Rather than taking an historical approach to address the status of women and minorities in science, we began with contemporary issues and then traced those issues backwards to see whether and how we might find connections and differences among the current status of women in science, the position of prominent female scientists of the past century, and nineteenth-century considerations of women and education.
The following articles prompted our initial discussion of the status of women in science:
• (then Harvard President) Lawrence Summers’s remarks about women in high-level positions in science, and his follow-up letter to Harvard faculty;3
• Ben Barres’s “Does Gender Matter?” a critical response to Summers’s position, published in Nature. Barres’s position opposes Summers’s and was particularly intriguing because he writes as a transgendered (female to male) scientist, one who has experience in the field as both a man and a woman;
• Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold’s “Nepotism and Sexism in Peer Review,” an exploration of gender bias in the peer review process in science.
Mary Barbercheck’s “Mixed Messages: Men and Women in Advertisements in Science” served as the foundation for an assignment that required students to research, analyze, and discuss potential impli- cations of contemporary media portrayals of scientists.
Barbercheck’s article focuses on her two-year study (1995–1997) of images of scientists that have appeared in advertisements in Science. The study was aimed at determining whether the images of scientists rein- forced the gender stereotypes of the broader society. Barbercheck specifically identified Science as her research focus because the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an organization that has clearly acknowledged and promoted efforts to engage more women and minorities in science professions, publishes it. The results revealed that the images of scientists she examined did not support the emphasis by the AAAS on diversity in science. Rather, Barbercheck’s results revealed that the advertisements in Science main- tained traditional stereotypes of women and that women appear much less frequently in regular issues than they do in special issues focusing on women, minorities, and/or diversity in science (120). Barbercheck notes at the article’s conclusion:
The most significant message of this study may be that there is more cultural content between the covers of Science than we would care to acknowledge. The change of images in scientific advertising to more positive ones for women and people of color may help us slowly change our stereotypes about men, women, race and science, and therefore make a contribution to the attainment of greater diversity in science. (130)
Our “Images of Scientists: What Do Scientists Look Like?” group assignment required students to collect and analyze a hundred images of scientists conveyed via a variety of contemporary sources. Each of six groups was assigned a different source to examine: (1) television and movies, (2) popular science magazines, (3) professional science jour- nals, (4) the Internet, (5) health and fitness magazines, and (6) text- books. The requirements of the assignment mirrored Barbercheck’s work, including developing a hypothesis and methods for the research; collecting data on race and ethnicity of the images of scientists they found; characterizing the images of scientists conveyed and analyzing those characteristics by race and gender; and finally, discussing the
implications and significance of their findings. Each group submitted a formal report and gave a ten-minute presentation on its research and findings to the class. Because Barbercheck’s article provided a good foundation for considering the importance and significance of media messages as well as a useful model for the report, students were able to effectively undertake a new form of research and report writing.
As a whole, the project helped students think critically about the messages and implications of current media representations of scien- tists; they were surprised by their findings because they expected to find equitable and diverse images, having assumed that important changes had taken place since Barbercheck undertook her research. In addition the project provided the opportunity to address other important and unexpected issues related to diversity.
Some students had difficulty writing about and reporting their find- ings because they believed that the process of identifying and acknowl- edging different races was in itself racist. Their reactions provided the opportunity to discuss the distinction between race and racism as well as some of the advantages and drawbacks of the thinking that underlies claims such as “I do not see race. Everyone is the same to me.” In other cases, projects raised the opportunity to discuss (a) the implications of the language used in analysis of race (some groups’ interchangeable use of “colored people” and “people of color”); (b) the thinking that informed decisions about how to group images for the racial analysis (“white” and “nonwhite” versus expanding the analysis to include white, African American, Asian, Latino/a, etc.); and (c) the differences implied in or by specific racial identifiers used (“African” and “African American”). We also discussed difficulties associated with the accurate assessment of the racial identity of individuals, including multiracial individuals, based solely on appearance. These discussions set the stage for future discussions of the concept of race, both as a social and a sci- entific concept.
In some instances the fact that few scientists could be found in spe- cific media, such as health magazines, led to the opportunity to take the research in a slightly different direction and consider why that might be the case. In the time between assigning this project and students’ com- pletion of it, we investigated the role and status of women in science over time, including:
• Rosalind Franklin’s pivotal role in the discovery of the structure of DNA (her data were used to produce the model), which involved an examination of the original Nature articles on the double helix struc- ture and a study of the differences in portrayals of Franklin in
Watson’s The Race for the Double Helix and Maddox’s The Dark Lady of
DNAas well as movies based on these books;4and
• Nineteenth-century scientific views on the education of women as discussed by Janice Law Trecker in “Sex, Science and Education” and Nancy Tuana in “Brains or Wombs: Sex and Education.”
At this point in the course, students had encountered an enormous amount of evidence for discrimination in science. Throughout these discussions we referred back to earlier readings to reveal just how much has changed and to consider whether traces of past views on women inform the current situation.