I. Framing the Question
My purpose in this paper
is to relate the participation of women in science to issues of ethics
in science, with some emphasis on physics. In most discussions of
ethical issues in science, including some quite recent papers1
, explicit considerations of women and gender enter only in terms of the
larger set of social ethical standards that scientists should observe,
for example anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action policies.
The issue of sexual harassment is usually cited. The principle of
openness in science2 might be interpreted as relating
to inclusiveness regarding gender, race, and class, but no explicit connection
between openness and gender is usually drawn.
To uncover how considerations
of women and gender might enter into science ethics in a more central way,
the first step is to define a domain in which issues of women and of gender
intersect with ethics and science. By issues of women, I mean especially
those social and intellectual controversies arising around efforts to bring
about equal participation by women (in any area). By gender, I mean
characteristics, roles, ideas, and values that historically or stereotypically
have been identified with men or with women. By science, I mean a
human process of creating knowledge -- a process associated on the one
hand with particular professional activities and institutions, and on the
other with particular values, methods, and ways of knowing. By ethics,
I mean a code of moral conduct, which in science has the purpose of preserving
the integrity of scientific knowledge and upholding the authority of science
regarding knowledge claims.
Issues of women and science
intersect in the social-political effort taking place in U.S. policy arenas
in recent years to understand the low numbers of women in science and to
attract and retain women in science. Insofar as it is construed as
an effort to correct past wrongs -- namely, the systematic and subtle forms
of exclusion of women from scientific practice -- this area intersects
the domain of ethics. The question might be posed as, What is the
responsibility, if any, of scientists to ensure that women are no longer
excluded from the full range of scientific activity, as well as from the
various types of rewards and consequences which may result from such activity?
Issues of gender and science
intersect in the scholarly effort taking place in gender and women's studies
to understand how scientific knowledge-making has influenced, and has been
influenced by, the social status of women relative to men and beliefs about
gender. Insofar as scientific methods and knowledge have been used
to justify excluding women from science, not necessarily intentionally
but also not arbitrarily, this area too intersects with the domain of ethics.
The question here might be posed as, What is the responsibility, if any,
of scientists to understand the potential for the use of science to exclude
women and to try to minimize such potential?
Women/gender, science, and
ethics thus intersect in the facts that (1) women historically have been
excluded from professional scientific practices and (2) the methods, logic,
data, and knowledge of science have been used to justify women's exclusion3
. We think and are taught to think not only that science should be
gender neutral, but that it is. This is particularly true in physics, where
all signs of and references to gender are absent, as are signs of the historical
and cultural "decisions" which excluded women. Yet in physics women
are proportionally fewer in number than in the other disciplines of science,
including mathematics. Gender-neutrality as a desirable quality of
scientific methods, thinking, and knowledge has not translated into a gender-equitable
or gender-inclusive scientific profession. And while it is difficult
to say that individuals -- scientists -- have acted unethically in creating
this situation, we may legitimately ask what circumstances and (ethical)
assumptions fostered such an outcome, whether those circumstances and assumptions
remain operative today, and whether they are adequate to science.
The question for scientists, at the outset, is, What is their responsibility,
if any, to create a situation of gender-equity and -inclusiveness in science?
II. Some Preliminary Ideas and Caveats
1. Ethical codes and practice in
science depend both on social, ìhumanî values and on specifically ìscientificî
or knowledge values. Social values apply because science is a social,
human activity; scientists' values must support the society in which they
live and work. Scientific values and methods of science serve the
acquisition and dissemination of reliable knowledge of the world.
The knowledge value most directly associated with science is objectivity.
Objectivity as a knowledge value is based, in turn, on epistemological
assumptions -- that is, assumptions about how the world is set up to be
knowable and about the relationship of the knower to the world.
2. My point will be that the fact
of women's participation in science accompanies and brings about a shift
in values, both social values and knowledge values. Perhaps it is important
to state that I am not going to claim that women affect science or science
ethics because women are biologically or even socially ìdifferentî from
men. "Gender" in this paper does not mean biological sex; it refers
to characteristics that have been culturally, ideologically associated
with males or females, men or women. "Gender" then also refers to culturally-constructed
categories, and from those to the ideologies (in particular, ideologies
of power) which guide the constructing process itself. Insofar as
the ways in which differences in biology or socialization have been assumed
or construed to matter in the make-up and organization of the world, they
have influenced science and its values. And as women's participation
brings new understanding of the implications of biology (or non-implications,
as in "biology is not destiny") and new forms of socialization, it also
influences science and its values.
The basic point (that women's
participation in science accompanies and brings about a shift in values)
is applicable to all socially- and culturally-identified groups who are
underrepresented in the community of science. In this paper, however,
I mostly limit my statements to women, and when referring to women historically
or socially, I am speaking of the mostly middle class, mostly white women,
who have constituted most of the women in professional American and European
science up to the present. ìWomanî is a category into which we (as
mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly male scientists) tend to group
persons of extremely diverse experience and ideas. Historically,
just as the pronoun "he" eclipsed women by claiming to represent humanity
but actually representing men of the dominant class, the word "woman" has
eclipsed, to begin with, working class women and women of color.
I hope to gather arguments useful against this kind of erasure.
3. Feminism, as a movement and
especially as a theme of scholarly research, has made possible the change
in women's social status and made sense of the issues arising through that
change. I think of "feminism" as meaning ìpro-womanî, an idea needed when
women as a category have been ignored or placed in a subjugated position.
Feminism is, among other things, an explicitly value-laden, political group
of positions and agendas, but it is not without responsibility. Feminism
has to confront society with the fact that, until very recently, women
as a cultural category have been ignored, devalued, and subjugated.
Feminism has to reveal the various forms of subjugation operating through
laws, institutions, customs, social theories, and cultural values.
And feminism has to come up with a better design for society, based on
a thorough review and rethinking of gender.
Historically, science has
been a tool in the subjugation of women, if also a tool in their progressive
liberation; therefore science does not escape feminist scrutiny.
Feminism thus leads to a review and rethinking, not only of gender, but
also of science. Feminist studies of science and epistemology range
from criticism of traditional ideas to the construction of new conceptual
frameworks, values, and methods. In this paper, the intended direction
is constructive. That is, one of my objectives is to introduce to
the physics community some feminist work which examines the ethical questions
that arise and the scientific values that are served when we "add" women
to the community of scientists.
4. This paper represents only a
first attempt on my part to draw together gender, ethics, and science.
From a background in high energy physics, science policy, and most recently
issues of women and science, I have gathered an acquaintance with physics,
politics, and feminist studies of science. In this paper I have drawn on
the scholarship of others, but not necessarily in ways they intended or
would approve.
A particular concern is the
possibility of collapsing the domain of individual moral responsibility
-- ethics -- into the domain of community responsibility, that is, the
domain of policy, law, or politics. For instance, is it really the
responsibility of each individual scientist to promote, or not discourage,
the participation of women, in the same sense that it is it the responsibility
of each individual scientist not to falsify data? While noting the
risk in blurring a useful philosophical boundary (distinguishing individual
from group responsibility), I want to point out that the answer to this
question depends on where one assumes gender-equity and gender-inclusiveness
fall in relation to the other boundary mentioned earlier, that between
the "human" and "scientific" values that scientists are asked to respect.
The usual assumption, I think, is that even if scientists, as citizens
or as humans, might be morally obligated to encourage women, they would
not be obligated to do so as scientists. In fact, one could argue
that as scientists they might violate another science value, the ideal
of a intellectual-merit-based reward system, by encouraging women.
This idea could be stated that society, or the leaders of society, have
a responsibility to encourage women, but science, and scientists, do not.
Appealing to the scientist
as a citizen or human being is not necessarily a ìweakî form of moral obligation.
After all, an experiment which objectively resolves a scientific question
but results in anguish or death to other human beings violates the most
basic ethical standards. But feminist scholarship offers another
path (which I will describe at greater length in the next section), in
which human and scientific responsibility come closer together. As
stated above, the conduct of scientists is "coded" to support social values
(such as humane-ness) and scientific values and methods (such as honesty,
carefulness, openness). Scientific values and methods support the acquisition
of reliable knowledge of the world; they also support assumptions about
how the world is set up to be knowable. If we understand the participation
of women in science to be valuable to science as a way of knowing (as well
as to society), the conduct of scientists, as citizens and as scientists,
should reflect this value. Thus, because it is knowledge values that
scientists consider themselves obligated to respect in their activities
as scientists, a key objective of this paper is to show how the participation
of women in science is to be considered an important knowledge value.
III. What Is the Responsibility
of the Scientists Regarding Womenís Participation in Science?
Thus far, the ethical issue
in science pertaining to women/gender has been posed as follows: How could
or should members of the science community respond to the understanding
that, as a professional community, they have unfairly excluded women?
And how could or should they respond to the understanding that science
has been used to justify women's social subjugation, including exclusion
from professional science? A partial answer to this question has
also been sketched, that scientists need to understand women's participation
in science as being important, even critical, to science as a way of knowing.
But first it is reasonable to look at how the science community has responded
to society's call to bring into balance the numbers of men and women in
science.
1. Perhaps the first type of response
is to conduct scientific research into biologically-based differences between
men and women that would explain the underrepresentation of women in science.
At present, the fact that statistically men score slightly but significantly
higher in tasks requiring visual-spatial ability is often cited as meaning
that men naturally show higher aptitude for math and science than women.
There are, of course, a lot of problems with this as an "explanation,"
and these are problems that afflict much of the research in this area.
For instance, do the numbers match -- does the degree of implied difference
in men's and women's brains correspond to the disparity in their representation
in math and science fields? Is skill in visual-spatial tasks innate
or acquired by exposure to certain experiences? Then there is the
problem of "overinterpretation"; that is, does possessing higher visual-spatial
ability actually mean that a person will be better at math and science?
And if so, is this because as a community scientists in a sense tailored
science so that persons skilled in this area would succeed?
As a response to the issues
of women in science, this approach tends to set aside (if not ignore) the
historical exclusion of women from science and risks furthering the use
of science in rationalizing, "naturalizing", and justifying women's past
and continued absence from professional science. As a response by
scientists, this approach carries the message that science is, indeed,
free of cultural ideology and gender bias and that no special attention
is warranted even though the research directly seeks to measure differences
between males and females. It is conceivable, however, that research
methods which account for gender bias could be devised, and in fact efforts
in this direction have begun in some fields, such as psychology.
2. The next type of response has
been to change certain ways of doing business, but leave the core activities
(and values) of science alone. In this approach, the responsibility
is on persons in charge of setting or implementing policy to ensure that
ìthe door is openî, that standards for entering and undertaking science
careers are the same for men and women, and that they enjoy the same opportunities
and treatment. For example, university deans and department chairs
may institute efforts to recruit women, according to the institution's
interpretation of affirmative action. They may establish policies
to ensure that the learning or work environment is not hostile (no sexual
harassment) or "chilly" (no subtle forms of stereotyping behavior that
cumulatively discourage women from continuing). Some departments may initiate
or take part in special programs to encourage women to enter or stay in
science, such as precollege summer science programs, undergraduate research
internships, and mentoring programs. Beyond this, a few chairs and
faculty members may consciously try to foster the productivity and success
of women, by, for instance, not overburdening a junior woman faculty member
with committee assignments.
As a response to issues of
women in science, this approach recognizes women's past exclusion as impinging
on a current social or human value, the principle of equal opportunity,
but not affecting science in a central way. Programs are aimed specifically
at women, and the effort is to disturb as little as possible the work of
scientists, including teaching and especially research. While providing
equal opportunity for women becomes an added (ethical) responsibility --
to be carried by scientists, but only those acting in an administrative
capacity -- scientific values and methods are unaffected, and consequently
the vast majority of practicing scientists also is unaffected, by design.
3. The third and fourth types of
response in this progression are more in the realm of what scientists could
do than the realm of what they have done. The third level of response is
to examine the history, modern sociology, and cultural traditions of science
in relation to the participation and status of women. To respond
at this level, one has to move across the boundaries that enclose (some
might say insulate) science into fields which look critically at science,
namely social studies of science and gender studies of science. In
making such a move one becomes prepared to question the norms and values
of the science world, a somewhat problematic position if one wishes or
intends to continue to be an accepted member of the science community.
Nonetheless, this level of response, if it eventually can be made by enough
members of the science community, represents a kind of professional self-inquiry
that can begin to uncover the force of gender ideology in science and hence
lead to positive change as far as women's participation is concerned.
Alternatively, if policy-makers in the world of science can translate the
findings of those who study the science world into policies, programs,
professional or educational practices, curricula, and so forth, this also
can lead to positive change.
Is science "gender-neutral"?
Londa Schiebinger's historical studies of women and gender in the science
of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, for instance, reveal the gender
bias of what was considered to be legitimate, objective (in other words
"good") science. Her analysis shows how the exclusion of women foreclosed
the possibility of challenging scientific assumptions and claims about
sex and gender difference and thus maintained the subordinate status of
women until well into the 20th century4 .
Is success in science truly
based on merit? Is the (informal) conduct expected of people in order
to judge them "good scientists" biased such that it is easier for men to
be and do them than for women? Beamtimes and Lifetimes, by Sharon
Traweek, is an anthropologistís study of the culture of high energy physicists
and investigates the messages transmitted to physics students "between
the lines" of textbooks, the unspoken rules governing the approval and
progress of graduate students and post-docs, and the gendered content of
those messages and rules5 . Deborah Tannenís You Just
Donít Understand is a popularized version of her extensive study of how
men and women display, through ordinary conversation, quite distinct language
modes (competition versus agreement) and primary concerns (status versus
connection). Pointing out the problems that arise when men judge
what is being said by a woman according to menís primary concerns (and
vice versa), Tannen indicates subtle difficulties that are likely to arise
for women working in fields where men and men's language-culture prevail6
.
And Judith McIlwee and Greg Robinson devote a chapter of their study, Women
in Engineering: Gender, Power, and Workplace Culture, to how the culture
of engineers reinforces, through informal behavior and language, allegiance
to the values of engineering and to the hierarchical structures of their
workplace communities7 .
This approach involves cultivating
the ability to look critically at science, particularly at gender as a
variable, and translating any understanding gained into either one's personal
judgments and actions or into policies and programs influencing the practices
of one's community. As a response to issues of women in science,
it recognizes that achieving equal opportunity for women in science requires
re-evaluation of professional standards and practices, including informal
standards and practices, though it leaves science as a way of knowing unaffected.
4. The last type or level
of response to be considered here is to examine science as a way of knowing
and the values and assumptions which form part of that way of knowing.
In this approach, one is
looking not at science as a cultural institution and women's inclusion/exclusion
in relation to that institution; rather one is looking at the principles
which underlie scientific knowledge-making and how considerations of gender
(or more broadly, human difference) figure among those principles.
As stated above, ethical conduct in science upholds specifically scientific
values and methods (what I have called knowledge values, as distinguished
from human values); these knowledge values and methods support the acquisition
of reliable knowledge of the world, and they also support assumptions about
how the world is set up to be knowable. In science the highest value
is placed on obtaining "objective" information, and principles of conduct
in science aim to secure such information and preserve its integrity.
Almost all principles and values (ethical and otherwise) in science relate
to objectivity: quantification, precision of measurement, faithfulness
to experimental findings (or to "nature") in reporting, and so forth.
Scientists are expected to use carefully designed instruments and methods
in both the gathering and analyzing of objective information. In
examining science as a way of knowing, one is asking, What is objectivity?
What is the assumed "set up" of things in the world such that objective
knowledge is possible? This is where gender and women's studies of
science have been perhaps most constructive, revealing how the notion of
objectivity needs to be developed (or transformed, depending on the writer)
when women are included in the community of scientists and when that community
seeks to respect the values of gender equity and inclusiveness.
Scientists traditionally
think of objectivity as a quality of an individual mind (possibly aided
by instruments), affecting the cognitive acts of observation (or measurement)
and reason (or analysis and interpretation)8 . In Aristotle's
theory of what we would call sex or gender difference, for instance, both
the physical and social characteristics of men, including their rationality,
were explained by the prevalence in the male of hot and dry humors; females
lacked sufficient heat to be rational creatures9 . This
fundamental assumption persisted in various forms until the 18th century,
when the emerging science of anatomy laid the foundation for a theory of
sex and gender difference based on comparative measurements of male and
female bodies -- skull size and weight, for example. However, even
the unexpected discovery that on average the woman's skull was larger than
the man's in proportion to the overall size of the skeleton did not alter
assumptions about the relative rational capacity of men and women; rather
the larger skull was interpreted as linking the woman's proportions to
those of the child and thus revealing her intrinsic immaturity relative
to the man. The woman's skeleton was typically shown with an exaggerated
pelvis, to emphasize her special role as child-bearer, and a small skull10
.
As modern science began to
crystallize as a profession, rationality (and hence the capacity to be
objective) meant "thinking like a man", to quote Evelyn Fox Keller speaking
in reference to the writings of Francis Bacon11 . Lorraine
Code, in an exploration of feminist epistemology, What Can She Know?, draws
attention to the underlying notion of the "knower" in philosophy since
Descartes; the knower (which we may also read as the "scientist") is an
autonomous, self-sufficient being, with authority to speak in the public
domain12 . Such "meta-analysis" is revealing of both the
gender and the class of the knower, given the absence of legal autonomy
in the lives of almost all women in the 16th through 19th centuries, the
necessary role of care-giver filled largely by women, and the work of intellectuals
resting on the labor of comparatively unprivileged persons. So we
begin to see that the ground of this evolving Western philosophical tradition
is a conception of the world (whether composed of "humors" or of "objects")
as knowable to men's minds, but not to women's.
Physicists of today might
say that neither "individual" nor "mind" is the issue in objectivity; rather,
they might argue, objectivity consists in removing acts of individual judgment
as much as possible from the processes of observation and analysis and
instead using instruments, measurements, and mathematical formulas to ask
questions of nature and decipher the answers. Nonetheless, the underlying
belief is that an individual observer, whether human or human-designed,
is responsible for the degree to which an observation is reliable and accurate,
and that individual rationality is responsible for the degree to which
an observation is reliably and accurately interpreted. The sense
of objectivity as an individual act or quality also shows up in the common
translation of idea that "science is gender-neutral" as meaning that facts
and knowledge obtained by scientific means are independent of the sex of
the knower. We moderns believe, with Poullain de la Barre, that "the
mind has no sex"13 , that men and women are equally capable
of rationality.
But feminist studies have
showed convincingly that our society, like almost every other, is organized
along lines which separate and distinguish male from female, masculine
from feminine. That is, though minds may have no sex, "society" sees
sex in everything and labels everything with gender. The social use
of sex and gender distinctions has been inextricably entwined with issues
of dominance and subjugation. That science reflected and reinforced
social inequity is not surprising; science is a human activity and, in
some form, follows the cultural values of its society (though science also,
sometimes, may shape cultural values). In this sense, science has
been no more "gender-neutral" than society has been gender-equitable.
Helen Longino, a feminist
philosopher of science, has argued that science is best understood as fundamentally
social in character and that objectivity is intrinsically a social, interactive,
accomplishment, not a quality of individual cognition14 .
Longino goes beyond the idea that scientists and science are influenced
by social context to locate the most basic cognitive acts involved in objectivity,
observation and reason, in a context of human interaction. To put
her ideas into (perhaps overly) simple terms, it takes more than one person
to validate any observation, and reasoning (analysis and interpretation)
also must be replicated and subject to criticism by others. The social
character of science is evident in the practice of peer review, formal
channels for reporting results, efforts by other scientists to repeat experiments,
and so forth.
Longino further stresses
that objectivity is achieved to the extent that a community meets four
criteria, as follows: "there are recognized avenues for criticism of evidence,
of methods, and of assumptions and reasoning; the community as a whole
responds to such criticism; there exist shared standards that critics can
invoke; and intellectual authority is shared equally among qualified practitioners"
(my italics)15 . The last criterion is most pertinent to the
discussion of gender and ethical issues in science. As Longino says,
The long standing devaluation of women's voices and those of racial minorities meant that [gender-biased and racially-biased] assumptions have been protected from critical scrutiny. Thus a community must not only treat its acknowledged members as equally capable of providing persuasive and decisive reasons and must not only be open to multiple points of view; it must also take active steps to ensure that alternative points of view are developed enough to be sources of criticism. That is, not only must potentially dissenting voices not be discounted, they must be cultivated.16
The greater the diversity of qualified,
equally participating, mutually critical practitioners, the greater the
degree of objectivity. It is the capacity of a community to examine
evidence, reasoning, and assumptions from different perspectives, each
admittedly partial but each able to challenge and critique others, that
results in the making of better -- more objective -- knowledge. Longino
concludes, "this criterion enables us to condemn the exclusion of women
and racial minorities from the practice of science as an epistemological
shortcoming and as a political injustice."17 In
the terms I have used in this paper, gender difference, like other culturally
constructed human differences, is thus found to count as a knowledge value,
and the cultivation of diverse perspectives becomes part of the ethical
responsibility of scientists as scientists, not only as human beings.
In an essay entitled "Situated
Knowledges"18 Donna Haraway adds a number of important
ideas to this redefining of objectivity. Haraway believes that science,
and scientists, must abandon objectivity in the traditional sense as it
promotes pretensions to absolute knowledge and, with those pretentions,
a fantasy of a disembodied position above human responsibility. No
single, all-encompassing, "objective" perspective exists; what is possible,
according to Haraway, is a collection of positions of partial perspective,
each position an observational mechanism embodied in a human being, organism,
or device. By acknowledging their (and their devices') positions
(with position taken both literally and metaphorically) and partial viewpoints,
and acknowledging the legitimacy, indeed the value and necessity, of others'
positions and partial viewpoints, scientists give up a kind of misguided
"innocence." For example, it is no longer possible to believe that
instruments produce complete, authoritative, "objective" evidence or that
instruments remove the (ethical) responsibility of the persons who design
and use them, in terms of the knowledge derived or any social or ecological
side-effects of those instruments. Like Longino, Haraway thus finds
ethics and epistemology grounded together in what she calls "responsible
positioning"; that is, human moral responsibility is grounded in our (scientific)
assumptions about how the world is organized, and how we can know it.
To genuinely assume an ethical position in science which values different
culturally-defined positions and seeks to end subjugation of any group
of persons, we have to conceive the world -- the possibilities of what
we can know about the world -- in a new way. To begin, we have to
recognize the limits of what an individual, or a single culturally-defined
position, can "see" and the interdependency of multiple, partial perspectives.
IV. Consequences and Conclusions
By examining and critiquing
the underlying epistemological assumptions in science, gender and women's
studies are redefining the social and knowledge values which ethical conduct
in science is intended to support. As a consequence, gender and women's
studies challenge several traditional notions relevant to ethical issues
in physics.
1. First, we have to
acknowledge that physics is not value-neutral with respect to women and
gender. Women have been excluded from physics, perhaps more than
from other science disciplines, by means of norms within science culture
which reflect the long-standing assumption that women were not rational
and that feminine characteristics did not belong in science. Excluding
women from science was part of a self-reinforcing set of assumptions in
which characteristics believed to be essentially masculine were seen as
more valuable (in general and to science in particular) than characteristics
believed to be essentially feminine. Scientific evidence and reasoning
gave authority to these beliefs, which went unchallenged because of the
absence of significant numbers of women among professional scientists.
2. Second, we can't accept the
idea that "physics is ethical by nature." The exclusion of women
from physics can be considered an example of the fact that physics, like
science generally, is not intrinsically ethical. Rather, science
in a community which does not cultivate diverse and critical voices may
end up following the social-political agendas of the dominant social group,
at least for a considerable period of time.
3. Third, we have to question whether
physics should be thought of as the model for all science. Physical
science may be unique in studying phenomena that legitimately can be located
outside of, separate from, and different from, the observer or observing
apparatus. Physics typically studies non-human, non-living, discrete, and
persistent or repeating phenomena. There may be ethical concerns
about treating human or other living organisms "as if" they were the "subjects"
of physical science.
To conclude, I invite you
to entertain three interrelated statements relevant to the responsibility
of scientists regarding the participation of women in science.
1. Women -- the increased
presence and participation of women in social domains previously reserved
to men -- are potentially, if not actually, transforming the world.
The presence and participation of women have a paradigm-shifting effect
-- not because women are essentially different from men, or even because
women are socialized differently, but because this represents -- and perhaps
causes -- a profound shift in social and scientific values and thinking.
2. Having women present
and active in the domain of knowledge-production is valuable both to society
and to science. It is a social value as it reflects the sense of
social fairness and justice and as it improves conditions of life for women.
It is also a knowledge value as it enhances the quality of scientific objectivity
and as it bears on the expansion of human understanding. This, in
turn, is important to society. As the conduct of scientists is coded
to reflect both social values and knowledge values, there is a basis to
expect scientists to regard as their personal responsibility the building
of a community capable of a higher degree of objectivity than at present.
3. A shift in paradigm
potentially allows us to "see" things which we couldn't see before.
This is extremely valuable in science. New understanding comes about
sometimes because of the involvement of persons who are "outsiders" to
the entrenched science community and who therefore come with a different
perspective. New understanding also comes about because the process
of including formerly excluded persons requires the community to alter
its value system. Characteristics formerly devalued are seen as valuable,
and "difference" itself becomes valued. The new perspective may add
new knowledge in the light of which existing knowledge may have to be retheorized
or reinterpreted.
Lest we think that this is
all a utopian dream, it should be noted that women and revised ideas about
gender already have had a transforming impact in primatology and some areas
of anthropology. Not surprisingly, these are fields in which sex/gender
distinctions have traditionally come under scrutiny; yet the transformations
in these fields did not begin until women not only became involved in significant
numbers but also articulated their findings in support of a new paradigm19
. In physics, women enter a "world without women"20, though
now perhaps not so much literally as ideologically. Sex/gender distinctions
are believed not to exist in the phenomena studied in physics. The
possibility that beliefs about gender are embedded in the "facts" or laws
of physics is explored only by feminist scholars, a few of whom were formerly
active in physics. Women currently active in physics do not have
the background, time, motivation, autonomy regarding choice of problem,
or network of community support to investigate such ideas21
. Although this situation appears to preclude the possibility of
a feminist-engendered transformation in physics in the near-term (if ever),
it also implies that the discovery of gender beliefs in physics could have
profound effects on science and society.
Notes:
1. For example, see the National Academy of Sciences, ìOn Being A Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Researchî, National Academy Press, Washington, DC (1995). See also Resnick, David, "Philosophical Foundations of Scientific Ethics", in Ethical Issues in Physics: Workshop Proceedings, Eastern Michigan University, July, 1993; Marshall Thomsen, ed.
2. Resnick, David, "Philosophical Foundations of Scientific Ethics", in Ethical Issues in Physics: Workshop Proceedings, Eastern Michigan University, July, 1993; Marshall Thomsen, ed.
3. Schiebinger, Londa, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
4. Schiebinger, Londa, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Also, by Schiebinger, Nature's Body: The Making of Gender in Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
5. Traweek, Sharon, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
6. Tannen, Deborah, You Just Donít Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Morrow, 1990.
7. McIlwee, Judith and Robinson, J. Gregg, Women in Engineering: Gender, Power, and Workplace Culture. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1992.
8. The analysis of objectivity into observational and reasoning aspects follows Helen Longinoís work, referenced below.
9. Schiebinger, Londa, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. For Aristotleís and other historical theories of sex/gender difference, see specifically Chapter 6, ìCompeting Cosmologies: Locating Sex and Gender in the Natural Order.î
10. Ibid., Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, ìMore than Skin Deep: The Scientific Search for Sexual Difference.î
11. This quote comes from ìScience and Gender: Evelyn Fox Kellerî a video from the Bill Moyers series of interviews, ìA World of Ideasî, produced by Public Affairs Television, 1994. Available through Films for the Humanities, Inc., Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543. Keller refers here to her collection of essays, Reflections on Gender and Science, which includes a discussion of Francis Baconís concept of science as a ìmasculine philosophy.î Schiebinger, in The Mind Has No Sex?, Chapter 5, ìBattles over Scholarly Styleî, takes a slightly different view of Baconís use of the term ìmasculineî in this context; Schiebinger believes Bacon meant by ìmasculineî not ìmaleî, but (in Schiebingerís terms) ìactive, virile, and generative.î ìFeminineî, however, was a term of derogation. Both Keller and Schiebinger would agree with the interpretation that the outcome of these semantic arguments was the exclusion of so-called ìfeminineî qualities (as well as women) from science.
12. Code, Lorraine, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge.
13. ìLíesprit nía point de sexeî, wrote Poullain de la Barre in 1673. Quoted in Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?, cited above, p.1.
14. Longino, Helen, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Chapter 4, ìValues and Objectivity.î
15. Longino, Helen, ìEssential Tensions -- Phase II: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science.î Chapter 12 in A Mind of Oneís Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt. p. 266.
16. Ibid., p. 268.
17. Ibid., p. 269.
18. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Chapter 9, ìSituated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.î
19. Schiebinger, Londa, Natureís Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993; p. 113-4. Schiebinger refers to Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
20. The phrase comes from Noble, David F., A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
21. This idea, that women
are rarely able to engage in both scientific and feminist research, has
been discussed both Evelyn Fox Keller, in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death,
New York: Routledge, 1992 (in ìGender and Science: An Updateî) and Ruth
Hubbard, in The Politics of Womenís Biology, New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1990 (in ìIntroduction: Science and Science Criticism).