Fox in the Henhouse
A fascinating story about Evelyn Fox Keller, an MIT scientist and professor of the history of science who has written extensively about the role of gender in the sciences. (For some reason, it's a hot topic now....)
Key quote:
"Let me make clear from the outset," she wrote in "Reflections," "that the issue that requires discussion is not, or at least not simply, the relative absence of women in science." Women are relatively absent in almost all important intellectual and creative endeavors, she said. But few of these endeavors, she went on, "bear so unmistakably the connotation of masculine in the very nature of the activity."
"To both scientists and their public, scientific thought is male thought," she continued. "Hard" objectivity itself is identified with masculinity, she wrote, and "soft" subjectivity is identified with femininity. "What would it mean for science if it were otherwise?"
I think that's worth pondering without any commentary from me.....
