Women's Science: Learning and Succeeding from the Margins (review)

Women's Science: Learning and Succeeding from the Margins by Margaret A. Eisenhart and Elizabeth Finkel. Chicago, IL, and London, UK: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 272 pp., $44.00 hardcover.

In "stalking the second tier," Sheila Tobias (1990) explored why capable undergraduates (including women) abandoned or perhaps never felt called to the study of science. Women's Science: Learning and Succeeding from the Margin, explores the complementary question: In what arenas do capable women feel drawn to participate more actively in the sciences? Along with an ardor and enthusiasm for science rarely found among women, the study revealed lingering problems with sexism even in the most enlightened organizations.

The authors conducted in-depth observations at four sites. The first two were educational sites: a high school genetics classroom and a university engineering design internship. The other two sites were in the non-profit sector: an environmental advocacy group that worked to ensure passage of key environmental legislation and a conservation organization concerned with the purchase, management, and development of lands to protect biological diversity. All four sites involved women in significantly larger numbers than conventional classrooms or companies, with one site having half its workforce comprised of women. As the authors point out, however, all sites were at the margins, well away from the power, activities, and funding of conventional science.

The two classroom sites modeled different aspects of "doing science," but included the use of open-ended learning, cooperative learning, and hands-on activities favored by many women. In the high school genetics classroom, teams of students build and defend models to explain the distribution of traits in populations of insect-like organisms displayed on a computer screen. Although the populations of organisms are simulated, the activities in which the students engage are very much like the work of research geneticists. The engineering design internship linked student teams with clients in industry or the public sector for the purpose of solving real-life problems.

In both classrooms most women performed as well as men. However, one team of women in the high school genetics classroom actively blocked the teacher's efforts to get them engaged in the modeling process. And although the women students clearly preferred the internship experience to conventional engineering classes, they eventually shouldered more than their fair share of the load in completing the team's project.

The two non-profit sites shared a common focus, environmental policy. The environmental advocacy group used workers to canvass urban neighborhoods, advocating specific policies at the same time they solicited funds in support of the organization. Although the canvassers did not have educational backgrounds in science, a scientific literacy survey of seven female and eight male canvassers showed rates of literacy three times greater than that of the general population. Canvassers routinely sought out scientific information informally in order to communicate the organization's legislative position more clearly and forcefully. The conservation corporation presented the most balanced work site. Women were well integrated into both the management and scientific functions of the organization, sharing power with their male colleagues. Both non-profit organizations appeared to be successful in involving women because they linked science to purposeful public activity. Yet the environmental advocacy group remained deaf to the safety concerns of women expected to canvass unknown neighborhoods at night, resulting in a dropout rate among women that was twice that of men. Women in the conservation corporation faced a leadership that, under the guise of gender neutrality, refused to acknowledge the problems of combining a career with a family.

This research makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how elite male dominance is sustained within the sciences. Having worked in the field of science education off and on since the 1970s, I marvel that so few policy makers seem to notice the correlation between the increased dominance of elite science and the decreased scientific literacy of the American population. With perhaps the...