi:10.4135/9781483384740
Keller, E. F., & Longino, H. (1996). Feminism and science. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Nielsen, J. M. (1990). Feminist research methods: Exemplary readings in the social sciences. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Ramazanoglu, C., & Holland, J. (2002). Feminist methodology: Challenges and choices. London, England:
SAGE. doi:10.4135/9781849209144
References
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.
Signs, 28, 801–831. Retrieved from [Link]
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. (2019). Data feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Du Bois, B. (1983). Passionate scholarship: notes on values, knowing and method in feminist social science.
In [Link] & R. [Link] (Eds.), Theories of women’s studies (pp. 105–116). London, England: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Fonow, M. M., & Cook, J. A. (1991). Beyond methodology: Feminist scholarship as lived research.
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Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Graham, H. (1983). Do her answers fit his questions? Women and the survey method. In [Link], [Link],
[Link], & [Link] (Eds.), The public and the private (pp. 132–147). London, England: Heinemann.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599. Retrieved from
[Link]
Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harding, S. (Ed.). (1987). Feminism & methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hughes, C., & Cohen, R. L. (Eds.). (2011). Feminism counts: Quantitative methods and researching gender.
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Jayaratne, T. E. (1983). The value of quantitative methodology for feminist research. In [Link] & R.
[Link] (Eds.), Theories of women’s studies (pp. 140–161). London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mies, M. (1983). Towards a methodology for feminist research. In [Link] & R. [Link] (Eds.), Theories of
women’s studies (pp. 117–139). London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Millman, M., & Kanter, R. M. (1975). Another voice: Feminist perspectives on social life and social science.
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Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms? In [Link] (Ed.), Doing feminist
research (pp. 30–61). London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Phoenix, A. (1994). Practising feminist research: The intersection of “gender” and “race” in the research
process. In [Link] & [Link] (Eds.), Researching women’s lives from a feminist perspective (pp.
49–71). London, England: Taylor & Francis.
Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist methods in social research. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Scott, J. W. (1991). The authority of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17, 773–797. Retrieved from
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Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston, MA: Northeastern
University Press.
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Stacey, J. (1988). Can there be a feminist ethnography?Women’s Studies International Forum, 11, 21–27.
Stanley, E., & Wise, S. (1983). Breaking out: Feminist consciousness and feminist research. London,
England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London, England:
Zed Books.
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