Feminist scholars have long debated quantification trends in the social sciences. Of particular concern has been the extent to which the prestige assigned to quantitative methods may reinforce ‘malestream’ dynamics in academic knowledge production. ‘Malestream’ dynamics include the (implicit or explicit) privileging of a male-centric lens in the research process and the association of ‘hard’ numerical data with notions of ‘scientifically superior’ masculinity. We build on these discussions by asking how the rise in quantitative writings may affect gender disparities in the civil war literature. Using descriptive data from a newly coded dataset that contains 1,851 articles published in high-ranking journals between 1998 and 2018, we, firstly, illustrate how – in the generally male-dominated field of civil war research – the author gender gap is particularly pronounced among quantitative writings. Secondly, we present an in-depth discussion of three articles that use statistical analysis to test the effects of violence on prospects of post-traumatic growth. A distinct difference between the three articles is that they tend to be more sceptical of arguments on ‘positive change’ following violence the more account they take of gender differentiation in their theoretical framing and/or empirical identification strategy. All in all, our arguments call for greater awareness of gender bias in quantitative research, and for more rigour in currently hegemonic standards of what ‘counts’ as reliable evidence.

中文翻译：

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为什么性别量化趋势是一个问题：创伤后成长争论和内战男性流

女权主义学者长期以来一直在争论社会科学中的量化趋势。特别值得关注的是，定量方法的威望可能会在多大程度上加强学术知识生产中的“男性流”动力。 “男性流”动力包括在研究过程中（隐含或明确）以男性为中心的视角的特权，以及将“硬”数字数据与“科学上优越”的男性气质概念联系起来。在这些讨论的基础上，我们询问定量著作的兴起如何影响内战文学中的性别差异。使用来自新编码数据集的描述性数据（包含 1998 年至 2018 年间在高级期刊上发表的 1,851 篇文章），我们首先说明在内战研究通常由男性主导的领域中，作者性别差距如何在定量著作。其次，我们对三篇文章进行了深入讨论，这些文章使用统计分析来测试暴力对创伤后成长前景的影响。这三篇文章之间的一个明显区别在于，他们在理论框架和/或经验识别策略中更多地考虑性别差异，往往对暴力后“积极变化”的论点更加持怀疑态度。总而言之，我们的论点呼吁提高对定量研究中性别偏见的认识，并要求对当前霸权标准“算作”可靠证据更加严格。