Who's data- construction of databases is gender biased

(J. Ann, What is your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions International Studies Quarterly Vol 49 No 1 March)

The "message that feminists are seeking to deliver" is, therefore, a more profound challenge to the discipline than Keohane implies; moreover, the questions that feminists deem important are typically not adequately answerable within a conventional social scientific framework. Feminist questions challenge the core assumptions of the discipline and deconstruct its central concepts; many of them are constitutive rather than causal.'7 Working from the discovery of the gendered biases in state-centric security thinking, feminists have redefined the meaning of (in)security to include the effects of structural inequalities of race, class, and gender. Similarly, on the bases of theoretical critiques of the gendered political uses of the public/private distinction, feminists have rearticulated the meaning of democracy and have tried to reconstitute its practice to include the participation of women and men in all the political and economic processes that affect their daily lives (Ackerly, 2000:178-203). While not rejecting in principle the use of quantitative data, feminists have recognized how past behavioral realities have been publicly constituted in stategenerated indicators in biased, gendered ways, using data that do not adequately reflect the reality of women's lives and the unequal structures of power within which they are situated. For this reason they rely on hermeneutic, historical, narrative, and case study methodological orientations rather than on causal analysis of unproblematically defined entities and social relations. Importantly, feminists use gender as a socially constructed and variable category of analysis to investigate these dynamics."8 They suggest that gender inequality and other social relations of domination and subordination have been among the fundamental building blocks on which, to varying extents, the publicly recognized features of states, their security relationships, and the global economy have been constructed and on which they continue to operate to varying degrees. In contrast to an ontology that depicts states as individualistic autonomous actors-an ontology typical of conventional social science perspectives on IR and of liberal thinking more generally--feminist ontologies are based on social relations that are constituted by historically unequal political, economic, and social structures.19 Unlike conventional social science IR, which draws on models from economics and the natural sciences to explain the behavior of states in the international system, IR feminists have used sociological analyses that begin with individuals and the hierarchical social relations in which their lives are situated. Whereas much of IR is focused on factors that explain the behavior of states, feminists are motivated by the goal of investigating the lives of women within states or international structures in order to change or reconstitute them. Given these different ontological presuppositions and emancipatory goals, evaluation of feminist research according to the scientific standards articulated by Keohane is problematic. (6-7)