Feminist theorists developed the term ‘malestream’ to illustrate situations where male sociologists carry out research that focuses on the male perspective only, then assuming that their findings can be applied to females as well. The term malestream is used in place of mainstream sociology.
Political theorist Mary O’Brien coined the term in The Politics of Reproduction (1981).
She used it for Western political and philosophical thought built around men’s experience of reproduction, yet presented as universal human thought. Feminist sociologists later adopted it for their own discipline.
Among feminists, it is often agreed that sociology neglected to study women’s issues and societal roles until the late 1970s.
Up until this point, the studies were conducted by men, for men, and generalized to the whole of society. Feminists believe that this generalization is inadequate in representing women.
In much sociological research that did include women, researchers tended to ‘add women on’ as an appendix. Findings on women were rarely incorporated in substantial detail (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
In studying feminist perspectives in sociology courses, for instance, this topic may have only been permitted one or two lectures and left for the women to teach.
Limitations of malestream sociology
Feminists have criticized malestream sociology on several grounds:
- Over-generalization: Findings from all-male samples were applied to everyone, distorting the picture of women in society.
- Ignored position: There is little recognition that women’s structural position and experiences differ from men’s (Abbott et al., 2006).
- Male norm: Women are viewed through men’s eyes. Those who do not fit the ‘norm’ are presented as deviant (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
- Stereotyping: Women in male-led research are often presented stereotypically, with subjective inferences drawn from male bias.
- Marginalization: Women’s issues are argued to be deliberately ignored or downplayed, sustaining women’s continuing subordination (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
- Invalid knowledge: With women’s experiences excluded, feminists argue malestream theories fail the criteria for adequate, valid knowledge.
Some feminists locate the deeper problem in patriarchal conceptual frameworks. These are the beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions that give higher status to what is traditionally male than to what is traditionally female.
Such frameworks put men up and women down, which is thought to contribute to the sexist oppression women face (Warren, 1989).
Why is there a malestream bias?
It is suggested that there are three explanations for why there has been a malestream bias in sociology. According to sociologist Ann Oakley (1982), these explanations are:
- Biased origins: Sociology has been biased since its origin.
- Male profession: Sociology has predominantly been a male profession.
- Ideologies of sex difference: These ideologies shaped how the social world is constructed, building in assumptions about how men and women differ.
Early sociology in the 19th century was focused on understanding the political and economic changes relating to the development of industrial capitalism.
These changes included an increase in factory workers, divisions in social class, the rise in the working class (men), and the extension of political participation (of men). Women were therefore not the focus of attention.
During this time, women were most associated with the private sphere of the home, while men were more associated with the public sphere of the workplace and politics.
Women were seen mainly through their position in the private sphere as wives and mothers, whereas men were observed in the public sphere. As such, theoretically and empirically, women were ‘hidden’ from the gaze of sociologists.
Examples of malestream sociology
In politics
Malestream research in political analyses tends to exaggerate differences between men and women (Siltanen & Stanworth, 1984). It has been suggested that women’s participation in politics is far less than men’s. Their concerns are also said to differ.
For instance, men are said to be concerned about pay and work hours, whereas women are more concerned with working conditions and concerns that reflect family commitments.
Bourque and Grossholtz (1974) argued that malestream researchers have often misinterpreted data or have made assumptions that fit with their ideas of women’s political behavior. For instance, malestream researchers believe that men (especially husbands) influence women’s political opinions but that women do not affect men’s opinions.
Men’s political attitudes and preferences are assumed to be mature. Women’s are seen as immature if their views differ from those of men (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
Marxism
Marxism holds that belonging to the proletariat class means having a particular relationship to the means of production. Workers do not own it; they sell their labor to those who do. Class identification is associated with producing surplus value.
Marxism can be criticized in three ways, which Marxist feminism addresses directly:
- No class of their own: When Marxism was founded, women had no direct relationship to paid labor beyond being associated with someone in paid employment.
- Men as the class: Social classes were mostly made up of men, so women were seen as irrelevant to class analysis.
- Gender-blind exploitation: Marx saw exploitation of the proletariat as the critical issue, without considering that gender and race can also result in exploitation.
Biological differences
Many sociologists saw the public-private division of labor as natural.
Anthropologist George Murdock (1949) surveyed the division of labor across societies. He argued that biological differences between men and women are enough to explain it. Men’s strength, and women’s role in bearing and nursing children, made a sexual division of labor efficient.
These natural gender roles went unquestioned. The woman’s role as a housewife was seen as the most efficient way of organizing society. There seemed no reason to doubt the subordination of women (Abbott et al., 2006).
How does the malestream relate to crime?
A further example of the malestream is how it relates to criminal activity. When analyzing crime, more studies look into crimes committed by men rather than women.
Carol Smart (1977) observed an insignificant number of studies investigating women and crime. Meanwhile, research into male criminality was vast. This may mean that crimes by women are under-researched and viewed in comparison to those by men.
Why was women’s crime so neglected? Several explanations have been suggested:
- Fewer offenders: Smart (1977) reasoned that women are less likely to commit crimes, so they are often viewed as less of a societal problem.
- Social pressure: Women may face more pressure to stick to their social roles and not deviate into crime.
- Less violent crime: Women’s crime may be ignored because it is not as violent as men’s, so it is seen as less of a social threat (Heidensohn, 1996).
To understand women and crime effectively, feminists suggest two key questions. Why do fewer women commit crimes? And why do the women who do commit them do so?
Real-World Applications
The malestream critique did not stay a theoretical complaint. It changed how researchers collect data and frame their questions across several fields.
Criminology and Women Offenders
Feminist criminologists put the critique to work. Women offenders were no longer a statistical footnote to theories built on male offending. Their own accounts and structural position moved to the center.
Pat Carlen’s (1983) study of women’s imprisonment is a classic example.
- Aim: To understand how sentencers and penal institutions actually treated women offenders, rather than assuming theories built on male offending would transfer unchanged.
- Method: With official access to Cornton Vale, then Scotland’s only women’s prison, Carlen observed the prison, courts, and bail hostels during 1980–1981. She also interviewed imprisoned women, sheriffs, police officers, and social workers.
- Results: Decisions to imprison a woman turned heavily on whether she was judged an adequate mother, not mainly on her offense. Male offenders faced no equivalent test.
- Conclusion: Imprisonment worked as social control organized around gendered expectations of domesticity, not as a gender-neutral response to lawbreaking (Carlen, 1983).
A malestream sentencing study could never have found the ‘good mother’ mechanism.
Chesney-Lind and Faith (2001) later argued that feminist criminology forced the discipline to separate two questions it had collapsed into one.
Why do fewer women offend? And how are the women who do offend actually processed?
Measuring Gendered Violence
The critique also reshaped how crime is measured. Walby and Towers (2017) tackled a specific problem: the divide between gender-neutral and women-only surveys was failing to produce good evidence on violence.
- Aim: To mainstream gender into the measurement of violence, since the split between gender-neutral and women-only data collection was failing to deliver good evidence.
- Method: They assessed two contrasting surveys against a quality checklist. These were the Fundamental Rights Agency’s Survey of Violence Against Women and the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
- Results: The Fundamental Rights Agency survey failed, and the Office for National Statistics had limited the potential of its Crime Survey.
- Conclusion: They proposed a short, purpose-built questionnaire and ways of analyzing data that escape the current polarization (Walby & Towers, 2017).
Gender became a variable to measure, not a category built silently into survey design. The study is a direct descendant of the malestream critique, which argued that tools designed without attention to gender distort data.
Housework as Real Work
Before the 1970s, malestream sociology largely did not treat housework as real work worth studying. It was assumed to be a natural extension of the wife and mother role.
Ann Oakley’s (1974) The Sociology of Housework set out to change that.
- Aim: To describe housework from the standpoint of the women who did it, including their attitudes, satisfaction, and working conditions.
- Method: Oakley conducted 40 in-depth, tape-recorded interviews, each around two hours long, with London housewives. They covered the working week, routines, and attitudes to specific tasks.
- Results: Most women, across social classes, reported dissatisfaction with housework comparable to or exceeding that reported in studies of monotonous factory work.
- Conclusion: Asking women directly, rather than inferring their experience from male paid employment, established housework as genuine sociological data (Oakley, 1974).
Hartmann (1976) extended the argument. She claimed that the sexual division of labor in the home was not natural or efficient but patriarchal. In her view, it served capitalism by supplying unpaid domestic and reproductive labor.
Health Research
Malestream thinking shaped medicine too. Male bodies were long treated as the default research subject.
Liu and DiPietro Mager (2016) traced women’s exclusion from US clinical drug trials. Through much of the twentieth century, policies excluded women of childbearing age from early-phase trials on safety grounds.
As a result, dosing, side-effect profiles, and efficacy data for many medications were established almost entirely on male physiology. They were then generalized to women.
This is the same generalization from men to everyone that the critique identifies in sociology.
The authors describe the policy reversal from the 1990s onward as still incomplete, with sex-disaggregated analysis of trial data remaining inconsistent. US rules now require federally funded trials to include women and analyze sex-based differences.
Solutions to malestream sociology
Below are some changes that can be made to ensure that sociological research moves from malestream to mainstream.
Changes in research methods
Researchers can reduce gender bias in four ways:
- Include all genders: Designs should include all relevant genders, using an equal number of male and female participants where possible.
- Label the sample: Prefixing a specific sample’s perspective makes clear whom the research targets. Describing participants as ‘white, western, heterosexual men’ makes visible how individuals are privileged (Warren, 1989).
- Mix researchers: Data should not be interpreted from the perspective of just one gender, so a mixed-gender research team is preferable.
- Serve everyone: Findings from studies that investigate society should be helpful to and usable by all genders.
Re-examining texts
Morgan (1992) suggested that to combat malestream sociological research, some of the classic texts should be re-examined.
Through this, it can be made more apparent whether the research is focused only on men or whether women are also included. Likewise, re-interpretations can be made that are not generalized to the whole of society.
Radical re-thinking
Some argue that adding women is not enough. It does not challenge the foundations of existing malestream theoretical perspectives (Abbott & Wallace, 1997). Nor does it challenge malestream views of which issues are significant enough to research.
Instead, it is seen as necessary to totally re-conceptualize sociological research.
Existing theories are argued to be sexist beyond reform. They should be radically rethought to see society from the position of women as well as men (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
Standpoint theory
Standpoint theory offers a more radical answer. Adding women to existing designs, or labeling privilege, does not go far enough (Smith, 1987; Harding, 1986).
Why not? Women’s structurally subordinate position gives them access to knowledge about society that dominant groups cannot easily see. Subordinate groups must understand both their own position and the dominant group’s in order to survive within it.
Questions matter too. Research questions, categories, and even what counts as a ‘problem’ reflect the social position of whoever is asking (Smith, 1987). Malestream sociology therefore asked malestream questions. No sampling fix removes that.
A sociology built from women’s everyday, lived standpoint would be not just fairer but more accurate.
This is a more contested claim than the original critique. It implies that knowledge produced from a dominant position is distorted, not merely incomplete.
Feminist viewpoint
Feminist perspectives in sociology can serve to tackle male bias and expand upon theory and knowledge. It is thought that feminist research can provide a better, less partial, and less distorted account of society compared to malestream research (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
Some feminists have been criticized for ignoring the differences between women and assuming that there is a commonality between white middle-class women and other groups of women.
Intersectionality offers a response. An intersectional feminist approach to sociological theory and research may better understand various women’s perspectives.
Gender is not the only factor. Race, social class, ability, sexual orientation, and age should also be recognized. Then ‘human’ is deconstructed into various categories, not only men and women (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).
Critical Evaluation
The malestream critique has real, measurable support. Feminists also debate how far the critique, and its fixes, should go.
Contemporary Research
Two questions drive recent work. Has the discipline changed? And does the underlying mechanism, men’s knowledge standing in for everyone’s, persist where researchers no longer study only men?
Has Criminology Stopped Being Malestream?
Camenius and Sandman (2021) tracked how women were represented in three Swedish crime-related journals across nearly a century.
- Aim: To test empirically whether explanations of and solutions to crime in Swedish criminology stayed as male-centered as the critique implies.
- Method: A mixed-methods content analysis of three Swedish crime-related journals, 1920–2015. It combined a count of gender-neutral versus gendered causes and solutions with a qualitative analysis of how women appeared.
- Results: Explanations and solutions were considerably more gender-neutral than expected. Yet women were discussed almost only in relation to the body, sexuality, or victimhood.
- Conclusion: Aggregate bias has eased, but a subtler pattern survives in which topics make women visible at all (Camenius & Sandman, 2021).
The verdict is mixed. On aggregate measures, Swedish criminology has moved away from crude androcentrism. Yet women appear through the body, sexuality, and vulnerability.
They are rarely shown through agency, motive, or structural position, the dimensions foregrounded when men are the subject. Compared with Smart’s (1977) impressionistic observation, this is a quantified update. It suggests the critique needs restating more precisely, not abandoning.
Does Citation Bias Persist?
Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell (2018) asked whether men’s work is still treated as a field’s central knowledge, this time through citation practices.
- Aim: To measure gender gaps in citation across political science, sociology, and economics methods subfields, and to test whether gaps shrink as subfields become more gender-diverse.
- Method: The authors analyzed all articles published in several journals from 2007 to 2016. They compared citation rates for work by men and women across fields with different gender balance.
- Results: Female scholars were significantly more likely than male or mixed teams to cite female peers. More diverse subfields showed smaller gaps. Even so, women’s work was undercited in journals publishing mostly female authors.
- Conclusion: The ‘Matthew effect’ weakens as fields diversify, but a ‘Matilda effect’ persists (Dion et al., 2018).
The study is widely cited as quantitative evidence that the malestream mechanism persists. It now works through citation networks, not only through who gets studied.
Read together, the two studies suggest malestream patterns are harder to see. Yet they persist. They show up in which topics make women visible, and in whose work a field cites forward.
Intersectionality Critique
The corrective may itself essentialize ‘women’. Abbott and Wallace (1997) note that some feminists have been criticized for ignoring differences between women.
They assumed white middle-class women’s experience spoke for other groups. Collins (2000) argues that treating ‘women’s standpoint’ as one unified perspective repeats the malestream error in miniature. A dominant group’s experience is generalized to stand in for everyone.
A parallel historical argument comes from hooks (1981). Feminist movements repeatedly organized around concerns most salient to white middle-class women, such as suffrage and workplace access.
Black women’s different priorities and structural position were marginalized.
An intersectional approach attends to gender, race, social class, ability, sexual orientation, and age together. Abbott and Wallace (1997) argue that it gives a better account of the range of women’s perspectives.
Rival Perspectives
Four rival positions answer the same problem differently:
- Positivism: The positivist view treats malestream bias as bad sampling, not a flaw in method. Fix the sample, and valid generalization survives. Harding (1986) calls the feminist version ‘feminist empiricism’.
- Standpoint feminism: Research questions reflect the asker’s social position, so no sampling fix removes malestream bias (Smith, 1987; Harding, 1986).
- Intersectional feminism: A generic women’s standpoint would still generalize from privileged women to all women (Collins, 2000).
- Postmodern feminism: ‘Women’s experience’ is not a stable category to build a corrective sociology on, because gender is performatively produced (Butler, 1990).
These are not minor variations on one fix. Each implies different research designs and different claims about what counts as valid sociological knowledge. Butler’s challenge does not defend malestream bias. It questions whether any single standpoint can do the work.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Malestream describes sociology in which male researchers study men, then assume the findings apply to women too.
- Origins: Early sociology studied industrial capitalism, the male working class, and public life. Women, tied to the private sphere, stayed ‘hidden’.
- Consequences: Generalizing from men distorts women’s experience. Male standards become the ‘norm’, and women are presented as deviant.
- Examples: Bias shows up in political analysis, Marxist class theory, biological explanations of gender roles, and crime research.
- Solutions: Include all genders, label sample perspectives, re-examine classic texts, or rethink theory from women’s standpoint.
- Modern Evidence: Recent studies find progress alongside persistent patterns. Swedish crime research still shows women mainly through the body or victimhood, and women’s scholarship remains undercited.
References
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