| Sumario: | Policy reports on the "status of women" constitute one of the most abundant archives on the world's women in the second half of the twentieth century. This essay is an account of and a reckoning with the promises and limits of the social scientific report through an analysis of archives of early "status of women" reports, focusing on reports produced across the decolonizing world from the 1970s to the 1990s. This history reveals paradoxical and difficult genealogies of Third World women researchers who critiqued yet invested in state-sponsored genres of social scientific research in pursuit of equitable citizenship. I explore how the first United Nations International Women's Year in 1975 inaugurated a novel knowledge economy about women's status that created long-lasting infrastructures for social scientific research on women and sexual minorities at the intersection of multiple authorities, including the United Nations, independent nation-states, nongovernmental organizations, and international foundations. Through an analysis of early multicountry studies and reports from postcolonial South Asia, I interrogate how the paradigm of measurable equality in the social scientific study of women occluded other ways of knowing while naturalizing biological determinism in Third World feminist research. Ultimately, the essay asks feminist scholars to reflect on the ethical and epistemological dilemmas created by the dominance of the social scientific report, which today forms the primary mode of research in a multinational knowledge industry of research on women, gender, and sexuality that dominates much of the world.
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