In the past three decades scholars in virtually every humanistic and social scientific research discipline, and in some natural sciences (especially the life sciences), have drawn attention to quite striking instances of gender bias in the modes of practice and theorizing typical of traditional fields of research. They generally begin by identifying explicit androcentric biases in definitions of the subject domains appropriate to specific scientific fields. Their primary targets, in this connection, have been research that leaves women out altogether (e.g., anthropological research that has arbitrarily and, as it turns out, falsely characterized subsistence systems and political structures exclusively in terms of male activities; [see Slocum 1975]), research that ignores women’s contributions or victimization (e.g., in the definition of literary or artistic canons and historical traditions), and research that conceptualizes its subject, male or female, human or non-human, in explicitly gender biased terms (e.g., models of animal behaviour that project onto it the gender-specific attributes of particular human societies and models of human psychological development that take exclusively male patterns of development as the norm and characterize distinctive female patterns as ‘deviant’; see Harraway 1978 and Gilligan 1982, respectively).