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He Blinded Me with Science Harvard President Larry Summers hit the nail on the head. It is part of our cultural mythology that women’s biology — which really means our bodies — is the reason for our exclusion from everything you can think of that men have wanted to keep for themselves. We are made somewhat differently from guys. For this reason we haven’t been allowed to go to school, own property, or vote. Lately, it’s why we don’t go into math and the sciences; or if we do, why we don’t succeed in reaching top positions. But as one of a gazillion women trained in science, I am sure that it’s not our distinctly-configured bodies, or even our distinctly-configured brains, that are the impediment to our advancement. Women have about as much chance of advancing in the sciences as they do in, say, the NFL. Or the Vatican. I joked about this at a recent alumni meeting at Harvard, where I went to see what was going on. I said, “Women in the sciences are required to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Poverty, because we earn 79 cents to every dollar a man earns. Chastity, because we can’t get anywhere on the Mommy track. Obedience, because we are never going to be the Pope. Mother Superior is as far as we’ll get.” None of the women laughed. They nodded in agreement. The National Football League, the Vatican, and “science” as we know it were all conceived entirely without the input or consideration of you-know-who. The NFL and the Church make no bones about this. Science, on the other hand, claims to be unbiased and objective. It isn’t; it is as chauvinist and dogmatic as any religion, and as indifferent to cultural critique. If you don’t believe as we believe, they say, then you aren’t really one of us. We forged ahead anyway. It was the women’s health movement that liberated medicine from its dependence on the 70-kilogram male as its standard for every measure of health — including the hematocrit, a measure of red blood cells. In 1987, the UVM pathology department was still using the hematocrit of the 70-kg male as the normal value. Those of us who’d worked in women’s clinics knew from observation and records that women tolerate a lower, wider range of hematocrit — which makes sense, given our bleeding cycles. I pointed this out to the professor, who said, “Well, there haven’t been any studies published” — as if there wasn’t already a vast amount of information in circulation from the very women’s clinics I mentioned. He said, “Our protocol is to treat everyone whose values are below this standard, whether they are symptomatic or not.” A low hematocrit is an indication of anemia, which is treated with iron pills, which, as anyone knows who has taken them, are not without side effects. A lab book that I later consulted did show separate hematocrit values for women and men. How else to explain why an expert in the field would not to know this, or care, other than that the facts were irrelevant to his view of medicine? Examples of this innate bias abound. A chief medical officer at Fletcher Allen Health care, consulted by a woman with a uterine fibroid problem, recommended the standard hysterectomy. “The uterus is a dumb organ,” he said. “All it does is bleed.” It is astounding that a person who holds that view could rise to the top in a career in women’s reproductive health, and in health care in general. But that’s the way it is. And everyone seems OK with that. At the University of Vermont College of Medicine, out of fifty or so departments (medicine, surgery, obstetrics, etc.) only two have ever been chaired by women; yet women now make up half of each medical school class. In the vast administration of the College, there are still only two senior officers who are women. In graduate schools across the country — in law, in journalism, in the humanities — women outnumber men as students; yet they lag far behind in tenure, in administration, and as heads of departments. The reason for this may be biology — but it isn’t ours. Women, and men, are capable of mastering calculus and particle physics. Women, and men, are capable of designing Nobel-quality research. Women and men are capable of holding department chairmanships and college presidencies. And women, and men, are capable of shuttling children to play dates, organizing child care, and getting meals on the table. The chief difference between us is that men refuse physical and temporal responsibility for the children they engender — because the design and engineering of their ‘careers’, their reluctance to share turf, and their insistence on underpaid, or unpaid, female servitude take precedence. But all this, they say, is really because their biology makes them this way. Anthropologist Margaret Mead said that in every culture she ever saw, men have invented spheres of activity from which they exclude women. It is ironic that science in particular is blind to its own pattern of exclusion, thus perpetuating the problem instead of using its methods of analysis and design to solve it. A printer friendly version of this article is available. Vermont Woman is a forum for news, issues, features, arts and entertainment from the perspective, experience, and voices of Vermont women. Vermont Woman is a monthly newspaper published in South Burlington, Vermont and is excerpted here on this site. All content ©Copyright 2005, Vermont Woman Publishing |
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