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From: sbishop@desire.wright.edu
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Men barred from primatology conference
Message-ID: <1990Dec3.135939.1955@desire.wright.edu>
Date: 3 Dec 90 18:59:39 GMT
References: <1061@ai.cs.utexas.edu> <15147@cs.utexas.edu> <8283@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Followup-To: sci.bio
Organization: University Computing Services, Wright State University
Lines: 34

In article <8283@dog.ee.lbl.gov>, austern@ux5.lbl.gov (Matt Austern) writes:
> 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.
> 

One thing that is interesting to remember is, the majority of ground breaking
anthropological research in the last twenty years with gorillas, chimpanzees,
orangutans and baboons has been done by women.


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