Androcentrism

Androcentrism is the Greek word ανδρο which means the conscious of placing the men at the center. This is the practice of making the masculine gender point of view as the center to hold the view of the world’s history and culture is referred to as Androcentrism. On the other hand, gynocentrism refers to the practice of making feminine point of view as the centre of the view of the world. The first person to open the term Androcentrism is Charlotte Gilman who introduced the term in the scientific debate as an analytic concept.

In the traditional set up at the past men were given better and formal education than women. Women and girls were able to write and read less frequently compared to the boys and men. Even today, in many developing countries this is in practice. The second half of the twentieth century has recorded more men entering the universities than the women. There are some universities which consciously limited the number of female undergraduates. All this all resulted in andocentric educated opinion. Since women were not given enough education, they could not raise out their opinions and ideas in education. Even the written materials reflected the male’s point of view very much than a feminine outlook.

Even in sports, many sports magazines have appealed to the male audience rather than the female. Even the advisers who were in the sports were men. Many media channels like Fox Sports and ESPN targeted male audience. Women were considered as less interested in sports and a weaker vessel.

In the industrialized countries, women have got better exposure to proper education in now a day. The male practices and the values are taken as the norm and the female practices or the values are considered as a deviation from the common way of doing things. The values of women are considered as unsuccessful aspirations.

The Man- Made; or, Our Andocentric Culture which was published in the year 1911 which attempted to give a profound description for the problems that arise due to the androcentric practices throughout. There are some scholars who have understood androcentrism on the perspective of masculinity and societal fixation.

Kohlberg explored the reasoning of the moral judgments. He was interested in experimenting how people make judgments as they become older. He has based his research on men thinking that the moral ideologies and the thinking were just the same with both the sexes. Later he made comparison between men and women and found that men operated on level 4 and women operated on level 3.