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Hypatia 19.1 (2004) 292-296



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Three Decades of Feminism in Science:
From "Liberal Feminism" and "Difference Feminism" to Gender Analysis of Science

Kristina Rolin


The title of Londa Schiebinger's Has Feminism Changed Science? (1999) invokes questions which are of interest to feminist philosophers of science: Will the inclusion of more women in scientific fields bring about socially more responsible or epistemically more successful science? What sciences have been changed by feminism and by what kind of feminism? What aspects of science have been changed: The culture of science? Questions posed by scientists? Or even the very content of science—its theories, concepts, and hypotheses? For philosophers who are interested in these questions, Schiebinger's book offers an informative overview of recent scholarship on women in science and gender in science.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part treats women in science, past and present; the second treats gender in the culture of science; and the third addresses gender in the content of science. Schiebinger begins the overview by arguing that both liberal feminism and what she calls "difference feminism" (4) have their blind alleys. Liberal feminism has encouraged women to assimilate to science while leaving gender ideologies that inform and shape scientific cultures and institutions invisible and intact. "Difference feminism" has tended to emphasize gender differences to the point of romanticizing those values traditionally considered feminine in its search for women's distinctive "ways of knowing."

Schiebinger's own position is a sophisticated middle ground between liberal feminism and difference feminism. In order for gender equity policies to be effective, she argues, they need to be informed by studies of gender in the culture and content of science: "What we need is a healthy working relationship between scholars involved in developing gender critiques of science and those doing science" (185). Yet feminists should, she asserts, steer clear of those [End Page 292] conceptions of "feminist science" that celebrate empathetic, nondominating, environmentalist, or people-friendly science as feminist. What feminism can offer to sciences are tools of gender analysis that can be applied to develop better science, by integrating a critical awareness of gender into the basic training of young scientists as well as the everyday practices of scientists (8).

Schiebinger then goes on to show that when tools of gender analysis are applied to studies of women in science, they provide a better understanding of why the so-called "pipeline model" of gender equity policy is inadequate. The pipeline model is based on the assumption that if more girls and women entered the educational end of the pipeline, more women would be turned into scientists and academics. In this model, women's low participation in science is understood as a product of a process of self-selection rather than as a process of discrimination. "The pipeline model, built on the liberal assumption that women (and minorities) should assimilate to the current practices in science, does not provide insight into how the structure of institutions or the current practices of science need to change before women can comfortably join the ranks of scientists," Schiebinger argues (1999, 64).

Understanding how gender ideologies inform and shape the cultures of science is a key to understanding more subtle forms of gender-based discrimination in science. Schiebinger's own area of scholarship, history of science, offers interesting insights into how the cultures of science—their customs and folkways, styles of communication, modes of dress, and unspoken values—have developed in the absence of women. For example, the eighteenth-century ideology of sexual complementarity defined the intellectual virtues of the scientists as antithetical to the ideal virtues of femininity. Sociological and anthropological studies of contemporary science suggest that even today many scientists expect a successful scientist to be aggressively competitive; modesty, a stereotypically feminine virtue, does not add to the credibility of the scientists. To admit that gendered notions of intellectual virtue or styles of interaction put men and women into unequal position is not to imply that gender differences in behavior are inevitable or...

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