Nailing that bias: A critical realist ethnographic approach to generating knowledge about gendered informal rules

Though usually governed by gender-neutral formal rules, gendered outcomes are still common within most political organizations. Thanks to feminist research, we know that these outcomes are shaped by deep-rooted gendered norms and gendered actors who reproduce them through their actions. However, due to the informal and context-specific nature of norms and the relative inaccessibility of political organizations, we seldom know which exact norms and which exact actors are responsible for a particular gendered pattern of behavior. This paper draws upon critical realism and feminist institutionalism to propose a methodological approach that is ideally suited for adjudicating between competing truth claims about (gendered) informal rules and actors. This approach combines the strengths of ethnographic immersion and abduction. While immersion enables the identification of relevant gendered social events, abduction enables a dynamic development of a theory that best accounts for these events. Empirical illustrations are made with the help of the author’s own research on political parties and the gendered rules-in-use that govern them.