Reading · Critical Metascience

Metascience is not a monolith! It has many different aspects, including the fast-growing area of feminist metascience. I’ve recently discussed feminist metascience and open science on this Substack here and here, including work by Jenni Adams, Miranda Lynn Barnes, Madeleine Pownall, Elizabeth Bennett, and others. So, it’s great to see that a special issue on the topic is forthcoming in the journal Gender and Society.

Abstract This introduction brings feminist scholarship into conversation with metascience and open science. Drawing on feminist epistemology, we argue scientific reform is not a neutral technical project. Rather, practices intended to improve rigor, transparency, and accessibility may also expose marginalized scholars and research participants to harm, reproduce inequality, and facilitate hostile scrutiny, particularly in the current political environment. These tensions point to the need for feminist metascience and feminist open science. We define feminist metascience as the study of how gender and intersecting relations of power shape the production, evaluation, circulation, and correction of scientific knowledge, and we define feminist open science as an approach to transparency that remains attentive to care, protection, and risk. We offer these definitions and the articles in this special issue as a starting point for larger conversations about how feminist scholarship might contribute to emerging debates over scientific reform.

Munsch, C. L., & Reyes, D. V. (2026). Feminist metascience, feminist open science? Pain points and possibilities. Gender & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432261466769

In their Introduction to the special issue, Christin Munsch and Daisy Verduzco Reyes define feminist metascience:

Gender organizes social life, is historically and socially produced, and operates in relation to other axes of domination like race, class, sexuality, nationality, coloniality, and disability. Broadly speaking, then, we might define feminist metascience as an approach to the study of science that brings this orientation to bear on how knowledge is produced, evaluated, circulated, and corrected.

They also define feminist open science:

If open science is committed to transparency, sharing, and reproducibility, a feminist open science necessitates asking how those commitments can be pursued in ways that also attend to power, inequality, care, and the unequal conditions under which knowledge is produced. In this sense, feminist open science might be defined as an approach to open science practice that seeks to advance transparency and accountability while remaining attentive to the ethical, political, and epistemic consequences of openness itself. Such an approach treats openness not as an absolute good or fixed checklist, but as a situated set of practices whose value and risks must be assessed in relation to specific communities, methods, and institutional conditions.

They then guide us through the articles in the special issue. As they explain:

We open the issue with Madeleine Pownall’s article, “Women as the First Open Scientists.” Much like Morris’s (2015) landmark account of how Du Bois’s foundational contributions to sociology were obscured by racism, Pownall recovers five pioneering women in the field of psychology whose work laid important foundations for what are now framed as contemporary open science reforms. By documenting women’s early contributions to practices such as replication, analytical precision, and conflict-of-interest disclosure, she challenges narratives that cast openness and transparency as recent innovations.

Abstract Recent years have seen growing emphasis on “Open Science,” a movement to enhance research transparency, robustness, and accountability. Prompted by concerns over fraud, questionable research practices, and low reproducibility in psychological research that emerged in the 2010s, Open Science has been framed by some dominant advocates as a new approach to research in psychology and across the social sciences. However, women in social science have long practiced and promoted principles now hailed as innovative, although their contributions are often left out of mainstream narratives. This erasure is troubling, especially as feminist scholars have critiqued the increasingly exclusionary culture of mainstream science reform. This article traces the overlooked contributions of five pioneering women: Mary Whiton Calkins and her replication efforts in the 1890s; Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley, who advocated for analytical precision in the 1910s; Alice Bryan’s 1940s adversarial collaboration; Carolyn Wood Sherif’s metascientific work in the 1960s; and Leonore Tiefer’s promotion of conflict-of-interest declarations of sex research in the 2000s. I document how their contributions laid the intellectual foundations of what is now contemporary Open Science in the social sciences. In doing so, I celebrate a lineage of feminist scientific labor that has always emphasized openness, ethics, and equity.

Pownall, M. (2026). Women as the first open scientists: Five stories of the neglected contributions of women in (social) science reform history. Gender & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432261466293

The next two articles examine specific professional practices, drawing attention to the ways everyday scholarly activities are themselves gendered. For example, Jina Lee’s article (“Claiming Novelty, Claiming Authority”) shows that scientific authority is performed through routine rhetorical practices. Specifically, Lee finds that the use of novelty claims—rhetorical assertions that frame research as groundbreaking—vary by gender and disciplinary context. In science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, which possess a high level of paradigmatic consensus, professional success is narrowly tied to assertive, masculine-coded self-promotion, creating a double bind for women that results in fewer novelty claims and, in turn, fewer downstream citations. Conversely, the humanities and social sciences offer more varied pathways to recognition, which appear to mitigate these constraints.

Abstract How does gender shape who can successfully claim authority in science, and how does this vary across disciplines? Drawing upon theories of doing gender and feminist epistemologies, I examine a key mechanism through which scientific authority is established: novelty claims, defined as rhetorical statements that frame research as novel, distinct from actual novelty. These claims operate as gendered professional practices linking gender to scientific impact. Through analysis of 106,125 papers from SciSciNet and Microsoft Academic Graph databases, I find that novelty claims mediate gender gaps in citations differently across disciplines. In STEM fields, women first and last authors make fewer novelty claims than men, and this is associated with fewer citations. In humanities and social sciences, novelty claims remain positively associated with citations, but there are no gender differences in their use or in citations. These patterns persist after controlling for women’s representation in each field, indicating that gender hierarchy gets reproduced through deeper epistemic power relations rather than demographic imbalance.

Lee, J. (2026). Claiming novelty, claiming authority: Gender gaps in scientific impact across disciplines. Gender & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432261462166

Likewise, in “Sharing Knowledge Openly,” Molly King and Jeffrey Lockhart examine open access and repository participation not as straightforward indicators of scholarly virtue, but as practices embedded in unequal institutional and interpersonal conditions. They find that women and scholars of color are underrepresented in “green” open access publishing—the practice of self-posting alternate versions of papers online for free—and situate these patterns within “bropen science” culture, differential exposure to harassment, unequal access to resources, and uneven distributions of time and labor.

Abstract Open science is an increasingly important movement in contemporary social science. Many funders have begun to mandate open practices, newer journals like Socius are open access, and preprint servers have increased readership for paywalled articles. Feminist scholars have written about the values and pitfalls of open research. In this paper, we put those ideas in conversation with each other and empirical data on open access publishing to develop a feminist framework for thinking about feminist knowledge, data, publishing, and audience. Using a survey of 19,462 social scientists, linked with their entire Web of Science publication history from 2000 to 2023 and all papers posted to SocArXiv, we replicate past work showing that articles by women are less likely to be some types of open access. We extend these findings to scholars of color and feminist scholarship, while also demonstrating a few surprising null results for all three groups.

King, M. M., & Lockhart, J. W. (2026, June 23). Sharing knowledge openly: Author gender, race/ethnicity, & feminist science. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/a2d86_v2

The final set of articles concern the spread of ideas both in and outside of the academy. Laura K. Nelson and colleagues (“What Gets Lost in Translation?”) develop a feminist-informed metascience framework showing that the success of academic ideas depends not only on who produces them, but also on how those ideas are translated. Using publications tied to the NSF ADVANCE program, the authors propose a creation-diffusion model demonstrating that context, author expertise, and the substantive content of ideas shape whether ideas are taken up and spread. Ideas framed in more institutionally palatable ways diffuse more widely, whereas sharper feminist critiques of structure and inequality are more likely to be resisted, softened, or left behind.

Lauterwasser, S., Nelson, L. K., Gold, J. R., Gates, A. J., & Zippel, K. (2026). What gets lost in translation? Epistemic tensions between translation and diffusion in practice-oriented scholarship. Gender & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432261464637

Similarly, Jennifer Lee (“Who Receives Scientific Deference?”) examines what happens when scholarly ideas enter public discourse. Through an examination of media representations of women and men social scientists, she shows that the public reception of expertise is filtered through gendered cultural schemas. Women’s work is often trivialized, politicized, or recoded as popular writing, whereas men’s work is more readily framed as rigorous, objective, and properly scientific. In positioning these articles at the end of the issue, we emphasize that the fate of ideas depends not only on their creation and dissemination, but also on their visibility and diffusion. For this reason, we call for a broader conception of metascience that attends to the processes through which scientific findings are legitimated, undermined, or distorted.

Abstract Drawing on feminist metascience and Ridgeway’s “framed by gender” theory, I ask: How are men and women social scientists constructed in public media? I conduct a comparative analysis of media portrayals of eight public sociologists (four women–men pairs): Arlie Hochschild–Barry Glassner, Juliet Schor–Richard Florida, Angela Duckworth–Daniel Kahneman, and Michelle Alexander–William Julius Wilson. Findings reveal that women’s work is frequently de-legitimized by trivializing their contributions and emphasizing political biases, whereas men’s work is framed as empirical, rigorous, and legitimate, even when flawed. Women are often denied what I call “scientific deference” á la Goffman. These asymmetries underscore that scientific meritocracy and objectivity are not intrinsic properties of science but are instead culturally constructed ideals. By demonstrating how media narratives reflect and sustain gendered hierarchies of epistemic authority, this study extends feminist critiques of science beyond STEM and highlights the role of public discourse in shaping who counts as a legitimate

Lee, J. J. (2026). Who receives scientific deference? Gender and the public construction of social scientists. Gender & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432261465433

The editors conclude that:

Science requires more than technical reform. It requires metascientific work and open science initiatives capable of reckoning with the gendered and intersectional conditions that shape every aspect of knowledge production itself.

Feminist Metascience and Feminist Open Science

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