role-of-gender-in-science

Bias = may be either unconscious or conscious

“…a disposition to reach a particular kind of endpoint in reasoning or judgment, being skewed toward a specific sort of interpretation. There is no question that biases in this sense are very often integral to our reasoning. … And they are in any case inevitable. The idea is not to get rid of biases in human cognition, but rather to understand how and when these biases can over-apply, or be ‘spoofed’, or otherwise lead to unreliable reasoning.” (Kenyon, Clear Thinking in a Blurry World)

sex vs. gender = biological category vs. cultural category

“Sex is the biological category, whereas gender is the culturally shaped expression of sexual difference: the masculine way in which men should behave and the feminine way in which women should behave.” (“gender,” Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy)

Richardson-2008-case-study provides strong evidence for:

1. Did the fact that, until recently, there were disproportionately few women researchers in most scientific fields affect the quality of science as a body of knowledge?
   • the master gene model dominated when the field was male-dominated
   • the model was revised in 1990s as broader cultural and demographic changes occurred
   • This shows that homogeneous groups are more likely to share unexamined assumptions, while diverse fields are less likely to have persistent blind spots.
   • This is seen by the fact that feminist biologists anticipated problems with master gene model before the broader field recognized them
2. Do biases about appropriate gender roles influence the formation and acceptance of hypotheses?
   • the master gene model was centered on men and assumed “male as presence, female as absence” which encouraged gender stereotypes
   • gender assumptions shaped which questions were asked and determined research priorities, seen as selective attention arose with the master gene model, prioritizing male over female processes and neglecting ovarian development
   • gender assumptions also played a role in resistance to contradictory evidence

Richardson-2008-case-study provides strong support for Douglas-2007-rejecting-value-free-science as it illustrates that pretending science is value-free doesn’t eliminate values, it merely hides them. It also reveals a crucial aspect not fully discussed by Douglas: hidden, unreflective values (gender stereotypes) can produce epistemic damage, while explicit critically examined values (feminist analysis) can produce epistemic improvement.

See Also Feminist-epistemology

Feminist philosophy of science

what does it mean to do philosophy of science as a feminist¹ =

• prevent gender from disappearing in an analysis of scientific knowledge and practice
• asking to what extent the underrepresentation of women (and other social groups) had influenced what research problems have been pursued and how these problems have been framed
• investigating how increased social diversity in science can improve scientific research

For Feminist philosophy in the analytic tradition, doing philosophy as a feminist involves:

• critical mission = understand when gender bias is epistemically harmful and what antidotes are needed to counter the harms
• constructive mission = understand how objectivity is to be conceptualized, when feminist values can improve scientific research, how epistemic communities should function

Rolin-2021-Analytic-Feminist-Approaches

Feminist criticism of the Value-free Ideal¹

Helen Longino presents the ideas of the value-free ideal of science, as explained in Douglas-2007-rejecting-value-free-science, in the terms of:

• constitutive values = values that promote epistemic goals of science
• contextual values = values that originate in the social and cultural environment of science

Longino does not draw a sharp distinction between the two as she sees constitutive values as not always epistemic values, since values that are perceived as constitutive may promote moral and social goals.

Longino argues that value-free science is unattainable because contextual can influence the ways constitutive values are interpreted and weighed. More importantly, value freedom is undesirable because contextual values can play epistemically beneficial roles in science.

Three ways in which feminist values can be epistemically productive =

1. feminist values can provide criticism that helps scientists to identify and correct false beliefs or biased accounts, as illustrated by Richardson-2008-case-study
2. feminist values are a source of scientific creativity
3. feminist values can improve the ways scientific communities are organized

Footnotes

1. Rolin, Philosophy of science analytic feminist approaches ↩ ↩²