FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE (1)

The Furor Over Feminist Science
By Sasha Nemecek
Scientific American, Jan 97

In the book, Higher Superstition, their call to action against the forces of anti-science in academia, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt take on what they call a "new academic industry" - feminist critiques of science. Gross and Levitt contend that this highbrow assault, along with related branches of the field known as science studies, challenges whether science has a legitimate claim to truth and objectivity.
"The new criticism is sweeping: it claims to go to the heart of the methodological, conceptual, and epistemological foundations of science", they write of the feminist camp. Critics who accuse feminist science studies of being anti-science often cite only the most radical scholarship - such as philosopher Sandra Harding's charge that Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica is a "rape manual". Although feminists have taken a particularly hard hit in recent skirmishes between "the two cultures", they certainly have not held up a white flag.
Feminists began their scrutiny of science in the 1960s and 1970s by concentrating primarily on inequalities in science education and employment; their arguments opened eyes as well as doors. In 1994 women received approximately 25 percent of the Ph.D.'s awarded in the U.S. in engineering, physical sciences, and biological sciences, compared with roughly 6 percent in 1970. By the late 1970s, feminist critiques of science began to touch on the material of science itself, asking whether, and how, various disciplines might have been molded by the exclusion of women. For instance, medical researchers once relied on data drawn solely from male subjects when studying a disease or a new drug - a practice that certainly skewed their understanding of women's health. But today, women are included in drug studies more routinely. Ailments such as heart disease, once seen primarily as a male affliction, are now recognized as important problems for women as well.
Digging deeper into the philosophy of science, feminist scholars considered how scientists' choices of topics and descriptive terminology reflect prevailing cultural attitudes about gender - and, in the process, ignited some spectacular rhetorical fireworks. One prominent practitioner of feminist scholarship is the historian and philosopher of science, Evelyn Fox Keller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller, who trained as a theoretical physicist, has been "looking at how traditional ideologies of gender got into science through gendered metaphors". By gender, she does not mean how many X and Y chromosomes a person has but rather stereotypes about what is 'masculine" and "feminine". For instance, she points to a long tradition in Western culture of viewing rational thinking as a masculine trait, while seeing intuition as feminine. Keller emphasizes that she is not suggesting that women in fact think intuitively or that all men are purely rational, only that certain traits have been historically associated with one or the other sex. And historically, it seems that traits labeled as feminine were often undervalued.
This theme pervades Keller's most famous work, A Feeling for the Organism, a 1983 biography of the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Barbara McClintock. Keller argues that McClintock's different approach to genetic research - her intuitive, empathic style of "getting to know" the corn plants she studied - made her a scientific oddball whose research was ignored and even ridiculed for much of her career. McClintock received the Nobel in 1983 at the age of 81, shortly after Keller published the book. More recently, Keller and others have pondered the emphasis given to DNA as the "master molecule", particularly in the early years of genetics and molecular biology in the 1950s. This terminology, Keller asserts, reflects science's tendency to frame problems in terms of a linear sequence of cause and effect - elevating control (to some, a stereotypically masculine trait) over interaction (often seen as feminine). But scientists have come to appreciate that DNA is just part of a complex system for expressing genetic information.
Bonnie B. Spanier, a professor of women's studies at the State University of New York at Albany, who holds a doctorate in microbiology, has examined whether scientific metaphors have changed in response to this new understanding. In her recent book, Impartial Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology, Spanier surveyed current biology textbooks and journal articles and found that many of the old metaphors were still in place. "Despite the significance of proteins and other complex macromolecules", she concludes, "scientists were still using the language of genes being in control, at the top of the hierarchy of the cell". Spanier expresses concem that more than semantics may be at stake: some scientific ideas might be overlooked because they do not fit into this hierarchy. As an example, she cites research into the causes of cancer. "By focusing on the genetic basis of cancer, for example, researchers tend to be deflected from studying other aspects, such as environmental causes", she says. This has encouraged researchers to focus more on women's health issues, such as breast cancer.
Egg and sperm have also been described with language that feminist science studies scholars term "gendered'. Human reproduction has proved to be fertile ground for feminists such as Emily Martin, an anthropologist at Princeton University. For years, she notes, biologists viewed sperm as the active party in fertilization and the egg as passive; it turns out that both participate equally in the process. Martin argues that cultural stereotypes of men as aggressive and women as passive influenced the original choice of imagery. Although these stereotypes oversimplify human nature as well as biology, Martin sees their persistence as significant: "We want to bring them into the light - find out where they came from and what work they do now".
Feminists have tackled nonbiological disciplines as well. For instance, Karen M. Barad, a physicist and philosopher of science at Pomona College, has written about the influence of gender on theoretica physics. Barad argues that traditional presentations of quantum mechanics tend to overlook a more interpretive mode of thinking in favor of brute calculations. She points out that Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, originally championed the more philosophical approach, but she claims Bohr's message has simply not been passed on to today's students. Like most of her colleagues, Barad insists that her work is intended to enhance rather than to deny science's ability to uncover genuine truth. "There is a way to think that science is getting at physical phenomena", she suggests, "without that being seen as a rejection of the idea that culture can influence science. It's not an either/or option". Even Harding, whose description of Newton's Principia and other statements have sparked so much controversy, maintains that her criticisms are meant to strengthen science. In fact, she says she is sorry she used the term "rape manual" in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, "I had no way of knowing how it would be used and repeated out of context. I wish it weren't in there". Now at the University of California at Los Angeles, Harding argues that science should aim for what she calls "strong objectivity" - a means of evaluating not only the usual scientific evidence but also the social values and interests that lead scientists toward certain questions and answers.
Still, some scholars, such as Noretta Koertge, a historian and philosopher of science at Indiana University, and co-author (with Daphne Patai) of Professing Feminism, fear that applying feminist theory to science could have an unintended consequence. By painting science as a strongly "masculine" enterprise, Koertge says, feminism is turning women away the debilitating argument is there is something different with the way women understand the world - that women are intrinsically not suited to science", as it is practiced now, she explains. "Feminists want more women in science", she continues, "but they say, science should be changed to accommodate women" - for example, by emphasizing qualitative over quantitative methods. Others reject Koertge's assessment. "I never argued that women would do a different kind of science", protests Keller, who acknowledges that her work has often been interpreted in this manner. "My point has always been to liberate both science and women", she says. Martin, similarly, thinks exposure to the ideas of feminism will help today's students: "They aren't going to be the same sort of scientists, doctors, and so on. They'll be asking new questions". Of course, not every idea in feminist science studies will stand the test of time,but then again, neither will all current scientific theories.