Gender inequality and paradigms in the social sciences

The article is based on a survey of 788 Danish researchers, mainly from the serial sciences, and analyses differences between female and male research ers concerning cognitive styles and cognitive convictions. Sandra Harding's portrait oi modern science as androcentric and characterized by a set of g ender-related dualisms is taken as a point of departure, and the results by and large show gender differences which can be related to this picture. Ma le researchers give move importance to methodological ideals taken from nat ural science. objectivity, mathematical methods, rationality. universality and cumulative results, err., than female researchers do. These differences are shown to be correlated with the degree of power orientation of researc h topics.