Reflections on Gender and Science

"Evelyn Fox Keller is an evolutionary biologist who got very concerned about the nature of science practice, and realised that there were issues of gender involved. This book has various historical essays about Plato and Bacon, how science turned into a very male field and what it meant, and then some more recent situations. It’s a curious book and I don’t think I’ve entirely got to grips with it. The first time I read it, I was very interested by the early historical stuff but I reacted incredibly badly to the later chapters. I thought she was trying to say there was a female way of doing science. But then I read it again and I realised I had completely misread the book. Actually she wasn’t saying that at all, she was saying that having a female way of doing science would be a terrible thing. It’s interesting because it touches on what we were discussing earlier – what the key differences between men and women are, and if there are differences. It’s quite subtle, and I’m still trying to digest what she’s written. So it’s a collection of essays that takes you through how we may have got to the situation we’re in now, but it leaves open where we’re going. Well those are two very different questions. In my subject [physics], I think the number of girls doing the A level [in the UK] is something like 25%, so you’ve already lost the battle to a large extent. Girls perceive the physical sciences and engineering as not for them. Now is that because the boys in their classes take their ideas to pieces, or is it because on television all the people they see doing engineering are men? There are all kinds of things that can cause that battle to be lost at a very early age. Whereas the question of the leaky pipeline [whereby women drop out of higher education and research at progressively more senior levels] is entirely different. I like to think that problem is easier to solve, whether by the intervention of a teacher, or by having more role models, or by educating universities to be more supportive. Those kinds of things are easier to do than the societal things which impact on getting girls into science in the first place. It’s OK for girls to play with dolls, to be interested in the life sciences, but we convey a very negative image of the physical sciences for them – playing with dolls doesn’t seem to translate into, “let’s take this thing to pieces, let’s understand how it works”. And we have to think about the ways toys are marketed. There was a long article in the Guardian recently about the pinkification of toys. If you look in the [toy retailer] Early Learning Centre I understand the toys are segregated for gender, and toys for girls tend to be pink. Is that good? Bad? What does it do to the way we distinguish at an incredibly early age what boys and girls do? Exactly."