Asking Different Questions: Women and Science, and: Women in Science: Meeting Career Challenges (review)

Asking Different Questions: Women and Science directed by Gwynne Basen and Erna Buffie. Montreal, Canada: National Film Board of Canada, 1996, 51 minutes, $250.00 VHS.

Women in Science: Meeting Career Challenges edited by Angela M. Pattatucci. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998, 304 pp., $51.00 hardcover, $24.50 paper.

Both of these works feature the voices of women scientists and engineers. The video, Asking Different Questions, sets forth multiple visions of what could and should be. Women in Science, a somewhat flawed book, details the formidable obstacles facing women who would do science. The struggles so starkly presented in the book accent the need for the visions given in the video.

In Asking Different Questions, women who have achieved some measure of success in mainstream science describe their own interrogation of that realm's boundaries and shortcomings. They offer visions of how science can be and is enriched by attending to different sources of information, by asking questions other than those normally posed. And they contend that women, for various reasons, are often the ones who pose the different questions that need asking.

Ursula Franklin, a physicist and crystallographer, speaks throughout the video and much of what she says links to the other women's comments. Franklin makes clear that women's different questions arise from engagement with the experiences of marginalized groups, not from some essential quality. She asks if science will change if more women do science and answers, "It's an open question. If those who come in feel themselves still profoundly connected to the historical experience of women," then yes, but "if they see themselves and become mainstream, then it may not happen."

Rosalind Cairncross, a chemical engineer and consultant, notes in the video that women bring an interconnectedness to scientific questions that helps stitch together ideas across disciplinary boundaries, leading to a more holistic approach. As the founder of a new interdisciplinary unit studying environmental issues in South Africa, she laments the way in which scientific expertise often sets one apart rather than connects one to the community. In the new unit scientists meet with community members to learn what they can tell about the ecological problems they face. Cairncross observes, "To have your best dream come true you would rejoin the family of humanity through science because you are useful, you are relevant, you are functional in the whole community sense, rather than being the cause of the problem." Or, as Franklin claims, scientists must listen "to what the questions are so that the tools of science can be used for worthwhile purposes."

Karen Messing, an occupational health scientist, puts listening to the questions at the core of her work: "It's important to know how to synthesize the special knowledge that workers have and the special knowledge that I have so that together we can make some science as a collaborative effort." She describes her approach as "heresy" in her colleagues' eyes: "We're telling them to do what they've been told not to do." Listening carefully to what workers have to say is seen as contaminating objectivity in a way that, as Messing points out, listening to what the company has to say is not.

For Peggy Tripp-Knowles, a forest geneticist, what industry had to say in terms of the type of research it would fund didn't permit her to ask the kinds of questions she was interested in. She found herself paying attention to "tree improvement," how to quickly create lots of "perfect trees" with "dollar signs all over them." When she realized her research was actually harming the health of the environment she was studying, she returned the last of her research money, closed down her lab, and looked for other ways to express her love of nature. She believes that just getting more women into science won't make any difference if they "take on the...