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From: austern@ux5.lbl.gov (Matt Austern)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,soc.men,soc.women
Subject: Re: Men barred from primatology conference
Message-ID: <8283@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 28 Nov 90 20:13:51 GMT
References: <1061@ai.cs.utexas.edu> <15147@cs.utexas.edu>
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Reply-To: austern@ux5.lbl.gov (Matt Austern)
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Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (theoretical physics group)
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In-Reply-To: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
X-Local-Date: Wed, 28 Nov 90 12:13:52 PST

In article <15147@cs.utexas.edu>, turpin@cs (Russell Turpin) writes:
>
>One wonders how they know that women are better at this kind of
>research, and how objective their appraisal of the conference
>was.  Are there any studies of this?  Perhaps a blind review of
>papers published by men and women?

I'm not particularly defending the conference organizers, but there's
some context here that I haven't seen on the net.

There's a fairly well developed field of feminist theory of science
(Evelyn Fox-Keller is the best known author, but there are others),
which looks at the question, essentially, of how our own ideas of
gender influence what we think we see when we observe the world.
Primatology is the discipline that is most frequently used as an
example in these critiques.

The point (The point of people like Fox-Keller, that is; I'm reporting
the claim, not advocating it, since I lack the expertise to judge it.)
is that when scientists look at social relations in non-human
primates, what they see often depends on their ideology of social
relations in humans.  Some primatologists even claim that studying
other primates has direct relevance to what is "natural" for humans;
how could that fail to be influenced by ideology?

In particular, it is claimed that male and female primatologists
report very different patterns of behavior; men seem, for example, to
be much more prone to report male dominance.

An all-female primatology conference still might not be a smart idea,
but there is reason for it---it wasn't just done on a whim.

(Incidentally, I don't want to give the impression that feminist
critiques of science are restricted to primatology: they're much more
general than that.  Primatology, though, is the field that these
authors seem to feel is most blatently influenced by ideology.)
-- 
Matthew Austern    austern@lbl.bitnet     Proverbs for paranoids, 3: If 
(415) 644-2618     austern@ux5.lbl.gov    they can get you asking the wrong 
                   austern@lbl.gov        questions, they don't have to worry
                                          about answers.