Could someone who understands academic stuff explain this to me please?

[noblegiraffe]

nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2467&context=tqr

The article is 'Are STEM syllabi gendered? A feminist critical discourse analysis'.

It says things like 'However, upon deeper review, language used in the syllabi reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women'

It talks about a masculine learning climate, where knowledge is imparted by an expert to a student, facts are to be learned and individual work is expected.

Am I missing something or is this just saying similar to 'maths isn't for girls because they prefer group work and essays'? Which hardly seems feminist to me.

My DD dislikes special girls events. At uni open days the only 'women in engineering' thing we looked in on was because she wanted to be nice to the students bothering to do it, and because they had cake.

Maybe the answer on the school trips is to have one event, 50:50 participation but separate sessions for each sex, single sex teams, that sort of thing.

Here are some resources I have found useful on the topic of sex, gender, diversity and science.

Someone on this board recommended the collection of papers published together as Feminist Approaches to Science. I have a copy of the book, if anybody would like to borrow it. The papers cover areas of science where gender, sex, and science cannot help but intersect. The collection was published in the '80s, so whilst some of the context in which science is done has moved on since then, I still found it useful to read. It is somewhat scholarly in tone, so I found it a bit hard-going.

Another resource I recommend on this topic - and easier reading - is the essay Culture and Gender do not Dissolve into how Scientists “read” Nature: Thelma Rowell’s Heterodoxy. I first read this essay when I read the book in which it was published. The book, Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology, is a collection of essays. It might be particularly interesting to girls who are at school who are interested in STEM subjects and who like reading. It is a collection of essays, so the readability is variable, but the reader can dip in and out. A teacher could give an essay to a class to read, for example. Reading one of the essays from Rebels, Mavericks... might make an interesting exercise for a diverse class of students, or an extension-type-exercise for students who are prone to asking questions that go beyond the curriculum. I am not a teacher, so I have little sense of what age range would be able to read this book. I would have thought GCSE or older, maybe? My guess is that this would have less of a sense of something missing than any number of "Women into science and engineering" events, but I am not a teacher, nor a schoolgirl, so I am guessing, really.

There are some valuable elements to the paper.

It's a critique of the way the course materials are written, rather than of scientific content.

I do believe (based I suppose on experience) that groups who have previously been led to believe they are bad at something are prone to drop out if the course material is presented as difficult and the teaching style unforgiving of any weaknesses. So people from working class backgrounds, those with no family experience of HE. But in Science that would also apply to women, whose confidence will have previously undermined.

So if language is used which suggests there's going to be no time to go over a concept if you don't get it (because you should already know it) or that there will be little opportunity to expand ideas from the individual student's pre-existing knowledge base, then the course will be seen as more difficult with a higher likelihood of failure.

It is possible to teach a great deal of Science without using that teaching style. Where the paper falls down is that it doesn't recognise that some of those problems are going to apply more due to the subject area. Geology and Ecology, given as examples in this, are often gateway subjects for bringing people who lack confidence in Science back into STEM. That's because those subject areas allow someone who enjoys 'rational' thought but has knowledge or confidence gaps to get up and running pretty quickly. It's pretty easy to teach Ecology and allow someone to draw on already happening to individually know a lot about Mozambique or coal mines or whatever to build up an essay or project around that, picking up core elements of Ecology as they go along. You can't really do that with Algebra. Students really do need to know the previous steps in getting to that particular level in Maths. You can't just enjoy rational stuff so jump in without any Maths background.

But in general much of the language and teaching style that makes those courses the paper discusses appear difficult can be altered, as the writer recommends.

And those problems can happen on any course. For example, I was taught post modernism (and related theories) by someone who would take examples from what might be called a canon of Western civilisation, and then apply the theories to them. And then when people without a private school education asked what all this Corinthian stuff was (or whatever), the lecturer would be condescending, make us feel ignorant and so on. And I did feel ignorant and connected that to being from a comprehensive school, unwelcome, that post modernism was too difficult etc. All of that was unnecessary because the whole course could have been based on what we individually did know, and work post modernism around that.

I do believe (based I suppose on experience) that groups who have previously been led to believe they are bad at something are prone to drop out if the course material is presented as difficult and the teaching style unforgiving of any weaknesses. So people from working class backgrounds, those with no family experience of HE. But in Science that would also apply to women, whose confidence will have previously undermined.

This phenomenon is described in the academic literature as stereotype threat.

I confess to only reading this quickly, but I am reading it that science in its modern thought is about rational, objective ways of knowing. This is masculine because of its Enlightenment roots. It is very much the lone scholar model of genius. It is about applying theories and models objectively and without emotion or placing oneself subjectively.

Whereas feminism has long recognised that we are all subjectively placed. Science is socially constructed, it is not a rational 'truth' - it is a truth created at a point in time, for a particular purpose, within a particular context. It is dynamic - science and the scientist.

That is the first point. There is a particular worldview of science which has male roots and replicates historically masculine ways of knowing and experiencing the world.

The second point then seems to be about the ways in which language masks gendered power hierarchies, whilst seeking to perpetuate them. There is a lot of literature on the ways in which science uses gendered concepts (the dominant, thrusting, powerful and strongest sperm penetrates the egg floating passively down the Fallopian tube).

I find the notion that there are masculine ways of knowing and feminine ways of knowing quite confusing.

Science uses gendered concepts (the dominant, thrusting, powerful and strongest sperm penetrates the egg floating passively down the Fallopian tube).

When you write this, are you implying that dominance, thrusting, power and strength are masculine and that passivity and floating are feminine? To the best of my understanding, the science of reproduction does not describe spermatozoa as thrusting or dominant, and nor does it describe ova as floating passively, but I may have read a different book to you, it is quite possible.

'Whereas feminism has long recognised that we are all subjectively placed. Science is socially constructed, it is not a rational 'truth' - it is a truth created at a point in time, for a particular purpose, within a particular context. It is dynamic - science and the scientist. '

Feminism in general doesn't have a stance on whether or not we are subjectively placed. Some particular kinds of feminism might do.

Who is claiming science is not socially constructed? How is it possible for science to be anything else?

Social constructs can be both rational and true anyway, so I'm not sure why those things are being set up in opposition to each other.

The article The Egg and the Sperm by Emily Martin 1991 is open access - it looks at the way science books describe reproduction. Can't link as on phone. The discussion on this thread brought it to mind.

Well on one level it is true that the egg passively floats and the supermarket actively swims as one is a mobile gamete and one isn't.
It's also true that only one sperm fertilises an egg, it might be hard to describe that without giving the impression that sperm didn't somehow win the fertilisation race
How would you describe it in a non-gendered or even female centred way? I started writing something about the impregnable egg but even that implies a strongest sperm. Confusing.

Sperm not supermarket. Stupid phone

Blimey, that must win an autocorrect prize.

Anyway, whats confusing? An ovum is big, and needs to be in the female reproductive tract to work, the much smaller sperm have to move to get to it. Simple objective fact, no value judgements, just how biology works in humans . No need to go all sociological about it.

I really don't get why gendered labels would be applied to the ideal of the scientific method leading to better understanding of objective truths versus the rather messier reality of how things get done and interpreted in the real world.

' There is a particular worldview of science which has male roots and replicates historically masculine ways of knowing and experiencing the world. '

Is this statement a feminine, subjective, emotional one?

Or is it a masculine, objective, rational one?

If the former, by what method should I decide if the statement is... (not sure here) valid, important, useful, factual, true?

Because I kind of feel and think that statement is a rational argument that rational arguments are not rational.

Which confuses me.

Or maybe its just sexist tosh that 'objective, rational' is assigned as masculine and 'subjective, emotional' is assigned as feminine.

Yes.

Or maybe its just sexist tosh that 'objective, rational' is assigned as masculine and 'subjective, emotional' is assigned as feminine.

I think that this is what I am getting at. It's sexist tosh to say describing something as strong makes it gendered. Sperm are motile; ova are not. This does not somehow give the propert of being able to move a masculine quality.

The Egg and the Sperm by Emily Martin 1991 is open access - it looks at the way science books describe reproduction.

A paper published in 1991 is old, even outdated, in the biological sciences. What would be interesting is to redo such an analysis now, and find out what, if any, anthropomorphisms are assigned to gametes these days.

It may well be sexist tosh, but it is sexist tosh that has underpinned power hierarchies for many, many years. Such power hierarchies are gendered, otherwise there would be no inequality.

I say gendered because strength is not innate to men, it is a quality society has traditionally assigned to men.

1991 maybe old, but it is within many of our lifetimes. It is the languages and ideas we grew up with. It is the language and ideas our parents lived with.

almondpudding, the paper makes reference to absolute truth as distinct from socially constructed knowledge.

Social constructs can be rational, yes I agree, but it does not mean there is one absolute true way of understanding something.

You are correct to point out the diversity of feminist thought, generalisations are never good.

The paper in the OP, I mean

1991 maybe old, but it is within many of our lifetimes. It is the languages and ideas we grew up with. It is the language and ideas our parents lived with.

In part, this is why I think it would be important to review systematically, ideally using the same methodology as was used in that paper, the language and ideas that people are growing up with now. I wonder whether or not they have changed at all. I hope so. I would have thought so. Just because one grows up with a set of ideas, does not mean that one cannot grow up to challenge those ideas, and to write new text books, and to share new ideas with current and future generations.

Who does believe in absolute truth, on a practical level? This is a genuine question. The only people who I can think of whom I would put in this category, are deeply religious, and their belief is a matter of faith.

erinaceus, nowhere did I say that ideas cannot be challenged. But understanding where ideas come from and how they pervade our language and shape experience is part of that.

I think many people would still hold to the idea that science = truth.

I've thought about this quite a lot (mainly from earlier debate on here).
My view is science = fact (not always but it can) rather than science = truth.
So sperm are motile and eggs aren't. That's a fact. Doesn't matter how we describe it, those properties are fundamental.
I think the problem comes when some scientists equate hypothesis with fact or even worse truth and become dogmatic and closed minded.
I also think that other methods of analysis can be equally as valid and rigorous as science. I've started to refer to research instead of science now to try to recognise that.

I agree that understanding where ideas come from and how they pervade our language is part of knowing what ideas exist that one might consider challenging. At the same time, context is important. If one wishes to hold onto the idea that science represents some form of truth, then it might be useful to appreciate the extent to which in scientific terms 1991 is really quite a long time ago. Thus, the paper that you cite will represent a way of knowing as it was then, and not a way of knowing as it is now.

I think many people would still hold to the idea that science = truth.

Maybe this is true, that many people hold to the idea that science = truth. I had not really thought of it that way. The pace at which science moves, means that scientific knowledge represents a sort of time-bound truth, as in, a form of truth or knowledge that holds for a particular group of people at a particular time and in a particular place. It moves around, science does; what purports to be scientific knowledge is subjective, and political, quite a lot of the time. There was this Lewis Wolpert quote about it, which I heard him say once on Radio 4 and have been looking for the reference for ever since, about how the scientific method is pure, and scientists are not, something like that.

I also think that other methods of analysis can be equally as valid and rigorous as science. I've started to refer to research instead of science now to try to recognise that.

This. Or, it depends what it is that you call science. One or the other.

My opinion is that the sort-of-hierarchy of truth or knowledge, such as the hierarchy illustrated here (link to png, link to web page describing the infographic is here), is really quite misleading, when it comes to developing any sort of consensus understanding of how our surroundings are.

I tend to think of science as "good" in terms of reproducibility. If you re-ran the study, what is the probability that you would reach the same conclusion? What about if you varied the conditions? What truths might emerge then? If one adopts this stance, one does not find oneself limited to quantitative methods, or systematic reviews, or whatever, but can use whatever methods one chooses, as long as one records what it was that one did. The recording of the methods becomes important because it makes it more likely that the study will be reproducible, in terms of methodology if not in terms of findings.