Cross-Cultural Studies of Women and the Male Bias Problem

This paper considers whether a prevailing male bias in ethnographic work makes cross-cultural research on the position of women invalid. The method used is an examination of the correlations of a gender of ethnog rapher (and gender of coder) measures with a large number of women's status variables drawn from a larger study. The results show that the num ber of significant correlations is not more than would be expected by chance. It is argued that as long as the codes of women's status are kept quite specific, the problem of male bias in such cross-cultural research should be negligible.