Research Associate, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand
2019 to 2020
Research Fellow
Persistent Biological Myths: Fifty Years of Creating a Feminist Approach to Science and Technology Studies (STS), 1969-2019
By highlighting issues of race and racism as well as sex and gender, this book project will explore a network of women scientists in the United States in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, who made important contributions to the understanding of gender bias in science. Ruth Hubbard, the first woman to achieve tenure in biology at Harvard in 1973, Rita Arditti with Science for the People and the Sociobiology Study Group, Evelyn Fox Keller and Evelynn Hammonds at MIT, the founders of the Genes and Gender Collective, Beverley Smith, Dorothy Burnham, Anne Fausto-Sterling and Banu Subramaniam all contributed to the growing literature and awareness related to scientific sexism and racism and a feminist critique of science. My research will follow the lives of these scientists, and their interaction with each other within a changing social and political context. It will shed light on aspects of the history of feminist STS and on efforts to promote women in science over the past half century.