Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 74, No. 4, 2018, pp.

871--888
doi: 10.1111/josi.12291

This article is part of the Special Issue “The Reception of Immigrants

and Refugees in Western Countries: Facilitators and Inhibitors of Positive
Relations,” Victoria M. Esses and Jolanda Jetten (Special Issue Editors). For
a full listing of Special Issue papers, see: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/
10.1111/josi.2018.74.issue-4/issuetoc.

The Shaping of Science by Ideology: How Feminism

Inspired, Led, and Constrained Scientific
Understanding of Sex and Gender

∗
Alice H. Eagly
Northwestern University

When the Second Wave of feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist
psychologists vigorously attacked earlier scholarship on gender for assuming
that women’s intrinsic nature accounts for their deficits of power and status.
Consistent with the liberal, progressive ideology that has prevailed among feminist
psychologists, most of their research on the psychology of gender instead found
the causes of women’s disadvantage in the social context of women’s lives. In
particular, social psychologists championed this perspective by providing evidence
of the influence of gender stereotypes, social norms, organizational barriers, and
sexist prejudices on the behavior of women and men. This approach de-emphasized
other causes of women’s disadvantage, notably the self-construals and personal
goals that guide individual choices. In addition, many feminist psychologists
rejected biological causation as sexist and reductionist, thereby participating
minimally in research on interactive processes by which nature and nurture work
together in producing sex differences and similarities. The challenge now facing
feminist psychologists is to reach beyond ideological constraints to discover how
social, self, and biological causes interact to produce the phenomena of gender.

It is truly an honor to receive the Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the
Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), the organization that embodies the
core values of many psychologists. SPSSI’s commitment to using psychological
science to ameliorate social problems has been a beacon throughout my career.
Yet, my involvement in SPSSI has also elicited troubling thoughts about ways

∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alice H. Eagly, Depart-

ment of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208. [E-mail:
eagly@northwestern.edu].
871

C 2018 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
872 Eagly

that psychologists’ political ideologies influence their research and consequently

the knowledge that they offer to guide policy. This essay probes these issues by
discussing feminist political ideology and its relation to psychological research on
sex and gender.
I first experienced tension between science and ideology early in my career—
in the 1970s—when I taught a course on the psychology of women (as we then
titled courses on gender). A feminist colleague asked me if I was taking a feminist
perspective in teaching the course. I did not know how to answer her question. I
was then a self-identified feminist and remain so today, but I was unsure about
the wisdom of framing a university course by a political ideology if the course
were to claim scientific credibility. A political ideology, I thought, would be a
double-edged sword: It could illuminate, and it could bias.
My concern about bias followed from some of the revelations that had emerged
in the 1960s in psychology. Biases had been unmasked by Rosenthal’s (1966) work
on experimental expectancy effects as well as Orne’s (1962) research on demand
characteristics and Crowne and Marlowe’s (1960) demonstrations of social de-
sirability bias. Researchers lost any faith they might have had in the objectivity
of their science. Psychology then took its mid-20th century turn from positivism
to postpositivism (see Eagly & Riger, 2014). Many, if not most, researchers then
accepted the difficult burden of figuring out how to minimize bias. Objectivity
became a goal, not a given, and it remains so today as researchers struggle with
p-hacking and the replication crisis (e.g., De Boeck & Jeon, 2018; Wicherts et al.,
2016)
In the mid-20th century, the biases that received most attention were embedded
in psychological measures and experimental procedures. The broader issues of
ideological bias went unrecognized, mainly because the majority of academic
psychologists shared a liberal, progressive ideology (McClintock, Spaulding, &
Turner, 1965). This consensus made ideological bias invisible. Now, however,
political ideology is no longer invisible, given the sharp ideological cleavages
in U.S. society. A rash of articles claiming liberal political bias in psychology
have appeared in academic journals, mainly directed toward social psychology,
the subdiscipline most closely linked to social policy and political issues (e.g.,
Duarte et al., 2015; Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Redding, 2001). I suggest that it is
time to take ideological bias out of the shadows throughout psychology, including
in the study of sex and gender (see Eagly, 1995, 2013).
There is no better place than SPSSI for discussing these issues, given its
embrace of scientists as honest brokers who seek to fairly and transparently com-
municate the scientific information that bears on policy (Eagly, 2016; Pettigrew,
1967). Honest brokers abhor any form of bias, including those that flow from po-
litical ideologies. Therefore, the goal of this article is to shine a light on feminist
ideology as it relates to psychological research on sex and gender.
The Shaping of Science by Ideology 873

Waves of Feminist Research

Feminism, as a social movement and ideology, deserves credit for motivating

research on gender. In the 1970s, inspired by the Women’s Movement, psycholog-
ical researchers charged forward in an effort to understand a wide range of issues
pertaining to sex and gender. The earlier feminist research record was sparse al-
though it included studies by Wooley (1910) and Hollingworth (1914) emerging
from feminism’s First Wave. Because one basis of resistance to women’s suffrage
was belief in female intellectual inferiority, Wooley and Hollingworth addressed
that issue and found that women performed as least as well as men on various
cognitively demanding tasks.
Feminism’s Second Wave, emerging in the second half of the 20th century,
produced a much larger cadre of feminist psychologists and a far more complex re-
search agenda. In early efforts, feminists attacked the prevailing analyses of gender
for assuming that women’s intrinsic nature accounts for their disadvantaged status
(e.g., Sherif, 1979). Examples of what feminists criticized included Bettelheim’s
(1965, p. 15) statement in a conference on women in science and engineering that
“We must start with the realization that, as much as we want women to be good
scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions
of men and to be mothers.” Feminist writers such as Shields (1975) eviscerated
such reasoning. One prominent writer, Weisstein (1968, p. 75), provided a pre-
scient statement of how feminist psychologists would reason about the causes of
women’s disadvantage: “One must understand the social conditions under which
women live if one is going to attempt to explain the behavior of women. And to
understand the social conditions under which women live, one must be cognizant
of the social expectations about women.”
Psychologists interested in gender proceeded to produce a large body of
research. This extraordinary surge of activity appears in Figure 1, which displays
the frequencies of published articles on the psychology of gender and women,
from 1960 through 2017, assessed as articles per 1,000 in the PsycINFO database.
Following Eagly, Eaton, Rose, Riger, and McHugh (2012), this analysis used
index terms to implement three definitions of the field: (1) the bottom trend line
represents a narrow definition that includes only articles on human sex differences,
(2) the middle trend line represents a more expansive definition that also includes
articles on the psychology of gender (e.g., androgyny and femininity), and (3)
the top trend line represents an even more expansive definition that also includes
articles pertaining to women, mothers, and feminism (see Eagly et al., 2012,
p. 213, for details). The steep rise with the Second Wave feminist movement is
notable, followed by a fall, a further rise, and then a fall, reflecting the expanding
scope of psychological science and a lessening emphasis on gender research.
Much of the research on the psychology of gender pertained directly or in-
directly to understanding and ameliorating female disadvantage in society (Eagly
874 Eagly

Sex differences plus all gender and women Sex differences plus all gender Sex differences
110

100

90

80
Arcles per 1,000 in psycINFO

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
Publicaon year

Fig. 1. Annual frequency of articles on the psychology of sex differences, gender, and women by three
definitions, relative to all human psychology articles in PsycINFO, 1960–2017. [Color figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

et al., 2012). Consistent with Weisstein’s (1968) directive, feminist researchers

preferred to seek the causes of women’s disadvantage in the social context of their
lives. Feminists found this approach to be conducive to progressive social change,
as argued by Yoder and Kahn (2003, p. 287): “ . . . a social contextual approach,
more so than biology- or socialization-based approaches, opens up promising
possibilities for social interventions that may work to promote understandings of
and equity for women and men, girls and boys.” Other psychologists echoed this
emphasis on the external environment, for example, Greene (2010, p. 445) wrote,
“In feminist psychology . . . there is an explicit mandate to situate behavior in a
social context of power differentials and to not treat it as an entity that occurs in
isolation or as a defect in the person.” Also, in critiquing psychology’s conven-
tional methods, Riger (1992, p. 731) argued “By stripping behavior of its social
context, psychologists rule out the study of sociocultural and historical factors, and
implicitly attribute causes to factors inside the person.” Finally, Wikipedia’s arti-
cle on “feminist psychology” (Feminist Psychology, 2018) concurred with these
statements by defining feminist psychology as “a form of psychology centered on
social structures and gender.”
Studies illustrating this focus on social context investigated, for example,
social norms and stereotypes, institutional arrangements, and political traditions
that placed women at a disadvantage. Social psychologists, in particular, provided
The Shaping of Science by Ideology 875

abundant evidence of the influence of gender stereotypes and norms on the be-
havior of women and men. Prominent examples include research on (1) double
standards whereby women may have to meet a higher standard of competence
than men do (e.g., Biernat & Fuegen, 2001), (2) double binds whereby women
can face backlash for agentic behavior (e.g., Eagly & Karau, 2002; M. J. Williams
& Tiedens, 2016), and (3) stereotype threat whereby fear of confirming others’
negative expectancies about women’s abilities can cause their performances to
decline (Betz, Ramsey, & Sekaquaptewa, 2013). Psychologists also showed that
widely held attitudes contributed to women’s disadvantage, for example, in the
form of Hostile and Benevolent Sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001) and Old-fashioned
and Modern Sexism (Swim, Aikin, Hall, & Hunter, 1995).

Limitations of Second-Wave Research

In this remarkable flood of research, there was limited interest in identifying

causes of women’s disadvantage rooted in individual women, such as personal
goals that guide individual choice. It is not that research on individual differences
disappeared. After all, both Bem (1974) and Spence (e.g., Spence & Helmreich,
1978) produced innovative research on the psychological dimensions of masculin-
ity and femininity. However, this research served primarily to deconstruct claims of
sex differences by showing that it is not sex itself but individuals’ masculinity and
femininity that matter. Researchers seldom emphasized the robust and substantial
sex differences on these masculinity and femininity measures (see meta-analyses
by Badura, Grijalva, Newman, Yan, & Jeon, 2018; Donnelly & Twenge, 2017).
Those researchers who viewed the distinctive psychological qualities of
women as contributing to their disadvantage were not well received in the commu-
nity of feminist researchers. Consider, for example, the concept of fear of success
introduced by Horner (1972). The key idea was that many women, especially
talented women, fear success and therefore draw back from high achievement.
Despite a brief flurry of interest, Horner’s research soon elicited a barrage of crit-
icism (e.g., Levine & Crumrine, 1975). In the most adamant of these rejections,
it was simply wrong to consider ascribing women’s disadvantage to their own
personal attributes. As Paludi (1984, p. 778) wrote, “It would, therefore, appear to
be desirable to abandon the label ‘fear of success,’ since its continued use serves
only to reinforce the popular and widespread, but scientifically unfounded, idea
that sex differences in occupational or academic participation are attributable to
an intrapsychic difference between men and women, and thus serve to blame the
victim.”
Despite feminist hostility to research that implicated women’s traits as pro-
ducing their own disadvantage, a lively tradition developed of studying the self
in relation to gender. In particular, Cross and Madson (1997) made the controver-
sial claim that women’s self-construals are more interdependent compared with
876 Eagly

men’s, which are more independent. Others countered by arguing that both women
and men have interdependent self-construals, with women valuing close, dyadic
relationships and men valuing collective entities such as teams and organizations
(e.g., Gabriel & Gardner, 1999). In addition, pursuing a different aspect of the
self, many researchers considered whether women’s self-esteem is lower than
men’s (e.g., Bleidorn et al., 2016; Helwig & Ruprecht, 2017). Research in these
traditions largely escaped feminist critique because it did not implicate women’s
traits as producing their own disadvantage. Instead, reversing causation, investi-
gators more often speculated that these self-related tendencies reflect women’s
often disadvantaged social position (or, occasionally, biological or evolutionary
influences).
Another person-oriented theme of sex and gender research in psychology
involved comparing men and women on psychological variables. Some feminists
steadfastly opposed all research that compared the sexes: They argued that such
research typically posits stable, enduring traits that disfavor women and gives
insufficient attention to situational pressures (e.g., M. Fine & Gordon, 1989;
Unger, 1990).
Despite such objections to comparing women and men, eventually many
feminists softened their stance when effect size metrics replaced more informal
generalizations (e.g., Maccoby & Jacklin, 1978) and encouraged visualizing dif-
ferences as overlapping distributions (Cohen, 1988). In fact, comparing women
and men became extremely popular in psychology and so far has yielded 606
journal articles or chapters reporting meta-analyses (through August 2018) that
PsycINFO categorized as pertaining to human sex differences. A common gener-
alization about these comparisons is that the great majority of sex differences are
small in magnitude and thus correctly described as similarities (Hyde, 2005, 2014;
Zell, Krizan, & Teeter, 2015). This description made sex differences research far
more palatable to feminists because many had embarked on research in the hope
that they might shatter stereotypes about women having traits that differ from
those of men (see Eagly, 1995, 2013).
Much less welcome for most feminists was research on potential biological
causes of female disadvantage. Such research was often rejected as reduction-
ist and harmful to women. Gloria Steinem reportedly remarked, “It’s really the
remnant of anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research” (Young,
2013). After all, it seemed that feminists had vanquished biological determinism
in the 20th century with their critiques of maternal instinct and other biological
constructs (e.g., Shields, 1975). However, feminist psychologists of the 1970s had
to confront sociobiology, which received powerful advocacy in Wilson’s popular
book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In Wilson’s theorizing about the
evolutionary roots of human social behaviors, sex differences were front and center
and have remained so in the subsequent development of evolutionary psychology
(e.g., Buss, 2016). Feminists reacted with alarm. Biologist Bleier (1978, 1984) led
The Shaping of Science by Ideology 877

the way by mounting a mix of scientific and political criticisms and was joined by
other feminist scientists (e.g., Eagly & Wood, 1995, 2011; Fausto-Sterling, 1985;
Travis, 2003).

The Relevance of Political Ideology and Kurt Lewin

These emphases in research on sex and gender allowed mainstream feminist

psychology to produce a description of the phenomena of women’s disadvantage
as rooted in the external environment—in the patriarchal structures of families,
task groups, organizations, and nations. In this understanding, the individual psy-
chological attributes of women have little, if anything, to do with disadvantage,
given that women and men are psychologically very similar. Except for reproduc-
tion, possible biological foundations of sex differences received little emphasis.
Therefore, there was only one route to gender equality: Dismantling the social and
political structures that oppress women.
This description is consistent with the political ideology of progressive lib-
eralism and with liberal feminist thinking in particular. Given the contemporary
critique of psychology as biased by its political liberalism, that very consistency
should make feminist psychologists pause and reflect. Does this feminist-inspired
psychology of gender that I have outlined encompass all or even most of what is
relevant to understanding women’s disadvantaged power and status? Might this
body of highly informative research have a disproportionate emphasis on a pa-
triarchal external environment, perhaps reflecting the politically liberal ideology
shared by the majority of investigators?
To provide some guidance from someone not involved in feminist science, I
turn to one of the founders of social psychology, Kurt Lewin (1936). His theory of
behavior had a central theme, which is that “Every psychological event depends
upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although
their relative importance is different in different cases.” Lewin stated this idea in
a simple equation:
B = f (P, E)
where B is the behavior, P is the person, and E is the environment. Lewin evidently
meant the comma in the equation to convey flexibility in how P and E exert their
influence—for example, in parallel or interactively.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, I
took part in a seminar taught by Dorwin Cartwright that was devoted to Lewin’s
work (Cartwright & Lewin, 1951). Cartwright had studied with Lewin as a post-
doctoral scholar, so was an excellent guide to Lewin’s contributions. When we
pondered the Lewin equation in the seminar, it struck me as too simple and obvious
to be all that interesting. Yet, from my more mature viewpoint, I find Lewin’s mes-
sage valuable because it serves as a warning that psychological research and theory
878 Eagly

can tip excessively toward either P or E. When that happens, this simple equation
can help nudge us toward representing the true complexities of understanding
human behavior. Sometimes, it is political ideology that narrows psychologists’
thinking to only the P or the E of Lewin’s causal forces, and sometimes it can be
merely disciplinary narrowness. I maintain that feminism has narrowed its focus
mainly to the E. It is time to reintroduce P and focus on how P and E interact
to produce the phenomena of female disadvantage and male dominance. Further-
more, in welcoming the person back, feminists should allow it to have a body as
well as a mind.
The most salient and successful effort to implicate the person in explaining
female disadvantage is Sandberg’s (2013) lean-in initiative. She focused on women
as individuals and urged them to take bold actions by, for example, confidently
speaking up at meetings and volunteering for challenging assignments in their
workplaces. Large numbers of women were ready for Sandberg’s message: Her
book proved to be a blockbuster that survived an impressive 213 weeks on best-
seller lists and has sold over 4.2 million copies (Newman, 2018), outpacing even
the 3 million plus sales of Friedan’s breakthrough 1963 book “The Feminine
Mystique” (Menand, 2011). Many women found the Sandberg call for action
meaningful enough that they joined groups where they discussed how to implement
the lean-in message. Apparently, over 40,000 of these lean-in circles have formed
in 160 nations (https://leanincircles.org/).
Even though social science has robustly confirmed women’s tendency to take
a less active role than men in most decision-making groups (e.g., Karpowitz &
Mendelberg, 2014), many feminists were dismayed by Sandberg’s message (e.g.,
C. Williams, 2014). They sharply critiqued her for emphasizing P over E—that
is, for departing from liberal feminist orthodoxy by failing to confine her analysis
to structural barriers in organizations and other external factors such as gender
stereotypes and social norms. She instead encouraged individual women to take
action on their own behalf, despite the power of the environment. Accusations
quickly followed that Sandberg was blaming women for their disadvantage—that
is, blaming the victim or implying that women need to be “fixed” (e.g., Brooks,
2014; Cobble, Gordon, & Henry, 2014; Holmes, 2013). Facing this backlash,
Sandberg agreed that women are held back “by discrimination and sexism and
terrible public policy” and acknowledged the need for reform. However, she
further argued that “the conversation can’t be only about that” and indicated that
she wished to emphasize “what we can do as individuals” (Faludi, 2013, p. 37).
I suggest that Lewin would have applauded Sandberg’s restoration of P to the
behavioral equation that can guide understanding of female disadvantage.
What accounts for the remarkable popularity of Sandberg’s lean-in message?
Political ideology is certainly relevant. Analysis of contemporary political cul-
ture in the United States suggests that an ideological shift has coincided with
the attempts of some feminists to bring back the person inside the environment.
The Shaping of Science by Ideology 879

Sandberg’s book is consistent with this more general change of outlook among
many U.S. citizens toward a neoliberal political philosophy and away from classic
social liberalism (e.g., Rottenberg, 2014, 2017). Neoliberalism assumes a socioe-
conomic system in which the so-called “free market” extends to every aspect of
public and personal life: The state takes less responsibility to provide public wel-
fare and instead promotes markets and competition. Individuals frame their lives
by entrepreneurial beliefs about how to get ahead in this world of competition
(Metcalf, 2017). The lean in message fits right in to this neoliberal worldview. For
women, casting off hesitation and shyness by leaning in can enhance their ability
to negotiate and thrive in a world of markets and competition.
Surely, the rise and extraordinary success of the lean-in movement derives, at
least in part, from the neoliberal beliefs that have taken root in the United States,
especially among its more privileged citizens. In this neoliberal context, individual
achievement follows from individual effort and ability. In this spirit, even some
of the journalists writing in mainstream newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune
have ridiculed traditional liberal feminism as “obsessed . . . with a dreadfully
tired script” and stated that “constantly telling people they are victims isn’t so
empowering after all” (Wilhelm, 2018).
Why has the classic liberal feminist message about oppression begun to
strike many as tired and one-sided? Even beyond the inroads of neoliberal po-
litical philosophy, this critique follows from the obvious progress toward gender
equality that has taken place. Too often, feminists fail to recognize the positive
trends (Winegard, Winegard, & Geary, 2015). Consider the following examples of
progress: (1) Women occupy the presidency of 30% of U.S. colleges and univer-
sities (American Council on Education, 2017) and are 41% of provosts (Almanac
of Higher Education, 2017, p. 20); (2) women are 28% of the CEOs when all U.S.
organizations are considered (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017) and 45% of
the CEOs of nonprofit organizations (Patz, 2018); (3) a meta-analysis of studies
on the emergence of leaders from leaderless groups showed a steady decline in the
tendency of men to emerge more than women (Badura et al., 2018); (4) research
on sexual harassment in the U.S. federal workforce found a marked decrease in ev-
eryday harassment between 1994 and 2016 (e.g., sexual teasing, suggestive looks;
U.S. Merit Systems Protections Board, 2017); (5) in academic science, observa-
tional data from actual hiring at 89 U.S. research-intensive institutions for recent
cohorts indicated that women who apply for positions had a better chance of being
interviewed and receiving offers than did male job candidates (National Research
Council, 2010); (6) experimental simulations of academic hiring found a strong
favoring of women over equally qualified men in STEM (W. M. Williams & Ceci,
2015); (7) female and male professors in recent U.S. cohorts in psychology depart-
ments have progressed at similar rates from assistant to associate to full professor,
after securing a tenure-track position (Box-Steffensmeier et al., 2015; Ginther &
Kahn, 2014); and (8) in U.S. business management in recent years, high-potential
880 Eagly

female job candidates have enjoyed a wage premium over men because of their
diversity value (Leslie, Manchester, & Dahm, 2017).
Consider also the #MeToo movement (https://metoomvmt.org/), which has
revealed a shocking prevalence of sexual misconduct on the part of powerful men
across the institutions of U.S. society. What is new is that courageous women are
publically speaking out, reflecting some weakening of the institutional structures
that silenced women of an earlier generation. Consequently, these men are falling
from their high perches, forced to resign, and in some cases to face trial and
imprisonment.
These encouraging findings are by no means meant to suggest that discrim-
ination against women has disappeared, but that there is notable progress. Some
important battles have been won, some lost, and most are still in progress. My point
is that patriarchy is faltering, and that is one reason why many women think that
they can make progress in their lives and careers through individual effort—that
is, through some version of leaning in.

Advantages of a Psychology of Gender Based on P + E

Let us now go back to Lewin. How would he advise psychologists to make

scientific progress? He would say that those who can acknowledge only E are as
misguided as those who can acknowledge only P. By turning to Lewin’s timeless
message that behavior is a function of the person and the environment, psychol-
ogists could build a science of sex and gender that is not merely buffeted by the
winds of prevailing political ideologies.
Researchers should simultaneously consider two sets of influences: social
regulation and self-regulation (Eagly & Wood, 2012; Wood & Eagly, 2012; see
also, Deaux & Major, 1987). Social regulation refers to the influence of the social
environment, and self-regulation refers to the influence of one’s own personal
beliefs and standards. Even though the external environment coerces behavior,
individuals usually have some personal choice, at least outside of totalitarian
societies. To emphasize only social regulation or only self-regulation in accounting
for female disadvantage in society is to tell only half of the story, as Lewin so
wisely informed us more than 80 years ago.
How might P and E work together? The influence of E is well established in
gender research: Abundant evidence shows that the behaviors of women and men
are to some degree influenced by social pressures (e.g., Wood & Eagly, 2012).
How does the individual fit in? Some psychologists resist giving power to the
person by arguing that the person is a product of the environment—that is, of
socialization. Surely, it is important to recognize the palm print of the culture on
the psyches of individuals. However, individuals are formed by many influences
in addition to gender norms, in part because they adopt multiple and intersecting
identities (e.g., Cole, 2009). They then move forward to make choices, as in
The Shaping of Science by Ideology 881

their careers, from a range of available options. Of course, those who are more
privileged choose from options that are more attractive. Nevertheless, individuals
act with the guidance of self-regulatory processes as they attempt to attain their
personal goals in the context of the available opportunities (Diekman & Eagly,
2008; Wood, Christensen, Hebl, & Rothgerber, 1997; Wood & Eagly, 2015).
An example of research that takes both P and E into account is the program
by Diekman, Steinberg, Brown, Belanger, and Clark (2017) on goal congruity
as a motivating factor, especially in relation to women’s lesser representation in
STEM occupations. One emphasis of this theory is on attributes of the person: The
motivations of women and men differ because women accord more importance
to communal goals—that is, helping others and working with them to make the
world a better place. Diekman and her colleagues have thus recognized that, viewed
thematically in terms of communion and agency, sex differences are not trivial
or small. Also, the environment makes available different options–in particular,
social roles, which have affordances, or opportunities for fulfilling communal or
agentic goals. Following Lewin’s advice, Diekman et al.’s research program thus
takes into account the attributes of occupational roles as well as person-level sex
differences in life goals to explain why women are relatively rare in some, but not
all, areas of science.
What about influences of biological sex on behavior? Lewin is of no help here
because he did not have the opportunity to consider a developed neuroscience or
behavioral genetics and endocrinology. I suspect that, had he lived in our era, his
intellectual breadth would have guided him to consider biological influences on
individual psychology.
What biological influences might feminist psychologists consider? The idea
that psychological sex differences are to some degree preformed prior to so-
cialization is generally associated with research suggesting that prenatal and
early postnatal androgens affect brain structure and behavior (Berenbaum, Beltz,
Bryk, & McHale, 2018; Hines, Constantinescu, & Spencer, 2015). This idea has
gained credence in part from the substantial early sex differences in children’s
temperament—that is, biologically based, early-developing behavioral and emo-
tional tendencies that take the form of boys’ greater surgency and girls’ greater
effortful control (Else-Quest, Hyde, Goldsmith, & Van Hulle, 2006). These sex
differences in temperament are manifested in large differences in childhood toy
and activity preferences (e.g., Todd, Barry, & Thommessen, 2017). However, neu-
roscientists now find early androgenization to be only one part of the story and
have discovered different classes of sex-biasing factors deriving from the inherent
inequality in sex chromosomes between XX and XY individuals (Arnold, 2017).
Biological scientists have thus identified several pieces of the puzzle that makes
up the human sexome, defined as the aggregate of all sex-biasing biological influ-
ences (Arnold & Lusis, 2012). These influences can emerge earlier or later in the
life cycle, for example, in infancy or at puberty.
882 Eagly

By taking into account relevant biological research, feminist psychologists

can look beyond prominent feminist critiques of biological science as fundamen-
tally misguided (e.g., C. Fine, 2017; Hoffman & Bluhm, 2016) and as merely
“adding new allure to an old fashioned sexism” (Jordan-Young & Rumiati, 2012,
p. 311). Rather, scientists have made progress in understanding the intertwining
of nature and nurture (e.g., Sasaki & Kim, 2017). For example, scientists now
argue that the influences of nature and nurture are often blurred because environ-
mental events regulate and modify gene expression along with the transmission of
these epigenetic modifications across generations (e.g., Hodes, Walker, Labonté,
Nestler, & Russo, 2017). Thus, contemporary biological scientists typically do not
assume that behavioral sex differences are in simple fashion biologically “hard-
wired.” Therefore, it is time for feminist psychologists to abandon the argument
that any credence given to biology defeats the drive for social change (see Eagly
& Wood, 2013, for further discussion). Deserving special attention is the work of
those biologically oriented feminist researchers who take the social environment
into account (e.g., Van Anders, Goldey, & Kuo, 2011).

Moving Forward

The challenge for feminist psychologists is to overcome ideological con-

straints to discover how social, self, and biological causes together produce the
phenomena of gender. Partial explanations do not provide sufficient understand-
ing. Yet, I expect that some readers will object to the themes of this essay by
arguing that feminist psychology is a big tent that has always attracted some
psychologists who offer analyses rooted in personal traits or biology. I certainly
agree but maintain that research framed as feminist that is directed to understand-
ing female disadvantage typically endorses situational causation, that is, the E in
Lewin’s equation (Eagly et al., 2012), as is consistent with the prevailing feminist
ideology of social liberalism.
Political ideology is both friend and foe to scientific progress. Ideology in-
spires research, and it has very successfully played this positive role in relation to
the psychology of gender. However, if a particular ideology continues to influence
research over many years, it can impede progress. Political ideology can become
a stultifying straightjacket in relation to research. Yet, ideology is the most diffi-
cult of biases to erase because its advocates seldom recognize or acknowledge it.
Still, as social scientists, we are responsible for improving our science, and that
effort should entail envisioning research unbound by ideology, a truly difficult and
perhaps impossible task. However, an effort to understand ideological bias does
not require abandoning one’s own ideology, but avoiding making one’s research a
prisoner of that ideology.
Finally, in relation to social policy, the principal goal of SPSSI is to foster
evidence-based social policy. When psychologists advocate for social policies
The Shaping of Science by Ideology 883

by presenting themselves as social science experts, they should act as honest

brokers, who decline to misrepresent science by presenting only those findings
that are ideologically congenial. However, if science itself is constrained to partial
understanding by the weight of scientists’ shared political ideology, it would not
really be possible to act as an honest broker. Only if psychologists can collectively
transcend ideological bias can they enter policy discussions as true experts rather
than as advisors who bolster their favored political agendas.

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ALICE H. EAGLY is a professor of psychology and James Padilla Chair of Arts

and Sciences, Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research, and professor of
management and organizations. Her research covers many topics including gender,
888 Eagly

feminism, attitudes, prejudice, stereotyping, and leadership. She has received nu-
merous awards for her contributions, including the Distinguished Scientific Con-
tribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Gold Medal
Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American
Psychological Foundation, and the Eminent Leadership Scholar Award from the
Network of Leadership Scholars of the Academy of Management. She is also a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.