Economics and policy making are profoundly gendered -fixation with objective facts and accurate predictions retard acquisition of useful knowledge by creating analytical blindspots

(Sandra, Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective, Feminist Economics 1:1)

When the values and interests to be identified by researchers are those that differ between individual researchers or even recognized research communities, the neutrality ideal can be useful. Here feminists have stressed that it has not been vigorously enough pursued. (It has its limits here, too. My point is only that it also has its uses.) But when culture-wide values and interests shape research projects, the neutrality ideal is notjust useless; even worse, it becomes part of the problem. It defends and legitimates the institutions and practices through which the distortions and their often exploitative consequences are generated. It certifies as normal, natural, and therefore not political at all, the policies and practices through which powerful groups can gain the information and explanations that they need to advance their priorities. As two feminist postcolonial critics put the point, modern science's claimed neutrality is "a politics of disvaluing local concerns and knowledge and legitimating 'outside experts"' (Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya and Vandana Shiva 1988: 60). Such information and explanations may well "work" in the sense of enabling prediction and control. However, this obvious fact does not end the matter. One form of explanation that "works" may at the same time obscure or draw attention away from other regularities and their causes that would suggest other possibilities for organizing nature and social relations. One can get information about the natural and social order that makes possible the accumulation of wealth by the few and misery by the many, or other information that makes possible the equitable distribution of means to satisfy basic human needs for food, shelter, health, work and just social relations. Moreover, the regularities of nature and social relations that make possible healing a body, charting the stars, or mining ores may be explained in ways permitting extensive, though not identical, prediction and control within radically different and even conflicting, culturally local, explanatory models. The kinds of explanations favored by modern science are not necessarily the most effective ones for all projects - for example, for achieving environmental balance, preventing chronic bodily malfunctions or distributing access to scarce resources fairly. The fact that societies with massive investments of public resources in natural and social science research have not been interested to prioritize such fundamental human problems is itself illuminating. "It works" is no guarantee that "it" works for explaining all of nature's regularities and their underlying causal tendencies, that "it" is the only reasonable explanation of a given phenomenon, or that "it" does not also generate systematic ignorance. "It works" is no guarantee of cultural neutrality (cf. Harding 1994, forthcoming b). This kind of argument is widespread in U.S. anti-racist analyses and in the postcolonial science studies and development literature, including much work now generated under U.N. auspices as that institution tries to grasp why forty years of conceptualizing "development" primarily as a matter of science and technology transfer from North to South has largely resulted in the dedevelopment (and worse) for the vast majority of the South's peoples. (Cf. Vernon Dixon 1976; Susan Feiner 1994; Goonatilake 1984; Harding 1993, 1994, forthcoming b; Nandy 1990; Petitjean etal. 1992; UNCSTD forthcoming.) The neutrality ideal functions more through what its normalizing procedures and concepts implicitly prioritize than through explicit directives. This kind of politics requires no informed consent by those who exercise it, but only that scientists be "company men" (and women), following the prevailing rules of scientific institutions and their intellectual traditions. This normalizing politics frequently defines the objections of its victims and any criticisms of its institutions, practices or conceptual world as agitation by special interests that threatens to damage the neutrality of science and its "civilizing mission," as an earlier generation saw the matter. Thus, when sciences are already in the service of the mighty, scientific neutrality ensures that "might makes right." Feminists in every discipline have argued that androcentric "might" has all too often appealed to neutrality-maximizing standards in order to justify as "right" distorted descriptions and explanations of natural and social regularities and their underlying causal tendencies. We need a concept of objectivity, and methods for maximizing it, that enable scientific projects to escape containment by the interests and values of the powerful. This only weak concept of objectivity, that remains contained by the neutrality ideal, can't do it. What is the mechanism in scientific processes through which neutrality, and thus objectivity, is supposed to be maximized? Method is supposed to "operationalize" neutrality and, thus, achieve objectivist standards. However, method is conceptualized too narrowly to permit achievement of this goal. For one thing, method - in the sense in which students take methods courses or a research report describes its methods - is conceptualized as functioning only in the context of justification when hypotheses are being tested. It comes into play only after a problem is identified as a scientific one and after central concepts, a hypothesis and research design have already been selected. It is only after a research project is already constituted that methods of research, in this conventional narrow sense of the term, start up. However, as critic after critic has pointed out, it is in the context of discovery that culture-wide assumptions shape the very statement and design of the research project, and therefore select the methods. Moreover, it is well known that the availability of a research technology that was itself selected in earlier contexts of discovery and found productive frequently helps select which scientific problems will be interesting to scientists and to funders (cf., e.g., Strassmann 1993a). And cultural interests, values and relevances always select which problems will get to count as important ones for research. Of course in the "mangle of practice" (Andrew Pickering 1991) during the research process, hypotheses, representations of the object of knowledge and research technologies are adjusted to each other such that an important element of objectivity is produced without the promise of total neutrality. The world constrains our beliefs without uniquely confirming them. The "positive" neutrality ideal has blinded us to the costs of limiting our understanding of "method" only to techniques that standardize or otherwise obscure the values and interests represented in the results of research. Even the U.S. National Academy of Sciences - certainly not a den of wild-eyed radicals now argues that the notion of research method should be enlarged beyond its familiar meaning of techniques to include the judgments scientists make about interpretation or reliability of data, ... the decisions scientists make about which problems to pursue or when to conclude an investigation, ... the ways scientists work with each other and exchange information. (National Academy of Sciences 1989: 5-6) All three of these expansions of the notion of method make dear that methods can themselves be selected because they advance local social values and interests. Thus methods aimed only at eliminating all values and interests from the results of research have no way of detecting the ones that first constitute scientific problems, and then select central concepts, hypotheses to be tested and research designs. The issue I am raising is that some normative influences on research evidently advance the growth of knowledge and others retard it, but the "positivist" understanding of method lacks any way to identify which are which; moreover it is incapable of detecting the most widespread cultural assumptions, such as androcentric, economically elite or Eurocentric ones, that invariably lead to only partial and distorted representations of nature and social relations. (15-18)