Evelyn Fox Keller’s research reminded us that women make science better

Women’s History Month is an opportunity to remember pioneers like physicist and biologist Evelyn Fox Keller. Her work shows that diversifying science improves research and discovery.

Evelyn Fox Keller, a foundational figure in feminist philosophy of science, died last September at the age of 87. Through her research, she showed that objectivity, a key value of science, is actually always partially subjective. Her work shows that diversifying science improves research and discovery.

A physicist by training, Fox Keller studied biology before becoming a philosopher and historian of science. As a professor at MIT, Fox worked on the Keller Program in Science, Technology and Society. Her work has helped build a body of scholarship, including my own, about how scientific language contains metaphors that dictate what people can see and understand.

One of Fox Keller’s key discoveries was that seemingly neutral assumptions in biology can actually be differentiated by sex. Keller’s informed social analysis of science paved the way for approaching science as a cultural phenomenon. This has given us space to think about how diversity and inclusion can improve science.

In 2017, Joe Nadeau made a seemingly surprising discovery. egg it is sperm In human concepts. This challenged microbiology’s long history of presenting sperm as the active agent that finds and invades eggs. Microbiologists have been studying and teaching about human conception for decades, but now they are beginning to question the key assumption that the human egg, or ovum, is passively involved in fertilization. That was just recently.

It is therefore equally surprising that even more recently, two years later, another laboratory discovered an active role for eggs. The same “new” discoveries were being made over and over again. The insidious metaphor of the passive, feminine egg was at least partly to blame.

At the turn of the century, anthropologist Emily Martin, whose research was based on the writings of Fox Keller, found that commonly assigned biology textbooks were uniformly gender-based to explain the concept of the human. You have shown that you are using a metaphor. Sperm were assigned typical masculine characteristics: forceful, active, and forceful. Ova, on the other hand, was assigned a feminine stereotype, described as passive, adrift, and receptive.

The discovery and rediscovery of the active role of eggs is not new. In fact, this egg was first observed in his mid-1980s, and various laboratories continued to prove that the egg was a powerful and decisive factor in conception well into the 1990s. However, Martin notes that in scientific papers reporting these discoveries, one section announces the discovery of an active role for the egg, while in another section scientists still rely on gender-based metaphors. They found that they describe sperm as masculine and active. Feminine and passive egg.

Identifying the role that metaphors play in influencing scientific research is an important step to improving research results. The presence of diverse cultural perspectives is essential to check the possibility that assumptions in the form of metaphors may interfere with objectivity.

This is different from questioning the objectivity that is essential to good science. As Fox Keller and others have pointed out, the objectivity of research in the history and sociology of science can be maximized if the scientific community fosters a culture that accommodates diverse critiques and a variety of critiques. It shows that it is high. The scientific community therefore needs to be heterogeneous in a way that fosters the development of a wide range of views that can be heard and properly considered.

It is essential to apply this diverse model in practice. In 2017, I became director of the Feminist Institute at the University of California, Davis. One of our goals was to bring Fox Keller-like research, trained in the humanities and social sciences, to bench scientists themselves. We obtained National Science Foundation funding to build a laboratory curriculum for our Ph.D. By teaching STEM students how diverse cultural backgrounds can contribute to better and stronger objectivity, we aim to reach out to those who feel on the margins of academic science, primarily women and underrepresented students. We hypothesized that it would be possible to empower the minority population.

Keller’s colleague Helen Longino, another foundational thinker in the philosophy of science and gender, has important warnings about homogeneous communities in science and beyond. Without diversity of background, she argues, we cannot challenge the metaphors we use, the kinds of questions we ask, and the cultural assumptions behind them. Freeing ourselves from the limitations of these assumptions requires greater participation and diversity in science. This will only lead to better science and more discoveries.

In our curriculum, we shared examples of discoveries that challenge assumptions within science, such as the active role of the human egg and solving the growing problem of algorithmic bias. These were intended to enable students to see aspects of their own experience and the historical experience of their communities as valuable in scientific practice.

A survey was conducted at the end of each course. Participants said they felt a greater sense of belonging to the scientific community, knowing that diversity further strengthens objectivity.

Although many people outside the history and philosophy of science may have never heard of her, Evelyn Fox Keller’s work has changed science from the natural sciences to developing computer labs. It is now possible to talk about the role of culture in the spaces in which it is practiced. artificial intelligence. Importantly, Fox Keller did this not by questioning the value of objectivity, but by encouraging us to recognize the value it brings in order to make science better. was.

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