Why Biographies of Women in Science Are Controversial
Dear friends of women in science,
Recently, the Smithsonian gave its annual appeal for help for its archive of women in science. Among other things, it has a collection of photographs of unidentified women doing science (maybe your grandmother?) and would like to find their IDs. You can find the archive here and the photo collection through this blog.
My colleague Karen Parfitt alerted me to the fact that noted historian of science, Patricia Fara, commented on biographies of women in science in Nature here. In an article called "Women in Science: Weird Sisters?", Fara said that the selections of a lot of those who do biographical information on women scientists perpetuate stereotypes and they often discuss women in less than optimal ways, for example referring to their first names almost exclusively. Other times, emphasis is placed on their "womanly" activities like cooking and childcare and their science is barely mentioned. My own favorite example of that is Christiane Nusslein-Vollhard, who was asked for her chocolate cake recipe by interviewers after she won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Fara pointed out that these biographies were problematical and can be counterproductive because they suggest that the science isn't important and even if women succeed, they won't be treated as the men are (e.g. referred to by last name, as Watson or Crick might be).
I'm curious, how do you feel about this issue? Is anything better than nothing, or should those who post biographies of women in science be much more selective and careful?
cheers,
Laura
FBP: Ironic that you refer to "Fara" as "Patricia." One of her criticisms of some biographies of female scientists was that they referred to their subject by first name. Fara would thus frown upon Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing, Michael Holyroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey, and some parts of Feferman and Feferman's biography of Alfred Tarski. (Tarski changed his last name early in adult life, making references to him in his early years a bit tricky.)
Fara's article was about selected aspects of five book-length biographies of female scientists, so some of her criticisms do not apply to short online biographies and news stories. Other criticisms were: some book titles played on gender stereotypes (e.g., "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA"), one biography had a (muted) pink bookjacket, biographers mentioned personal appearance and dress.
Publishers play a role in choosing bookjackets and titles. I've seen the assertion that authors should not be held responsible for what's on the bookjacket in a review of Ceci and Williams's "The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls." This book has a statistic about female professors on its jacket and in its advertising which is (in the most charitable interpretation) easy to misinterpret. (The term "tenure-track" is used to mean "tenured or tenure-eligible." The lowest percentage from the top 50 US departments in 2002 is given for "tenure-track academic positions.") Several years ago, I wrote to the publisher (Oxford University Press) to say that this was incorrect, but it is still up on the web. In my opinion, this is probably doing more to obscure women's participation in science than any of the examples mentioned by Fara.
I wrote an article tracing the history of this and a few other widespread statistics (misleading, fabricated, or garbled) pertaining to women, which is here: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol1/iss2/
Laura, I think your headline is misleading this time. You don't want to get rid of the online bios, but some people would love to purify out the parts that they think demean women. I wonder if we let that happen if everything will eventually offend someone and we'll end up with nothing? Hate to be cynical, but...
MRB
Laura-- I've seen too many internet resources for women in science disappear. So I don't think we should argue that Smithsonian take theirs down, but I do think Patricia makes some good points. We want a science site to feature people we are comfortable calling scientists. We want them referred to as respectfully as possible, knowing the struggles they went through to persist and succeed. So I'm taking both sides in this debate!
FBP
