When STS Became Gendered: A Brief Account of Feminist Science Studies

Jonathan Banda
Keywords: feminism, epistemology, gender, critique
This section will briefly review the history of feminist critiques of science, centering on
two specific areas of concern: the topical interests of feminist science studies and its position
within the field of Science and Technology Studies in general. In particular, this review argues
that theoretical and epistemological concerns displaced the more policy-oriented concern
regarding the representation of women in science, while feminist science studies in general
continues to see itself as marginal to mainstream STS approaches. Like STS, feminism, as an
interdisciplinary conceptual field, encompasses diverse analytic approaches. The intent here is
not to provide a comprehensive survey of feminist STS; instead this brief analysis will use
exemplars, in particular the works of Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding, two of the most
prominent feminist science scholars. These works represent a working through over time of
the problematic relationship between gender and science and between feminist theory and STS.
Feminist science studies turned early on (to use Sandra Hardings words) from the woman
question in science, which advocated for the visibility of female scientists, to the science
question in feminism, which focused on epistemological concerns and the role of gender in the
production of scientific knowledge itself.
Women in Science
Beginning in the late 1970s scholars began to question the failure of social studies of
science to take gender seriously as an area of inquiry. As Evelyn Fox Keller notes, works of
feminist theory had appeared in various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, but not
in any field related to science studies. By the early 1980s, however, a growing body of work
emerged that explored the relationship between gender and science. Some of this work

addressed the history of women in science (for example, Margaret Rossiters Women Scientists
in America, 1982) and the exclusion and disadvantage of women in scientific practice. While
feminist scholarship in science studies proliferated since the 1980s, the most prominent scholars,
however, did not consider the woman question in science. In 1985, a symposium Feminist
Perspectives on Science was held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The papers
presented at this conference, including early works by Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding,
covered a wide variety of themes related to gender, two (out of eight) directly addressed the
unequal participation of women in the sciences.
Gender in Science
In her introduction to Feminist Perspectives on Science (1986), the published volume of
the symposium referenced above, Ruth Bleier noted that one of the main questions feminist
science scholars faced was: how can we even begin to conceptualize science as nonmasculine,
as somehow pure and objective (nongendered), when most of written civilizationour history,
language, conceptual frameworks, literaturehas been generated by men? For early feminist
scholars, the corrective action was to increase womens involvement in the sciences and to work
to remove this masculine bias. For others, like Sandra Harding, the feminist standpoint would
offer a better science. And yet for others, the goal was not to construct a pure and objective
science, but instead science could better account for the world by incorporating a multiplicity of
situated perspectives. The historical argument proposed here, therefore, is that the more policyoriented woman question in science, while a concern of early feminist science scholars, was
largely set aside in favor of theoretical and epistemological questions, ones more aligned with the
general interests of the field of STS. These feminist scholars largely did not question the
underrepresentation of women in science, but instead asked how scientific knowledge was co-

constituted with gender and other categories of difference (for example Donna Haraways
Primate Visions [1989]).
Conclusion
This brief review cannot sufficiently cover the breadth and diversity of feminist
contributions to science and technology studies, many of which parallel the dominant theories
and concerns of STS at large. Adele Clark and her colleagues (1999) pioneered work on the
intersections of technoscience, health, and gender, contributing to a growing interest in studies of
biomedicine. Recently, Karen Barads Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) and other works of
New Materialism have turn towards object-oriented theories of agency to provide better
accounts of the world. Nevertheless, despite similar interests, one concern of feminist scholars
has remained fairly consistent over time: that is, the marginalization of their work in the field of
STS itself. In the 1980s, Bleier claimed that the sociology of scientific knowledge remained
particularly oblivious to feminist scholarship and to gender as important dimension of inquiry.
In the early 1990s, Haraway critiqued mainstream STS for never ask[ing] how the practices of
masculine supremacy, or many other systems of structured inequality, get built into and out of
working machines. In 2008, Sandra Harding challenged Bruno Latours (whose actor-network
approach remains prominent in the field) principled non-engagement with feminist critiques of
science. While certain feminist scholars and their works figure prominently in STS, Emma
Whelan argues that the engagement between the two has been asymmetrical; in order to gain
cognitive authority and to present themselves as the necessary allies of scientists,
mainstream STS distanced itself from overtly political approaches to science studies. As this
brief review of history suggests, perhaps Haraways words written almost twenty years ago still
remain relevant: It is past time to end the failure of mainstream and oppositional science studies
scholars to engage each other's work.