Androcentrism is the tendency to place the experience of man at the centre of explanations about the world and about individuals in a generalised way. It is a practice that often goes unnoticed and through which the perspective of men is assumed as the universal look, and even the only valid or possible one.

This has been a very present trend in the development of western societies, and it has also been questioned in an important way by different people, so it is worth reviewing what androcentrism is and where it has been most present.

The philosophy of who we put in the center

One thing that contemporary philosophies and sciences have taught us is that there are many ways to look at and explain the world. When we perceive and interpret what surrounds us, and even ourselves, we do so based on a certain framework of knowledge .

We have built this framework of knowledge throughout our history and largely through the stories we have heard about ourselves and others. In other words, the knowledge we have acquired has to do with the different perspectives that have, or have not, been placed at the center of the same knowledge.

Thus, for example, when we speak of anthropocentrism, we refer to the philosophical tendency and conception that positions the human being in the center of knowledge about the world , a question that formally began with the modern era, and that substituted theocentrism (the explanations that put God in the center). Or, if we speak of “Eurocentrism” we refer to the tendency to look at and build the world as if we were all Europeans (experience is generalised).

These “centrisms” (the tendency to put a single experience at the center and use it to explain and understand all other experiences), include both everyday and specialized knowledge. While they are at the core of our knowledge and practice in both fields, they easily go unnoticed.

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 accounts, 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 into these stories only peripherally, or not at all. This applies to many fields. We can analyse, for example, androcentrism in science, androcentrism in history, medicine, education, sport, and many others.

This is a phenomenon that has emerged largely as a result of the fact that in our societies, men are the ones who have mostly occupied public spaces , and it is fundamentally in the public sphere where those practices and discourses have been developed that then allow us to know the world in one way or another.

Such practices are, for example, science, history, sport, religion, etc. In other words, the world has been constructed and perceived fundamentally by men, with which, it is their experiences that have become historically extensive: great 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 composes it (that is to say, from their cosmovision).

Where can we see it?

The above is finally related and visible in the most everyday things, in the rules that tell us how to relate, how to behave, how to feel and even in the stories we tell about ourselves.

The latter means that, far from being a phenomenon that is situated and provoked specifically by the masculine 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 of those who do not identify with the hegemonic model of “man”, remains hidden and invisible, and therefore, difficult to incorporate under equal conditions.

For the same reason, several people (mainly women) have asked themselves, for example, where have the women who did science been? Why do they practically only show us the biographies of men? And the women who made history? Where are the stories of the women who have lived through wars or revolutions? In fact, who have finally passed into history? Under what models or imaginaries?

The latter has allowed us to recover more and more, and in different areas, the heterogeneity of the experiences that we share in the world , and with this, different ways of relating, perceiving and interpreting both what surrounds us and ourselves are generated.

Bibliographic references:

  • Falcó, R. (2003). The archaeology of gender: Women’s spaces, women with space. Centre for Women’s Studies: Universitat d’Alacant.