Sexism in science: trailblazing women who shattered stereotypes
- Christa Kuljian
The tools that feminist science studies have developed are critical to the sciences because they ask new questions, and develop new methodologies.
Seven women were part of a trailblazing network of feminist scientists in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in the Boston area in the US. Christa Kuljian is a science writer and historian of science who focuses much of her research on issues of science and society, gender and race. She is the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction – Sanctuary and Darwin’s Hunch. In her new book Our Science, Ourselves she focuses on the life stories of the seven women. We asked her about her book.
How did you choose the scientists you focused on in the book?
I grew up in the Boston area in the 1970s, and in high school, my parents gave me a copy of the revolutionary guide to women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which was published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. In the early 1980s, I studied the history of science at Harvard and took a course with Ruth Hubbard called Bio 109: Biology and Women’s Issues.
Hubbard, in 1974, was the first woman to achieve tenure in biology at Harvard, and she features in the book. Her course taught about how scientists, including Charles Darwin, promoted stereotypes and myths about women’s biology. The idea for Our Science, Ourselves grew from that formative experience in Hubbard’s course.
But it also had roots in another, more recent experience. In 2016, I published Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, about the history of palaeoanthropology in South Africa. The book explores questions that some of my history of science professors might have asked. What influence did the social and political context of colonialism and apartheid have on the search for human origins?
After it was published, I was struck by several stories that brought science and sexism into the popular media. In July 2017, James Damore at Google wrote that “the gender gap in tech” likely existed because of biological differences between men and women, and he received support from popular psychologist Jordan Peterson.
In September 2018, an Italian physicist, Alessandro Strumia, said that the low number of women in physics was proof that women were innately less capable than men. He suggested that male scientists were being discriminated against to give opportunities to women.
These statements reminded me of what former Harvard president Larry Summers had said back in 2005. Drawing on the work of psychologist and popular writer Steven