Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804758158 ISBN 13: 9780804758154

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The prominent scholars featured in Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering explore how gender analysis can profoundly enhance human knowledge in the areas of science, medicine, and engineering. Where possible, they provide concrete examples of how taking gender into account has yielded new research results and sparked creativity, opening new avenues for future research.

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. Her books include The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989), Has Feminism Changed Science? (1999), and, most recently, the prize-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2004).

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. Her books include The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989), Has Feminism Changed Science? (1999), and, most recently, the prize-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2004).

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GENDERED INNOVATIONS IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

By Londa Schiebinger

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-5815-4

Contents

Preface....................................................................
vii
Contributors...............................................................
ix
1 Introduction: Getting More Women into Science and Engineering—Knowledge 
Issues Londa Schiebinger..................................................
1
2 When Gender Criticism Becomes Standard Scientific Practice: The Case of 
Sex Determination Genetics Sarah S. Richardson............................
22
3 One Thing Leads to Another: Gendering Research in Archaeology Margaret 
W. Conkey..................................................................
43
4 Sex Matters: Letting Skeletons Tell the Story Lori D. Hager.............
65
5 Change around the Edges: Gender Analysis, Feminist Methods, and Sciences 
of Terrestrial Environments Louise Fortmann, Heidi Ballard, and Louise 
Sperling...................................................................
79
6 Feminist Perspectives on Geographic Information Systems: Implications 
for Geographic Research Mei-Po Kwan.......................................
97
7 Stem Cells, Women, and the New Gender and Science Charis Thompson.......
109
8 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
9 Are Photons Gendered? Women in Physics and Astronomy C. Megan Urry......
150
10 "A Very Scholarly Intervention": Recruiting Women Faculty in Science 
and Engineering Danielle LaVaque-Manty and Abigail J. Stewart.............
165
11 Building Two-Way Streets to Implement Policies that Work for Gender and 
Science Sue V. Rosser.....................................................
182
12 Projects of the National Academies on Women in Science and Engineering 
France A. Córdova..........................................................
198
Bibliography...............................................................
213
Index......................................................................
235

CHAPTER 1

Introduction:Getting More Women into Science and Engineering—KnowledgeIssues

Londa Schiebinger

Innovations surrounding women and gender have rockedscience 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 inthis volume)? Or who would have thought that geneticists would dethrone the"master gene" model—that conceptualized mammalian sex as determinedby a single master gene on the Y chromosome—and put in its place an accountthat emphasizes interactions between the testis and ovary factors (seeRichardson this volume)? Or who would have imagined that an artificial kneewould be designed with nineteen unique aspects to meet the distinctive skeletaland load-bearing needs of females?

In my lifetime, the situation for intellectual women in the United Stateshas improved dramatically. We can measure these changes partially throughimages. Anyone growing up in American consumer culture understands thepower of images. Images project messages about hopes and dreams, mienand 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 scientistin our society. Historically, when prompted to "draw a scientist," 98 percentof the students drew males (Kahle 1987, see Figure 1.1). By the 1990s, that haddeclined to 70 percent with some 16 percent of the scientists drawn beingclearly female and another 14 percent ambiguous with respect to sex (Figure1.2). In the 1990s, a remarkable 96 percent of the scientists continued to bedepicted as Caucasian despite the prominence of Asians in science (Rahmand Charbonneau 1997).

We can also see gendered innovations in the content of science, in thiscase, in understandings of human evolution. Most of us grew up with an imageof human evolution as the "evolution of man" (Figure 1.3). Evolutionarytheory presented males as actively and aggressively driving forward humanevolution. As Charles Darwin stated, only something he called the "equaltransmission of characters" allowed traits selected for in males to be transmittedto 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 openedits new "Human Biology and Evolution" exhibit featuring this reconstructionof early humans from the 3.5 million-year-old footprints preserved involcanic ash near Laetoli (Figure 1.4). This diorama clearly gives woman aplace in human evolution, and although the assumptions captured in this imagehave changed dramatically since the 1960s, the process is still incomplete.The humans embodying the footprints are portrayed as a robust male toweringover his smaller female consort, his arm positioned to protect and reassureher. We simply do not know, however, the sex or relationship of the twoindividuals who made these impressions—footprints cannot be sexed. Theseearly humans might have been a large male and his much smaller mate, butthey 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—genderedinnovations—in science and engineering. By gendered innovations I meantransformations in the personnel, cultures, and content of science and engineeringbrought about by efforts to remove gender bias from these fields. Asdocumented in this volume, understanding and removing gender bias hasbrought new insights to specific sciences and fields of engineering. I want toemphasize from the beginning that gender analysis is not attached to the Xor Y chromosome—that, if properly trained, most researchers successfullymaster its theory and practice. Gender analysis, when applied rigorouslyand creatively, has the potential to enhance human knowledge and technicalsystems by opening them to new perspectives, new questions, and newmissions.

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 womenin science and engineering. This level of analysis treats the history and sociologyof women's engagement in scientific institutions. Who are the greatwomen scientists? What are their achievements? What is the experience ofwomen in university, industrial, and governmental laboratories? Programsaimed at increasing the number of women in science and engineering (rightlyor wrongly) attempt to "fix the women"—that is, to make them more competitive—byincreasing funding to women's research, teaching them how tonegotiate for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804758158
• ISBN 13: 9780804758154
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Herausgeber: Schiebinger Londa
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland