The Gender Dimension: The Use of Gender as a Lens in Contemporary Social Sciences

When is gender used as an analytical lens in the social sciences, and by whom? The question has recently gained visibility in public debate, largely due to controversies surrounding the alleged diffusion of so-called “wokism” in higher education. Beyond these polemics, however, the issue is of direct relevance both to scholars working in this area and to anyone interested in the sociology and history of science. Yet no large-scale empirical studies have addressed it to date. Two main obstacles explain this absence: first, the concept of gender encompasses multiple realities that are not easily reducible to a single definition; second, conducting a precise analysis across large volumes of texts and disciplines has, until recently, been virtually impossible.

To overcome these challenges, we fine-tuned a large language model (LLM) and trained it to recognize the diverse dimensions of gender. Its performance exceeds what could realistically be achieved by human research assistants, whose coding is typically limited to much smaller samples. This approach provides, for the first time, a broad and accurate overview of the use of gender in French social sciences since the 2000s. The results point to limited overall growth, significant disciplinary variation, and diverse forms of institutionalization of this perspective. Building on these descriptive findings, we then ask what explains the observed trends, particularly the modest increase in the use of gender. We test several hypotheses, including the feminization of disciplines and the role of generational renewal, with younger scholars proving more likely to publish research adopting a gender perspective.