by In this week’s reading, we talked about feminist critique of science. In this topic, we explore how females are treated in the scientific fields and the causes for these treatments. Historically speaking, females are greatly discouraged from joining the scientific field and that there are a lot of stereotypes and prejudices lied in front of their ways to success. Within this background, some females, who are both feminists and scientists, stand up. They wrote books and delivered speeches across the world so that people can hear their voices and start to think for females. In this article, I’m going to talk about ways which gender discriminations affects females ,especially female scientists, some causes for gender discrimination in the scientific fields, and the progresses we made for this issue.
Traditionally, most scientists believe that science is objective and “value-free” meaning no matter how prejudicial the outside world is, the realm of science will always function without these interferences. However, in the article we read “Feminist critique of science”, this is not the case. Whether or not the field of science welcomes you will depend greatly on one’s gender, fortune, and the social background. For females, their gender often creates obstacle on their career path. This is because many people in the past don’t trust women in being competitive in the scientific field. Partially affected by the legacy from Aristotle, many people believed that women are inferior than men and that men and women are different both physically and intellectually. The worse thing is that people even conducted researches in the 17th and 18th century to prove these points. After such believes are in place, it’s harder to get rid of them because people would use the outcomes to argue for the previous held believes. On page 184 of the reading, James McKeen Cattell proposed a statistical study in 1903 that show fairly low female participation rate as people “who had distinguished themselves in a particular field”. This research is then used as a proof saying how females are uncompetitive and unimportant academically. This is just one vicious cycle mentioned in the article and who know if there are more out there.
It’s also the case which certain scientific field are unfairly linked to one gender (200). For example, in the reading, it talked about that many people believed the field of physics and engineering are meant only for men, and scientific field like nutrition is “reserved” only for women. Label like this is another challenge for female scientist on their way to pursue the science they want.
Many of these obstacles discussed above took place many years ago, and did the situation improve nowadays? The short answer is yes, but not enough. Goals for feminist scientists are eliminating researches that lead to any kind of exploitation and oppression, making science accessible to anybody who expresses an interest, inclusiveness of both gender and cultural diversity, and reenact ecological and multi-species views (204). And for these goals, some of them are achieved, and the others still need more works. Some positive changes we made are that women are no longer considered as biologically inferior comparing to male counterparts, and that the researches that may lead to exploitation and oppression were stopped, which is also due to people’s awareness of protection females’ rights. However, there are more things we can work on, such as eliminating the hidden stereotypes. These stereotypes include the idea that women are only good at certain subjects or that women’s appearances is valued more than their minds. Usually, these ideas are not said in the public, but they are embedded within people’s heart, which is one reason why they are still present nowadays.
Due to the prejudicial ideas and stereotypes raised in the past, it’s inevitable that it will take more time for these ideas to disappear. While feminists are going around the world for speeches that urges the systems and laws to change, it’s also important for us to change the way that the education is conducted. Since children will be grown up and be adults like us in the future, as long as they no longer hold such ideas, the goals of feminist scientists for achieving gender and cultural diversity in the scientific field will eventually come true.