The Questions We Ask

We find that gender politics often leads us to pursue research questions aligned with our own experiences and beliefs. For example, while designing an intervention to increase women’s political participation in Pakistan, Cheema et al. (Reference Cheema, Khan, Liaqat and Mohmand2021) chose to focus on interventions that could address “everyday forms of male gatekeeping” in the urban center where they live rather than the extreme conservative “bans” on women’s voting in rural and tribal areas that have received much media and legislative attention. The decision to focus on these more quotidian constraints came at least in part from a lived familiarity with personally navigating them and knowing the real costs that they impose on women’s presence in public life. Such choices involve crucial tradeoffs: findings from field experiments conducted in a specific locality where context matters may have limited external validity (Pritchett and Sandefeur Reference Pritchett and Sandefur2015).

The identities of academic researchers and their positionality also can create blind spots that prioritize questions that ignore intersectional perspectives. Some approaches by experimentalists often have focused on an “add-women-and-stir” approach to change institutional gendered culture. These interventions, which randomize women’s inclusion in politics (e.g., Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov Reference Beath, Christia and Enikolopov2013), security (e.g., Karim Reference Karim2020), and economics (e.g., Hoogendoorn, Oosterbeek, and Van Praag Reference Hoogendoorn, Oosterbeek and Van Praag2013), do not interrogate what those interventions might mean for differently situated women in target communities, and neither do they decouple gender from women. In doing so, they inadvertently make assumptions about how the category of women is apolitical.

Our own situated gender politics as researchers also profoundly shapes which questions we consider legitimate and valuable. Many scholars have justified interventions and inquiries into the most intimate aspects of research participants’ private lives in the interest of changing gender norms (Pierotti, Lake, and Lewis Reference Pierotti, Lake and Lewis2018). Research questions that interrogate behavior relating to intimate-partner violence, sexual consent, and marital decision making is often legitimated by an implicit normative assumption that changed behavior is a societal good. Yet, interventions that seek to change violent or coercive gender behaviors often involve advocating for far-reaching sociocultural change. For example, Pierotti, Lake, and Lewis (Reference Pierotti, Lake and Lewis2018) studied an intervention by the International Rescue Committee designed to reduce intimate-partner violence by promoting positive masculinities through men’s discussion groups. Researchers can inadvertently find themselves legitimating projects that seek social and cultural transformation without being transparent about the values that underpin those projects. Furthermore, the subsequent consequences of these changes often are not included in research designs. Even if interventions to enhance women’s inclusion work in the short term, they might lead to future unintended consequences that experimentalists may not consider when designing the experiment, such as intimate-partner violence among women who become more politically active (Berry Reference Berry2018).

Gender politics affects who is eligible to participate in research. Historically, gendered inequality meant that most experimental research implicitly or explicitly focused on men; if impacts on women were considered, studies often sought men to speak on their behalf.Footnote ⁸ Women engage in more care work and often supplement household income (i.e., taking on multiple jobs), which can make them unavailable or inaccessible to researchers (Kumar et al. Reference Kumar, Nguyen, Harris, Harvey, Rawat and Ruel2018). Similarly, in some contexts, women may not be permitted to speak openly to enumerators without their husband present. Although norms that determine which topics are centrally relevant for political science have shifted, challenges remain. Research questions concerning women who have weaker ties to men (e.g., unmarried women and older women who may be perceived as unimportant for phenomena most central to much political and economic research) or those pertaining to women who are not members of the dominant social group typically continue to be excluded from mainstream political science scholarship.

The Ethics of Intervening

Gender politics also shapes how we understand ethical research. Field experiments raise particularly critical ethical questions, wherein active intervention into the lives of study participants often is implicitly justified by the perceived social benefits of the research.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, researchers who conduct field experiments on gender sometimes identify a commitment to transformative change. Yet, most interventions neither seek nor have the capacity to overhaul social and political structures or uproot interlocking hierarchies of oppression (Clayton and Anderson-Nilsson Reference Clayton, Anderson-Nilsson, Green and Druckman2021). It is essential, therefore, to engage thoughtfully with what is desirable and what is possible in the realm of what often are fairly short-term interventions. This links to thinking about appropriate outcome measures. Should we expect an intervention to lead to wide-sweeping social change or large-scale changes in attitudes? Perhaps not (Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov Reference Beath, Christia and Enikolopov2013). In developing outcome measures that are perhaps unreasonable, we risk setting up the experiment to fail. This means that experiments find null results for interventions that might have important effects but are discounted because they do not create the large-scale change that policy makers want to see.

Furthermore, interventions that lead to social transformation may have subsequent negative consequences. When intervening to change gender dynamics, researchers have an ethical obligation to consider carefully those interventions that could result in backlash for participants. It is essential to avoid harm; yet, backlash may be indicative of real change in patriarchal hierarchies. In our personal lived politics, it is precisely these “transgressive” actions that we may promote to transform existing power structures. However, we often are ethically obliged to do the opposite in our research: that is, negotiate our work within the status quo and limit risks to participants at the cost of transformational change. It is notable, however, that—like us—participants in research who seek to transform gender politics have their own political orientation, values, and preferences.Footnote ¹⁰ They may take risks of their own volition. As researchers, we must balance our own politics, the participants’ politics, and the risks of transgressive or transformative interventions.

Decisions Along the Way

Gender politics also shapes numerous decisions that researchers make throughout the research process. All stages reflect gender politics: the determination of who is a legitimate researcher; who should assist in the research process; who is eligible to participate in the research and why; which organizations and stakeholders can collaborate in the research as partners; what ethical considerations should be made; and who can benefit from the research.

These decisions within the research process sometimes are as important as the outcome. For example, when conducting qualitative fieldwork on the demand for formalizing marriages in Côte d’Ivoire, Hartman found that different political views held by members of the research team shaped opinion about which interventions were possible. The debate around this issue was critical to designing an intervention that sought radical change and that also was legitimate within the research context (Donald et al. Reference Donald, Goldstein, Hartman, La Ferrara and O’Sullivan2020). In one study, Karim (Reference Karim2020) worked with the police in Zambia and engaged in a validation workshop to present the results. The research proved to be a catalyst for important topics related to gender equality, including sexual harassment, paternity leave, and hazing. The very act of dialogue about gender equality among police officers proved to be transformative, creating buy-in for the study results. Similarly, during a debriefing session in Cheema et al.’s (Reference Cheema, Khan, Liaqat and Mohmand2021) study on women voter turnout in Pakistan, women canvassers noted their experience of traveling to parts of the city that they had never been to as part of implementing the canvassing treatment. Thus, working in the study expanded, if only briefly, their sphere of mobility in an urban public space that is costly for women to traverse.

As the discussion of ethics demonstrates, who becomes a researcher and who can engage in a research partnership matters because these relationships can bring resources, visibility, and strength to structures that continue to work for change after the research is completed. Partnering to conduct experimental research can be extremely costly, and it requires specific capacity, resources, and connections. All of these factors shape how researchers understand which organizations conduct good work. To work with partners who are women or who have women leaders is a political decision that requires certain material investments but that also can reap critical rewards. Cheema et al. (Reference Cheema, Khan, Liaqat and Mohmand2021) chose to work closely with organizations that resulted from the 1980s women’s movement and that are extremely active in mobilizing communities on women’s rights issues in Pakistan. Similar investments may be necessary to return research to those communities that participate in it if they include women. Lower levels of literacy or fluency in multiple languages and the relative exclusion of women from parts of the public sphere mean that inclusive research requires a thoughtful commitment of resources. Dissemination requires that same careful engagement. Given our politics, we hope that our projects inform policies in ways that align with our politics. Given that experiments often are understood to be the “gold standard” for policy research and may be treated more credibly or disseminated more widely than other forms of research, experimentalists arguably have even more responsibility to engage their own politics as the research process unfolds.