As one of those who can only speak to questions about gender within specific contexts, I do agree that there is a lack of serious gender history on the sub. We have a handful of flaired specialists in gender, but I think most are either currently not around much or have studied gender within the context of something else. It is a great shame, and I would love to see more gender-oriented contributions.

Ultimately though, there are two challenges. The first is the nature of the sub - we can field questions only when the knowledge exists to address them to a sufficiently high standard. There are a lot of questions that go unanswered simply because someone with adequate expertise isn't available to answer them. Quite a few of our subscribers probably have studied gender history, but don't feel confident enough in their knowledge to contribute. Similarly, I imagine most of us came to Reddit first, then AskHistorians, not the other way around - and that means we suffer a similar demographic skew to Reddit. Given that demographic skew, it doesn't enormously surprise me that we have a relative lack of gender history enthusiasts and experts.

The other challenge is that gender specialists are very often working within other specialities, and so any one contributor's knowledge is probably quite limited in the grand scheme of everything that gets asked. For instance, I'm not a North American historian - I'm a labour historian. My background is slavery studies, which encompasses a lot more than just New World slavery. But the North American context is the one with which I'm most intimately familiar and have spent the most time working in; I wouldn't feel very able to address debt bondage in India for instance, even though it is a system I know something about.

As such, I think it's pretty hard for us to do anything to address the situation beyond hope that more people with an interest in gender history will come along and start answering questions!

(disclaimer: I'm new to this sub, only been reading it for a few weeks)

It seems to me that to even to ask a good question about gender history requires some deal of background knowledge. (Since a lot of gender history--not just the answers but even the questions--rubs against the grain of "common sense" that has cohered over the past centuries.) (which is often the starting-point of gender history.)

Many of the questions in this sub (and the ones that get the most interest) seem to me (from just a few weeks' reading) to be the most "traditional" popular history questions (military history, Nazis, Stalin, etc.), or have origins in politics (marijuana usage, industrial capitalism, rise and fall of nations, etc.) They reflect the types of popular history books that have sold well in the past century, or reflect current political issues.

And the huge strides in gender history in the academic publishing in the past three decades hasn't yet found its way into the field of popular history.

So, the lack of questions (and answers?) about gender history might just reflect the (growing) gap between public knowledge and advanced expertise seen in every field? (physics, math, philosophy, etc.)

And popular history itself is quite "gendered." The successful books of popular history are very much geared towards a (fairly) traditionally-gendered male readership, with topics aligned to interest that reader. I can't really think offhand of a truly popular history book of the last decade that wasn't... unless you count all of the vampire-fiction, some of which brings in some pretty vivid historical settings. But please correct me if I'm wrong here!

Hmmm. I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I can understand why you would percieve it that way. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, a lot of questions related to gender are extremely broad. These kind of questions are incredibly difficult to answer, no matter what your speciality is. When even advanced courses on gender history often have to limit themselves to specific periods or subjects, it's nigh impossible to answer these even broader questions in the form of a reddit comment. Secondly, many people their gender knowledge is limited to a specific period. It's more common for historians to be specialized in specific periods than it is for them to be specialized in a historical subject throughout time.

Finally, it doesn't really help that gender studies themselves have been suffering somewhat from an identity crisis. Why? This is a fairly complicated question, but I'll try answering it. Basically feminist researchers put a lot of effort into bringing more attention to woman studies, however by doing so they continued a dichotomy which is inherently ahistorical and also counter-productive. The dichotomy between man and woman based on biological attributes (sex) is so ingrained in our worldview that it permeates a lot of research. However, gender wasn't always biologically defined as it is today. By purposly singling out "women" as the object of their studies, they already define their subject to a biological category which is "as opposed to men". So when an entire subdiscipline of history is based on an ahistorical dichotomy, it's obviously very troubling and limiting. That's why feminist researchers have been pushing towards a more balanced approach of "gender" in general instead of focusing on one sex specifically.

That being said, I personally still try to answer certain gender related questions whenever I feel comfortable in doing so. It's not my area of expertise, but I did follow a few advanced course by a respected professor within the field and I did write a paper myself. Still, I have to be really careful when answering these broad questions. Doesn't help either that "gender" studies are fairly limited in historiography and we often have to rely on interdisciplinary research.

I couldn't agree more; for the record, I'm another flaired user who doesn't announce it in my flair, but has completed two subfields on gender for my doctoral exams, and would feel comfortable answering several varieties of gender questions if they were asked -- though I do wish there were more EXPERTS on gender I could defer to! (I tend to use it as a lens upon my own work, rather than studying gender itself. That being said, I am even part of a gender-history dissertation writing group, so possible imposter syndrome?)

For me the real problem is that there are very few questions that cater to gender history -- and I don't think this is necessarily because of the state of popular history. Sure, it hasn't caught up to military/presidential history (ugh) in popularity yet, but just looking at the success of Jill Lepore's latest book The Secret History of Wonder Woman illustrates that there are popular history readers out there interested in gender issues! I think the popular presses are actually doing a fairly good job incorporating gender issues. (Ya know, relatively . . .) I would argue that it is the reddit demographic skew that keeps this sub so grounded in military, political, and ancient history.

I also agree with points made above; at the moment, gender history is unfortunately politicized. (I am not making the argument that gender is inherently political, although I could. Rather I suggest that modern society, and indeed reddit, constructs gender questions as political issues in the here and now.) I agree that answering a question honestly or historically could easily veer into the offensive for certain reddit users -- /r/badhistory still struggles with coming to a consensus over whether or not it is inaccurate to describe western individuals prior to the twentieth century as 'homosexual' although there is a clear historical and factual answer to this, which is unpalatable to certain contemporary LGBTQ agendas. On the other hand, to learn that heterosexual wasn't real either, and that masculinity was not always construed to exclude sexual acts with other males offends red-blooded conservatives trying to preserve the "natural" (ugh, don't get me started on this word as an environmental historian) relations between the sexes.

I think that simply answering questions as asked may not be enough to bring to the readers of /r/askhistorians the insights, depth, and importance of gender history.

I mean, I could write up an obligatory "this is how this question is implicitly gendered male" paragraph and explain how examining hegemonic gender constructions can lend insight to such 'male' topics as politics (per Joan Scott) international relations (per Laura Biggs) and war (per Mary Renda) just to name some of my faves, but would anyone actually bother to read it or be interested???

I think the solution may be something more proactive such as /u/textandtrowel is suggesting; where we actively gather the unfortunately few flaired users with expertise in gender and showcase their knowledge??

EDIT: To clarify, it took literally PhDs to articulate the questions that plague and vex the more novel (cutting-edge?) subfields of history. No one comes in here and asks "what is wilderness?" -- although I could write a book (and many environmental historians have!) over answering it. Similarly, no one asks "How are citizenship and the right to work raced and/or gendered?" Unfortunately, these are just not questions generally prompted by casual reading without a background in historical practice and theory.

EDIT EDIT: Read all these critiques and more for my opinion on the lack of questions and qualified answers about non-civil-war-era, non-slavery-related race issues, which I am far from qualified to speak about.

I've been reading this sub for about a year now, along with the other Ask(insert academic field) subs. And I'm going to dispute this notion somewhat.

Gender questions come up often in many of those subs (ask anthropology, ask historians, ask social science etc) and the overwhelming majority of the questions posed are clearly looking to either confirm or refute certain ideological narratives about gender.

If a Historian or social scientist or anthropologist were to answer those questions in an unbiased way their answers would in fact be narrow and speculative. If on the other hand they answered them with a narrative in mind you'd get hundreds of replies as the thread devolved into a debate about the accuracy of those narratives with many valid counter points and philosophical musings. So I assume that the historians/social scientists/anthropologists are actually answering these questions in an unbiased manner.

Currently most of what popular culture thinks is true about gender is speculative with competing narratives: some politically motivated some ideological or philosophical...not really the realm of hard history.

So when I see these less than satisfying answers I remind myself that there really isn't an alternative....and perhaps the real problem are the questions being asked.

So gender (and sex and sexuality) are my most favorite things to study. I too nearly left this place several times because 1.) there were so few questions about my area of study and 2.) because sometimes Reddit is not the nicest place to be a woman.
I've taken a bit of an alternate route, and gotten more involved in AH. It certainly frustrates me that this is not much of a space for gender history, but leaving won't help that. I hope we can find new ways of making this space more inclusive. I know that I, and all our flaired users who work on gender-related projects, would welcome more questions about gender, women's history, etc.

I do agree that it is important not to take basic biological principles and speculate about history beyond what we have strong evidence to support. On the other hand I do think it is a major mistake to follow the "blank slate" philosophy found often in Sociology that suggests that biology has little to no influence on human behavior. That seems obviously false to me. As someone who focused on studying biology, I think it that we should take what we know about biology and history and make the best estimates we can about paleolithic gender relations or other issues but be careful not to stray too far toward either "nature alone" or "nurture alone" in studying ancient gender history.

This is a bad post with a lot of hand-waving. You don't even cite specific examples. The generalization about the FAQ seems to miss the point of the FAQ as a starting place - people read it first, then are encouraged to ask questions beyond what it covers, in order to avoid covering the same ground over and over. Others have pointed out that this sub is Q&A driven; If there's a lack of content, it means there's a lack of interest. The way forward is to ask relevant questions that historians are equipped to answer.