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...