Science and sociability: women as audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901

This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of popularizers. The essay argues that, in various ways, the ubiquitous and visible female audience came to define the BAAS audience and "the public" for science more generally. The women who swelled the BAAS audiences were accepted as a social element within the meetings even as they were regarded critically as scientific participants. Portrayed as passive and nonscientific, women allowed the male scientific elites to distance themselves from their audiences. Arguing from diary and other evidence, we present examples that complicate existing notions of audiences for science as necessarily active.     

Bimbo or boffin? Women in science: an analysis of media representations and how female scientists negotiate cultural contradictions

This paper examines the gendered representations of scientists in the UK media. Our analysis reveals the asymmetrical ways in which men and women working in science, engineering and technology are portrayed, in particular through the emphasis on women's appearance and a focus on their exceptional status. It also highlights the way female scientists may be used to "sex up" the discipline in the context of increasing concern about the (un)popularity of science. This media analysis is contextualized by drawing on data from 86 scientists examining how women themselves experience press and television coverage and address the cultural contradictions surrounding their role. The research highlights the challenges facing women working in these fields and the dilemmas for those seeking to develop a "human" face for science and promote a positive image for women.     

Margaret Cavendish and patronage

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) was the first woman to publish on scientific subjects in English. Gender limited Cavendish's membership in the emerging scientific community; to circumvent this restraint, Cavendish used patronage rituals to establish the legitimacy of her scientific role. Through gifts of her books, and acknowledgement of their traditional authority, Cavendish sought recognition of her status as a natural philosopher from Oxford and Cambridge. At the same time, she challenged the superiority of the new experimental philosophy. She hoped her critique of the modern thinkers would force them to acknowledge her as a peer. Cavendish's experience demonstrates the role of patronage in the scientific community, and how social conditions limited the role of women in science.     

Murky waters: thoughts on desire, utility, and the "sea of modem science"

Historians of science in modern China have tried to challenge misconceptions that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese were slow to master science or, worse, that they missed the point of science altogether. In so doing, we have often put aside basic questions-like why Chinese were interested in modern science in the first place or how they found modern science useful for their own purposes-in order to demonstrate the quality and advancement of scientific work in China. But overlooking these underlying issues not only strengthens the myth of science as an obvious and inevitable step in development; it also limits the relevance of the Chinese case to the history of science more broadly. If, instead, the spread of science is reconceptualized as a problem of desire and utility, the Chinese example may suggest interesting new avenues for the study of cultural innovation across geographic and disciplinary frameworks.     

The matilda effect in science: awards and prizes in the US, 1990s and 2000s

Science is stratified, with an unequal distribution of research facilities and rewards among scientists. Awards and prizes, which are critical for shaping scientific career trajectories, play a role in this stratification when they differentially enhance the status of scientists who already have large reputations: the 'Matthew Effect'. Contrary to the Mertonian norm of universalism--the expectation that the personal attributes of scientists do not affect evaluations of their scientific claims and contributions--in practice, a great deal of evidence suggests that the scientific efforts and achievements of women do not receive the same recognition as do those of men: the 'Matilda Effect'. Awards in science, technology, engineering and medical (STEM) fields are not immune to these biases. We outline the research on gender bias in evaluations of research and analyze data from 13 STEM disciplinary societies. While women's receipt of professional awards and prizes has increased in the past two decades, men continue to win a higher proportion of awards for scholarly research than expected based on their representation in the nomination pool. The results support the powerful twin influences of implicit bias and committee chairs as contributing factors. The analysis sheds light on the relationship of external social factors to women's science careers and helps to explain why women are severely underrepresented as winners of science awards. The ghettoization of women's accomplishments into a category of 'women-only' awards also is discussed.     

The (co-)production of public uncertainty: UK scientific advice on mobile phone health risks

UK scientific advice on the possible health risks of mobile phones has embraced (or seems to be embracing) broader engagement with interested non-experts. This paper explains the context of lost credibility that made such a development necessary, and the implications of greater engagement for the construction (and expert control) of "public concern." I narrate how scientific advice matured from an approach based on compliance with guidelines to a style of "public science" in which issues such as trust and democracy were intertwined with scientific risk assessment. This paper develops existing conceptions of the "public understanding of science" with an explanation based around the co-production of scientific and social order. Using a narrative drawn from a series of in-depth interviews with scientists and policymakers, I explain how expert reformulation of the state of scientific uncertainty within a public controversy reveals constructions of "The Public," and the desired extent of their engagement. Constructions of the public changed at the same time as a construction of uncertainty as solely an expert concern was molded into a state of politically workable public uncertainty. This paper demonstrates how publics can be constructed as instruments of credible policymaking, and suggests the potential for public alienation if nonexperts feel they have not been fairly represented.     

Science in the everyday world: Why perspectives from the history of science matter

The history of science is more than the history of scientists. This essay argues that various modem "publics" should be counted as belonging within an enlarged vision of who constitutes the "scientific community"--and describes how the history of science could be important for understanding their experiences. It gives three examples of how natural knowledge-making happens in vernacular contexts: Victorian Britain's publishing experiments in "popular science" as effective literary strategies for communicating to lay and specialist readers; twentieth-century American science museums as important and contested sites for conveying both scientific ideas and ideas about scientific practice; and contemporary mass-mediated images of the "ideal" scientist as providing counternarratives to received professional scientific norms. Finally, it suggests how humanistic knowledge might help both scientists and historians grapple more effectively with contemporary challenges presented by science in public spheres. By studying the making and elaboration of scientific knowledge within popular culture, historians of science can provide substantively grounded insights into the relations between the public and professionals.     

Designing System Dualities: Characterizing a Web-Supported Professional Development Community

In this article we focus on the challenges we have encountered in attempting to support the development of an online community of practice for grade 5-12 mathematics and science teachers. Specifically, this project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web-based professional development system designed to support a community of practice (CoP) of in-service and preservice mathematics and science teachers who are creating, reflecting upon, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices. This research examines the interplay among a variety of variables that characterize the dynamics of building a social network through which participating teachers will seek to share and improve their pedagogical practices. Our research suggests that designing for virtual communities involves balancing and leveraging complex dualities from the "inside" rather than applying some set of design principles from the "outside." This research provides an illuminative case study from which others can more readily identify patterns occurring in their own interventions and navigate the challenges they face more intelligently.     

Designing System Dualities: Characterizing a Web-Supported Professional Development Community

In this article we focus on the challenges we have encountered in attempting to support the development of an online community of practice for grade 5-12 mathematics and science teachers. Specifically, this project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web-based professional development system designed to support a community of practice (CoP) of in-service and preservice mathematics and science teachers who are creating, reflecting upon, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices. This research examines the interplay among a variety of variables that characterize the dynamics of building a social network through which participating teachers will seek to share and improve their pedagogical practices. Our research suggests that designing for virtual communities involves balancing and leveraging complex dualities from the "inside" rather than applying some set of design principles from the "outside." This research provides an illuminative case study from which others can more readily identify patterns occurring in their own interventions and navigate the challenges they face more intelligently.     

“A tie is a tie? Gender and network positioning in life science inventor collaboration”

Collaborative relationships are an important anchor of innovative activity, and rates of collaboration in science are on the rise. This research addresses differences in men’s and women’s collaborative positioning and collaborator characteristics in science, and whether network influences on scientists’ future productivity may be contingent on gender. Utilizing co-inventor network relations that span thirty years of global life science patenting across sectors, geographic locations, and technological background, I present trends of men’s and women’s involvement in patenting and their collaborative characteristics across time. Amidst some network similarities, women are less likely to connect otherwise unconnected inventors (brokerage) and have greater status-asymmetries between themselves and their co-inventors. In multivariate models that include past and future activity, I find that some network benefits are contingent on gender. Men receive greater returns from network positioning for brokerage ties, and when collaborating with men. Women benefit from collaborating with women, and are more likely to collaborate with women, but both men and women collaborate with mostly men. I discuss the implications of these results for innovative growth, as well as for policies that support men’s and women’s career development.     

Popular press and forensic genetics in Portugal: expectations and disappointments regarding two cases of missing children

Two cases of missing children in Portugal (Joana and Maddie) have recently highlighted the dilemmas and contingencies associated with the technology of "genetic fingerprinting" for forensic purposes in the context of criminal investigations. The purpose of this article is to analyze the popular press's discourses and representations around forensic genetics in the context of those two highly mediatized criminal investigation cases. The symbolical construction and representation of forensic genetics by the media presents a form of public exposure to beliefs on forensic genetics' characteristics and potential. These are blended with popular cultural contexts that are constructed with reference to images of a super-science which may carry consequences in the public understanding of forensic science. The media coverage of both cases and their actual disclosure resembles the patterns ofa CSI effect, insofar as real science's capabilities and limitations are placed against fictionalized representations of forensic science.     

Ethical control of innovation in a globalized and liberal world: Is good science still science?

The independence of science was long seen as of prime importance. This position has become less common today. The perception of scientific research as a public service has led to the opinion that it must be accountable to citizens and produce knowledge and innovation that meet their expectations. Numerous authors have voiced the need for anticipatory ethical control of innovation focusing on the scientific research process. This control is considered as the must-have guarantee for “good science.” The current article attempts to trace the ideological origins of the ethical control of innovation, examines its effectiveness against the challenge of globalization and technology-derived major threats and its compatibility with scientific methodology. It also suggests ways to both regulate the innovation process and preserve the independence of science. On the whole, we conclude that truly effective ethical regulation of innovation, i.e. one that protects the greatest number from its adverse effects, is achieved first and foremost by questioning our liberal economic model and the place given to science in our societies.     

Working knowledges before and after circa 1800: practices and disciplines in the history of science, technology, and medicine

Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully "configurational" views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors' disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental "ways of knowing and working," variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode-synthetic experimentation and systematic invention-may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also "built into" an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories.     

Murdered bread, living bread: Doris Grant and the homemade, wholemeal loaf

Doris Grant (1905-2003), a middle-class, British housewife, published numerous books from the 1940s into the 1970s urging her fellow housewives to bake organic, wholemeal bread for their families. This article argues that Grant's arguments defy easy categorization as either 'conservative' or 'progressive'. On the one hand, her targeted appeal to women reflected a traditional, conservative understanding of gender roles: women were, first and foremost, wives and mothers and therefore naturally responsible for family diet and health. On the other hand, Grant also pushed her readers to look beyond their homes and recognize a dangerous food supply system that was impinging on their daily lives. She demanded that her readers reject comfortable complicity in this system and preached the value of individual action in effecting substantive change.     

Rights of animals, perceptions of science, and political activism: profile of American animal rights activities

This article reports original research examining characteristics of the active followers of the American animal rights movement. Typical respondents were Caucasian, highly educated urban professional women approximately thirty years old with a median income of $33,000 (1989). Most activists think of themselves as Democrats or as Independents, and have moderate to liberal political views. They were often suspicious of science and made no distinction between basic and applied science, or public versus private animal-based research. The research suggests that animal rights activism is part of a symbolic manifestation of egalitarian social and political views concerning scientific and technological change.     

Did Kettlewell commit fraud? Re-examining the evidence

H.B.D. Kettlewell is famous for several investigations conducted in the early 1950s on the phenomenon of industrial melanism, which are widely regarded as the classic demonstration of natural selection. In a recent (2002) book-length popularization of this episode in the history of the science, science writer Judith Hooper draws attention to what she interprets as discrepancies in the results reported by Kettlewell in his first scientific papers on the subject. On the basis of correspondence among Kettlewell and his associates, a survey of scientific publications that mention outstanding questions surrounding the phenomenon, as well as interviews with his son, surviving colleagues, and scientists who have worked on industrial melanims, Hooper all but explicitly concludes that Kettlewell committed fraud. The following essay critically examines her evidence in support of this allegation, including her discussion of his character, the alleged motives, and whether fraud was even committed. None of Hooper's arguments is found to withstand careful scrutiny. The concluding section draws several conclusions about how history of science should be depicted to the public.     

“双创”背景下的湖北基层企业科技创新能力评价研究

科技创新是企业提升竞争力并保持其可持续发展的有效手段。“双创”背景下,中小企业数量不断增长,成为科技创新的主体。湖北基层企业在湖北省经济发展中占有重要地位,其科技创新活动也越来越频繁。客观地评价湖北基层企业技术创新能力对于提高其创新能力,使其健康持续地发展具有重要的意义。本文从科技创新投入和科技创新产出两个方面构建评价指标体系,运用数据包络分析法对湖北省基层企业科技创新能力进行了综合评价。结果表明武汉市、襄阳市和宜昌市的基层企业研发综合技术效率相对较高,鄂州市、黄石市、神农架林区基层企业的科技创新不够稳定,存在投入冗余和产出不足的情况,据此提出提高其科技创新能力的对策建议。     

History from the ground up: bugs, political economy, and God in Kirby and Spence's Introduction to Entomology (1815-1856)

William Kirby and William Spence's Introduction to Entomology is generally recognized as one of the founding texts of entomological science in English. This essay examines the ideological allegiances of the coauthors of the Introduction. In particular, it analyzes the ideological implications of their divergent opinions on animal instinct. Different vocational pursuits shaped each man's natural history. Spence, a political economist, pursued fact-based science that was shorn of references to religion. Kirby, a Tory High Churchman, placed revelation at the very heart of his natural history. His strong commitment to partisan sectarianism cautions against reference to a homogeneous "natural theology" that was an agent of mediation. Fissures in the "common intellectual context" reached beyond the clash between natural theologians and radical anatomists to render the intellectual edifice of natural theology structurally less sound for the future.     

科学中的性别差异

科学和技术是社会发展的重要组成部分,同时也是社会公共活动中性别差异最明显的领域之一。女性不能更多地进入科技领域并取得发展,不仅是女性本身的损失,对科学技术的发展、社会和人类的进步都会产生消极的影响。在对科技领域的性别差异问题进行理论分析的基础上,提出缩小和消除科技领域性别差异的对策建议。     

Becoming an expert practitioner: court experimentalism and the medical skills of Anna of Saxony (1532-1585)

This essay proposes that the well-documented interest in empirical and experimental practice at the early modern German courts was not limited to male practitioners. Just as princes evinced an interest in practical alchemy, mathematics, and astronomy, a large number of gentlewomen became expert medical practitioners. Using a case study of one noblewoman, Electress Anna of Saxony, I would like to expand the notion of "prince-practitioning" to a more general and inclusive "court experimentalism." Like the prince-practitioners, Anna engaged in a laborious attempt to learn the hands-on techniques involved in becoming an expert; she collaborated with both noblewomen and noblemen in her efforts; and she semantically linked her medicine to the alchemical skills (Künste) practiced by her husband, Elector August. Although court experimentalism cannot be equated with experimentation in the modern sense, medicine is one area in which women actively shared in the early modern fascination with empirical knowledge.