Doing science, doing gender: Using history in the present.

Abstract

Feminist scientists, historians, and philosophers have produced an extensive body of work on women and gender in science over the past 50 years. They have demonstrated not only that science is a social activity imbued with gender dynamics but also that scientific methods, practices, models, and theories are deeply gendered. A smaller body of historical work has examined these processes in psychology. Although psychology is clearly a gendered science, it is also a social scientific field that directly theorizes gender. Psychologists have also had much to say about the causes of women's underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Here I selectively review the gendering of psychology's own theories and practices, its gender theory, and its empirical claims about the causes of women's underrepresentation in STEM. I argue that contemporary psychological analyses of the "women in STEM problem" should draw more directly on historical work that demonstrates the gendering of science and its ongoing effects. Public Significance StatementThis article reviews how scientific theory, practice, and institutions are imbued with gender. It is argued that the science/gender system should be taken into account by psychologists when they offer contemporary analyses of why women continue to be underrepresented in many STEM fields. This would allow psychologists to think about both science and gender in new ways.

Psychology of gender: Addressing misconceptions and setting goals for the field.

“…in order to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions" (Else, 2015). Taken together, these examples suggest that the psychology of gender may be particularly undermined 1 Further, feminist historians have fruitfully noted the ways in which these particular perceptions of science versus activism are themselves consistent with stereotypes, and perpetuate the ongoing gendering of science (e.g., Rutherford, 2020).…”

The Expertise Paradox: Opportunities and Challenges of a Public Psychology Framework

“…This ultimately involves a reconsideration and upheaval of the assumptions our discipline makes about what constitutes satisfactory evidence, how experience is valued, and thus how 'expertise' is constructed. This starts with a fundamental acknowledgement that power and expertise are socially and actively constructed (as per Gergen, 1973), and that 'science' is a masculine and capitalist construction (Rutherford, 2020). Just as how the decision of what researchers decide to research is never apolitical or 'neutral', but rather moulded and enacted by power relations (Fine, 2016), the same can be said for who psychologists decide to listen to and whose expertise is validated.…”

Gender and socio-intentionality: Why are “things” the way they are?

“…To address questions about the increasing limitations on women's reproductive rights in the United States, the policing of pregnancy, and the reduction of women's rights to their bodies around the world (Cosgrove & Vaswani, 2020), why academia is not a shining beacon for meritocracy (Febbraro, 2020), why the talk of choice is misleading in science and why we need to understand historical trajectories and repetitions (Rutherford, 2020), and why there are gendered communications in interdisciplinary contexts (Osbeck, 2020), the authors draw on feminist theory, philosophy, historiography, political science, and psychoanalysis. Clearly a psychological perspective alone would be insufficient to answer these questions.…”

“…The four articles also demonstrate that analyses of the status of women, gender, and sexism remain relevant to an understanding of how society as well as science and the discipline of psychology operate, and of how power permeates the minds and actions of persons and is enacted in particular contexts. Women can be the “object” of research (Osbeck, 2020), and gender can be a category that constitutes research (Febbraro, 2020; Rutherford, 2020) or a political interest that is expressed in social life (Cosgrove & Vaswani, 2020). Certainly—as the articles instantiate—gendered reality has become more complex since the 1970s.…”

“…There is a long history of this movement in politics, academia, and research that has led to many qualifications, differentiations, and diversifications in theory and practice as well as a backlash intended to turn back its achievements. The four articles in this issue attest to the varieties of theorizing women, from grounding lives in the consequences of laws and policies (Cosgrove & Vaswani, 2020) and academia (Febbraro, 2020; Rutherford, 2020), to analyses about the possibility of gendered interdisciplinary research. Any antifeminist backlash itself can be analyzed within feminist theory and the psychological humanities, as reflected in the target articles.…”