I do believe sexism has been prevalent in culture. More specifically, in certain vocations. One being the professional scientific community.
I do believe sexism was much more rampant in days gone by, but to this day still impacts women who wish to enter certain professional fields – one of which is the field of science (broadly speaking).
Science to this day is a male-dominated community. I believe there is more to be said than cursory dismissals such as (for example):
“Women have not expressed an interest in certain vocations. Therefore, vocations which have historically been male-dominated are those which women do not express the same interest as men do.”
I believe because scientists are predominately men, and because men are social creatures that are products of social constructs, there is much less separation of social/cultural mores from theoretical generation than is believed.
I do not believe scientific methodology provides a magical filter that separates men from social, psychological, or political “contaminants.” That is a myth. Theory is generated by a collective.
A scientific community is a collective that TOGETHER generates data, hypotheses, competing hypotheses, assumptions, and theory. Everyone within the collective is not wearing magical lenses that objectifies nature and the data.
What we have been experiencing on the sidelines second-handed is theory and interpretation of data that is androcentric based. Because women have largely been absent from science from its beginnings, we have not had the added benefit of theory generation from a perspective that may very well be different.
Who’s to say that hypothetically speaking if women had dominated science all their epistemic theorizing would be identical to what men have currently generated? I say there is no basis for that claim because we have so little to compare male generated theory to except theory generated by other men.
Is truth, Truth, just waiting to be grabbed out of the air by anyone?
Then why does truth change so much over time?
Findings indicate male/female brains are different. Keep in mind the simple truth that is brains that generate concepts.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... ly/281962/
“Because female brains seem to have a stronger connections between their logical and intuitive parts, “when women are asked to do particularly hard tasks, they might engage very different parts of the brain,” said Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report. “Men might over-engage just one part of the brain.”
“Their less-interconnected hemispheres might prompt men, for example, to be, “going along, executing things very skillfully and maybe not taking into account that someone didn't [do something] because they were having a bad day,” Verma explained. Meanwhile, “gut feelings, trying to join the dots together … women are known to be very strong in that.”
Given that my audience is so knowledgeable about science, there is something that possibly factors in as well: the idea of evolutionary epistemology.
Evolutionary epistemology is an objectivist theory of knowledge arguing that the evolutionary history of the human nervous system guarantees a relationship between our concepts and principles of reasoning with what is “out there.”
If there is any truth to EE, then I’d think because of the differences between the male and female nervous system a female conceptual analysis of theory may very well have distinctions which might very well improve our current scientific theorizing.
The Scientific Method is not some magical sexless object that we dug up. Scientific method is itself a concept generated by brains – most all of which have been male brains with their unique capabilities.
Women have their own unique capabilities. Some of which may very well be superior to men.
The scientific community has generated some magnificent theories. And we owe a lot to those gifted men. But in all the celebration to date by both scientists themselves and their armchair groupies, we are totally blind to what the community actually looks like from outside – a androcentric zone league club, who’s fan base looks on them as logical super heroes free of mortal foibles.
Here are a couple of links about sexism in science
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-the ... nd-in-hand
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... y-science/“The research used email and social media to invite scientists to fill out an online questionnaire about their experiences in the field. It found that an alarmingly high number of female scientists were sexually harassed (and even assaulted) while conducting research in the field.
The study authors received nearly 700 responses from 32 disciplines, 75 percent of them from women. And the numbers were shocking.
More than two-thirds of the women reported that they had been sexually harassed by colleagues. And 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. The majority of incidents involved superiors victimizing subordinates.”
“She was not the first woman to have endured indignities in the male-dominated world of science, but Franklin's case is especially egregious, said Ruth Lewin Sime, a retired chemistry professor at Sacramento City College who has written on women in science.
Over the centuries, female researchers have had to work as "volunteer" faculty members, seen credit for significant discoveries they've made assigned to male colleagues, and been written out of textbooks.”
