Empirical evidence from the labor market suggests that when an occupation is associated with women it is devalued, but without tight experimental control, these studies cannot establish that the relationship is causal. In a series of preregistered survey experiments, I test whether U.S. residents devalue three distinct occupations when they are feminine-typed rather than masculine-typed. I independently vary two gendered dimensions of each occupation: whether it is described as majority-women (vs. majority-men) and as necessitating feminine-typed communal (vs. masculine-typed agentic) traits. I find modest evidence that the gender ratio or gendered traits of an occupation independently shape its perceived value net of the other, but robust evidence that a doubly feminine-typed occupation (majority-women and typified by communal traits) is devalued relative to a doubly masculine-typed occupation (majority-men and typified by agentic traits). This study provides causal evidence that an occupation’s association with women shapes its perceived monetary value and shows that the effect is most pronounced when an occupation is feminine-typed on both dimensions. The devaluation of domains associated with women illustrates women’s limited options for evading gender bias: Although women are least likely to face gender bias in feminine-typed domains, those very domains are subject to gendered devaluation.
In this article, I examine how dresses become sites of struggle in Swedish preschools’ gender equality work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 preschool teachers and 112 hours of participant observation with a subset of 10 of them, I analyze how dresses become sites where domination, individual resistance, and solidarity shape possibilities for gender subjectification. In some preschools, domination was enacted through fear, ridicule, and parody, policing boys’ proximity to femininity. In others, solidarity revalued and normalized femininity through passive and explicit permission, symbolic reimagining, and expansive invitation, enabling all children to wear dresses. I argue that when individual resistance is sustained through solidarity, meaningful differentiation emerges, making it possible to reshape what becomes socially intelligible as gender through redoing and, at times, undoing gender. Rather than a permanent achievement, meaningful differentiation is a contingent accomplishment sustained by ongoing relations of power.
This article examines aguantar , the moral expectation that women endure suffering, as a form of gendered governance in rural Michoacán, Mexico. Drawing on 26 qualitative interviews with women, including trans women, the study conceptualizes endurance not as resilience but as a moral infrastructure that organizes belonging, safety, and respectability amid structural neglect and endemic violence. Aguantar transforms abandonment into obligation, making women’s immobility both a condition of virtue and a mechanism of control. The analysis traces the moral life cycle of endurance (its apprenticeship in girlhood, enactment in adulthood, and collapse into either resignation or departure) to reveal how moral systems repair themselves through exhaustion, and expose themselves through rupture. These findings advance feminist theories of gender and governance by showing how immobility functions as affective labor that sustains social order when institutions fail. Endurance emerges as both virtue and violence: It provides coherence through suffering while concealing structural harm. Recognizing aguantar as moral governance reorients feminist analysis from resistance to complicity, illuminating how patriarchal order survives through women’s ethical participation in their own containment.
This paper proposes a feminist-informed metascience theory to explain the interconnected processes of idea creation, translation, and diffusion. Drawing on feminist critiques of science centered on perspective, power, and praxis, we develop a creation–diffusion model that jointly examines how ideas are created and then how the content of ideas influences their spread across academic fields. Using a nationally funded gender equity program as a case of a practice-oriented knowledge-production community, we analyze how gender equity research concepts were translated and diffused through the program-funded publications. We operationalize substantive engagement with gender equity research using word embeddings and Concept Mover’s Distance. Then, with additional contextual variables, we measure (1) the predictors of this engagement (ideas) and (2) the impact of engagement on citation counts and citation interdisciplinarity (the diffusion process) across social science and STEM fields. Our findings show that, in addition to context, the content of the idea matters for diffusion: Engagement with critical dimensions of gender equity research, such as feminism and structural concepts, diffused less often, whereas other dimensions, such as gender and methods, achieved broader uptake. Our empirical findings highlight the role of perspectives and epistemic power in shaping both knowledge production and diffusion. Our theoretical framework and methods demonstrate how metascience can incorporate feminist theory directly into diffusion studies, and why it should.
Drawing on feminist metascience and Ridgeway’s “framed by gender” theory, I ask: How are men and women social scientists constructed in public media? I conduct a comparative analysis of media portrayals of eight public sociologists (four women–men pairs): Arlie Hochschild–Barry Glassner, Juliet Schor–Richard Florida, Angela Duckworth–Daniel Kahneman, and Michelle Alexander–William Julius Wilson. Findings reveal that women’s work is frequently de-legitimized by trivializing their contributions and emphasizing political biases, whereas men’s work is framed as empirical, rigorous, and legitimate, even when flawed. Women are often denied what I call “scientific deference” á la Goffman. These asymmetries underscore that scientific meritocracy and objectivity are not intrinsic properties of science but are instead culturally constructed ideals. By demonstrating how media narratives reflect and sustain gendered hierarchies of epistemic authority, this study extends feminist critiques of science beyond STEM and highlights the role of public discourse in shaping who counts as a legitimate scientist.
How does gender shape who can successfully claim authority in science, and how does this vary across disciplines? Drawing upon theories of doing gender and feminist epistemologies, I examine a key mechanism through which scientific authority is established: novelty claims, defined as rhetorical statements that frame research as novel, distinct from actual novelty. These claims operate as gendered professional practices linking gender to scientific impact. Through analysis of 106,125 papers from SciSciNet and Microsoft Academic Graph databases, I find that novelty claims mediate gender gaps in citations differently across disciplines. In STEM fields, women first and last authors make fewer novelty claims than men, and this is associated with fewer citations. In humanities and social sciences, novelty claims remain positively associated with citations, but there are no gender differences in their use or in citations. These patterns persist after controlling for women’s representation in each field, indicating that gender hierarchy gets reproduced through deeper epistemic power relations rather than demographic imbalance.
This introduction brings feminist scholarship into conversation with metascience and open science. Drawing on feminist epistemology, we argue scientific reform is not a neutral technical project. Rather, practices intended to improve rigor, transparency, and accessibility may also expose marginalized scholars and research participants to harm, reproduce inequality, and facilitate hostile scrutiny, particularly in the current political environment. These tensions point to the need for feminist metascience and feminist open science. We define feminist metascience as the study of how gender and intersecting relations of power shape the production, evaluation, circulation, and correction of scientific knowledge, and we define feminist open science as an approach to transparency that remains attentive to care, protection, and risk. We offer these definitions and the articles in this special issue as a starting point for larger conversations about how feminist scholarship might contribute to emerging debates over scientific reform.
