Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804758158
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804758154
- Pub. Date:
- 03/07/2008
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804758158
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804758154
- Pub. Date:
- 03/07/2008
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering / Edition 1
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Overview
Several government granting agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the European Commission, now require that requests for funding address whether, and in what sense, sex and gender are relevant to the objectives and methodologies of the research proposed, yet few research scientists or engineers know how to do gender analysis. This book begins to rectify the situation by shedding light on the how and the why.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804758154 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2008 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
GENDERED INNOVATIONS IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
By Londa Schiebinger
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5814-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Getting More Women into Science and Engineering—Knowledge Issues
Londa Schiebinger
Innovations surrounding women and gender have rocked science and technology in the past three decades. Who, for example, could have predicted that the chief scientist at NASA would be a woman (France A. Córdova, now president of Purdue University, and an author in this volume)? Or who would have thought that geneticists would dethrone the "master gene" model—that conceptualized mammalian sex as determined by a single master gene on the Y chromosome—and put in its place an account that emphasizes interactions between the testis and ovary factors (see Richardson this volume)? Or who would have imagined that an artificial knee would be designed with nineteen unique aspects to meet the distinctive skeletal and load-bearing needs of females?
In my lifetime, the situation for intellectual women in the United States has improved dramatically. We can measure these changes partially through images. Anyone growing up in American consumer culture understands the power of images. Images project messages about hopes and dreams, mien and demeanor, about who should be a scientist and what science is all about. We have seen some interesting changes in who is imagined to be a scientist in our society. Historically, when prompted to "draw a scientist," 98 percent of the students drew males (Kahle 1987, see Figure 1.1). By the 1990s, that had declined to 70 percent with some 16 percent of the scientists drawn being clearly female and another 14 percent ambiguous with respect to sex (Figure 1.2). In the 1990s, a remarkable 96 percent of the scientists continued to be depicted as Caucasian despite the prominence of Asians in science (Rahm and Charbonneau 1997).
We can also see gendered innovations in the content of science, in this case, in understandings of human evolution. Most of us grew up with an image of human evolution as the "evolution of man" (Figure 1.3). Evolutionary theory presented males as actively and aggressively driving forward human evolution. As Charles Darwin stated, only something he called the "equal transmission of characters" allowed traits selected for in males to be transmitted to females (Hrdy 1999).
In 1993, a much-heralded new image was produced to correct this picture. In that year the American Museum of Natural History in New York opened its new "Human Biology and Evolution" exhibit featuring this reconstruction of early humans from the 3.5 million-year-old footprints preserved in volcanic ash near Laetoli (Figure 1.4). This diorama clearly gives woman a place in human evolution, and although the assumptions captured in this image have changed dramatically since the 1960s, the process is still incomplete. The humans embodying the footprints are portrayed as a robust male towering over his smaller female consort, his arm positioned to protect and reassure her. We simply do not know, however, the sex or relationship of the two individuals who made these impressions—footprints cannot be sexed. These early humans might have been a large male and his much smaller mate, but they might also have been a parent comforting his or her adolescent offspring, or just two friends fleeing the volcano together.
The purpose of this volume is to analyze changes of this sort—gendered innovations—in science and engineering. By gendered innovations I mean transformations in the personnel, cultures, and content of science and engineering brought about by efforts to remove gender bias from these fields. As documented in this volume, understanding and removing gender bias has brought new insights to specific sciences and fields of engineering. I want to emphasize from the beginning that gender analysis is not attached to the X or Y chromosome—that, if properly trained, most researchers successfully master its theory and practice. Gender analysis, when applied rigorously and creatively, has the potential to enhance human knowledge and technical systems by opening them to new perspectives, new questions, and new missions.
To understand better how this works, I set out three distinct levels of analysis (see also Schiebinger 1999 and 2003):
1. Fix the Number of Women: Participation of Women in Science and Engineering. The first level focuses on increasing the participation of women in science and engineering. This level of analysis treats the history and sociology of women's engagement in scientific institutions. Who are the great women scientists? What are their achievements? What is the experience of women in university, industrial, and governmental laboratories? Programs aimed at increasing the number of women in science and engineering (rightly or wrongly) attempt to "fix the women"—that is, to make them more competitive—by increasing funding to women's research, teaching them how to negotiate for salary, or, more generally, how to succeed in a man's world.
2. Fix the Institutions: Gender in the Cultures of Science and Engineering. A culture is more than institutions, legal regulations, or a series of degrees or certifications. It consists in the unspoken assumptions and values of its members. Despite claims to objectivity and value neutrality, the sciences have identifiable cultures whose customs and folkways have developed over time. Many of these customs developed historically in the absence of women and, as I have argued elsewhere, also in opposition to their participation (Schiebinger 1989). How have the cultures of science and engineering, where success requires at least some mastery of the rituals of day-to-day conformity, codes governing language, styles of interactions, modes of dress, hierarchies of values and practices, been formed by their predominantly male practitioners? Programs that attempt to increase women's participation taking this approach work to "fix the institutions." The National Science Foundation's (NSF) current ADVANCE grants, for example, attempt to transform university cultures. These efforts range from understanding subtle gender biases in hiring practices, for example, to restructuring the academic work/life balance by offering parental leave, stopping the tenure clock, and the like.
3. Fix the Knowledge: Gender in the Results of Science and Engineering. Scholars have emphasized the consequences of exclusion for women, but what have been the consequences of this exclusion for human knowledge more generally? At this third level, authors focus on "fixing the knowledge." A number of chapters in this volume explore how gender analysis, when turned to science and engineering, profoundly enhances human knowledge. This is a vital issue to address today, and here we provide examples of how gender analysis has sparked creativity by opening new questions for future research. This work is crucial to our efforts to recruit and retain women. Importantly, programs, such as those at the National Institutes of Health (NIH—see below) have linked the project of increasing the number of women in the medical profession to that of reconceptualizing medical research.
WHILE IT IS USEFUL to distinguish issues at three analytical levels, these perspectives are obviously closely tied to one another. Emerging evidence reveals that women will not become equal participants in science and engineering until we have fully investigated and solved the knowledge problem. Disciplines are somewhat arbitrary ways of cutting knowledge. We need to be open to the possibility that human knowledge—what we know, what we value, what we consider important—may change dramatically as women become full partners. Science is about critical thinking, exploration, and travel into unknown worlds. We have much to gain by embarking on this voyage.
To set the stage for what follows, let me place the chapters within the analytics I distinguish.
Participation of Women in Science and Engineering
Many people believe in progress. They believe that things are gradually getting better for women. How many times have I been patted on the head and told, "Just wait, dear, and women will move to the top." One point I want to make is that progress for women is not a fact of nature but the result of careful interventions on the part of individuals, institutions, and governmental agencies.
Let me offer just three quick examples of how we cannot just sit back and wait for things to right themselves. Opportunities for women result from larger social and economic restructurings in a society in addition to changes in university cultures. As is widely known, women were excluded from modern universities from their founding in the twelfth century until the end of the nineteenth century. In this sense, women are real newcomers to university research labs. Women embarked on modern careers in science after the women's movements of the 1870s and 1880s propelled them into universities. As women gradually gained admittance to graduate schools—by the twentieth century a prerequisite for serious work in science—they began flooding into PhD programs in all fields. By the 1920s their numbers were at a historic high in the United States, with women earning 14 percent of doctorates in the physical and biological sciences. Between 1930 and 1960, however, the proportion of women PhDs plunged as a result of the rise of fascism in Europe, the Cold War, and McCarthyism in the United States. Shockingly, women did not regain their 1920s levels of participation in academic science until the 1970s (Rossiter 1982; Zuckerman et al. 1991).
A second example shows even more clearly how social structures influence women's opportunities in science and engineering. In the seventeenth century in Germany, 14 percent of all astronomers were women. Today the percentage of women astronomers in Germany is around 5 percent (counting all lecturers and professors at German universities). How was this possible? The very different economic and social structure of life in early modern Germany gave women an opportunity to participate in ways not available to them today. As I have argued elsewhere, astronomy in this period was organized along guild lines. Guilds were social and economic organizations through which most goods were produced and services provided. Guild production took place in the household. In astronomical families, the labor of husband and wife did not divide along modern lines: he was not fully professional, working in an observatory outside the home; she was not fully a housewife, confined to hearth and home. Nor were they independent professionals, each holding a chair of astronomy. Instead, they worked as a team and on common problems. Many took turns observing so that their observations, often made in their own attics, followed night after night without interruption. At other times they observed together, dividing the work so that they could make observations that a single person could not make accurately. Guild traditions within science allowed women, such as Maria Margaretha Winkelmann, to strengthen the empirical base of science (Schiebinger 1989).
A final example from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals that traditional departmental hiring processes do not always identify exceptional female candidates. MIT was successful at increasing its women faculty when its president and provost collaborated with department heads and women faculty committees to implement novel hiring procedures. These successes in both the Schools of Science and Engineering were pushed forward as a response to the disastrous 1996 reports on women faculty at MIT. Forward-looking deans, Robert Birgeneau in Science and Thomas Magnanti in Engineering, were able to help hiring committees find qualified women when encouraged to. These women hired in the School of Science achieved tenure at the same rate as their male colleagues and a slightly higher level of professional success than the men as measured by election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and the like (Hopkins 2006).
I am not arguing that we adopt any particular social order or university policy. My point is that the overall organization of society—the way we organize households, child care, economic production, roads, social services, universities, schools, and governments—all have an impact on women's opportunities in science. Foundational questioning and reorganization of society and science will be required to make women truly equal. Studies show that professional women currently do more domestic labor than professional men. At the same time these women are expected to compete on an equal footing with men (some of whom have stay-at-home partners) for jobs and salaries (Williams 2000). We need to end the social welfare state in the home for men (especially those with professional partners). Men need to assume their fair share of the pleasures and pains of organizing and caring for domestic spaces.
Since the Sputnik years, the United States and Western European countries have attempted to increase the participation of their populations in science—women as well as men. In the United States, this led to foundational legislation, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and Title IX of 1972, designed to foster equality for women. In her chapter in this volume, Sue Rosser documents how the NSF, beginning in the 1980s, has attempted to improve the numbers of women in science and engineering by jump-starting their careers with extra research monies and the like. In a later chapter, France Córdova summarizes similar efforts undertaken by the National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine). Founded in 1991, the Academies' Committee on Women in Science and Engineering (CWSE) has worked with Congress and universities to develop policy aimed at assisting women's careers. (I should note that I attempted to include a chapter on innovations in Europe in this volume but European Union lawyers would not approve its publication.)
These initiatives—both on the part of the government and universities—have focused narrowly on getting more women in the door. As important as these measures are, they alone are not enough. In recent years, the NSF, CWSE, and numerous universities have moved to the second level in my stepped analysis and begun working toward understanding and helping to correct the underlying causes of inequality.
Gender in the Cultures of Science and Engineering
There have been two fundamental approaches in efforts nationwide to gain equality for women in the academy: liberal feminism and difference feminism. Oddly enough, many people in the United States and elsewhere practice feminist virtues, while at the same time shying away from calling themselves "feminists." I would venture to say that the vast majority of Americans are feminists, at least liberal feminists—that is to say that they support equality and professional opportunities for women—though most would not call themselves feminists. It is important to recognize that what is "feminist" in one time and place becomes business as usual in another. It is a curious phenomenon that when feminist practices or points of view become widely accepted in science and engineering, or in the culture more generally, they are no longer seen as "feminist," but as "just" or simply "true." The result is that the term feminist continues to refer to people and policies on the radical cutting edge. In her chapter on genetic models of sex determination, Sarah Richardson presents a classic example of how feminism disappears when its principles are mainstreamed into science. The fact that researchers may be unaware of the sources of new insights does not make those sources any less real—but it does serve to keep feminism on the sidelines.
Authors in this volume will use the term feminist to refer to efforts to bring about institutional and social change leading to greater equality for women because one needs to discuss this process and this is the appropriate English term for it. One thing to emphasize is that there are many feminisms. Sue Rosser (2005) has distinguished at least ten different feminist approaches to science and technology. Here I want to emphasize only two fundamental feminist perspectives: liberal and difference feminism. Although these two approaches differ, they are not mutually exclusive, nor does the one supersede the other. In some instances liberal feminism is the best approach—it is certainly the best understood in the United States. At other times the insights offered by what I call difference feminism lead best to reform.
Liberal feminism has been the major form of feminism in the United States and much of Western Europe since the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's vigorous call for equality in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Liberal feminism has supported well the participation of women in the professions. It has informed major legislation guaranteeing women's rights, as well as equal education, pay, and opportunity. It is the theory underlying government and university interventions seeking greater equality for women at level one in my analysis. Liberal feminism has made such inroads that most people think of these issues in terms of "fairness" rather than of "feminism" (Rosser and Córdova, this volume).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from GENDERED INNOVATIONS IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING by Londa Schiebinger. Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Contributors ix
Introduction: Getting More Women into Science and Engineering-Knowledge Issues Londa Schiebinger 1
When Gender Criticism Becomes Standard Scientific Practice: The Case of Sex Determination Genetics Sarah S. Richardson 22
One Thing Leads to Another: Gendering Research in Archaeology Margaret W. Conkey 43
Sex Matters: Letting Skeletons Tell the Story Lori D. Hager 65
Change around the Edges: Gender Analysis, Feminist Methods, and Sciences of Terrestrial Environments Louise Fortmann Heidi Ballard Louise Sperling 79
Feminist Perspectives on Geographic Information Systems: Implications for Geographic Research Mei-Po Kwan 97
Stem Cells, Women, and the New Gender and Science Charis Thompson 109
If You Meet the Expectations of Women, You Exceed the Expectations of Men: How Volvo Designed a Car for Women Customers and Made World Headlines Tatiana Butovitsch Temm 131
Are Photons Gendered? Women in Physics and Astronomy C. Megan Urry 150
"A Very Scholarly Intervention": Recruiting Women Faculty in Science and Engineering Danielle LaVaque-Manty Abigail J. Stewart 165
BuildingTwo-Way Streets to Implement Policies that Work for Gender and Science Sue V. Rosser 182
Projects of the National Academies on Women in Science and Engineering France A. Cordova 198
Bibliography 213
Index 235