Can feminist thought make economics more objective?
Author InfoSandra Harding Abstract Feminist research is often perceived to be less objective than conventional research on the grounds that the latter is value-neutral and the former is not. This essay shows that a major problem with the familiar standards for maximizing objectivity that permit such a conclusion is that they are too weak. They have no resources for detecting widespread cultural assumptions, values and interests, such as the androcentric ones to which feminist work draws attention. Good method works by identifying cultural values that differ between researchers or research communities. However, since androcentric values are often culture-wide, something more rigorous than only conventional good methods evidently are needed for researchers to be able to identify them. Thus feminist research does not introduce political assumptions, values and interests into research fields that are otherwise value-neutral; it identifies the ones that are already there. Rejecting the debi
