By Ellie S. Klibaner-Schiff, Associate Magazine Editor, Harvard Crimson, 9 February 2024
The historian of science sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about gender, science, and her ideal superpower. “Science is done by humans in context in cultural spaces, and is inflected by those contexts,” she says.
Sarah S. Richardson is the Aramont Professor of the History of Science, a Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the director of the GenderSci Lab. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: In 2018, you founded the Harvard GenderSci Lab, which works to generate feminist ideas for scientific research on sex and gender. What prompted you to establish the lab?
SSR: I was newly tenured. With my academic freedom and the resources I had access to, I wanted to formalize a model for producing scholarship that I’d had access to informally until that point. We had a gender and science reading group that had started to organically write together and think together. It brought scientists and medical folks together with people like me—historians, philosophers, and gender studies scholars. I thought that was about the most exciting thing happening in my whole life. The GenderSci Lab was created to be a platform to really dig deep into this model of what I call “radical collaboration.”
The other thing that made me want to found it is that, over the years, I’ve had a stream of students from the sciences coming over to gender studies and saying, “I really am inspired by feminist work on science, and I want to know how I can bring that into my scientific research.” We didn’t have any tools for them. How do you learn how to do research? In a lab. How are they comfortable learning to do research? In a lab. Creating the space where we’re working together on research questions, and we’re doing the work, was the best way to train up a new generation of feminist and queer scientists. So they could actually practically learn how to bring these critiques, perspectives, values, and principles into scientific research design, and the questions that they ask, and bring a whole new perspective to their fields of study.
FM: What have been some of the most interesting findings of the GenderSci Lab?
SSR: I like to say we only write big papers. One of our first moonshots was to take on the so-called “gender equality paradox” in STEM, which is the most recent version of the “women are not really suited to STEM fields” point. In essence, the argument uses some very crude and spurious forms of evidence and practices of correlation to argue that more gender-equal societies have less gender-equality in STEM, positing that therefore, when women are free to do as they want, they don’t prefer STEM fields. We reanalyzed the original study that made those claims and was in headlines, and found major errors in the reasoning and published a six-part analysis using all of our multidisciplinary tools. We published a critique in Psychological Science that the original authors of that theory have never been able to answer. It really illustrated how we use all of our different disciplines to take on hard questions and to analyze forms of bias and hype in sex difference claims that are really important in the world….
Read more at the Harvard Crimson