Feminist critiques of sexism at the data analysis stages of published research are scarce. It seems unlikely that feminists were confident that analysis was done in a rigorously objective or gender-neutral way. It is more likely that feminists concentrated their criticisms on the decisions and processes which were publicly available for scrutiny. Readers cannot know how researchers analysed their findings. The research question, the sample, and the actual instruments were usually in the public domain, but processes of analysis were private, for both quantitative and qualitative research. Since the 1980s there has been a vogue for the publication of ‘confessional’ accounts, and a fashion to be more transparent about analysis. Today the analytic procedures used in both qualitative and quantitative research are debated, and it is possible to discover from confessional writing, and from debates about analysis, how findings were produced. However, even this increased explicitness has not produced a flurry of feminist critiques of sexism in the data analysis stages. The boom in confessional and autobiographical writing has probably been more prevalent among qualitative researchers. There is scope for feminist analyses of the confessional texts on the analysis stage, such as the papers in Bryman and Burgess (1994).
In practice, however, feminists have focused on the two more publicly available stages that follow analysis, what is written up and what is published. Several of the examples of criticism here draw on re-analyses/re-examinations of data sets. My main example is Irene Jones’s extended critique of the Murdock and Phelps (1973) study again.