The Role of Science in the Struggle for
Equality
Janet A. Kourany
In the World
*In most countries there is a greater preference for male children than
female children. In
*Domestic violence against women is common in all regions and cultures.
For example, in the years 1986 to 1993, 60 percent of Chilean women, 59 percent
of Japanese women, 46 percent of Ugandan women, 41 percent of Belgian women,
27-36 percent of Canadian women, and 25 percent of Norwegian women reported
physical abuse by a male partner. Concluded the 1989 United Nations report
"Violence Against Women in the Family": "In the end analysis, it
is perhaps best to conclude that violence against wives is a function of the
belief, fostered in all cultures, that men are superior and that the women they
live with are their possessions or chattels that they can treat as they wish
and as they consider appropriate."
*While rape is an ever-present fear of women worldwide, most of the
world's rape laws conceive of rape as an offence against men--either the
fathers of unmarried women or the husbands of married ones. Similarly, in war
rape is regularly used by one side's soldiers as the ultimate humiliation and
punishment of the men on the other side. For example, in
*According to the United Nations, women worldwide almost always hold the
less prestigious and lower-paying jobs and do most of the household labor and
child care. While the gender pay gap varies from country to country (e.g.,
women employed outside of the home in Japan earn 51 percent of what men earn,
while they earn 71 percent in the United Kingdom and 96 percent in Sri Lanka),
women all over the world fare worse than men by almost all economic measures.
Of the 1.3 billion people in poverty, 70 percent are women.
In the
*Every 15 seconds a woman is battered. Indeed, battery is the leading
cause of injury to adult women. More than half of all married women will
experience some form of violence from their spouses during marriage, and more
than one-third will be battered repeatedly. But women who leave their batterers
are at a 75 percent greater risk of being killed by them as those who stay.
Domestic violence kills as many women every five years as the total
number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
*One out of every eight adult women has been the victim of forcible rape,
usually by someone she knows, but 98 percent of rape victims never see the
arrest or prosecution of their attackers. More than 30 percent of rape victims
develop post-traumatic stress disorder, around 30 percent develop major
depression, more than 30 percent contemplate suicide, and more than 10 percent
actually attempt suicide. The
*Standards of feminine beauty (and thereby, feminine acceptability) are
remarkably detrimental to women's health. For example, the current emphasis on
thinness has encouraged eating disorders (it is estimated that 5 to 10 million
females suffer from some type of eating disorder), the current emphasis on
large breasts has encouraged breast implants (with attendant risks ranging from
leaking and rupture of the implant and loss of sensation in the breast to
autoimmune disorders and fibrositis), and the current emphasis on tanned skin
has encouraged prolonged sun-bathing and use of tanning salons (creating a
skin-cancer epidemic as well as premature aging of women's skin).
*Even though women earn higher grades than men (in the same classes) in
both high school and college, women consistently receive lower scores on
standardized tests such as the SAT, PSAT, and ACT (which, therefore, fail in
their mission of predicting scholastic success). Among the consequences are
fewer scholarships awarded to women.
*In virtually every profession--business, higher education, medicine,
law, sports--women earn less money and achieve lower status than men. For
example, a major study published in 1996 by the National Science Foundation
found that women's median income from all scientific disciplines
combined--mathematics, computer specialties, psychology, the social sciences,
physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering--was 78 percent of men's income.
And only 60 percent of the women held tenure or tenure-track positions,
compared with 77 percent of the men.
*In 1997 more than 40 percent of families composed of women raising
children on their own had incomes below the poverty line (the rate was even
higher for African-American and
After "three waves" of feminist activism in
the
Science
can be a powerful ally in the fight for equality for women. What other
institution than science, after all, can expose society's prejudice against
women for what it is? What other institution than science can both justify the
replacement of this prejudice with a more adequate perspective, and also move
society to accept the replacement? For the most part, however, science has done
more to perpetuate and add to the problems women confront than to solve them.
For example, psychology's central assertion, historically, has been that women
are inferior to men--intellectually, socially, sexually, and even morally. And
biology historically has set for itself the task of explaining the basis and
origin of this inferiority in terms of what is basically unchangeable--biology.
This has had the effect of justifying--and thus, helping to perpetuate--women's
inferior educational and employment opportunities as well as women's inferior
positions in the family, government, and other social institutions.
Consider
women's intellectual capacity, for example. For centuries it was claimed that
women are intellectually inferior to men, and for centuries the basis for such
inferiority was sought in biology. In the seventeenth century, women's brains
were claimed to be too "cold" and "soft" to sustain
rigorous thought. In the late eighteenth century, the female cranial cavity was
claimed to be too small to hold a powerful brain. In the late nineteenth century,
the exercise of women's brains was claimed to be damaging to women's
reproductive health--was claimed, in fact, to shrivel women's ovaries. In the
twentieth century, the less "lateralization" (hemispheric
specialization) of women's brains was claimed to make women inferior in
visuospatial skills (including mathematical skills). And the research
continues. During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, scientists claimed that
women's brains are smaller than men's, even after taking into account average
differences in body size, that the corpus callosum (the mass of nerve fibers
connecting the right and left cerebral hemispheres) is more slender in women's
brains than in men's, that the splenium (the region of the corpus callosum
found at the back of the head) is more bulbous in women's brains, more tubular
in men's brains, and so on. And these differences were again being linked to
differences in intellectual capacity (that people with smaller brains have
lower IQ test scores, that greater splenial bulbosity means less lateralization,
and hence, less visual-spatial ability, and hence, less mathematical ability,
etc.). And the research still continues.
But
fields like psychology and biology are not the only source of the view that
women are inferior to men--demonstrably inferior, scientifically
demonstrable. The historical sciences, too, have supported this view of women's
inferiority through their mode of representation of the past, a mode of
representation marked by heroic exploits and spectacular accomplishments of men
counterpoised with lackluster doings and non-accomplishments of women. Consider
archaeology. Archaeologists "have contributed to and perpetuated certain
limited and ethnocentric (i.e. sexist) views on women and gender
relations." Take, for example, what archaeologists recognize as the
"hallmarks" of human evolution--tools, fire, hunting, food-storage,
composite tools, language, agriculture, metallurgy, and so forth. Most of these
hallmarks of human-ness are associated with technological control of the environment
(technological control, after all, has always defined the "Ages of
Man": Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age), and all of these
hallmarks of human-ness have until very recently been at least tacitly
associated with males (e.g., "The most visible activity in the
archaeological record is stone tool fabrication, an exclusively male
endeavor." etc., etc.). As a result, male-as-active, instrumental (as in
man-the-toolmaker), male-as-provider, male-as-innovator,
male-as-quintessentially-human, are made to seem natural, inevitable. At the
same time, female-as-outside-the-domain
of-technological-innovation-and-control, female-as-not-active (that is,
passive) and less-than-quintessentially-human, are made to seem natural and
inevitable as well, and thus capable of explaining (and justifying) the gender
inequalities we still find today.
Other
scientific fields perpetuate or add to the problems women confront, but in
different ways than by documenting women's inferiority. Consider economics, for
example. The central concept in current mainstream economics
("neoclassical" economics) is that of "the market," a place
where rational, autonomous, self-interested agents with stable preferences
interact for the purposes of exchange. These agents may be individual persons or
collectives of various kinds, such as corporations, labor unions, and
governments. The agents, in either case, exchange goods or services, with money
facilitating the transactions; and the tool of choice for analyzing these
transactions is mathematics. Indeed, high status is assigned in economics to
formal mathematical models of rational choice. What tends to remain invisible,
however, or inadequately treated, are women.
Take
women's experiences in the family. Since the focus in mainstream economics is on
the "public" realm (industry and government), "private"
collectives such as the family tend to get scant attention. And since the
prototype for economic agents is individual masculine persons, when families are
attended to, they are most commonly treated as if they were individuals
themselves, with all their internal workings a "black box." Or they
are treated as if they had a dominant "head" who makes all the
decisions in accordance with "his" own (perhaps altruistic) preferences.
Either way of treating the family, of course, leaves women invisible as agents
in their own right in the family. More recently, however, families have been
treated by some economists as (cooperative or noncooperative) collective
decision-making partnerships. But since, here as elsewhere in mainstream
economics, the focus is on simplified mathematical models portraying the
interactions of rational, autonomous agents, these collective decision-making
partnerships end by being models of marital couples. Children, not yet
fully rational, certainly not autonomous, and threatening to the tractability
of the models, are either conceptualized as "consumption goods" or
not conceptualized at all. Left invisible, therefore, are women in the family
as care-givers, as agents who historically have borne the bulk of the
responsibility for the nurturance and education of children, and the care of
the sick and elderly. The upshot is that women's needs and priorities in
families are left invisible, and with them, the impact on women of public policies:
Any model of the
effect of price changes, or taxes or transfers on family behavior must,
implicitly or explicitly, rely on a theory of how families function. Beyond the
social scientists' need to understand, lies the policy-makers' need to make
wise policies. Better knowledge about what is happening in the family could
improve policies related to child poverty and child support, household-sector
savings rates, welfare and job training, the tax treatment of dependents and
family-related expenses, social security, elder care, healthcare, and
inheritance taxation, to name a few areas.
And worse knowledge about what is
happening in the family--which is what we've got--does not aid policies
related to children and poverty and welfare and job training and elder care and
healthcare--and at the center of it all, women.
Of
course, science has also produced much of the available information regarding
the problems of inequality women confront, and scientists have provided some of
the wherewithal for solving those problems. Psychologists, for example, have
explored at least some of women's "inferiority"-- lack of
assertiveness, low self-esteem, poor self-confidence, under-estimation and
under-valuation of achievements--and have explained this inferiority in terms of
women's oppression, and anthropologists have provided abundant evidence to show
that such inferiority is not universal. Psychologists have also devised
"compensatory socialization" type therapy and various self-help type
programs, as well as "public health" type approaches (e.g., for
domestic violence), in response. But much of this work has been done by
feminist scientists on the margins of their fields. This again shows that
science can be a powerful ally in the fight for equality for women, but for the
most part has not been.
And
this is wrong. Or so it would seem. After all, society--both women and
men--ultimately pays for science. And society is deeply affected by science:
science shapes our lives, not least of all by shaping our consciousness of ourselves.
As Heschel pointed out a long time ago: "The truth of a theory about man
is either creative or irrelevant, but never merely descriptive. A theory about
the stars never becomes a part of the being of the stars. A theory about man
enters his consciousness, determines his self-understanding, and modifies his
very existence. The image of a man affects the nature of man.... We become what
we think of ourselves." It would seem, therefore, that science should be
deeply responsive to the needs of society. But surely, one of the needs of
society--of both women and men--is justice, and equality for women is one
aspect of that justice. It would seem, therefore, that science should be an
ally in the fight for equality for women.
But if science should be an ally in the
fight for equality for women, in what sorts of ways should it be an ally?
Consider four suggestions, two related to research funding and two to the
evaluation of that research. First, funding for research of interest and
benefit to women should be significantly increased, so that scientists are
encouraged to pursue such research, while funding for research that neglects
women's interests and needs should be markedly reduced. This is, for example,
what happened in
How useful are these suggestions? Doubtless
many would object that the funding suggestions--linking funding to research of
interest and benefit to women and to research supporting egalitarian views--are
antithetical to science as an impartial search for truth, all truth. But
science does not impartially pursue all truth, nor can it: there is just so
much time and money for research, and choices must be made, and are made. Of
course, our objectors will continue, such choices should be made on purely
"scientific" grounds, purely "epistemic" grounds: the most
interesting, the most important research, from a purely scientific perspective,
or the research that will have the greatest impact on its field, or the most
immediately doable research, should be the research that is funded, else the
continued epistemic success of science will be jeopardized. But why? It is far
from clear that this is the way decisions are now made in our
"epistemically successful" science. Indeed, most current research is
paid for by the military; or by the pharmaceutical industry, the oil industry, the
chemical industry, or biotechnology firms--or by the government on behalf of
these industries, in response to lobbying by them. And not surprisingly, most
current research is tailored to the goals of these funders. Thus we have, for
example, agricultural research that revolves around pesticides, herbicides,
growth hormones, and other petrochemicals, of little help to smaller, poorer
farmers around the world; and medical research that revolves around expensive
high-tech treatments and cures rather than the less lucrative preventive
knowledge that would help so many more people. In short, "purely
epistemic" reasons for funding function a lot less frequently in science
than we have been led to expect, and other kinds of reasons--for example,
money--function a lot more frequently. And epistemically successful science
goes on in spite of it. So funding linked to support for egalitarian views, and
the like, need not pose any insurmountable problems. And if, as I have
suggested, science should be an ally in the fight for equality for women, then
such funding might be a plausible feature of such a science.
Consider, now, the two evaluative
suggestions--linking sexist and androcentric elements in research, and
inegalitarian conceptions, to negative evaluation, and egalitarian conceptions
to positive evaluation. What can be said in support of these suggestions?
Certainly, a variety of other evaluative criteria are already recognized by
scientists--for example, simplicity, fruitfulness, empirical adequacy, and the
like. So why not the criteria proposed as well? Consider what justifies these
other evaluative criteria--simplicity, for example. Will it be said that
simplicity is pragmatically justified, because it renders whatever has it more
easily put to use? But the egalitarian feature of a conception is pragmatically
justified as well, because it renders the conception more capable of moving
society toward an important social goal. Will it be said that simplicity is
epistemically justified, because it renders whatever has it more highly
supported by the same amount of evidence? But the egalitarian feature of a
conception is epistemically justified as well, because it renders the
conception more morally defensible. Will it be said that simplicity is
justified as an aesthetic ideal? But egalitarianism is justified as a moral
ideal. And why should aesthetics count in science, but not morality?
I
have been dealing with the question of the role of science in the struggle for equality
for women. This question cries out for attention, since it concerns the
well-being of at least half the population. Indeed, it concerns the well-being
of a good deal more of the population than that. For the terrain I have covered
has analogues pertaining to race, class, sexual orientation, and other
struggles for social justice (e.g., If science can be a powerful ally in the
fight for equality for African-Americans, should it be, and in what sorts of
ways? etc.). The question I have considered here is ultimately, therefore, a
very large one, and I have barely begun to investigate it. But if I have
succeeded in motivating at least some interest in it without at the same time
stirring up the threatening demons of Lysenko and Soviet science and Nazi science,
my goal in this paper will have been richly fulfilled.
This article is a version of a paper given at
a Conference on "Value-Free Science: Ideal or Illusion?", Center for
Ethics and Values in the Sciences,