Has Feminism Changed Science? (review)

Londa Schiebinger is best known for her 1989 book The Mind Has No Sex?, which dealt with women and gender in early modern European science and medicine. Here she turns her attention to the late-twentieth-century United States, mostly the 1980s and 1990s. She has divided the topic into nine chapters, based on published sources. The first part deals with "pipeline" issues that show large increases in the number of women earning degrees in almost all sciences since the early 1970s. Along the way she discusses publication counts, citation counts, indigenous knowledge, international comparisons, women's colleges, and women leaving science. Two chapters then discuss life-style issues such as the image of science, career vs. marriage and family life, sports, competition, spousal hiring, and shared academic posts.

Part 3 contains four chapters on how feminism has affected particular areas: medicine, primatology (and archaeology), biology, and physics and mathematics. (Engineering, computer science, and geology are omitted.) The chapter on medicine may interest the readers of the Bulletin the most. After a flashback to early modern times, Schiebinger focuses on new legislation in 1990-94 that created an Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and started a fourteen-year Women's Health Initiative at a projected cost of $625 million. (In 1995 the National Breast Cancer Coalition persuaded Congress to appropriate $400 million of U.S. Army funds for additional research on women's diseases.) The impetus for these remarkable achievements came from the increased number of women legislators in Congress, after Anita Hill's riveting testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 emboldened many more women to run for office and others to make substantial financial contributions. Once the new and continuing women legislators (with their seniority) formed a caucus for women's health, they were able to get several bills passed—including one requiring more female subjects in clinical trials of drugs, another providing mammograms and Pap smears for low-income women, and a third providing more funding for women's diseases. There was less support for the diseases that afflict proportionately more women than men, such as clinical depression. This brief chapter will disappoint anyone who would like to know more about developments at the NIH in the last three decades, from the numerous lawsuits brought by disgruntled women employees to Bernardine Healy's tumultuous term as director. And of course even NIH is only one part of the larger story of women's health that would extend from the rise of alternative therapies, the self-help movement that created Our Bodies, Ourselves, to activism for research on breast cancer, and much more. For that there are now other works.

But this selectivity is also the book's strength. It covers a lot of ground and a great many different topics in a short amount of space. Undergraduates like it, for they learn about a lot of things that happened in the 1980s and 1990s that they had not been aware of—debates over SAT scores, Dr. Frances Conley's walkout at Stanford, the discovery of "Lucy," the early hominid, and the special issues of Science magazine. What surprisingly we do not hear about, and yet ought to in a book with this title, are the landmark lawsuits of the 1970s—Sharon Johnson, Louise Lamphere, Shyamala Rajendar, or even AWIS vs. Elliott Richardson, which increased dramatically the number of women on NIH study sections—that is, all the struggles in academia and the government that created opportunities for the later feminist scientists.