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Gender and science
SANDRA G. HARDING

Gender-based analyses of philosophies of science have arisen at the conjunction of two other movements. First, in the 1960s it became increasingly the accepted position that scientific claims failed to reflect only an external reality. Scientific processes are not transparent; they necessarily permit cultural and social values and interests to contribute to the descriptions and explanations of nature’s order. Thus gender values and interests, too, could have shaped scientific practices and claims. Second, women’s movements developed powerful gender analyses of all other aspects of social relations. What resources could such accounts provide to illuminate also the practices and cultures of the sciences?
Consequently, diverse analyses have appeared showing how sexist and androcentric values and interests have shaped scientific projects, and shaped them with unfortunate results not only for gender relations, but also for the advance of both sciences and philosophy. They also examine how other values and interests, ones that are gender-neutral and ones that draw on resources found in women’s lives, can have beneficial effects. Concern has been raised in the following issues. Is correcting ‘bad science’ sufficient to eliminate sexist and androcentric results of research? How has the exclusion of women from those groups that select what will count as scientific problems resulted in narrow and distorted representations of nature’s order? How has excessive reliance on gendered meanings of nature, the scientist, and scientific method – gender coding – shaped scientific claims? If the subject of science remains coded masculine, how can women claim positions as speakers/authors of scientific research – as scientific subjects? In what ways have research procedures (technologies) been gender-coded and how has their use directed the development of subsequent sexist and androcentric technologies and applications of science? Why have standards for maximizing objectivity and good method been too weak to prevent knowledge-decreasing values and interests from shaping the results of research?
1 Origins and scope
2 Bad science or standard science?
3 Whose problems?
4 Gender coding
5 Technology
6 Objectivity and method
1 Origins and scope
By the late 1960s, the Enlightenment vision of science had been undermined by views that observations are theory-laden, our beliefs form a network such that none are in principle immune from revision, and our best theories are underdetermined by any possible collection of evidence (see Observation §§3–4; Underdetermination). Thus empirical evidence could no longer be regarded as foundational. Slack in the procedures of the scientific system of belief-sorting permits the play of local values and interests across the entire fabric of scientific practices and claims – values and interests that can advance as well as retard the growth of knowledge. Moreover, there are no longer good grounds for assuming the unity of science, since neither physics’ formally expressed laws of nature, nor the logic supposed to ground them, can be regarded as foundational in the sense of being assumed to have escaped the play of values and interests (see Unity of science). Sciences are embedded in their surrounding cultures – or, as the point was later made, co-constituted with them.
These findings made it difficult to reserve a subject matter for the philosophy of science that was safe from the legitimate gaze of historians and, later, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists and even literary critics. After all, what is the point of philosophies of science that cannot account for the successes of science? In this first stage of post-Enlightenment philosophy of science, feminists raised issues about how gender relations, too, had shaped the sciences and their philosophies.
A second stage focused on one or another specific science, since it was thought that science in general had turned out to be too complicated to permit any comprehensive philosophical claims. Participation in this stage included Evelyn Fox Keller’s works on, and in, physics and biology and Helen Longino, Elisabeth Lloyd and others in, and on, biology. Ethnographies of scientific practices and culture meanwhile were produced by historians, sociologists and anthropologists (for example, Donna Haraway’s on twentieth-century primatology (1989) and Sharon Traweek’s on contemporary physics (1988)). Feminist political theorists’ questions about philosophical issues in the social sciences were understood often to be relevant also to the natural sciences. By the late 1980s, a third stage had produced a revival of more general philosophic concerns. These analyses have been able to draw on both earlier stages, and on the resources of literary and other cultural analyses of representation, narrative, discourse and rhetoric.
Feminism does not introduce gender into science or the philosophy of science, for it is already there. Instead, feminism introduces gender as an analytic category (parallel to economic or Christian categories) into the philosophy and social studies of science discourses. As Keller puts the point, feminism tries to locate the scientific subject in his (masculine) practices and his rhetoric of neutrality that deny his very existence (Fox Keller 1983: 16–). Determining where this occurs is an empirical project. Moreover, in these accounts, gender is understood as socially constructed, not as determined by sex differences. As such, gender is not only a property of individuals but, far more importantly, of institutions and of symbolic systems. Thus science and the military are more masculine than are nursing or social welfare in their gendered divisions of activities and social meanings.
Feminist science studies were initially focused on six distinct areas. One, where have women been located in sciences’ institutions, and what have been the obstacles to their entrance, retention and advancement? What are the particular consequences for the content of knowledge in each scientific field of the exclusion or restriction of women? Two, in what ways are scientific applications and technologies sexist or androcentric? Are these only ‘misuses and abuses’, or are blueprints for them provided by research methods themselves? Three, where are there sexist or androcentric silences and distortions in the results of research in biology and the social sciences? How do these biases reflect back on ‘logics’ of research and explanation for the natural sciences? Four, how do gendered models and meanings of nature, the scientist and the research process distort scientific representations of nature and social relations? Five, how are central epistemological regulatory notions – objectivity, good method, rationality, the abstract individual knower – conceptualized to favour the values and interests of the dominant groups? And six, what is the role of science education in exacerbating these problems?
Feminist work in other disciplines has been self-transforming. Women of colour in the West, working-class women, third-world women, sexual minorities and others marginalized by the dominant discourses have all challenged the centring of concerns and perspectives characteristic primarily of privileged women in the West. Thinking from the margins has become a crucial theoretical and empirical strategy for many ‘centre’ women, too. This work has only begun for the philosophy and social studies of science. Nevertheless, outlines for such projects have already been sketched out in the work of a few thinkers such as Harawayand Harding, and Shiva (1989) (see Postcolonial philosophy of science). The serious attention to issues of self-reflexivity characteristic of feminist work more generally provides stimulus and resources for the philosophy and the social studies of science also.
Finally, feminist philosophies of science draw on diverse disciplinary and theoretical resources. There is not now, nor will there ever be, a single feminist philosophy of science. Philosophical issues have been raised within the conceptual frameworks of the special sciences studied, disciplinary and theoretical frameworks of the social studies of science, and diverse political philosophies . This entry will focus on five issues that surface repeatedly in these diverse approaches.
2 Bad science or standard science?
Are sexist and androcentric silences and distortions in the results of research in biology and the social sciences the consequence merely of bad science or, worse, also of standard science? The line between the empiricists and the post-empiricists, as we can refer to those who prefer one or the other of these positions, is not always hard and fast. Nevertheless, it is useful to characterize in such a way the two poles of the continuum on which feminists think about this question. Those who are satisfied with the first choice believe that there is nothing wrong with existing principles of good research in each disciplinary area, or with an empiricist logic of explanation. The problem is that researchers have not carefully or thoughtfully enough followed them. Basing generalizations about humans only on data about men, assuming that women’s biology normally functions in immature or pathological ways, or that only males have evolved – such claims are examples only of bad science. Philosophers in this group often go on to criticize conventional assumptions that knowers are abstract individuals and to stress the importance of accountability to an epistemic community. Whatever their concerns, this group is marked by its vigorous intention to keep its projects firmly located within the empiricist tradition. For them, feminism raises new issues that enlarge the scope of research and reveal cause for greater care in its conduct and philosophic formulations, but leaves fundamentally unchallenged an empiricist logic of research and explanation.
A diverse group think gender problems in the natural sciences cannot adequately be understood or resolved by empiricist approaches: standpoint theorists such as Hilary Rose (1983), Dorothy Smith (1987) and Nancy Hartsock, standpoint theorists who also draw on post-structuralist resources; Donna Haraway (1991) and Sandra Harding (1986), and others like Evelyn Fox Keller who do not give their distinctive analyses a special name.
These feminist post-empiricists differ among themselves on the whole range of issues that divide the rest of post-empiricists; philosophically some feminist post-empiricists are more conservative and others more radical. All share the suspicion that there is something wrong with the standard ‘logics’ of both research and explanation. Androcentric values and interests are not just contingently present in the results of research; they also play a role in the cognitive, technical core of science that, in the Enlightenment vision, was held to be immune to all social fingerprints. If such values and interests can permeate the cognitive core of science – its ’method’ and collection of formal claims – then it is not sufficient simply to more carefully follow existing methods, theories and norms of science; instead these features must be transformed if the results of research are to escape distortion. Nor are remedies that rely on the critical effectiveness of a community of experts – an epistemic or scientific community – sufficient, since it is precisely such communities that have been unable to detect their own shared androcentric assumptions. There are problems with standard science that post-empiricists think require more radical kinds of resolution .
3 Whose problems?
Androcentric biases enter sciences at every stage of the research process, including the selection of problems. Just which array of problems scientists will pursue at any moment is far less due to scientists’ individual choices to ’pursue the truth wherever it may lead’ than it is to priorities of their sponsors and culture. However, the prevailing view has been that the selection of problems has no effect on the cognitive, technical core of science, that there is no logic of discovery, and thus that any attempt to regulate science prior to the context of justification is not only futile, but an infringement on sciences’ creative potential (see Discovery, logic of).
There is something odd about this protection of problem selection from responsibility for distortion in the results of research. The post-Kuhnian histories and ethnographies of science have revealed in great detail exactly how cultural assumptions and politically interested decisions made prior to the context of justification, the ones that constitute scientific projects and select methods to test hypotheses, preclude the possibility of the results of this research achieving cultural neutrality. If the problem is conceptualized as how to identify the proximate biological causes of cancer, one can be sure of a very different picture of nature and social relations in the results of that research than if the problem were conceptualized as how to identify the environmental carcinogens that are known to be the most powerful of the many causes of cancer. Focusing on proximate causes supports the interests and values of medical researchers, the tobacco, junk food and meat industries, and industrial and military polluters; focusing on environmental causes supports the interests and values of their critics and environmental researchers. Neither approach can be interest-free.
Feminists have argued that our collective knowledge about the natural and social worlds disproportionately represents the kinds of question of interest to the dominant social institutions – those interested in increasing profit, maximizing social control, legitimating hierarchical authority and the status quo and thereby advancing the values and interests of men in the advantaged groups, frequently at the expense of the values and interests of the poor, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and ‘have nots’ in other parts of the world. The patterns and contents of what sciences tend to discover about nature’s order disproportionately reflect what the dominant groups both have and have not wanted to know.
Faced with this problem, all feminists have recommended that scientific communities become more inclusive for scientific reasons as well as ones of social justice. Since the victims tend to be more sensitive to less obvious expressions of discrimination and devaluing of their concerns, their presence and critical analyses would be likely to improve the ability of the sciences to arrive at less partial and distorted representations of nature. However, such strategies are of dubious effectiveness by themselves; the concerns of marginalized people tend to remain marginalized when individuals from such groups are simply inserted into dominant and often resisting institutions that make no other changes.
Some feminists have proposed an additional strategy that could systematically help eliminate distortions in sciences’ representations of nature that are produced by androcentrism, Eurocentrism, or other values and interests that are shared by research communities (and, often, their cultures). They propose a strategy of conceptualizing scientific projects in the first place from outside the conceptual frameworks of dominant social institutions and research disciplines, namely from the standpoint of the lives of those who bear a disproportionate share of the costs of how such institutions and disciplines function. Standpoint epistemologies thus direct researchers to start research from women’s lives (‘lives’ plural, since ‘women’ is as heterogeneous a category as is ‘humans’) to generate scientific problems that are ones for women too, rather than only problems for the dominant institutions and the disciplines that work up knowledge for them. This ‘method’ is a collective and political process – a social and scientific achievement rather than an automatic outcome of women’s experience or of living a woman’s life. In a sense, they are proposing a kind of logic of discovery for more accurate, because interest-balanced, representations of nature and social relations.
4 Gender coding
What should one make of gendered metaphors and models of nature, the scientist and the research process that have been prevalent throughout the history of modern science? Historians and philosophers have pointed to the ‘nature, she; scientist, he’ language so familiar from Bacon and Machiavelli’s writings to those of contemporary science texts. Susan Bordo (1987) Evelyn Fox Keller (1984) and Carolyn Merchant (1980) show how invoking images of the hyper-masculinity of science provided solace for the loss of the organicist ‘mother-world’ in early modern science. Such metaphors and models have helped to constitute the cognitive content of scientific claims, they and others argue.
The interactionist theory of metaphors and models holds that such forms of socially-meaningful language and concepts are a necessary part of every scientific theory. ‘Nature is a machine’ is not only heuristically or pedagogically useful; it also tells scientists how to develop their theories into new domains and where to revise when observations prove recalcitrant. As machines become more familiar, more natural, so too nature is experienced as more mechanical. And as the metaphor becomes more familiar, its regulatory functions shift from explicit plans into tacit knowledge. Similarly, conceptualizing nature as a wild and unruly woman who must be tamed if man is to be able to control his fate, as did Machiavelli, simultaneously directs scientists to favour certain kinds of interaction with nature and naturalizes certain ways of treating women. Enlightenment sciences have been directed by the illusion that there is a ‘bare nature’ at which scientists can gaze if they strip away the veils under which she hides her true features. But this metaphor distorts our understanding of how nature-as-an-object-of-knowledge is always already socially constructed, and yet also not agreeable to just any old fears, fantasies or desires that cultures choose to project on to its order. Humans speak in diverse metaphors, models and conceptual frameworks, but nature does answer back with as much (and only as much) precision as human interactions with it demand.
Such gender coding appears in ancient dichotomizing practices evident from Parmenides to the present day that construct self–other schemas coded masculine–feminine: rational–irrational, logic–emotions/passions, culture–nature, dynamic–static, mind–body, adult–infant, abstract–concrete, autonomous–dependent/relational/contextual, and so forth. Reliance on these symbolic systems can lead to oppressive social relations and distorted understandings of nature’s order. After all, the dichotomies are empirically false of men and women’s natures. Our understanding of nature can benefit from a broader array of metaphors and scientific processes than containment within such androcentric metaphors permits.
A persistent feminist concern has been with the modern coding of neutrality as masculine. If maximizing objectivity and rationality are conceptualized as requiring neutrality, and masculinity is defined partially in terms of its neutrality (even to gender, since ‘man’ and ‘he’ are taken to represent the generically human), then it is a kind of contradiction in terms to imagine that women can be objective and rational. This remains so even when their achievements are indistinguishable from men’s. There is no speaking position available to women as rational, objective thinkers since that position has been fully occupied by the masculine. Moreover, those areas of science that are thought least shaped by social values and interests thus are the most vigorously masculine. Precisely because they are thought to be the most neutral, physics, mathematics and logic are the most masculine intellectual areas.
It should be stressed that these arguments about the role of gender metaphors and models in science are no more about individuals’ idiosyncratic motivations than are arguments about the role of mechanistic or organicist metaphors. Androcentric individuals are not the issue: cultural assumptions, fears, desires, values and interests are. The metaphors and models used by Plato, Machiavelli, Bacon and Descartes are interesting because of what they reveal of the cultures within which these individuals constructed their texts for imagined audiences.
What should be done about these distorting conceptual frameworks? One widely shared proposal is to recover and revalue the feminine in nature, scientific practice, and the history and philosophy of science in order to enlarge sciences’ conceptual resources. If hierarchical models of nature are preferred by cultures seeking to legitimate gender or other social hierarchies, then we lose the chance to understand those ‘democratic’ aspects of nature’s order that are often coded feminine. If masculine models of research are preferred, we lose the chance to understand those aspects of nature’s order that could be revealed by methods associated with the feminine. If reason must be divorced from the emotions and objectivity from cultural location, we lose the chance to understand the positive role that emotions and cultures can play in the growth of knowledge.
Another proposal is to seek metaphors and models that do not emphasize the importance of gender difference, and point out the limitations of those that do. We would thus have the chance to grasp heretofore less visible aspects of nature’s order as well as undermine the oppressive rule of hegemonic gender difference.
5 Technology
Like the science discussions, feminist approaches to technology have drawn upon recent constructivist tendencies to show how artefacts have politics: technological change is a site for gender struggles over the meanings of and access to technological literacy, the use of new technologies and control over their consequences (see Constructivism). Judy Wajcman’s (1988) important analysis focuses on such issues as they occur in the organization of work, reproduction, the built environment, militarism, and computer culture. Research technologies, too, are gendered. Since modern science is often distinguished from other more speculative science traditions precisely by its reliance on experimental methods’ technologies of intervention in nature, these studies show yet another way in which the social consequences of sciences are a direct result of features of their cognitive core. If one learns about genes or extra-uterine forms of reproduction by manipulating them, one creates blueprints for how to change them. Technological uses of sciences are partially directed by successful research methods.
These accounts are also valuable because they provide rich resources for understanding how Western claims to scientificity are used to impose technologically oppressive social relations on women in developing countries. Here too, feminist standpoint approaches reveal why philosophies and other social studies of technology should start off their projects from the lives of those who have suffered from Western sciences and technologies, in order to gain a less partial and distorted understanding of their strengths and weaknesses .
Objectivity and method
Feminist reflections on the goal of objectivity, the neutrality ideal and methods to achieve these are part of a more general discomfort with the West’s assumed authority about the nature of reality and desirable forms of social relations. Five analyses will suggest the range of proposals here.
The first of these was referred to in §4. If objectivity requires neutrality, and neutrality is coded masculine, how can a woman – or a feminism that speaks on behalf of women – ever claim objectivity for women’s speech? And how can sciences’ claims to objectivity avoid continuing to overvalue manliness? Many feminists have found these objections compelling and have recommended adopting some other language –for example, subjectivism or relativism – for discussing the reliability of our understandings of nature and social relations. However, others have sought to clarify or transform the concept.
Helen Longino (1990) sets out to show how even though science is socially constructed, it already has good procedures for achieving objectivity. The relevance of evidence to a theory is determined by the context of inquiry, by background beliefs. All too often, social or practical interests (contextual values), including gendered ones, in background beliefs have functioned as the cognitive values (constitutive ones) that determine what counts as a good scientific judgment. However, she argues that we can identify these background beliefs independently, and thus show how certain states of affairs have been rightly or wrongly taken as evidence for a hypothesis. Such processes are social and thus public, for they depend upon a scientific community sharing a common language with which to describe experience and intersubjective agreement that screens out idiosyncratic and subjective elements. Most importantly, since the scientific community rather than the individual scientist is the knower, enhanced attention to the role of criticism is crucial for overcoming power imbalances within such a community that can result in the devaluation of legitimate criticisms. Objectivity requires a transformative criticism such that the community adjusts its assumptions and processes in light of criticism by all of its qualified members.
Evelyn Fox Keller draws on psychoanalytic theory to argue that objectivity is best reconceptualized as profiting from the use of subjective experience rather than as opposed to it. This ‘dynamic objectivity’ contrasts with the prevailing philosophical preference for ‘static objectivity’ through which the knower must take a basically adversarial relation to the objects of study. Such a science, with its rhetoric of domination and coercion, attracts individuals who find emotional and cognitive comfort in such ways of relating to nature and other people to the exclusion of other, at least equally revealing styles, methods and theories of such relations. ‘Good science’ gets defined in an excessively narrow way. Dynamic objectivity ‘grants to the world around us its independent integrity but does so in a way that remains cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world… dynamic objectivity is not unlike empathy’ (Keller 1984). Dynamic objectivity’s long history can be detected in the thought of the many scientists who have seen their work primarily as an erotic rather than adversarial activity.
Sandra Harding has argued (1991) that the neutrality ideal can usefully be detached from the goal of objectivity; methods for maximizing ’strong objectivity’ can be substituted for it. Androcentrism, Eurocentrism and the like have been shared by virtually entire research communities; they are not the kind of subjective, idiosyncratic values that the research methods activated in the context of justification are capable of detecting. The neutrality ideal is an obstacle to detecting the conceptual practices of power since it categorizes as political only the critics of power, not those who claim the ‘view from nowhere’ within its protective normalizing assumptions and procedures. Standpoint epistemologies, that direct one to formulate questions in the first place from outside the dominant institutions, practices and culture, and to start instead from disadvantaged lives, can provide systematic resources – a ‘strong method’ – for philosophies of the natural and social sciences. Abjuring both epistemic foundationalism and relativism, and careful neither fully to identify with nor to appropriate the voice of the other, standpoint theories insist that only socially situated knowledge, only partial perspectives, are possible. Those issuing from disadvantaged social locations can provide less partial and distorted understandings of nature and social relations.
Donna Haraway’s rethinking of objectivity occurs in the context of her incisive questions about the relation between the production of science (‘technoscience’) and of culture. She develops the ethical and political implications of standpoint theory further, stressing the need for a notion of objectivity that initiates, instead of closing off, issues of responsibility for science’s images of nature and the rational knower. She argues that the objects of knowledge, too, must be reconceptualized:
A corollary of the insistence that ethics and politics covertly or overtly provide the bases for objectivity in the sciences as a heterogeneous whole, and not just in the social sciences, is granting the status of agent/actor to the ‘objects’ of the world…. Accounts of a real world do not, then, depend on a logic of ‘discovery’, but on a power-charged social relation of ‘conversation’.
(Haraway 1991)
Such an agent could be pictured as the Coyote or Trickster, she proposes, embodied in American southwest Indian accounts, for this figure ‘suggests our situation when we give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while we will be hoodwinked’ by nature.
In conclusion, it is striking how little attention has been paid to the philosophic effects of gender relations by even the most radical of mainstream philosophies and social studies of science. In effect they exclude such relations from the realm of the social that otherwise is a major concern. Feminist accounts are more objective in this respect, as well as in their attention to the conceptual effects of race/imperial relations and more rigorous understanding of self-reflexivity issues.
In their attention to relations between power and knowledge, feminist science analyses both reflect and promote the widespread critical re-examination of Enlightenment ideals and their political consequences. Their diverse attempts to envisage post-Enlightenment sciences and philosophies of science join widespread global projects to bring Western sciences under democratic control. And yet the feminist projects also are fully inside Western traditions, for they emerge from and advance one long-standing project there of criticizing the favoured beliefs of the powerful in order to block ‘might makes right’ in the domain of knowledge production.