This proposal seeks to draw lessons from various facets of the ongoing debate on the under- representation of women in science, a debate raging since January 2005 and including four major university presidents, dozens of academics, many students, various activists for gender equality, and the media. This project will entail systematic interviewing of a wide spectrum of participants on their role in the debate and their understanding of the issues at stake. The project will pay special attention to the absence from this debate of pertinent findings from historical and contemporary scholarship on women in science. The aim is to learn why the debate erupted when it did; why it will not go away; how can the public debate make contributions to the policy of improving gender equality in science; and how to ensure that past, present, and future scholarship on women in science become routinely accessible to decision makers and public debaters in an effective, engaging, and ongoing manner.
The project aims to bridge the gap between the actual availability of extensive scholarship on women in science in the last two decades, and its lack of representation as a crucial resource in public debates and routine policy making. The project contends that this gap is responsible to a large extent for delaying the impact of well meaning initiatives in public policy, as well as public understanding of why gender equity in science continues to lag despite efforts to address it.
The project will extract major themes from a wide range of participants in this debate by means of participant observation at organized debating events, conferences, and organizational initiatives, oral history interviews, and analysis of published literature on the topic. The PI will bring those themes to public attention by organizing a AAAS session on the topic, by circulating the lessons emanating from this debate in the form of a collective volume that will synthesize the myriad issues that surfaced in the course of the debate, and by informing the policy agenda for gender equality in science in the 21st Century with the authentic voices of a broader range of concerned participants. The project is both timely and time dependent. Many conferences and debates have recently taken place in response to the comments of Harvard President Larry Summers, and now is the time for the PI to take advantage of the opportunity to examine these issues.
The intellectual merits of the proposal include a gaining a better understanding of how interdisciplinary scholarship on women in science (by historians, social scientists, gender theorists, scientists, policy analysts, biographers) affects, or fails to affect, public opinion and structural changes in science. The broader impact of the project stems from its ability to detect unexpected obstacles to the diffusion and application of findings from basic academic research on women in science in the civic and policy arenas. Yet another source of broad impact stems form the project's enabling activity in highlighting a multitude of voices in and out of this debate, so as to enrich the sources of input into the critical issue of gender equality in both science and society.
