Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Purdue University Press e-books OLD Purdue University Press 1-1-2000 Women succeeding in the sciences: Theories and practices across disciplines Jody Bart Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/press_ebooks Bart, Jody , " Women succeeding in the sciences: Theories and practices across disciplines " (2000). Purdue University Press e-books OLD. Paper 15. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/press_ebooks/15 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Women’s Studies / Education B ar t The fact that many women have trouble succeeding in the “hard” Women Succeeding in the Sciences Succeeding Women sciences, mathematics, and engineering is well established. This interdisciplinary collection of essays breaks new ground by refo- cusing the discussion on the remedies. WOMEN Women Succeeding in the Sciences gathers together a wide variety of specialists—from philosophy, sociology, and education succeeding to physicists, biologists, and mathematicians—who examine what people have done, and are doing, to foster success, and how the voices of women scientists can enhance our knowledge in these fields. in the All told, these persuasively argued essays help bridge the conceptual gap between the sciences and the humanities that Sciences seems endemic at all colleges and universities in the United Theories and Practices Across Disciplines States, and the gender gap that has denied us successful women in the sciences. edited by Jody Bart Jody Bart is an assistant professor of philosophy and director of Women and Gender Studies at Sweet Briar College. Her work fo- cuses on feminist political thought and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. P ISBN 1-55753-122-6 ur due > Purdue University Press ,!7IB5F7-fdbccd!:t;K;k;K;k West Lafayette, Indiana Purdue University Press Women Succeeding in the Sciences Women Succeeding in the Sciences Theories and Practices across Disciplines edited by Jody Bart PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS West Lafayette, Indiana Copyright © 2000 by Purdue Research Foundation. All rights reserved. 040302010054321 œ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women succeeding in the sciences : theories and practices across disciplines / edited by Jody Bart. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–55753–121–8 (cloth : alk. paper).— ISBN 1–55753–122–6 (pbk. : alk paper) 1. Women in science. 2. Science—study and teaching. 3. Women— Education. I. Bart, Jody, 1960– . Q130.W676 1999 507.1—dc21 99–26055 CIP Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Helen Brooke Taussig (1898–1986): A Biography of Success 1 Laura Malloy Frankenstein’s Native 25 Elizabeth Stassinos Women Becoming Mathematicians: Constructing a Professional Identity in Post–World War II America 37 Margaret A.M. Murray Strategies for Teaching “Female-Friendly” Science to Women: Using History and Research to Guide Instruction 101 Valerie N. Morphew Successful Strategies for Teaching Math to College Women 107 Ruth O’Keefe Factors That Increase Persistence of Female Undergraduate Science Students 115 Michelle Smoot Hyde and Julie Gess-Newsome Perspectives from a Female Undergraduate Student on Successfully Integrating Learning and Researching Science with Leading Organic Chemistry Workshops 139 Nermana Ligata and Madeline Adamczeski A Peer Mentoring Program for Underrepresented Students in the Sciences 149 Casey Clark, Ileana Howard, Sarah E. Lazare, and Doreen A. Weinberger v vi Contents Gender Bias in Biological Theory Formation 169 Colleen M. Belk Defending Feminist Territory in the Science Wars 177 Maureen Linker Strong Objectivity and the Language of Science 195 Andrea Nye Feminist Theories of Knowledge: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 205 Jody Bart Gender and Physical Science: A Hard Look at a Hard Science 221 Amy Bug Inventing the Future: Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at Purdue University Calumet 245 Barbara Mania-Farnell and Colette Morrow Contributors 259 Index 263 Acknowledgments Any work of this magnitude is a function of the efforts of many people, and this project is no different. First, many thanks to Sweet Briar College Administration for supplying the Ewald endowment funding and the Sue Reid Slaughter funding for producing the conference “Women Succeeding in the Sciences: Theories and Practices across the Disciplines.” Special thanks to the staff of Sweet Briar College for their contributions to mak- ing a successful conference and to the members of the Women and Gen- der Studies Advisory Committee for their ideas and energies. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my many students who worked hard on the conference, produced the undergraduate conference as part of the main conference, and—by their wit and energy—keep me young and inspire me to strive to provide them with interesting scholastic activities. Many thanks to my editor, Margaret Hunt, whose tireless work on this anthology is pri- marily responsible for its release. Finally, as always, thanks to my parents, Jana and Teddy Bart, for always encouraging me to reach beyond myself and for having instilled in me early an insatiable curiosity for all intellec- tual and creative activities. vii Preface This book, and the conference that gave rise to it, are a reflection of the re- cent—by which I mean in the last twenty years—growing scholastic inter- est in the topic of women in science. This interest extends across a wide variety of disciplines, from philosophy, sociology, and education to areas of the so-called hard sciences. The issues raised by this topic are the ques- tions surrounding the fact that women as a social category have entered into study, practice, and research in science in ever higher numbers. These questions also surround the use of women as subjects of scientific research. Some of these questions are theoretical, some practical, but all of them in- volve some interest in whether the gendered social experience of women, and the differences between this experience and the lived social experience of men, have any bearing on women’s contributions to scientific inquiry theory formation. They relate to the validity of women’s experiences to the way women ought to be trained as scientists; that is, to the way women learn. Thus, the interdisciplinary field of Women and Gender Studies prop- erly becomes the academic backdrop against which discussions of these is- sues can take place across the disciplines. The essays in this anthology resulted from a conference called Women Succeeding in the Sciences: Theories and Practices across the Disciplines, given at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia. As the director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at the college, I wanted to do some- thing to bridge the conceptual gap between the sciences and the humani- ties that seems to be endemic at all universities and colleges throughout the country. In short, even at this small liberal arts college for women, the two main branches of a liberal arts education were seen as severely sepa- rate, both pedagogically and politically. This state of affairs seemed inef- fectual to many of us at the college because it left students without a clear ix x Preface understanding of why these two branches of their liberal arts education were required of them, or what relationships the branches had to each other. Quite frankly, at that time even the faculty at this institution (then only 61 members) held no clear idea of the conceptual connections be- tween these disciplines, and competition between the departments struck many of us as counterproductive to our mission of shaping a coherent lib- eral arts education. It became apparent that the program of Women and Gender Studies, through this conference, could provide the perfect response to this state of affairs, begin to educate both students and faculty on the relationships be- tween the humanities and the sciences, and exhibit why students need an understanding of both scientific methodologies and practices, as well as of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. The field of Women and Gender Studies is inherently interdisciplinary, incorporating information on nearly every aspect of human endeavor, from history to literature to the social sciences to the physical sciences as well. Women have been en- tering the sciences in every aspect, as academics and in the private sector, in ever greater numbers over the last twenty years, but women have always been in science and have always made significant contributions that the his- torical record—until recently—has only treated peripherally. This confer- ence was designed to bring people together not only to talk about the his- torical contributions of women in the sciences but also to share various pedagogical methodologies for teaching science to women and teaching about women in science; to share practices for “doing” science in ways that take gender into consideration as a research subject or use gender sensitive models of including women in research projects; and to share ideas about philosophies regarding women and science, from women’s participation in theory formation to women as objects of scientific investigation. The essays in this anthology reflect both the spirit and content of this highly successful conference and serve as excellent tools for teaching both students and educators across many disciplines about the topic of women in science. Helen Brooke Taussig (1898–1986) A Biography of Success Laura Malloy Helen Brooke Taussig was the designer of the first surgical treatment for so-called blue babies and the founder of the medical specialty of pediatric cardiology. A devoted scholar and teacher, she wrote the first standard ref- erence text for pediatric cardiology (Congenital Malformations of the Heart, 1947) and established the clinical criteria for diagnosing heart malforma- tions.