Gendering practices in quantitative research on alcohol and violence: Comparing research from Australia, Canada and Sweden

In this article, we analyse the treatment of gender in Canadian and Swedish quantitative research on alcohol and violence and compare it with the treatment of gender in similar Australian research. In previously published work, we argued that Australian research on ‘alcohol-related presentations’ to emergency departments, and on alcohol and violence among young people participating in the night-time economy, tends to overlook the stark gendering of violence in its analyses and policy recommendations. It does this via a series of ‘gendering practices’ (Bacchi, 2017): omitting gender from consideration; overlooking clearly gendered data when making gender-neutral policy recommendations; rendering gender invisible via methodological considerations; displacing men and masculinities via a focus on environmental, geographical and temporal factors; and addressing gender in limited ways. We identify a similar set of gendering practices at work in Canadian and Swedish quantitative research on alcohol and violence, as well as a key difference. This key difference emerges in relation to the practice of addressing gender. Here, we see a bifurcation in the Canadian studies: between one group of articles in which gender is central to the analyses and ensuing policy recommendations, and a second group containing only one example in which gender is partially addressed. We draw attention to the differing realities of gender, alcohol and violence iterated by these contrasting knowledge practices, and offer two possible explanations for this difference. We close by asking how future research analyses and policy recommendations might differ if gender-sensitive quantitative tools were developed, gender considerations were systematically integrated, and gendered effects were taken into account when alcohol policy choices are made.