Biological Determinants of Gender Flashcards
Can the institution of science be considered gendered? How so?
Why are women scarce in scientific research and development?
- women accounted for less than a third of those employed in scientific research and development across the world
- women are less likely and more likely to leave STEM careers
- leave rates for women in SET peak about 10 years into their careers
- work experiences impact women’s decisions to leave
What did Lawrence Summers say at a private conference in 2015?
He suggested that the unfortunate truth behind why there are so few top women scientists at elite universities might some part have to do with issues of intrinsic aptitude that a biological difference exists between women and men
Define essentialism
- is the idea that gender differences in behaviour stem from qualities that are resident in or possessed by women and men
Define biological determinism?
- is a scientific tradition that tries to connect biological sex differences and gendered relations
What was Saini’s response to Summers Quote?
- in all the statistics on housework, pregnancy, child care, gender bias, and harassment we have some explanations for why so few women are at the top in science and engineering
- rather than falling into Lawrences summers tantalizing trap of assuming the world looks this way because it is the natural order of things, take a step back
- imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often do not face
What are some ways sexism exists in science?
- sexist language
- sexist concepts
- an androcentric perspective
- sexist methodology
- sexist interpretation of results produced by that methodology
What is sexism?
- refers to the belief that innate psychological, behavioural and intellectual differences exist between women and men and these differences connote the superiority of one group and the inferiority of the other
What did Simone de Beauvoir say in the second sex, 1949
he wanted to prove women’s inferiority, antifeminists began to draw not only as before on religion, philosophy and theology, but also science, experimental psychology and so forth
What is Darwin’s theory of natural selection?
four conditions:
- Individuals within a population differ
- The differences are in part passed from parent to offspring
- Some individuals are more successful in surviving and reproducing then others
- The successful individuals succeed because of variant traits they have inherited and will pass onto their offspring
What did Caroline Kennard say in her letter to Darwin?
- someone has taken the position of arguing the inferiority of women’s past, present and future was based upon scientific principles
- if a mistake has been made the great weight of your opinion and authority should be righted
What was Darwin’s response to Kennard?
- i certainly think that women though generally superior to men, moral qualities are inferior intellectually
- he tells her there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance in their becoming the intellectual equals to men
- for women to overcome this biological inequality, he adds they would have to become breadwinners like men, and this would not be a good idea because it might damage young children and the happiness of the household
- Darwin is telling Kennard that women are not just intellectually inferior to men but they are better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes
- women are literally less evolved than men
What was Kennards response to Darwin?
- for many Victorian women’s incomes were vital to keeping families afloat, the difference between men and women was not the amount of work they did but the kind of work they were allowed to do
- in the 19th C women were barred from most professions as well as politics and higher education - as a result when women worked, it was generally in lower paid jobs such as domestic labour or textile industry
- let the environment of women be similar to that of men and with opportunities before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior
Describe Eliza Burt Gamble’s theory of the evolution of women, an inquiry into the dogma of her inferiority to man (1894)
- evolutionary theory despite what Darwin had written about women, actually offered great promise to the women’s movement, it opened a door to a revolutionary new way to understand humans
- gamble’s message was that women had been cheated out of lives they deserved, that equality was in fact their biological right
- her arguments were doomed to never fully enter the scientific mainstream, only circulate outside it
How did the discovery of sex hormones change things?
- the sex hormones in particular regulate sexual development and reproduction
- the two main female ones are estrogen and progesterone. estrogen is what causes a women to develop breasts among other things while progesterone helps her body prepare for pregnancy
- male sex hormones are known as androgens of which the most well known is testosterone
- with the discovery of hormone’s, scientist had a new way to explain the stereotypes
