Role of the Ideology of Gender-Balance in Academic Research
Discussion
Cadell Last:
"we have to understand this desire to “gender balance” everything as the way in which the ideology of historical spirit at this time perceives sexual-gender antagonism as the fundamental antagonism which cannot be thought directly (its too traumatic for the disembodied liberal-bourgeois intellect).
Consequently, there are massive ideological demands on researchers to perceive the world through gender categories as the primary way to understand diversity of thought, i.e. you have 30 individuals (25 happen to be men, 5 happen to be women), but only enough resources to interview 10 individuals. Well, because we have to view the world through gender as the most important category, everything has to be balanced. This potentially massively changes the way the research is conducted and the truth is unfolding. If we are looking through the ideology of merit (i.e. who are the best 10 individuals to interview in terms of their research experience or achievements?), or if we are looking through the ideology of the particular research specialization (i.e. who are the best 10 individuals to interview in terms of the specific questions I am asking on this topic), the people interviewed, and consequently the research outcomes, will be totally different.
Depending on the ideological frame, you may have a situation where the 10 individuals selected are “gender balanced” (5 men, 5 women), or you may have a situation where the 10 individuals selected are “gender imbalanced” (9 men, 1 woman). But the point is that the gender ratio is only important if the interviewer is doing research that pertains to gender-related questions. If the research is about something totally unrelated to gender it is purely ideological in a bad sense to demand a balance of gender categories. (It is like how university departments are trying to balance out the demographic of professors by actively selecting for women and people of colour independent of any consideration for merit or research specialization).
Again, what this demand is fundamentally pointed towards is that (for many reasons), the ideology of historical spirit at this time perceives sexual-gender antagonism as the fundamental antagonism. (To explore this in full: What Is Sex?) What ideology does, in a bad sense, is cover up antagonism and replaces it with balanced-neutrality so that historical spirit doesn’t start thinking about the antagonism as such (i.e. the merger of male and female hierarchies in the work place and all of the complex consequences of merging male and female hierarchies in the work place)."