Gender Bias And The Scientific Process And Content Of Research

In Reflections on Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller, Keller writes about the presence of masculinity, rather than femininity, in science. Keller begins makes it clear that, although there are significantly more men than women in the field, the issue at hand is not the lack of women working in science, but the “attribution of masculinity to science as an intellectual domain” (76). This means the language, tone, and overall dominance. Keller states that this stems from the myth that masculinity is associated with objectivity and neutrality, whereas femininity is associated with subjectivity and emotions. Therefore, because of these two associations, it is believed that men are better suited to be scientists than women, which is why the

Around the mid-nineteenth century until today’s times, three beliefs about women and men has become a major aspect for part of biology

How Stereotypes Can Drive Women to Quit Science was an intriguing article. From first hand experience of being a girl who enjoys science, I can say that none of the "guys are better than girls at..." stereotypes have ever affected me. All girls have what it takes to be engineers, but not all girls enjoy math and science. I agree with the last line of the article, "in order to boost the numbers of women who choose to go into those fields, you have to boost the number of women who are in those fields." This is typical human nature and applies to everything. I went to an arcade last night with my close friend. We were the only two older kids in the arcade and we felt uncomfortable, but then, we went and played laser tag and all of the sudden,

Currently, since scientists have valued facts differently it is essentially an implication that no risk factor is at the moment convincing enough. Hence, rather than disagreeing upon which factor is essentially the cause, scientists have come to a mutual understanding that “none of the identified factors seem to be suitable” (Hempel, Chambers, Bagnall, & Forbes, 2007). The example of this chronic condition represents that viewing facts from different opinions and perspectives is not necessarily a mechanism for disagreement: but it is a step toward experts agreeing that further research is crucial. Consequently, the Natural Sciences prove that different values do not always lead to disagreement and hence varying perspectives is not a dependable mechanism for disagreement. This is because scientists do not always require personal knowledge to draw conclusions, and are usually open to considering varying

In some contexts it is appropriate to make inferences, but when it comes to scientific data it is difficult to make an inference without inserting a level of subjective bias into what should be objective research. Often the subjective bias introduced when there is ambiguous data is based in cultural context, which is why the data will not be questioned as it supports an already existing culture based belief. In chapter five of his book, Marks discusses this dilemma through the lense of an experiment conducted in the 1960s (Marks 2002:123). At the time it was commonly known that the Y chromosome was the genetic bases for the male gender. Although this was the scientific knowledge at the time, it was closely intertwined and not separated from the cultural understanding of what it meant to be

Over the years in American history, women have fought for the rights and freedoms that men were born with. For a while now after all this hard work women have put in to get these rights, you would think there wouldn’t be any more hoops to jump through, but you would be unquestionably wrong. Emily Martin wrote “The Egg and The Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” to show the world that there is gender stereotyping not only in our culture but also scientific language as well (Martin, 39). In reproductive roles males are depicted as the heroic warrior who go on missions to get to females, while women are seen as wasteful and passive, not working nearly as hard as the men. Not only does science exhibit females in such a derogatory aspect, but it’s teaching children in early age science textbooks the gender bias as well. Scientific stereotyping seems to be influenced by cultural stereotyping which in itself is a drastic problem. When will it be acceptable for males and females to work together as equals in a humane environment? Academic research throughout the conversation of language in science indiscreetly displays gender bias towards males, aiding the theories that Martin addresses in her article.

It is expected that science should give objective and reasonable explanations for any phenomena. However, every treatise is the result of thorough work of a scholar and obviously contains someone’s personal opinion, in other words, bias. Bias in general is described as the influence of one’s beliefs and attitudes on his actions and decisions (Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Staats, 2016). The question is for what purpose is it done and how does it influence people’s perceptions?

Evolutionary theory has been used to also provide scientific justification for the oppression of women. Even Darwin himself commented in The Descent of Man that males have much stronger physical and thinking abilities than do women (Darwin 504). Furthermore, when one actually looks at the demographics of the scientific community, it is heavily male. This discipline has always been male dominated and has shown and expressed many sexist attitudes towards women, which influenced many scientific findings throughout research. Darwin and other intellectuals of the time believed that the evolutionary theory, “ like Genesis, demanded women’s subservice to men and total devotion to maternity” (Hamlin 3). While freethink feminists utilized science to their own advantages to rid religion from the feminist movement, they neglected the staunch sexism that was present in Darwinian

Throughout mankind’s history, humans have placed themselves in the center of the universe. Whether this involves placing us at the literal center of the universe, as we once did in the now obsolete geocentric model of our solar system, or in the more philosophical sense, as Paul W. Taylor and Peter Singer explain in their retrospective essays, it is very difficult for us to take ourselves out of the central picture. However, both Taylor and Singer address the cause for this concept along with its falsity.

Heliocentricity is a theory that places the Sun as the center of the universe, and the planets orbiting around it. It’s important because it is the belief that the earth is the center of the universe. (Cole, et al. 2012) For many years, different philosophers argued about what they believed was the center of the universe. Some had their ideas revolve around the church and others had self-opinionate ideas without any integration of the church. Nicolaus Copernicus was an understudy of past onlookers and a theoretician. He contemplated the watched movements of grand bodies in connection to the acknowledged geocentric Aristotelian framework, which put the earth at the focal point of the nearby planetary group, with the sun and planets in circle. Copernicus ' perceptions drove him to infer that there was some kind of problem with the geocentric hypothesis. He tried the speculation that the earth was truth be told in circle around the

The general things about bias is that it can exist anywhere, to anyone and about anything, whether it’s about or against to others or to themselves, which the bias may or may not hold truth about that particular assumption. The bias just hosted our opinion, thought and expectation about something. Which sometime people unconscious said things that might oftener someone, people should forgive by what they said, because bias is so common now and it’s easier to oftener others with words when they are not meant to. Also, it will be wise to think before saying about other people because you might hurt the other unconscious. So, it common that women have a bias against themselves in science, such as the bias that men are suitable to work in science

Discovery is humanity’s most subjective form of human progression. Discovery is not validation of man’s evolution, but a testament to man’s ignorance and limitations. From the “discovery” of the new world to the “discovery” of the Earth being spherical, the achievements in discovery mask the reality of man’s flaws in relation to nature. Concurrently, in science and in medicine, discovery has seemingly lost its subjectivity because due to the scientific method, discovery is not merely coincidence, but logical inevitabilities. However, the crux of the argument is that research practices predetermine a favorable outcome, not an objective conclusion. The subjectification of outcomes through “scientific” means is exemplified in the modern-day science of genetics and the genesis of genetic disease. The apex of such research revolves around Alzheimer’s disease and the potential cure for it. The opposing factions, regarding finding the cure for the disease, both agree that in the discovery origins of the disease also lies the key to cure genetic diseases. Yet, the deviating claims of disease origin converge on two claimed points of genesis, genetics or genomics, with both offering absolute scientific conclusion that support both. How can both sides present objective scientific data that cements their side as being correct when the opposing side has just as much data and correctness in their claim?

During the Renaissance, when people started learning that they had the capacity to change elements of their lives, it led them to further inquire into their surrounding world in order to understand how they could achieve this change. The curiosity sparked by knowing the human body carried on into people’s ideas of the universe and caused them to question and challenge preconceived knowledge, such as the idea at the time that the earth is the center of the world. This is illustrated in the contrasting diagrams of the universe between Claudius Ptolemy and Nicolaus Copernicus. Ptolemy’s theory, and the one that “was adopted by most scholars during the Middle Ages,” was that of geocentrism, in which the earth is the center of the universe; Copernicus’

Feminist interaction with the philosophy of science, and in particular a feminist interpretation of epistemology, concerns the extent to which bias influences and shapes knowledge within the scientific community, and means to rectify this. There are three main distinctions of feminist philosophy of science - feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism. I am to be comparing and contrasting two of the three, specifically feminist standpoint theory and empiricism. I shall argue that standpoint theory and empiricism are both legitimate methods for feminist epistemology, yet standpoint theory is a more applicable and plausible method for the analysis of science in particular. I will first explain the main tenets of the feminist philosophy of science, going on to then explain reasons why standpoint theory and postmodernism are legitimate tools of analysis in their own right, and then evaluate their legitimacy.

Null Hypothesis - Gender bias does not have a role to play in people’s mind-set towards male victims.