Has Feminism Changed Science? (review)

Has Feminism Changed Science? This question makes a pithy book title, but it does not truly capture the impressive breadth of Londa Schiebinger's inquiry. Schiebinger addresses a range of complicated and much-debated questions, asking: How are both the culture and the content of science gendered, historically and currently? How ought feminists approach their critical inquiry into the culture and content of science? How should science change in response to feminist critique? And finally, across a range of fields, from medicine to archaeology to physics, how has feminism changed the practitioners, culture, and content of science?

Schiebinger addresses these questions in three parts. She looks first at how women historically came to be excluded from the institutions of modern science, and how two decades of a "pipeline" model of recruitment of women, in which programs have been created to encourage girls' interest in science early in their schooling, have largely failed. Second, she suggests that this failure is the result of the continued marginalization of women in the cultures of a whole range of sciences. She shows how the cultures of science continue to assume a gendered division of labor, in which women's household work supports their husbands' scientific work. She also points out the ways in which cultures of science tend to conflict with the cultures of femininity into which women have been socialized and to which they are expected to conform. Finally, Schiebinger surveys the content of a range of sciences, including medicine, biology, primatology, archaeology, and physics, asking in what ways knowledge production has been gendered, and highlighting the impact of feminism on the content of each of these sciences. The influence of feminism is most spectacular in medicine, where government and academic organizations have begun to focus significant monetary and intellectual resources on women's health issues, and women are rapidly entering the profession. Fields such as primatology are close behind, by the end of the century taking for granted subjects of research and interpretations that were clearly inspired by the feminist movement of the 1970s. Still, Schiebinger demonstrates that all of these fields have a long way to go to fully respond to feminist critiques.

Schiebinger's brand of feminist philosophy of science is particularly friendly to scientists, and the book is meant for a broad audience that includes both science studies scholars and working scientists. It is her goal to overcome the animosities of the "science wars," and bring feminist critics of science and scientists together to work jointly on improving the culture and content of science. She therefore rejects both the philosophical extreme taken by some historians and sociologists, that science is a thoroughly social project which "constructs" the reality it claims to discover, as well as the philosophical extreme taken by some scientists, that scientific methods inevitably produce universal, objective knowledge, and are not affected by cultural context. In her formulation, useful feminist critique promotes directions for inquiry that benefit women, and points out biases and assumptions that damage the objectivity of science and keep women from participating as scientists. She takes a slightly more "social constructionist" approach to the language of science arguing, for example, that metaphors do not simply serve heuristic purposes, but rather reflect broader cultural assumptions and actually shape how research is performed and understood.

Schiebinger's philosophical approach makes a lot of sense given her desire to appeal to scientists to collaborate with feminist critics to make science more equitable, less biased, and more beneficial for women. However, it has the effect of implying that the models of feminism she rejects, such as "difference" feminism and many strands of postmodern feminism, have had no impact on science. It seems quite possible that they have, indeed, had an impact, though not necessarily in the ways Schiebinger would wish; for example, "difference" feminism, based on the premise...