The lack of representation of women in technological fields has and continues to be a major issue we’ve discussed in class. Despite numerous cultural pushes, women remain locked out of science for the most part. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in women that makes them worse at science, so it must be for societal reasons that they stay out of tech. Obviously there are cultural assumptions about which gendered attributes work in scientific fields, but I also think Schiebinger made a very potent point when she discussed how science and scientific thought were developed by men, which has created implicit bias. I think we need to look over the concepts we so easily accepted because they made sense culturally (like the heroic sperm metaphor) and work to ungender them. Ideally we would restructure all of science and redefine what technology is, but I don’t think that’s possible. Until then, maybe looking more critically at our assumptions – both cultural and scientific – and trying to untangle our biases from them.
