Londa Schiebinger
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender and intersectionality in science, technology, and medicine, she is the founding Director of . She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden, and from Universitat de València, Spain. She was the first woman in the field of History to win the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1999.
Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger has analyzed what she calls the three “fixes”:
"Fix the Numbers of Women" focuses on increasing the underrepresented groups participating in science and engineering; "Fix the Institutions" promotes equity in careers through structural change in research organizations; and "Fix the Knowledge" or "gendered innovations" stimulates excellence in science and technology by integrating sex, gender, and intersectional analysis into research design. As a result of this work, she was recruited in a national search to direct Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, a post she held from 2004 to 2010. Her job was to promote and support research on women and gender across Stanford University—from engineering, to philosophy, to medicine and business. In 2010 and 2014, she presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology. The UN Resolutions of March 2011 call for “gender-based analysis... in science and technology” and for the integrations of a “gender perspective in science and technology curricula.” Again in 2022, she prepared the background paper for the United Nations 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women’s priority theme, Innovation and Technological Change, and Education in the Digital Age for Achieving Gender Equality and The Empowerment of all Women and Girls.
In 2013 she presented the Gendered Innovations project at the European Parliament. Gendered Innovations was also presented to the South Korean National Assembly in 2014. In 2015, Schiebinger addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific, a meeting devoted to gendered innovations in research. She speaks globally on gendered innovations—from Brazil to Japan, and her work was recently presented in a Palace Symposium for the King and Queen of the Netherlands at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. In 2018-2020, she led a European Commission Expert Group to produce
Schiebinger's work is highly interdisciplinary. In recognition of her creative work across academic fields of research, she was awarded the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award in the Stanford Medical School in 2010, the Linda Pollin Women's Heart Health Leadership Award from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 2015, the Impact of Gender/Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies Pioneer Award in 2016, and the American Medical Women's Association President's Recognition Award in 2017. She has held prestigious Fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at the Stanford Humanities Center. She served as an advisor to the Berlin University Alliance, 2022/23.
Major works
Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment (2009-)
Schiebinger coined the term “gendered innovations” in 2005. In 2009, she launched Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment, a field of research and methodology, at Stanford University. The project was joined by the European Commission in 2011, by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2012. Gendered Innovations received funding from the European Commission again in 2018/20 and from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the system inherits bias. In other words, past bias is perpetuated into the future, even when governments, universities, and companies, such as Google, themselves have implemented policies to foster equality. The goal of Gendered Innovations is to provide methods of analysis to help scientists and engineers can get the research right from the beginning.Schiebinger has also worked to create infrastructure for gender-responsible science across the three pillars of academic infrastructure: funding agencies, peer-reviewed journals, and universities. She advises funding agencies, including the German Science Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation, on policies for integrating sex, gender, and diversity analysis into research. She and colleagues published guidelines for editors of medical journals to evaluate sex and gender analysis in manuscripts submitted for publication. She also seeks to help universities integrate social analysis into core natural science and engineering curricula. Finally, she advises industry on develop products that meet the needs of complex and diverse user groups.
''Has Feminism Changed Science?'' (1999)
Schiebinger's book, Has Feminism Changed Science?, has been split into three sections: 'Women in Science', 'Gender in the Cultures of Science', and 'Gender in the Substance of Science'. Throughout the book, she describes the factors that led to the inequality between male and female in the science field. In addition, she gave examples of different types of women in the society. An important idea brought up in the book was the private versus the public, where the private sphere is seen as the domain of women and public sphere as an area refers for men. Another important point she brought up was that the idea of including women in the fields of science does not mean that the sciences will adopt a more feminist view point. A simple increase in the number of women in a given field does not change the culture of that field. The construction of gender and science is a cycle in that ideas of gender are brought to the table already when practicing science and can inform what evidence people look for or areas they choose to study, and that whatever is found then influences theories of gender. The various contradictions shown through the achievements and silencing of women in science throughout history shows how nature and the society can influence gender and science. Schiebinger not only addresses the gender in the context of science, she also describes the feminism is changed through the history and culture. It is important to note that the book is written from a Western perspective and that the culture she discusses is that of the Western World, and in many cases, more specifically, the United States.The first of the book's three sections takes a look at the impacts of some of the first women to be known to have participated in science, such as Christine de Pizan and Marie Curie. The section also examines the numerical count of women in the various fields of science in academics in the late 20th century United States, as well as looking at the breakdown of other factors, such as pay rates and the level of degree held, in relation to gender. The section goes on to theorize that the cultural reinforcement of gender roles may play a factor as to why there are fewer women in science.
The second section, 'Gender in the Cultures of Science', argues that science has been gendered as being a masculine field and that women report a distaste for the excessive competition fostered by academic science. The section also argues that the splitting of gender roles in personal life, where women still take on a majority of domestic responsibilities, may be a reason that is hindering women in scientific fields from accomplishing more.
The third section of the book, 'Gender in the substance of Science' details the perspectives that women have brought to fields such as medicine, primatology, archeology, biology, and physics. In fact, Schiebinger states that as of the writing of the book, that women earned nearly 80 percent of all Ph.D.s in primatology, and yet, despite this, having a large number of women scientists in a field does not necessarily lead to a change in the assumptions of science, or the culture of science.
''The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science'' (1989)
Using a theory coined by François Poullain de la Barre, Schiebinger's prize-winning historical work focuses on eighteenth-century history of science and medicine. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science is one of the first scholarly works to investigate women and gender in the origins of modern Western science. The Mind Has No Sex? exposed the privileged first-born twins of modern science: the myth of the natural body, and the myth of value-neutral knowledge. As Schiebinger demonstrates, the claim of science to objectivity was the linchpin holding together a system that rendered women's exclusion from science invisible, and made this exclusion appear fair and just. She argues that women were ready and willing to take their place in science in the early modern period in astronomy, physics, mathematics, anatomy, and botany. But it was not to be.Schiebinger first identifies these women and the structures of early modern European society that allowed them a place in science. Of note is her work on German women working in guild-like sciences—Maria Sibylla Merian and Maria Margarethe Winkelmann. Schiebinger uncovered the story of Winkelmann, a noted astronomer, and described important paths not taken with respect to women in science in the eighteenth century. Winkemann, for example, applied to be the astronomer of the royal academy of sciences in Berlin when her husband died in 1710. Despite the great philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s support, she was rejected. With that, the door slammed on women astronomers for the next several centuries.
Not only were women, such as Merian and Winkelmann, excluded from modern science but something called “femininity” was also excluded. The best known part of this book is Schiebinger's chapter on “Skeletons in the Closet,” where she tells the story of the first illustrations of female skeletons in European anatomy. Schiebinger argues that it was the attempt to define the position of women in European society at large and in science in particular that spawned the first representations of the female skeleton. Great debate arose over the particular strengths and weakness of these female skeletons, focusing in particular on depictions of the skull as a measure of intelligence and pelvis as a measure of womanliness. After the 1750s, the anatomy of sex difference provided a kind of bedrock upon which to build natural relations between the sexes. The seemingly superior build of the male body was cited to justify his social role. At the same time, the particularities of the female body justified her natural role as wife and mother. Women were not to be men's equals in science and society, but their complements.
This internationally acclaimed book has been translated into Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, and Greek.