Female Identity in Science: Memories of the Visit of Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller

With the twin goals of inspiring young women to be scientists and facilitating dialogue that might tease out the factors behind the "leaky pipeline obstructing the advancement of women scientists in Taiwan" (Schiebinger 1999), the first International Conference on Woman Scientists was held in Taipei under the auspices of the National Science Council on 26–28 October 2008. As vice-chairperson, I had the honor of inviting Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller to be the keynote speaker for this significant event. Not only was she herself a scientist, but her well-known 1983 book A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock had also documented the accomplishments of a Nobel Prize–winning woman geneticist. The central theme of this work on gender and science delineated how being a woman—and not an oppressed object—impacted her own winding path to a scientific career, contributing to ideas on the contingencies of femininity and of biological and genetic scientific knowledge. The Chinese translation of the book was published in 1995, and a special edition with a new cover was published in 2008 as the gift for the conference's intended audience—predominantly female senior high school students and graduate students in science.

The gender disparity in the sciences, especially natural sciences and engineering, is recognized worldwide: among university students in the natural sciences in 2004, 67.8 percent were male as compared to 32.2 percent female, while in the field of engineering in Taiwan only 11.5 percent were female (I present the data for 2004 because it formed the basis for our planning at the time). The 2015 picture shows a slight improvement, with female natural science students at 33.2 percent, and in engineering at 16.3 percent. Moreover, the phenomenon of the "leaky pipeline," a metaphor for the continuous loss of women in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) as they climb the career ladder, has also attracted significant attention from feminist scholars. Policy-level changes in regard to gender and education were brought about by the establishment of the national-level Committee of Women's Rights Promotion (CWRP) on 6 May 1997, under the direction of the Taiwanese premier. The inauguration of the CWRP served as a nexus that consolidated expert knowledge from both the government and the private sector and brought gender perspectives into government policy.

Fig 1.

The documentary film Echo with Women's Voices, a history of the women's movement in Taiwan.

In the attempt to eliminate social and cultural barriers and to cultivate a friendly environment for women to enter the fields of natural science and engineering, the CWRP¹ delegates the National Science Council for the effective programs as one of the goals for gender mainstreaming in Taiwan. As such, the three-day conference in 2008 had two objectives: first, to create a platform for exchange between leaders and female academics from Taiwan and overseas in science disciplines, who might act as mentors, and senior high school students and graduate students; and second, to initiate a leadership role in dialogue among women scientists, sharing experiences of effective strategies and policy making to promote women in science from Asian countries including Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as Australia. The conference agenda explored in great detail the cultural and social structural factors, as well as the lack of institutional support, that have held down the number of women scientists in Asia and hindered their career progress. An additional seminar, "Language Matters—in Science as in Science Studies," was also held at the National Yang-Ming University, an institution predominantly consisting of biomedical scientists. Keller emphasized her view that perceptions and interpretations of gender and the body are mediated through language and that, in our society, the biomedical sciences function as a major provider of this language.

Based on a suggestion from Dr. Wen-Hua Kuo, a former student of Dr. Keller at MIT, her itinerary deliberately took in political protests and the activities of...