Feminism Confronts Technology

Judy Wajcman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745656625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Discriminación y relaciones raciales

Feminism Confronts Technology provides a lively and engaging exploration of the impact of technology on women's lives from word processors to food processors, and genetic engineering to the design of cities. Comprehensive and critical, this book surveys the sociological and feminist literature on technology, highlighting the male bias in the way technology is defined as well as developed. Wajcman sets the scene with an overview of feminist theories of science and technology: encompassing the technologies of production and reproduction as well as domestic technology.

The author challenges the common assumption that technology is gender neutral, looking at whether technology can liberate women or whether the new technologies are reinforcing sexual divisions in society.

1

Feminist Critiques of Science and Technology

Writing in 1844 about relations between men and women, Marx said that ‘[i]t is possible to judge from this relationship the entire level of development of mankind’ (1975, p. 347). More commonly it is the level of scientific and technological development that is taken as the index of a society’s advancement. Our icons of progress are drawn from science, technology and medicine; we revere that which is defined as ‘rational’ as distinct from that which is judged ‘emotional’. As we approach the twenty-first century however we are no longer sure whether science and technology are the solution to world problems, such as environmental degradation, unemployment and war, or the cause of them. It is not surprising therefore that the relationship between science and society is currently being subjected to profound and urgent questioning.

The development of a feminist perspective on the history and philosophy of science is a relatively recent endeavour. Although this field is still quite small and by no means coherent, it has attracted more theoretical debate than the related subject of gender and technology. It will become apparent in what follows, however, that feminists pursued similar lines of argument when they turned their attention from science to technology. I will therefore start by examining some approaches to the issue of gender and science, before moving on to look at technology.

The Sexual Politics of Science

The interest in gender and science arose out of the contemporary women’s movement and a general concern for women’s position in the professions. Practising feminist scientists have questioned the historical and sociological relationships between gender and science at least since the early 1970s. The publication of biographical studies of great women scientists served as a useful corrective to mainstream histories of science in demonstrating that women have in fact made important contributions to scientific endeavour. The biographies of Rosalind Franklin and Barbara McClintock, by Anne Sayre (1975) and Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) respectively, are probably the best known examples. Recovering the history of women’s achievements has now become an integral part of feminist scholarship in a wide range of disciplines. However, as the extent and intransigent quality of women’s exclusion from science became more apparent, the approach gradually shifted from looking at exceptional women to examining the general patterns of women’s participation.

There is now considerable evidence of the ways in which women have achieved only limited access to scientific institutions, and of the current status of women within the scientific profession. Many studies have identified the structural barriers to women’s participation, looking at sex discrimination in employment and the kind of socialization and education that girls receive which have channelled them away from studying mathematics and science. Explaining the under-representation of women in science education, laboratories and scientific publications, this research correctly criticises the construction and character of feminine identity and behaviour encouraged by our culture.

However these authors mainly pose the solution in terms of getting more women to enter science – seeing the issue as one of access to education and employment. Rather than questioning science itself, such studies assume that science is a noble profession and a worthy pursuit and that if girls were given the right opportunities and encouragement they would gladly become scientists in proportion to their numbers in the population. It follows that remedying the current deficiency is seen as a problem which a combination of different socialization processes and equal opportunity policies would overcome.

This approach, as Sandra Harding (1986) and others have pointed out, locates the problem in women (their socialization, their aspirations and values) and does not ask the broader questions of whether and in what way science and its institutions could be reshaped to accommodate women. The equal opportunity recommendations, moreover, ask women to exchange major aspects of their gender identity for a masculine version without prescribing a similar ‘degendering’ process for men. For example, the current career structure for a professional scientist dictates long unbroken periods of intensive study and research which simply do not allow for childcare and domestic responsibilities. In order to succeed women would have to model themselves on men who have traditionally avoided such commitments. The equal opportunities strategy has had limited success precisely because it fails to challenge the division of labour by gender in the wider society. The cultural stereotype of science as inextricably linked with masculinity is also crucial in explaining the small number of women in science. If science is seen as an activity appropriate for men, then it is hardly surprising that girls usually do not want to develop the skills and behaviours considered necessary for success in science.

When feminists first turned their attention to science itself, the problem was conceived as one of the uses and abuses to which science has been put by men. Feminists have highlighted the way in which biology has been used to make a powerful case for biologically determined sex roles. Biology has been central to the promotion of a view of women’s nature as different and inferior, making her naturally incapable of carrying out scientific work. For example, sex differences in visual-spatial skills are said to explain why there are so many more male scientists. In confronting biological determinists, many feminists inquired as to how and why the study of sex differences had become a priority of scientific investigation. They set out to demonstrate that biological inquiry, and indeed Western science as a whole, were consistently shaped by masculine biases. This bias is evident, they argued, not only in the definition of what counts as a scientific problem but also in the interpretations of research. It followed that science could not be genuinely objective until the masculine bias was eliminated. As we shall see below, this approach leaves unchallenged the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry and identifies only bad science and not science-as-usual as the problem.

The radical political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s also began with the question of the use and abuse of science. In their campaigns against an abused, militarized, and polluting science they argued that science was directed towards profit and warfare. Initially science itself was seen as neutral or value-free and useful as long as it was in the hands of those working for a just society. Gradually, however, the radical science movement developed a Marxist analysis of the class character of science and its links with capitalist methods of production. A revived political economy of science began to argue that the growth and nature of modern science was related to the needs of capitalist society. Increasingly tied to the state and industry, science had become directed towards domination. The ideology of science as neutral was seen as having a specific historical development. One of the most characteristic formulations of this position, associated with the radical science movement, was that ‘science is social relations’. The point was that the distinction between science and ideology could not be sustained because the dominant social relations of society at large are constitutive of science.

During this same period a radical shift took place in the history, philosophy and sociology of science, which added weight to the view that science could no longer be understood simply as the discovery of reality. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) marked the beginning of what was to become a major new field of study known as the sociology of scientific knowledge.¹ Its central premise is that scientific knowledge, like all other forms of knowledge, is affected at the most profound level by the society in which it is conducted.

Much research has examined the circumstances in which scientists actually produce scientific knowledge and has demonstrated how social interests shape this knowledge. Studies provide many instances of scientific theories drawing models and images from the wider society. It has also been demonstrated that social and political considerations enter into scientists’ evaluations of the truth or falsity of different theories. Even what is considered as ‘fact’, established by experiment and observation, is social. Different groups of scientists in different circumstances have produced radically different ‘facts’. Numerous historical and contemporary studies of science, and the social processes through which inquiry proceeds, highlight the social aspects of scientific knowledge.

Despite the advances that were made through the critique of science in the 1970s, gender-conscious accounts were rare. The social studies of natural science systematically avoided examining the relationship between gender and science in either its historical or sociological dimensions. Similarly, the radical science movement focused almost exclusively on the capitalist nature of science ignoring the relationship of science to patriarchy. In short, gender did not figure as an analytical tool in either of these accounts of science.

It is only during the last decade with writers such as Carolyn Merchant (1980), Elizabeth Fee (1981), Evelyn Fox Keller (1985), Brian Easlea (1981), Nancy Hartsock (1983), Hilary Rose (1983) and Ludmilla Jordanova (1980) that Western science has been labelled as inherently patriarchal.² As Sandra Harding (1986) expresses it, feminist criticisms of science had evolved from asking the ‘woman question’ in science to asking the more radical ‘science question’ in feminism. Rather than asking how women can be more equitably treated within and by science, they ask ‘how a science apparently so deeply involved in distinctively masculine projects can possibly be used for emancipatory ends’ (p. 29). It is therefore time to consider the main feminist critiques of science itself.

Scientific Knowledge as Patriarchal Knowledge

The concern with a gender analysis of scientific knowledge can be traced back to the women’s health movement that developed in Britain and America during the 1970s. Regaining knowledge and control over women’s bodies – their sexuality and fertility – was seen as crucial to women’s liberation. Campaigns for improved birth control and abortion rights were central to the early period of second-wave feminism. There was a growing disenchantment with male medical theories and practices. The growth and consolidation of male expertise at the expense of both women’s health and women’s healing skills was the theme of an American study, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Ehrenreich and English, 1976). This documented how the growth and professionalization of male-dominated medicine had led to the marginalization of female health workers. At the same time, critiques of psychiatry and the treatment of women’s depression as pathological were being expounded. Asking why the incidence of mental illness should be higher among women than men, feminists exposed the sexist bias in medical definitions of mental health and illness. Implicit in these analyses was a conviction that women could develop new kinds of knowledge and skills, drawing on their own experience and needs. The insights of the radical science movement contributed to the view of medical science as a repository of patriarchal values.

If medical scientific knowledge is patriarchal, then what about the rest of science? As Maureen McNeil (1987) points out, it was a short step to the emergence of a new feminist politics about scientific knowledge in general. Some feminists re-examined the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, arguing that the science which emerged was fundamentally based on the masculine projects of reason and objectivity. They characterized the conceptual dichotomizing central to scientific thought and to Western philosophy in general, as distinctly masculine. Culture vs. nature, mind vs. body, reason vs. emotion, objectivity vs. subjectivity, the public realm vs. the private realm – in each dichotomy the former must dominate the latter and the latter in each case seems to be systematically associated with the feminine. The general issue of whether conceptual dichotomizing is itself distinctly masculine or part of the Western philosophical tradition is beyond the scope of this book.³ My concern is with the way dualistic gender metaphors such as those used above reveal the underlying social meanings in purportedly value-neutral scientific thought.

There has been a growing awareness of the use of female metaphors for nature and natural metaphors for women. An examination of the texts of science highlights the correspondence between the way men treated women in particular historical periods and the way they used nature. Some feminist historians have focused on the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and the other fathers of modern science. Merchant (1980) argues that during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in Europe both nature and scientific inquiry were conceptualized in ways modelled on men’s most violent and misogynous relationships to women and this modelling has contributed to the distinctive gender symbolism of the subsequent scientific world view.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century biomedical science in France and Britain deployed similar gender symbolism to conceptualize nature: ‘… science and medicine as activities were associated with sexual metaphors which were clearly expressed in designating nature as a woman to be unveiled, unclothed and penetrated by masculine science’ (Jordanova, 1980, p. 45). Anatomically, males were depicted as representing active agents and females as passive objects of male agency. From her study Jordanova concludes that biomedical science intensified the cultural association of nature with passive, objectified femininity and of culture with active, objectifying masculinity. This strikingly gendered imagery of nature and of scientific inquiry is not just an historical relic, as these same dichotomies and metaphors can be found in contemporary writing on science. As Harding asks, is it any wonder that women are not an enthusiastic audience for these interpretations?

Rather than pointing to the negative consequences of women’s identification with the natural realm, some feminists celebrate the identification of woman and nature. This finds political expression in the eco-feminism of the eighties which suggests that women must and will liberate the earth because they are more in tune with nature. For them, women’s involvement in the ecology and peace movements was evidence of this special bond. As Susan Griffin expressed it: ‘those of us who are born female are often less severely alienated from nature than are most men’ (1983, p. 1). Women’s biological capacity for motherhood was seen as connected to an innate selflessness born of their responsibility for ensuring the continuity of life. Nurturing and caring instincts are essential to the fulfilment of this responsibility. Conversely, men’s inability to give birth has made them disrespectful of human and natural life, resulting in wars and ecological disasters. From this perspective, a new feminist science would embrace feminine intuition and subjectivity and end the ruthless exploitation of natural resources. Rejecting patriarchal science, this vision celebrates female values as virtues and endorses the close relationship between women’s bodies, women’s culture and the natural order.

While eco-feminism sees women’s values as having a biological basis, another approach to the question of women and science has been informed by psychoanalysis. The object-relations school of thought has been particularly influential in the feminist conceptualizations of science. This theory describes the mechanisms through which adult women and men come to model themselves and their relation to the world in different ways. To acquire his masculine identity the boy must both reject and deny his former dependencies, attachment and identification with the mother. The resulting conflicts in men over masculinity create a psychology of male dominance.

Using this theory Keller argues that girls and boys have different cognitive skills. As the male distinguishes himself from the mother, he also learns to differentiate sharply between subject and object, between himself and others. According to Keller, as scientists are men this male mind set, obsessed with detachment and mastery, has been written into the norms and methods of modern science. A radically different scientific method is described by Keller (1983) in her influential biography of Barbara McClintock. A Nobel prize-winning geneticist, McClintock is described as a scientist who merged subject and object in her ‘feeling for the organism’ and whose work was imbued with a holistic understanding of, and reverence for, nature. According to Keller, this woman’s work provides us with ‘a glimpse of what a gender-free science might look like’ by combining masculine and feminine characteristics. Rather than celebrating a woman-centred science as do the eco-feminists, this project insists on the possibility of a gender-neutral science produced by androgynous individuals.⁴

While emphatically rejecting the possibility of a neutral objective science, other feminist writers have shared a concern with the exclusion of woman-centred values from science. However, they attribute such values not to the individual psyche but to a socially and historically constructed gender division of labour. They trace the way in which, as the spheres of public and private life became increasingly separated during the course of the eighteenth century, women became confined to the private sphere of hearth and home. Skills such as reasoning and objectivity became associated with public life, and feeling and subjectivity with private life. These dichotomies have become historically associated with the development of distinctive feminine and masculine worldviews.

In a well-known article, Rose (1983) locates herself within the radical science tradition and endorses the Marxist characterization of bourgeois science as a form of alienated and abstract knowledge. It is the division of mental and manual labour, integral to capitalist production, which gives rise to this form of knowledge. Rose takes issue with this tradition however for its failure to question the impact of the gender division of labour on science. The focus of the radical science critique on the relations of production to the exclusion of reproduction negates women’s experience, which in turn impoverishes science. Science has been denied the input of women’s experience of the caring, emotionally demanding labour which has been assigned exclusively to women. According to Rose, a feminist science would need to encompass this emotional domain and thereby fuse subjective and objective ways of knowing the world. It would thus be a more complete, truer knowledge because it is based on women’s ‘shared experience of oppression’. Rose concludes that the reunification of ‘hand, brain and heart’ would foster a new form of science, enabling humanity to live in harmony with nature.

A Science Based on Women’s Values?

These debates about science mirror the more general preoccupations that have engaged feminists over the last two decades. Much early second-wave feminism was of a liberal cast, demanding access for women within existing power structures, such as science. In principle, equality could be achieved by breaking down gender stereotypes: for instance by giving girls better training and more varied role models, and by introducing equal opportunity programmes and antidiscrimination legislation. Such feminist writing focused on gender stereotypes and customary expectations, and denied the existence of any fundamental sex differences between women and men. Th...