Long Live The Differences Between Men And Women Scientists

Author: Julia King Evelyn Fox Keller received her Ph.D. in theoretical physics, with a dissertation in molecular biology, in 1963. For 12 years, she pursued a research career in mathematical physics and biology. Over the past 15 years, Keller shifted to the history and philosophy of science. She is well known for her investigations into the role of gender ideology in the development of science. In 1985, she published Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.), in which she argued that modern science has been deeply influenced by its historic attachment to a particular ideal of masculinity. For science to reflect the values of all humankind, it is not enough simply to bring more women into science, Keller says. What is also required is a radical restructuring of the very language and goals of science. This essay was adpated from an article Keller wrote to appear in The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community, a collection edited by H. Zuckerman, J.B. Cole, and J. Bruer. The book will be published in June by W.W. Norton & Co. of New York. Keller teaches the history and philosophy of science and feminist theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Before we can address the question of equity between men and women scientists, we must first find a way of introducing parity into the questions we askour starting assumptionsabout men's and women's relations to the pursuit of science. On the surface, there appears to be a simple way of doing this. It consists of denying that there are significant or relevant differences between men and women, making of them at least in relation to science one genre, namely human. It is this apparently simple approach that usually has been adopted by recent generations of American women scientists in their effort to attain equity in science. Such a formulation is not only inadequate in practice, having failed to secure equity for women scientists, but also inadequate in principle. Above all, it does not take into account the extent to which beliefs call them prejudices if you will are internalized by men and women, and even, though less obviously, by the practices of science. Accordingly, collapsing men and women into one term, colloquially, man, forgoes the possibility of perceiving the extent to which universal man has historically been modeled on a particular cultural experience of manhood; in turn, it also obscures the ways norms of masculinity have been covertly absorbed into science. During the late 19th century, the strategies invoked by women aspiring to admission to the world of science were often aimed more toward accommodation than toward equity. Many women scientists resigned themselves to, or sometimes actively sought, a secondary demarcation within the realm of science, accepting a feminine subsphere within the larger male sphere. Although this strategy may have created educational opportunities, it doomed those women who had managed to enter the world of science to women's work work that was poorly remunerated, low in status, and generally regarded as intellectually inferior. As a consequence, separatist strategies gave way to strategies of integration. In making this important move, women scientists saw a natural ally in scientific claims to objectivity and neutrality. If the production of science is independent of its producers, there should be no place for gender in the discourse in which it is grounded. And if scientific minds are truly disembodied, it is irrelevant whether a scientist is male or female. Accordingly, women with scientific minds should be able to claim equal access to science. By the early part of this century, scientific feminists both in the sense of feminists who were scientists and in the sense of feminists who grounded their political theory in scientific principles had come to see how readily claims of difference are translated into conditions of inequality. With this recognition came the conviction that it was necessary to stake their claims to equity on the repudiation of the myth of a feminine mind, on the refutation of difference. Their need to refute claims of natural difference seemed absolute on their success, they thought, would rest the entire future of women in science. So confident were they in the correctness of their views on one hand, and in the objectivity of science on the other, that they felt it was sufficient to rely on agreed-upon standards of scientific rigor and expose the flawed reasoning pervading popular belief. In retrospect, we can see that the confidence these women scientists had in the standards of scientific rigor was excessive. In one of the saddest episodes of women's history in this country, the tide soon turned against these early feminists. By the 1950s, the proportion of women scientists had declined to roughly half of what it had been during the early part of the century. During this dark period, all signs of the earlier feminists in science, asserting themselves as women even while insisting on their intellectual equality, had vanished. In their place arose a generation of women who sought to sustain their struggle to be scientists by tacitly agreeing to expunge from their professional identity the fact that they were women. Unfortunately, hindsight permits us to see that this strategy failed to protect these women scientists from the effects of an increasingly exclusionary professional policy it only helped obscure the effects of that policy. Not only the numbers, but also the status of women scientists deteriorated steadily. Even when the fortunes of women in science began to improve in the late 1960s and early 1970s partly in response to Sputnik and partly to the emerging women's movement the commitment of women scientists to the idea that gender is irrelevant to the practice of science remained strong. Supported by national efforts to expand our scientific workforce, however, real improvements gradually began to be made. Women started to count themselves again, and to recognize one another, and even to counsel one another. But the reclamation of their group consciousness as women simultaneously rekindled their other need to transform (if not to efface) male consciousness of them as women. Almost as a consequence of the re-emergence of their identification as women, their commitment to intellectual sameness to the repudiation of difference returned with renewed force. Once again, they regarded their principal target as claims of innate sex differences in mental attributes, particularly those that were now issuing from within the scientific community itself. The very terms of the debate about sex differences lend support to characteristic kinds of cultural myopia. Typically, the debate focuses on the nature or nurture of women, and implicitly assumes the nature or nurture of men as a norm. In such discourse, gender is not understood as a term that refers equally to both men and women; it tends to be read and heard primarily (if not exclusively) as a reference to women. Accordingly, the possibility remains unexamined that aspects of stereotypic male psychology or, rather, normative conventions of male socialization may unwittingly have been incorporated into the very measures and standards employed in assessing (or characterizing) the behavior and performance both of women and of men growing up under cultural norms different from those of white middle-class culture. One particular claim of differences between male and female mental attributes derives from differences observed in the performances of girls and boys on Standard Aptitude Tests (C. Benbow, J. Stanley, Science, 210:1262-4, 12 December 1980). Although critics have pointed out that these test scores correlate poorly, if at all, with creative performance of actual mathematicians, the question of what these test scores do correlate with has not been pursued. To what extent are they merely correlates of what some boys in our culture are encouraged to do? Or have learned as part of their masculine identity? In other words, to what extent do our routinely accepted criteria of scientific intelligence faithfully measure actual ability to perform intellectual tasks in the world at large, and to what extent are they inadvertent reflections of particular (gender-biased) cultural norms? A second example involves a possible cause of continuing inequity that was considered at a conference on women in science convened by the Macy Foundation in 1981. Concluding that most traditional forms of discrimination were no longer visibly operative, it was suggested in the course of discussion that one definitive and ongoing handicap could be identified: women were not trained to be sufficiently competitive to survive and prosper at the cutting edge of contemporary research. The recommendation that follows from the observation seemed obvious: retrain women to be more competitive. The question that was not raised was whether the norms of competition currently accepted by scientists are accepted because they are norms of male socialization or because they are necessary, or at least conducive, to good research. To phrase the matter bluntly, is it necessary or even good for physics that, as one eminent physicist has said, only blunt, bright bastards make it in this business? ( Technology Review, Nov./ Dec. 1984, page 42). Caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma, women scientists of the 20th century have tended to seek equity through the refutation of difference claims. In hindsight, however, one can see the pitfalls of this strategy: If a universal standard equates difference with inequality, the same standard would translate equality into sameness, guaranteeing the exclusion of any experience, perception, or value that is other. As a consequence, others are eligible for inclusion only to the extent that they can excise those differences and eradicate all traces of that excision. Yet such operations not only fail to effective protection against whatever de facto discrimination continues to prevail; they often prove only partially successful, leaving in their wake residual scars that prevent those who do survive from becoming fully effective competitors. Successful assimilation has thus tended to require not equal ability, but extra ability the extra ability to compensate for the hidden costs incurred by the denial or suppression of a past history as other. Recent developments in the history and philosophy of science have led to a re-evaluation that acknowledges that the goals, methods, theories, and even the actual data of the natural sciences are not written in nature; all are subject to the play of social forces. Empirical and logical exigencies may train the representations of nature that emerge from the desks and laboratories of scientists, but they do not determine it. Social, psychological, and political norms are inescapable, and they too influence the questions we ask, the methods we choose, the explanations we find satisfying, and even the data we deem worthy of recording. Such a shift in our conception of science provides a way out of the dilemma faced by earlier feminists in science. To the extent that we acknowledge a multiplicity of goals and standards in science, it becomes plausible . . . to argue for the inclusion of difference in experience, perceptions, and values as intrinsically valuable to the production of science; hence, it becomes possible to envision equality without sameness. But a trap resides in this proposition as well a trap that derives from the familiar and widespread temptation to map difference onto sex. Behind this temptation is the assumption that difference means duality and the implication that women as a class will do a different, or feminine, kind of science. The proposition that, under conditions of equality, women would do a different kind of science, a more feminine science, ignores the extent to which both women and femininity are socially constructed categories. More importantly, it ignores the extent to which our contemporary conceptions of femininity and science have been historically constructed in opposition to each other. If science has come to mean objectivity, reason, dispassion, and power, femininity has come to mean everything that science is not: subjectivity, feeling, passion, and impotence. Because science itself plays a role in these complex cultural and historical dynamics, any discussion of men and women in science must take into account the presence of gender-laden cultural biases in the very definition of science. Failure to do so is to overlook an important channel through which particular cultural values are imported into the norms invoked for distinguishing good science from bad science. It is in just this process that de facto discrimination is often practiced against individuals or groups who happen to bring with them any of those values that, for reasons having nothing to do with scientific productivity, have been prejudged as undesirable. Finally, it is in the name of scientific productivity as well as equity that we must recognize both the value of difference and its extent. The enormous variability, both cultural and individual, that exists among actual men and women goes well beyond biological variability, either between or within the categories of male and female. First, there is the cultural variability between different concepts of masculinity and femininity. In addition, there may be even greater variability in the degree to which individual men and women conform to or diverge from the gender stereotypes of their particular cultural frames. To forget these last sources of difference is both to ignore the diversity of human culture and to do an injustice to those women scientists whose very existence as scientists has required their transcendence of the stereotypes of our cultural heritage. If the denial of difference between men and women has proved to be neither functional for women scientists nor realistic in its application, the denial of differences among men and women can certainly fare no better.

Long Live The Differences Between Men And Women Scientists

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Evelyn Fox Keller

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October 1990

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