Gender and Games, Space and Time: Doing Feminist Research

An empirically grounded feminist perspective on research into gender and spatial abilities, and on the related and more recent question of why women are so greatly under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology and Engineering) fields are this paper's aspirations. To that end, we first share the results, as well as details the processes of their production, of three studies conducted over 5 years into gender and spatial condition. All used a "Virtual Morris Water Maze", (a virtual experimental laboratory of sorts), in concert with participant interviews and a standard test of "mental rotation" (the ability to "mentally" rotate a 3-D figure), to understand the basis of this well-established sex difference, and then illustrates specific areas in which critical questions of structural bias arise in paradigmatic research on gender and spatial ability. We then consider and illustrate how the same data on sex-linked differences in spatial ability might be reassembled, not to validate the existing gender-inequitable order represented in studies of STEM programs and occupations, but instead to show how an inability to recognize that sex, not spatial or any other 'ability', might be the primary confounding variable-and not because of immutable sex-linked cognitive abilities but principally because of mutable systems and structures of gender discrimination that continue to drive the research protocols through which these empirical findings have been arrived at.