WHAT IS FEMINIST RESEARCH AND WHY DO WE NEED IT?
By Emma Craddock
We need feminist research that centres women’s lived experiences and voices. Despite making up over half of the world’s population, women have been conspicuously absent from scientific research that has typically focused on the male experience and assumed it to be universal. Criado Perez’s (2019) book Invisible Women: The gender data gap, highlights the material effects of this in all areas of life. One area that I am particularly passionate about in my role as a Senior Lecturer in Health Research, is the patriarchal foundations of modern medicine, and healthcare research’s neglect of women’s lived experiences. Women have been underrepresented in medical trials. Health conditions that specifically affect women are under-researched and misunderstood. This has resulted in a lack of sex-disaggregated data and phenomena such as the ‘Yentl syndrome’ (Healy, 1991), where women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases mirror those of men. The impact of this is made evident by the recent announcement of women’s decreasing life expectancy in the most deprived areas of England.
I have begun this blog post with recent examples to highlight the pressing need for feminist research that takes account of women’s lives. However, this gendered neglect has deep roots. Tracing this history would take many more words than this post affords, but to provide some context I will outline some of the key elements that contribute to the continued neglect of women in research, and which led to the emergence of feminist research.
The 17th to 19th century ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (also known as the ‘Age of Reason’) was a crucial period of time that has had a lasting influence on the way the social world is organised and understood. It was here that the scientific method emerged, with its emphasis on objective, value-free, universal knowledge as the only form of legitimate knowledge. More widely, the world was organised into and understood as binary categories – male/female, reason/ emotion, objective / subjective, public/ private, where the former in these binaries was perceived to be superior to its inferior other. Therefore, male objective rational knowledge was privileged over female emotional subjective experience. Moreover, women were relegated to the private sphere while the public, political, and intellectual spheres were the arenas of men. It is clear to see the longstanding impact of this era when we look at the world we live in today, how women are treated, and their role in politics.
The starting point for a feminist approach to research is to challenge the androcentric foundations of the scientific method, drawing attention to how it is not in fact objective and universal, but biased in favour of dominant classes (white middle class men). In short, masculine domination is masked by what is portrayed as being abstract, neutral, and universal. We need to not only dismantle these assumptions to reveal their underlying gendered, classed, and racialised biases, but also seek to address the gendered imbalance of what is considered to be legitimate knowledge by focusing explicitly on moving women’s voices from the margins to the centre of research.
Feminist research focuses on lived experiences, feelings, and the subjective. It recognises the existence of patriarchy and resulting inequalities, and is a political project that seeks to challenge this by deliberately focusing on the experiences of the oppressed. Rather than reinforcing the myth of scientific knowledge being the result of objective, value-free and detached processes of experimentation, feminist research recognises and celebrates the importance of relationship, interaction, and intersubjective knowledge building when it comes to researching the social world. As Hesse-Biber and Piatelli (2007: 147, 148) contend, within feminist research, ‘tapping into lived experiences is key’ and that ‘without empathic, interpersonal relationships, researchers will be unable to gain insight into the meaning people give to their lives’.
We need to look closely at perceived gender-neutral contexts, such as healthcare and social movement activism, in order to reveal the hidden gendered power relations that exist. Anti-austerity activism in the UK presented a unique opportunity to explore the cultural and emotional dimensions of political engagement, their interaction with the material dimension and the role of gender in movements that are not explicitly feminist but where gendered concerns are still relevant, given austerity’s disproportionate impact on women. Such a study is vital given that, at the time of writing, only 32 per cent of MPs are women and the UK government neglected the statutory requirement to consider the equalities impact of its policies when austerity measures were drafted in 2010, resulting in women and ethnic minorities being disproportionately affected (Pearson and Elson, 2015).
Women suffer 75 per cent of the tax and benefit cuts with, on average, one fifth of women’s income being made up of welfare payments compared to one tenth of men’s (Fawcett Society, 2012). Further, women are subject to ‘triple jeopardy’, losing not only public services and jobs, but being left to fill the newly created service gap, unpaid (Fawcett Society, 2012). Thus, austerity reverses feminist gains, including women’s access to the public sphere and paid work, which provided financial autonomy, and entrenches care work as unpaid ‘women’s work’. In response, the Women’s Budget Group (2016) has called the austerity measures ‘regressive’.
Austerity is a feminist issue. Therefore, we would expect there to be a gendered focus in local movements such as the People’s Assembly, with women activists being part of this. However, this is not the case, raising the question of why this gendered dimension is absent. In Living Against Austerity: A Feminist Investigation of Doing Activism and Being Activist, I argue that the movement prioritises class politics over sex politics, partly owing to the dominance of white working-class men. Using a feminist approach to research a local anti-austerity activist culture revealed crucial insights about women’s experiences of activism. This included the gendered barriers and exclusions that exist but which were not recognised by the wider anti-austerity movements, which prevent women from becoming politically active, the creative ways women form their own responses to austerity led by women for women, the negative damaging impact of the ‘ideal activist’ identity (which while portrayed as an abstract individual, is actually the white able-bodied male given the criteria that define it), the shared experience of women’s guilt for not doing ‘enough’ of the ‘right’ type of activism (direct action) to fulfil the ‘ideal activist’ criteria, and how this was misinterpreted as a personal failing rather than a structural issue, resulting in negative emotions for women. The research thus reveals the complex ways spaces of resistance can reinforce dominant gendered power structures, while ostensibly fighting against them. It further demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to women’s lived experiences and voices to reveal the hidden and insidious ways that patriarchal structures and relations impact on women’s lives, as well as how women rise up against such oppression. Without feminist research, these insights would remain unseen. We need feminist research that centres women’s lived experiences and voices.
Living Against Austerity: A Feminist Investigation of Doing Activism and Being Activist. E-book £19.99 (20% off). Hardback £60 (20% off). Available at: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/living-against-austerity
References
Craddock, E. (2020) Living Against Austerity: A Feminist Investigation of Doing Activism and Being Activist, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Criado Perez, C. (2019) Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men, London: Chatto and Windus.
Healy, B. (1991) The Yentl Syndrome, The New England Journal of Medicine, 325: 274-276.
Fawcett Society (2012) ‘The impact of austerity on women’ [Accessed 22 October 2019].
Hesse-Biber, S.N. and Piatelli, D. (2007) ‘From theory to method and back again: the synergistic praxis of theory and method’, in Hesse-Biber, S.N. (ed.) Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Practice, London: SAGE Publishing, pp 143–54.
Pearson, R. and Elson, D. (2015) ‘Transcending the impact of the financial crisis in the UK: towards plan F – a feminist economic strategy’, Feminist Review, 109: 8–30.
Women’s Budget Group (2016) ‘A cumulative gender impact assessment of ten years of austerity policies’. March [Accessed 2 February 2018].