In this presentation I address how to think of the theoretical and ontological underpinnings of the category ‘women’. In the face of intersectional and deconstructive challenges to the project of analysing gender relations in terms of the category ‘women’, drawing on critical realism I present a way of doing this that is compatible both with social constructionism (in its weaker version) and with the acknowledgement of multiple interfolding grounds of inequality. Further, I consider how to assess common sense understandings that take women to be an undeniably real category, in light of feminist high theory questioning such commonsensical perspectives. I reflect on the allure of the intellectual exercises of high theory while elaborating a critique of these as problematically entangled in discursive forms of knowing.