Sex Discrimination,Personal Denial,and Collateral Damage

Many social scientists, especially those interested in social justice, have bemoaned the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA and have decried similar right-wing victories around the globe. We wish our research would have more of an impact. I argue that if we want our conclusions to have more application outside academia, we must first put our own house in order. As illustrated by a personal narrative, we are guilty of the sexism that we decry in others, although we can see that with clarity only in hindsight. Connected to our sexism are some epistemological shortcomings: our false insistence on the primacy of basic research and our false claim to conduct “value-free” research.