By Anne Sarzin
Twenty years ago, when Evelyn Fox Keller told one of her professors that she was working on the relation between gender and science, he replied: 'So what is it you've learned about women in science?'
According to Fox Keller, his words highlighted the ease with which we forget that men also have gender, and the confusion about the meaning of the term gender.
Delivering the 1996 Templeton Lecture, organised by the University's Centre for Human Aspects of Science and Technology, Professor Fox Keller focused on the way ideologies of gender influence the practices of science, and the role of language in determining areas of scientific research.
'This is not about women doing science differently to men. It is about everybody doing science differently when the gender ideology shifts,' she said.
Fox Keller is eminently qualified to comment on these and related issues. A Harvard PhD graduate trained in theoretical physics and molecular biology, she was formerly Professor of Mathematics and Humanities at Northeastern University and is currently Professor in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Her book Reflections on Gender and Science has been hailed as an important contribution to feminist theory and to the continuing critique of the established scientific method.
And her biography of Nobel Prizewinner Barbara McClintock has been acclaimed as a significant addition to the literature on women's achievements in science.
In her lecture, Professor Fox Keller said it was not enough to 'add women and stir'. Feminists had begun to realise that adding women to traditionally male spheres, without looking at the images of gender that had worked to exclude women, risked reproducing traditional gender division and hierarchies within these new spheres.
The focus of gender and science should not be the presence or absence of women in science but the ways in which traditional images of gender shaped scientific enterprise.
'My aim was to liberate both science and women from the shackles of a debilitating ideology of gender and therefore make the world for science and the world for women better,' Professor Fox Keller said.
She demonstrated ways in which categories of science had historically been delineated by implicit and explicit recourse to gender.
'The use of gender metaphors to define a properly scientific stance, or to distinguish good science from bad, has been ubiquitous since the birth of modern science,' she said, asking how these core categories might be differently delineated without recourse to gender or by recourse to different gender ideologies.
'It is clear enough the naming of mind as active and male, and nature as passive and female, or the naming of objectivity and reason as masculine traits, and subjectivity and feeling or intuition as feminine traits works to exclude women from science,' she said.
Exploring the effect of gender metaphors on science, Professor Fox Keller suggested that the way scientists talk shapes what they do and also what they hope to find.
Metaphor affected the way biologists described fertilisation. - the sperm penetrated the inactive egg. Until 1981, experimental work provided evidence of the motility of the sperm but no-one looked for mechanisms for activity of the egg.
'Current research endows the egg with archetypal powers,' Professor Fox Keller said. 'The egg sends out microvillae, which grasp the spermhead and drag it to the ovum. Unwanted sperm are incapacitated, ejected, or simply destroyed.'
Professor Fox-Keller suggests that the fertilisation story illustrates exactly the ways in which language shapes thinking and acting. 'To read this story as a story of male scientists versus female scientists is simply to project onto science the war of the sexes that sets up the sperm as being in contest with the egg,' she said.
'I repeat, this is not about women doing science differently to men. It is about everybody doing science differently when the gender ideology shifts.'
(Reprinted from Sydney University News, 6 September 1996, with permission.)