Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The history and present status of women in science are of interest to sociologists because of the longstanding disparities in women's and men's relative rank and levels of productivity in science, but also because of the male domination of the sciences as a whole. A range of psychological, structural, and cultural explanations have been developed to explain these circumstances and a whole plethora of initiatives and schemes have been implemented to redress the gender imbalance within science. Disparities nevertheless remain and their entrenchment is the subject of continued theoretical and empirical debate. Women have not always been a minority within science. As Carolyn Merchant has demonstrated, the scientific revolution was premised upon the formal exclusion of women from the new institutions of science. Wise women and midwives were persecuted and “well-born” women intellectuals were confined to the home as the division between public and private life intensified. At the same time, dichotomies between mind and nature, reason and feeling, and male and female hardened. Great women scientists like Christine de Pizan (1365–ca. 1430) and Laura Bassi (1711–78) were nevertheless rediscovered in the 1970s as second-wave feminists took up their predecessors’ quest to show that women can do science just as well as men. They also concentrated their attention on the barriers to women's achievement ... log in or subscribe to read full text