Masculinist theory

Three separate faults are named and any one of them is sufficient, which is what makes the definition usable. Research that only includes men is a sampling problem. Presentation from an exclusively male point of view is a framing problem and can occur with a mixed sample. Setting the experience of men as the normative standard is a measurement problem, since it makes anything else a deviation to be explained rather than a case to be described. The three can appear separately, and a body of work can correct the first while retaining the third. Masculinist theory is the epistemic arm of male endo-idealism, and it operates by the same laws, since under endo-idealism credit accrues to the endo-ideal and the endofilter delivers information already sorted. Marsh's example of the filter at work is exact. Where a woman states an idea before an endo-ideal claims it, a male endo-idealist will hold that he did not hear or understand her and that it was clearer when the endo-ideal said it, and authority is a word reserved for the endo-ideal. That is how a discipline can be genuinely mistaken rather than merely dishonest. Her broader complaint about the disciplines follows the same line, since she names psychology and economics as ideologies rather than sciences, and identifies homo economicus, the endo-ideal of classical economists, as a pure endoself installed as the model person.

Feminist critiques of science have made these arguments for decades. Sandra Harding's standpoint theory and Donna Haraway on situated knowledges both hold that a view from nowhere conceals a particular position, and Carol Gilligan's response to Kohlberg is the classic case of a developmental standard built on male subjects. Medical research has documented the consequences of male-default sampling in dosing and diagnosis, and Caroline Criado Perez collected the data gap across many fields. Marsh's definition is compact by comparison and adds nothing to the critique itself, since its work is to connect the epistemic failure to the endofilter, which accounts for why the fault persists among researchers who have accepted the criticism.