Androcentrism: what it is and how it affects women
This historical and social phenomenon puts man at the center of everything, as the main reference.
The tendency to have the male experience as a frame of reference.
Androcentrism is the tendency to place the experience of men at the center of explanations about the world and about individuals in general. It is a practice that often goes unnoticed and through which the male perspective is assumed to be the universal viewpoint, and even the only valid or possible one.
This has been a pervasive trend in the development of Western societies, yet it has also been significantly challenged by various individuals; therefore, it is worth examining what androcentrism is and where it has been most prevalent.
The philosophy of who we place at the center
Something that contemporary philosophies and sciences have taught us is that there are many ways to view and explain the world. When we perceive and interpret our surroundings—and even ourselves—we do so based on a specific framework of knowledge.
We have constructed this framework of knowledge throughout our history, and to a large extent, through the stories we have heard about ourselves and others. In other words, the knowledge we have acquired is shaped by the different perspectives that have been—or have not been—placed at the center of that knowledge.
Thus, for example, when we talk about anthropocentrism, we are referring to the trend and philosophical conception that positions the human being at the center of knowledge about the world, an issue that formally began with the modern era, and that replaced theocentrism (the explanations that put God at the center). Or, if we talk about Eurocentrism we are referring to the tendency to look at and construct the world as if we were all Europeans.
What is androcentrism?
Returning to the previous section, we can see that “androcentrism” is a concept that refers to the tendency to explain the phenomena of the world based on the generalized experience of a single subject: man. This phenomenon consists of incorporating in scientific, historical, academic and everyday stories, the masculine experience in the center (that is why it is “andro”, which means masculine gender; and “centrism”: in the center).
Consequently, all other ways of knowing and living the world are incorporated in these stories only peripherally or are not even incorporated. This applies to many fields. We can analyze, for example, androcentrism in science, androcentrism in history, in medicine, in education, in sports, and many others.
It is a phenomenon that has emerged largely as a result of the fact that in our societies, men are the ones who have predominantly occupied public spaces, and it is fundamentally in the public sphere where those practices and discourses have developed that later allow us to know the world in one way or another.
These practices are, for example, science, history, sports, religion, etc. In other words, the world has been constructed and perceived fundamentally by men, therefore, it is their experiences that have become historically extensive: a large part of how we see the world and how we relate to it, is made from their perspective, interests, knowledge, and general readings of everything that makes it up (that is, from their worldview).
Where can we see it?
The above is finally related and is visible almost every day, in the rules that tell us how to relate, how to behave, how to feel, and even in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
The latter means that, far from being a phenomenon that is located and caused specifically by the male gender, it is a process that we have all incorporated as part of the same history and the same society. And its main consequence has been that the experience of women and those who do not identify with the hegemonic model of “male” remains hidden and invisible, and therefore difficult to incorporate on equal terms.
For the same reason, there have been several people (mainly women) who have asked themselves, for example, where have the women who did science been? Why do they practically only teach us the biographies of men? And the women who made history? Where are the stories of women who have lived through wars or revolutions? In fact, who has finally gone down in history? Under what models or imaginaries?
The latter has allowed us to increasingly recover, and in different areas, the heterogeneity of the experiences we share in the world, and with this, different ways of relating, perceiving, and interpreting both what surrounds us and ourselves are also generated.
