Background
The idea of Muted Group Theory stemmed from social anthropologist Edwin Ardener from Oxford University in the 1970s. In "Belief and the Problem of Women" he concluded many ethnographers claimed to understand a society but only based information from findings from the male population. The researchers would then use this data to represent the culture as a whole, leaving out the perspectives of women, children and other groups made voiceless by the cultural hierarchy. Ardener wrote: "Those trained in ethnography evidently have a bias towards the kinds of model that men are ready to provide (or to concur in) rather than towards any that women might provide."
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