[2] Within anthropology, some of his most important contributions were to the study of gender, as in his 1975 work in which he described women as "muted" in social discourse.
[3] A graduate of the LSE, Ardener took up an Oxford lectureship in social anthropology at the invitation of E. E.
[5] One of his best-known contributions to anthropology came in the 1975 article " 'The Problem' revisited", in Perceiving Women, a volume edited by his wife and fellow anthropologist Shirley Ardener.
He identified a problematic tendency in anthropological methodology to talk only to men and about women, thereby ignoring at least half the sample of people they were supposed to be observing.
[7] Ardener diagnosed the problem as a result of the fact that ethnographic methods were both devised and verified by male anthropologists, who did not realise what they were overlooking.