Gender and intersectionality – developing quantitative research practices – Janet Siltanen

 

Janet Siltanen, Professor of Sociology, and Nick Scott (PhD/12), a Carleton Sociology PhD graduate, have developed a new toolkit for doing quantitative research on gender and intersectionality.

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada contracted Scott and Siltanen to put together this toolkit to help government researchers and policy analysts develop research skills that can account for diversity within gendered experience.

Titled Gender and Intersectionality – A Quantitative Toolkit for Analyzing Complex Inequalities, Scott and Siltanen’s kit describes and assesses four quantitative models for this purpose.

On March 25^th, 2013, Siltanen and Scott presented their work in a two hour “Community of Practice” event hosted by the Policy Research Directorate of HRSDC.  The event generated a lot of interest. Close to a hundred people registered for the session including researchers and analysts from HRSDC, and representatives from several other sectors of the federal government. Cari-Anne Ackland, an analyst at HRSDC and a current Sociology PhD student at Carleton helped to organize the event.

Commenting on the strong interest in the topic, Ackland stated “There is a clear demand among government analysts to understand the applicability of such methodological innovations for social policy, and to explore concrete examples of applied quantitative gender-based techniques.”

In their presentation, Scott and Siltanen noted the convergence of interests between academic and government analysts when it comes to questions of how to adequately research gender inequality.

Both are trying to respond to the awareness that when analyzing differences between women and men, it is important to adopt an intersectional perspective by incorporating what is known about significant differences within each gender. However, finding a way to do this in practice has proved challenging.

The idea that gender is enmeshed in complex intersecting patterns of inequality has been well developed theoretically, but is in need of further development as a methodological strategy for purposes of research. This is especially the case with respect to quantitative analysis – and both academic and government-based researchers are interested in finding ways to do quantitative analyses of gender inequality from an intersectional perspective.

In her opening remarks at the dissemination event, Professor Siltanen commented that the topic of the toolkit was of equal interest to academic researchers.

In fact, Siltanen and Scott will be presenting a version of the toolkit to the Canadian Sociology Association annual meetings at the 2013 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held in June in Victoria, BC. They also plan to write a version of the toolkit for academic publication.

Nick Scott summed up the convergence of academic and government research interest in the ideas presented in the toolkit, by saying “the enthusiasm demonstrated by HRSDC in advancing quantitative approaches to intersectionality is encouraging, because ultimately to address complex inequalities involving gender in effective ways, we need to bring academic experts, government researchers and policy makers together at the same table“.

Contact details:

Janet Siltanen:  Janet_Siltanen@carleton.ca

Nick Scott: nascot5@uottawa.ca

Cari-Anne Ackland : CariAnneAckland@cmail.carleton.ca