Gendered Science?

[Shivering Jemmy]

Just want to get the "sense of the meeting" on this topic. Do HoFers believe that science is gendered, in the strong sense (not simply that gender and sex linked considerations shape what science investigates, but that scientific truth is, in part, a creation of a gendered and sexist mindset), and with different gender "ground rules" a very different set of scientifically determined facts might arise?

[ismnotwasm]

1. To a point in specific fields

Anthropology, certainly, philosophy absolutely, medicine most likely, chemistry and physics not so much. That's not to say if women had equal partnership in the sciences all along, we might be better off, but certain fields can't be 'gendered' , because they stand outside gender IMO.

[Warpy]

2. I agree, pretty much

It took female anthropologists to study animal behavior in terms of something besides dominance and turn up shockers like the stallion in a given herd of mares was responsible for only 60% of the colts.

Unfortunately, women don't be making much of a difference outside science, especially in business.

[seabeyond]

3. Cordelia Fine

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

A brilliantly researched and wickedly funny rebuttal of the pseudo-scientific claim that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children—boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks—we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework.

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.

Passionately argued and unfailingly astute, Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different—a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/125531

i really have to read this womans book.

yes. i think very much so and i think especially recently we have seen it called out way often enough to keep a stern eye on what we are being fed with the assumption that there is going to be a bias that could very well be the total opposite of what we are being told.