Margrit Eichler Chapter Summary

Margrit Eichler is a Professor Emerita of the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research area is specifically family policy, reproductive and genetic technologies, feminist methodology, and an integrative approach to social in/equity that understands the issue of sustainability to be part of social stratification. Eichler’s wrote this book to elucidate as to how the field of Research Methodology indulges in sexism. She mainly draws this analysis from a study of various journals carried out by her in the process of writing this book. Eichler’s book, in a way provides a new alternative method for research. This book can be said to be one of the pivotal books in the introduction of a New or Alternative Research Methodology.

The main aim of writing this book as Eichler puts it is to ‘break down sexism in research into manageable components, these

Androcentricity (the assumption that males are main actors of the society) ii. Gender insensitivity (ignoring sex as a variable) iii. Overgeneralization ( a sample is drawn from only one sex and then a generalised result for both the sexes is drawn) iv. Double standard (identical behaviour or situation is evaluated and analysed by different techniques)

v. Sex appropriateness (assumption that certain behaviour patterns and characters are more appropriate for one sex than for the other) vi. Sexual dichotism ( another sub-aspect of double standard, it is when you treat both the sexes as two discrete biological and social groups irrespective of their overlapping characteristics) vii. Familism (when family is treated as the unit of analysis) Of these seven types, the first four problems are primary problems (problems that are distinct of their own, these kind of problems often coexist and overlap) and the remaining three are the derived problems (these kind of problems are not as distinct as primary problems, but because of the frequent use, they require a specified