Policy studies within a feminist frame

Feminist scholarship seeks to identify and purge androcentric bias in traditional disciplines, to reshape dominant paradigms so that women's needs, interests, activities, and concerns can be analyzed and understood systematically, and to develop research methodologies that are neither gender-biased nor gender-blind. This essay provides an overview of feminist scholarship in the field of policy studies. In particular, it considers feminist studies of substantive policy domains and of the policy-making process, as well as feminist critiques of research paradigms, methods, and results that have structured policy studies for the past 50 years.