Tuesday, September 27, 2005

It's a Secret - Science and Engineering are FUN! Just as a follow-up to my last post: Most women scientists and engineers I know (including myself) have experienced real joy, serious pleasure, in the doing of our work.  In the lab, at a construction site, doing field work, struggling to make sense of the data at our desks - it can be tremendously satisfying, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. I sometimes wonder when I read feminist science theory if the authors are aware of the incredible satisfaction we can experience in doing this work.  The feelings are similar, I think, to how artists might feel in the act of producing their art.  Difficult, sometimes frustrating; but oh so wonderful.  I'll return to this topic - the pleasure of doing science and engineering - in some future posts.  In the meantime, you may want to brush up on your Sally Hacker, Samuel Florman, and Audre Lorde.  For now, I'll just leave you with this quote from Walt Whitman, from "Passage to India": Singing my days, Singing the great achievements of the present, Singing the strong light works of engineers, Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied), In the Old World the east the Suez Canal, The New by its mighty railroad spann'd, The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires; Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul, The Past! the Past! the Past! The Past - the dark unfathom'd retrospect! The teeming gulf - the sleepers and the shadows! The past - the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past? (As a projectile form'd, impell'd, passing a certain line, still keeps on, So the present, utterly form'd, impell'd by the past.) ... A worship new I sing, You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours, You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours, You, not for trade or transportation only, But in God's name and for thy sake O soul.    6:37:27 PM    comment [] Feminist Science Theory - No Time For Women Scientists? I've been reading Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman.  First published in 1991 with a second printing in 1996, I'd still recommend it, if only for the excellent summary chapter 1, "Feminist Critiques of Science and Technology".  But as I read that chapter I was confronted once more with the issue I raised last week.  Let me quote Wajcman: As Sandra Harding expresses it, feminist criticisms of science had evolved from asking the "woman question" in science to asking the more radical "science question" in feminism.  Rather than asking how women can be more equitably treated within and by science, they ask "how a science apparently so deeply involved in distinctively masculine projects can possibly be used for emancipatory ends". Well.  I want science to be non-oppressive as much as the next person (maybe more so, depending upon who the next person is.  Like, say, one of those school board members in Dover, PA who's been pushing for Bible-based creationism in science classes since 2003.)  But must it be a question of pursuing an emancipatory science project rather than "asking how women can be more equitably treated within and by science"?  This, I think, is one of the major flaws in feminist science theory today.  Wajcman states: ...attempts to spell out a specifically feminist scientific method...are politically useful in that they turn the feminist spotlight on the content of scientific knowledge instead of simply highlighting questions of recruitment to science. Oh, if recruitment were a "simple" problem!  I don't think that non-scientist feminists really understand how potentially offensive this stance is to practicing women scientists and engineers.  (I also don't think they intend to offend.)  What a woman scientist might hear is this:  the content of your work is masculinist; you are merely a tool in an inherently oppressive enterprise.  Furthermore, we aren't really interested in that other issue that matters to you - getting more women into science.   But we do good work, the nascent feminist scientist wants to protest.  We cure illness and we clean up the environment and we design safer cars and buildings and we do a zillion other things that benefit humanity.  And we have to fight for legitimacy and our place at the lab within this male-dominated hierarchy all the time.  What we really need is some help with that struggle.  Can't you give us a hand?    But the feminists are so busy with their critical project, and with discussion of how science needs to be transformed, and with striving to apply their critiques to ever new fields of scientific endeavor.  Yes!  The atom is gendered!  We've achieved another victory!  And the women physicists and chemists go unheard, as they struggle to reach representation on the faculty ranks that matches their rate of obtaining PhDs.   I am not saying that feminist science theory and critiques are wrong, or completely unhelpful.  But I am saying that the massive shift towards esoteric theory and away from the concerns of actual women scientists and engineers that has dominated the field for many years has not been good.  Science is more than a text to be read.  There are real girls and women whose life choices and chances are being negatively affected by prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination.  I think feminism ought to care about that.           6:20:16 PM    comment []

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