However, feminist challenges reveal that the questions that are asked in social research, and most significantly those that are not asked, are at least as determinative of the adequacy of our total picture as are any answers we can discover:.
Defining what is in need of scientific explanation only from the perspective of bourgeois, white men's experiences leads to partial and ever perverse understandings of social life.
(page 7).
Sociology's role in the exclusion and silencing of women from this discourse has also been the object of feminist criticism. D. Smith (1987) states Sociology has been based upon men's social universe. This renders problematic the attempt to think how women experience the world from their place, given the limited concepts and theoretical schemes available to employ. In addition, Smith repudiates the idea that Sociology can be a science challenging therefore directly positivist ideas concerning the status of this discipline within the social sciences. She argues that.
The Sociology I conceive (is) much more than ideology and at the same time much less than "science". The governing of our kind of society is done in concepts and symbols. The contribution of Sociology to this is that of working up the conceptual procedures, models and methods by which the immediate and concrete features of experience can be read into the conceptual mode in which the governing is done.
(page 87).
Similarly, M. Millman and R. Kanter (1987) argue that Sociology focuses only on the formal, official action and actors. Thus, it explains the status quo and does not explore much needed social transformations; neither does it encourage a more just humane society. It is also relevant to mention here that the sociological subject in language has been male -"he" and that language which is used describes experiences purportedly universal, although they are exclusively male.