![]()
Females in science: a contradictory concept?
Ruth Watts
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Background: the belief that women and science, including mathematics and medicine, are incompatible has had a long and complex history and still often works to exclude women from and/or marginalise them in science.
Purpose: this article will seek to explore gender and educational achievement through investigating how such gendered presumptions have persisted at various levels of science, despite perceptions of science itself changing over time and scientific studies expanding, differentiating and becoming professionalized. In particular, after a brief discussion of the historical debates on the provenance and lasting recurrence of gendered assumptions in science, it will try to discover how these prejudices affected the education of girls and women in England from c.1910 to c. 1939 and then, to widen the picture, make some comparison with the USA in the same period, although, necessarily in an article of this length, this analysis will be somewhat cursory. It will then bring the history up-to-date by examining the situation in England today.
Sources of evidence: the article will proceed by using extensive local sources in case study research on Birmingham, by then the second largest English city. The comparisons with the situation in the USA in the same period and the examination of the present situation will be based largely on secondary sources.
Main argument: factors of location, family background, supportive networks and greater educational, political and employment rights will be shown to have allowed some women to break through the barriers that hindered many from accessing or rising in science. Thus, it will be seen through the Birmingham example that there was a growing yet limited field of scientific practice for women, ordered by a gendered philosophy which routed them into specific areas. This picture was further permeated by class, wealth, identity, contacts, networks and location albeit this was modified by the scholarship system. Comparisons with the USA show that similar factors were present there, albeit in a different context. Twenty-first century sources indicate that on the one hand there is still gendered access and progress for females in science in England yet, on the other hand, there have been, and are at present, a number of initiatives seeking to overcome this.
Conclusion: Even today, therefore, whatever sciences females do is affected by underlying gendered assumptions and structural power relationships which need to be understood.
Introduction
The belief that women and science, including mathematics and medicine, are incompatible has had a long and complex history. Science, a field of knowledge so important in our modern world, has generally been perceived as āmasculineā and women have been excluded or pushed to the periphery despite changing perceptions of science and its expansion, differentiation and professionalization. Even where a woman won renown in science, this rarely allowed her progress into the scientific world in the same way as men or opened doors to other women; it might, indeed, cause a negative reaction. This article will briefly discuss historical debates on the provenance and lasting recurrence of such assumptions and then how they affected the education of girls and women in England from c.1910 to c. 1939, a particularly interesting period when, despite the growth of scientific studies at all levels of education, gendered attitudes increasingly excluded girls from the physical sciences and higher mathematics and pushed them, insofar as they did science at all, towards the biological sciences and even more so, towards domestic science. To assess how this happened, it will be necessary to understand how gender inequalities in work and education were made manifest and to look at structural power relationships, while also ensuring that science is not defined only from a masculine point of view (Kenway and Willis 1995; Kourany 2002). The situation in Birmingham will be examined to investigate how women fared in science and medicine in the second largest English city in this period. Using a wealth of local sources, changes in schooling, further and higher education for women and in scientific fields themselves will be investigated to explore how far different sciences were opening up to females and how far they remained much influenced by contemporary, albeit changing, gendered theories and assumptions. To widen the picture, some comparison with the situation in the USA in this period will be made, although only general trends in this huge and diverse country can be noted here. Finally there will be a brief examination of the present situation in England to see how far this past history is still affecting access to and progress in science for girls and women today and to note some initiatives which seek to rectify the situation.
It is necessary to define first, however, how the ever changing concepts of āscienceā, āgenderā and āeducationā are used here. āScienceā is taken to include all subjects based on objective knowledge of physical matters including medicine, mathematics and technology. Without ignoring the biology of sex, āgenderā, is seen as largely culturally determined, changing according to place, time and situation (Maynard 1997; Wallach Scott 1999). Interrelating with this are factors such as class, āraceā and religion which together can dramatically affect access to knowledge. āEducationā, is accepted as the development of mental or physical potential rather than just schooling, systematic instruction, or training, thus helping understanding of how people of both sexes often made educational progress despite disadvantages and lack of access to prime educational routes.
Science in the twentieth century: a gendered subject?
In the last decade in Britain there has been some agitation over girlsā high performance rate in public examinations and boys corresponding seeming under-achievement in a way that was rarely shown when girls were struggling for equal education (Hinsliff 2004a). This is the case, despite the still very unequal pay and career prospects of men and women and continuing lack of encouragement to schoolgirls to try non-traditional work for women. In the USA rumours that the Ivy League universities were so worried by similar trends suggested that they were manipulating their admissions procedures against women (Hinsliff 2004b). Yet, simultaneously, alarm is shown by governments about the shortage of scientists and engineers and by feminists about a scientific world which appears to exclude women and minorities from an effective voice (Rosser 2000).
Since females appear to have gained a more equal education, it is necessary to examine why they still have to negotiate barriers with regard to the sciences, now prestigious subjects in the curriculum and certainly ones which attract the largest funding. In the past, pupils social class or gender has determined access to different subjects as much as ability. In England, certainly, the study of classics, the hallmark of being a āgentlemanā, were reserved largely for males of the upper, middle and professional classes. Yet even as some women were gradually winning the right to be taught Latin at least, and secondary and university education was opening up to them, science, hitherto promoted only by progressive educationalists, was slowly growing in prestige. In the twentieth century, with the huge advances in science and proliferation of its forms, it was, albeit by uneven and sometimes rather wandering steps, eventually to become a dominant part of the curriculum. Yet even as it opened up to girls it often was confined to botany or biology ā increasingly declining in status relative to physics and chemistry ā as better suiting the āfeminineā intellect. Domestic science was the only option offered to some girls. This gendered outlook, however, also opened up opportunities to females in some areas, notably medicine (see Tolley 2003; Watts 2007, 145ā154, 172ā173, 176ā92).
Gender and science in history
Why womenās access to science, particularly its higher reaches, has been so circumscribed has been keenly debated in the last thirty years by both women scientists and historians (especially in the USA) who soon realised that the ambivalent juxtaposition of āwomanā and āscientistā had a provenance of over 400 years. From this emerged concepts of masculinity and other deeply embedded gendered associations in the very language of science which have deeply affected the practice of it despite its ostensible upholding of critical, rational thinking. Many feminist scientists have argued passionately that feminists should investigate science because scientific research was controlled by those with political power and had been used so often to justify patriarchy as well as class and āraceā inequalities.1
The continually expanding growth of biographical material on women in science has shown both the actual diverse contribution of women to science and the constraints which have impeded this, the careful ways marginalised women have had to negotiate their way and the veil history has often drawn over their achievements. Studies exploring how the generality of women found avenues into science have opened up how scientific ātruthā is actually reached and the need to realise the significance of understanding how anyoneās progress is affected by place, time, religion and circumstance and that science is and has always been informed by class, racial and gender biases (Watts 2007, 11ā14, 209).
This has a strong impact on all educational experiences and institutions (e.g. Kelly 1987; Smail 2000).
Female access to science in the early twentieth century
From the late nineteenth century women appeared to be achieving greater equality politically, professionally and employmentāwise. Even so, although or because scie...
