Day 17

The essay I present tonight is one I’ve been wanting to write for a long time…at least twenty years, probably much more. It was time. Today we discuss the idea that science is not a field for women.

WESTERN, WHITE, MALE SCIENCE

There is a conceit on the left that science is an imperialist, colonialist, western, white, male enterprise, and as such, we should stop doing it, or at least stop considering it important. I cannot possibly pick all that apart in a single essay, though many non-white, non-Western scientists have done their part to detail what an egregious insult this is. So I will deal with the male part.

Is science male? If so, does that mean we should stop doing it? I remember when I first heard this argument. My jaw dropped so far I had to pick up the pieces off the floor. I sputtered. I fumed. Smoke came out my ears. I saw red. Then I stopped to think…what if that’s right? I thought and thought and thought…for about twelve seconds. It didn’t take any longer than that to figure out what was wrong with this argument.

I have been around quite a while…I won’t detail exactly how long, since it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this essay. I have been around long enough to remember when men (at least, western imperialist white men who were deeply embedded in the patriarchy) were making this very same claim. They didn’t say this meant we should stop doing science; they simply meant that we (women, non-white people, and other minorities) should stop trying to butt in while the adults played with the fun toys.

This trope took a long time and a lot of work to break, but we did it. Women kept up the fight valiantly and tirelessly, inserting themselves into these spaces where men thought they should have complete authority. We ignored them, and continued. They did a lot to keep us out, but we worked our way in, sticking our foot in the door, then shoving the door open. Now there are a lot of women in science…and the other STEM fields…though we have not yet achieved equity.

To keep women out of science, men ignored us, treated us like children, made laws and regulations and policies that prohibited women from being part of the “man’s world”. When we insisted on entering, they denied us lab space or time, blocked us from the microscopes and telescopes, mocked us, talked over us, stole our work, put their own names on it, refused to publish our papers…the list goes on and on and on. My generation, as well as the two generations that came before me, were determined, and we won. We opened the door for the generations that followed us, and now women study science, and in some areas, in greater numbers than men.

Another technique used was hiding the reality: women had been in science all along, though often stuck away somewhere doing difficult work for next to no pay. The Harvard computers were an amazing group of women, devising methodology for studying the stars that we still use today…they were paid only about a quarter of what men were paid, and men were given their data and their methodologies to use for their own research; the women were not allowed to use the data. They were also not allowed access to the telescopes. Those were for men only.

Other women – Ada Lovelace, Maria Mitchell, Rosalind Franklin, Rachel Carson – denied the recognition that was rightfully theirs, though these women are now being restored to a place in the canon. Women of color contributed massive amounts of information and methodology, but got little to no recognition from the patriarchy. Tall women, short women, thin women, fat women, white women, black women, Asian women, African women…all stripped from history to keep science white and male. It was difficult when I was starting out to find a good female role model in science. Now I have quite a few, thanks to the tireless work of science historians, many of them women, who restored female scientists to their places in history.

I was proud to become a scientist; it wasn’t easy, and men tried to prevent me from succeeding. Some women tried to prevent me from succeeding, most notably my mother, who did not believe science was an appropriate field for a woman. Thanks to all the wonderful women who came before me and opened the gates, and to my perseverance, and to the handful of women who mentored me, I completed my program and began working in the field…not a welcoming field in many ways, but things got better the longer I was there.

So imagine my horror to find out that women…women…who called themselves feminists were saying that science was a role for men, for white, western, imperialist men! This was the very thing men had thrown at us for all those years…some of them still do. Now we were being threatened from within our ranks. Quit science! You’re a traitor to your sex by doing science (or to your race, but again, I won’t cover that. It’s been done beautifully by many non-white scientists around the world who find this trope as disgustingly insulting as I do.) Were we moving backward? Moving back to that awful time when women were being kept from the field they loved? It appears we were…but we were doing it now in the name of progressivism. WTF?

Insulting? Yes. We are hearing now that logic is the field for men...white men…and women, as well as other races, have “different ways of knowing”. These ways, we are told, are more holistic, more nurturing, more centered on lived experience. Maybe some women do have a sense of nurturing, and lived experience, but frankly, so do some men. There are a lot of men who have no more ability to be logical than women are imagined to have; there are a lot of women who have logical minds that work in systematic, procedural manners and focus on empirical evidence.

Logic is not something innate in either men or women; it is learned. We train our brains to be logical, but for much of history, women have been discouraged from being logical. Now we fight back. We use logic to defeat the idea we can’t do logic, and manage to break through the solid wall of men standing in our way, only to find a solid wall of women standing behind them blocking the way with illogic and, frankly, insulting claims. Our brains are not fuzzy, dreamy brains. We do hard science and contribute a great deal to the field.

Science does not have a sex; it does not have a race; it does not have a country; it does not have a political or economic philosophy. While science has been used for racist, sexist, imperialist ends, it is the humans that do the science that misuse data. The answer has been to open science up to women and minorities; through our work, we have managed to make some correctives to the patriarchal interpretations of science, and move us forward from the 1950s to the present.

I stand with science. I stand with women. It is possible…perhaps even necessary…to do both. I reject the old arguments about science being a “guy thing”, even when they come from people nominally on my side. When insults fly from both the left and the right, the only thing one can do is duck, dodge, and deflect. Then, fight back. Demonstrate logically that women can be logical. Win prizes (women are doing that). Win scholarships (women are doing that). Contribute original ideas to all fields of science (women are doing that). And don’t let the naysayers win.