Whose STEM? Disrupting the Gender Crisis Within STEM

Abstract

This article challenges implicit understandings of scientific inquiry and gender within contemporary responses to the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Failing to recognize the gendered history of science, and thus STEM disciplines, we argue that much research and curricular interventions are overly invested in simply providing women institutional access to or creating feminized environments within STEM. Such shortsighted analyses lead to processes we term gender washing and painting pink, both of which diminish the possibilities for meaningful engagement with gendered ontologies within scientific inquiry. Working from important and diverse strands of feminist theory, we suggest that serious considerations of women and STEM must include a framework that critically engages the entanglement of gender and science. We conclude that a focused and intentional analysis of gender and scientific inquiry, that opposes constructions of STEM as fixed entities to simply be imparted or made accessible to women, has important implications for understanding science as a (post) human endeavor.

Notes

1. In this article, we focus mainly on the question of STEM through various feminist theorists. At the onset, we want to recognize that queer theory has a vital role to play in furthering the issue of diversity in STEM and, more important, in disrupting the gender binary (woman/man). However, given the overly gendered conversation in STEM (woman/man; girls/boys) we spend most of our time arguing within feminist thought.

2. We have chosen the women/girls phrasing to indicate that the concerns regarding women in STEM rests upon sociocultural assumptions of girlhood and the educational interventions that have come to be known as girls in STEM.

3. It is important to note that these findings regarding the problematic working conditions within STEM industries related to women are congruent with the findings found in the first and second iterations of the “Queer in STEM” survey (http://www.queerstem.org/). This survey has captured the conditions of the LGBTQA community in STEM (Mattheis, Nelson, Crus-Ramirez de Arellano, & Yoder, 2017).

4. We note that, although theoretically speaking, feminist thought has moved well beyond the binary of woman/man to include a far more complex discussion of gender, the general educational and cultural interventions that are repeatedly in vogue have shifted very little from this hegemonic binary. Thus, this section returns to the binary construction of gender to talk though and back at these cultural constructions.