On International Women's Day and Girls in Science, we wonder why there aren't more women scientists and if this day serves any purpose. Today, like every February 11th since 2015, is International Women's Day and Girls in Science, and while in other years we have talked about
wonderful women scientists who dared to defy stereotypes and improve the world with their contributions, and we have social networks and media full of interesting data about the
gender gap in STEM, at
eTítulo we want to give a different approach to the matter. We believe that, without a radical change (from the root) in the education system, celebrating this day is not very useful. Let's see why:
Let's do an experiment
First, we invite you to open the pages of any textbook or class notes and count the number of scientists, researchers, historians, philosophers, politicians, musicians, in short, authors, in any subject, who are cited as relevant. Now let's do the same, but counting the number of scientists, researchers, historians, philosophers, politicians, musicians... How do the numbers add up? The reality is very surprising, isn't it?
The self-fulfilling prophecy
Sociologist Robert K. Merton defined the self-fulfilling prophecy as follows:
The self-fulfilling prophecy is, at first, a “false” definition of the situation that awakens a new behavior that makes the original false conception of the situation “true”. What would happen if throughout our lives we had heard that we are not good at something? What if all the examples we have received throughout our education supported that information? What if the models we can identify with, the people we admire, our role models, reinforce the stereotype that there are fields reserved for certain people? What if our group of close people also follows the same trend because it is “normal”? What if we have assumed that there are natural things that are not? What they tell us and show us shapes us. Let's not fool ourselves, no one is completely immune to their own culture.
Pink and blue are just colors
Men and women have brains with equal abilities. Men and women have similar intellectual skills and abilities. We are not identical (especially because the brain is plastic and develops as we learn or experience and through the action of hormones), but we are equally capable of science. There has not yet been (nor will there ever be) a brain area that serves to perform mathematical calculations and is fueled by testosterone. It does not exist, so the gender gap in STEM careers cannot be explained by innate causes related to the loss of an allele in the embryonic period. The gender gap has to do with assuming sexist stereotypes and integrating them into our thinking with the label of “natural”. According to sociologist Margrit Eichler, androcentrism is perhaps the most widespread form of sexism and we can observe it when research or a study is done from the male point of view as if that were the only valid, relevant, and therefore extrapolatable view to the entire human gender. Ginopia (invisibility of the feminine) and misogyny (hatred or rejection of what is considered feminine) are the two most extreme manifestations of androcentrism.
Those were different times
Yes and no. Our textbooks talk about men because women did not study before. Or did they study but were not recognized? As Virginia Woolf said, “in most of history,
Anon was a woman” and furthermore, many of the works, studies, compositions, writings, and discoveries signed by a man are also works carried out by women (or with their collaboration) that their husbands, brothers, or colleagues “enrolled” without hesitation. Of course, there were more men who dominated all academic fields, but women who tried to break free from the role assigned to them by culture were also silenced (to learn more about these “small incidents” that have erased women from history and still hinder their day-to-day lives today, we invite you to read a book that was awarded the Royal Society's Best Science Book of the Year:
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado). Philosopher Ana de Miguel in
Ética para Celia makes a very enlightening (and amusing) reflection on the worn-out excuse of “it was a different time” when she talks about the theory of evolution:
I don't think the scientific community today dares to argue that “it was normal at that time” to think that way about women. At that time, what was not normal was to say that we came from monkeys, but it became normal with the evidence provided. When Darwin lived and published his book, women gave more than “evidence” of their abilities; moreover, they were fighting in the streets for their rights. But what criterion of “abnormality” do those who continue to hold the argument of “at that time” use? The reality is that Darwin had many prejudices against women and was a perfect ignoramus in his conception of them. Like so many male and female scientists, being very good in a specific topic does not exempt you from being ignorant in another. What matters is the future, and I think we can and should explain this in high schools: that Darwin's scientific spirit was limited to “his own.” Thus, with this simple explanation, girls and boys would know better where we come from, apart from the monkey. We come from patriarchy, and this is also not debatable, it is science. Well, but not enough
Even so, if we want to play at believing in an uncritical way that supposed past in which women existed only within households, dedicated to taking care of children and household chores so that their husbands, the true intellectuals, could dedicate themselves to science and lead humanity towards a better world, we would still have to ask ourselves: are all our textbooks a compendium of studies carried out before 1900? Does our university make an effort to show us current work? If, as is logical, the answer to the first question is
no and to the second is
yes, and when we have done the experiment of counting the authors cited in the syllabus of our degree, the count has not been more or less equal, then there is no choice but to ask another question: Why are we surprised when we see that science careers have the lowest percentage of women? And another question just in case: Is it enough to celebrate one day a year to vindicate the role of women in science and encourage girls to study science? Fighting against a stereotype is extremely difficult, so welcome to International Women's Day and Girls in Science, but much more is needed. We need to understand that science must be truly scientific and that, to be so, it must start studying women and men of all origins, cultures, conditions, and social classes equally.
The others
Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in her book
The Second Sex, said that “humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself, but in relation to him, he does not consider her as an autonomous being […] woman is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute; she is the Other.” If we base ourselves only on what the authors we know tell us and take into account the results of the serious research that defines our knowledge (“universal knowledge”), most of which have been carried out by white middle-class men, how are we going to close the gender gap if women, their abilities, their interests, and their reality are systematically ignored or considered irrelevant? How will we bring scientific study closer to women if they are “the Other”? It is clear that a scientific theory cannot be considered valid if it ignores the material reality that surrounds it; if it can only be generalized to a very small percentage of the population. For science, if we are not white American or English men from the middle class, existing is already going against the current, and therefore the educational model must stop being androcentric and start telling women the truth and to girls: that their abilities are adequate and never inferior due to their sex. But more important than telling is showing, and that is why it is not about convincing women to enroll in science careers one day a year, but about education not reproducing the stereotypes that hinder women's access to scientific degrees and filling academic content with female role models who can inspire women and remind men that knowledge does not belong to them and that humanity is made up of both sexes. Let female scientists be seen and let them be seen well 365 days a year. Let's recover history as it really was so that it can be told to everyone, and may girls and women never again have to study in textbooks that only talk about “the man” and the discoveries made by men about men.
