 I found it very interesting that she moved fields and she now researches in the history and philosophy of science, which I think is fascinating. And so the title of her talk is some aspects of research by social scientists of the gender gap in science. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you. Well, good morning, everyone. Before I start my talk, I would like to say I feel it's a great privilege being here at this conference and being involved in this project because as a historian of science I think we are writing a very important chapter in the history of science. So just to say, not just who I am, but where I come from, the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, I am the secretary general of this one, the division of history of science and technology of this union. And this diagram, not to go into detail, will give you an idea of how we sit in, as we say in French, between two chairs, that of the hard sciences, used to be icsu, and that of the philosophy and the humanities. And as you can see, we have commissions in common with some scientific unions. So we really work in between disciplines and I think that is true of most individuals as well as of the institution itself. And actually, if we want to ask what the social scientists have to say on the gender gap, which is quite a lot, I think that we will find that at least four disciplines, history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology are involved. And that's why we talk of a field and not a discipline. And the labels that you will find for people who are interested in these are social studies of science or STS, which is usually short for science and technology studies, but sometimes it means also science, technology, and society. So what do science and technology studies do? First, I should say that they were created jointly between the two World War and also the Cold War was an important context of their being set up by historians, sociologists, and by some scientists too. So they're interested in scientific knowledge, technology systems and society and how these interact. And they tend to study scientific facts as products of scientists' investigations. And just like the scientists, the facts they produce are socially conditioned rather than just objective representation of nature. This does not mean that people who do science and technology study do not believe that science produces true representations of nature. But I think we have to think maybe of the wave body duality here and apply it to science, both at the same time. And I would also add that it is a great part of scientists' activity to strive to make their, you know, the science they produce in a context valid across all the contexts there are in the world and universally valid in that way. So two, I would say there are two aspects to looking at science and technology and society. One is to think of the nature of science and technology. And for that, so again, regarding science and technology as social institutions that have distinctive structures, commitments, practices and discourses and those vary across cultures and change over time. And on the other hand, they're also interested in the impact and control of science and technology because as we know there are risks, benefits and opportunities and they have an impact on peace, security, democracy, the environment and also human values. And I will give some examples in what follows. So if we think about gender, how do these two aspects, how are studies about genders on these two aspects? So firstly, the first aspect is how gender shapes the sciences as social institutions. And I think this is mainly what we have been discussing here. But reciprocally, how do science and technology contribute to the construction of gender? This has been less discussed and I will say a few things about this because I believe both aspects are important to the gender gap in the sciences. Now in order to understand more about the second aspect, I think it's important to the life sciences which are I think mostly absent from our discussions here for reasons, you know, I would say contingent reasons not that we are not interested but we just do not have data. And my experience in the history of science and in other fields is that in fact it's not just us for the STS research, what there is to say about biological sciences and biomedicine is very different from what there is to say about basically feels like physics, mathematics and engineering or computer science. The main reason is that the medical application of life sciences have some direct and very conspicuous impacts on individuals and society, on individuals and on their body. So we will see more about that. So the topics of research there include medical technologies and the way they are put to use in ways that affect human bodies and also the definition of what the division between male, what is the male-female divide is, as you know, a hotly debated topics. And if only it was just double X or XY chromosomes, things would be quite simple and I mean there is clearly a claim there from biologists that this is a supposedly neutral definition. So one of the things that the social science have done is to look at the gender gap. We know it's everywhere, not just in the sciences, but this is a field in which biomedical technologies have some impact. So if we look at the world population and here, as in many places, this is not my research, so I usually indicate at the bottom of each slide who's done the research. And I should say all the slides are going to be put on the ICTP website after this conference, so if you're interested, you don't really need to take photographs, you'll have access to all the talks afterwards in that form. So one recent fact, a fact of the 20th and 21st century is the development of the prenatal diagnosis, which includes sex discernment. Techniques are obstetric, ultrasonography, or also known as ecography, and amniocentesis. These are some of the techniques. And the findings is that in recent decades, some countries have a very high level of sex ratio, the one that's regarded as natural being about 105 boys for 100 girls. And the figures are, again, from Christophe Gilmoteau, so they are figures for 2010. In China, this birth sex ratio is very high. And the figures are, again, from Christophe Gilmoteau, so they are figures for 2010. In China, this birth sex ratio is 118, India 110, in Vietnam 111. Already in 1990, Amartya Sen has spoken about missing women, and in his talk Gilmoteau says, well, these are about missing girls, missing babies. Other specialist question whether the sex ratio is necessarily the result of sex-selective abortion. The question is, could this be natural? But I think it seems to be still an open question, but on the whole I think predominantly people think that the phenomenon is not a natural one. And so this results in gender gap population. In China, for the end of the 20s, over 25 million boys more than girls, and over 12 million in India with a very large number of social problems that this poses. And here I would like to point out that it is the development of these biotechnologies that make abortion, you know, sex-selective abortion possible in the first place. Now that is not to say that there was no such imbalance before, it was reached by other means like female babies, infanticides. So here we see that the development of this new technology, biotechnology, poses a number of, I mean, ethical and social problems. That is, if we and many feminists argue that, believe that women should have control over their bodies. So they may choose to give birth to a boy rather than a girl. And for some women, it changes their status in the family and the quality of their life significantly. Or do we say that this is discrimination over girls who are not even given a chance of being born? So I think that this is a good example of how biosciences bring in issues that have a very, very immediate and wide social impact. So further, I would like to say a few words on the feminist critique of science and technology. I think they share a feature with other fields of research on science and technology that is focused very much on discourse and images. And there will be an example of that at the end of my talk. And they emphasize the use, the consumption of technologies in that, you know, having a prenatal diagnosis can be regarded as a, well, the consumption of the technology. Also, another very important point is deconstructing the natural. And I think that the very concept of gender as opposed to the biological sex divide is one such example of deconstruction of the natural. So, as I said, reproductive medicine, not just the biological science in general, have been a focus of such studies. And a well-known example, dating back to 2000, is Reina Rapp's book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. Rapp is an anthropologist who has done, well, I think it's called in English, Participant Observation. Following women who receive prenatal diagnosis, and she did her field work in New York. And so this is the, and she has shown that basically the way, you know, the way things go, her argument is this is very much reproducing class divide in the way, you know, women with diagnosis can make the decisions and the way families are constructed. And another more specific field I think amongst the feminist, the feminist critic of science and technology is feminist epistemology. So in a nutshell, this is the study of how gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject and practices of inquiry and justification. They talk about situated knowledge with the idea of being simply that the knower's social situation, in part determined by gender, determines her or his knowledge. And therefore knowledge is itself gendered, they argue. So, and this is, again, we have to think of the ways in which what people know or think they know can be influenced by their own gender or other people's gender. Again, I think my final example will be a good example of that. And they wonder, you know, the questions they ask is, what is it to know that I'm a woman? What is it like to be sexually objectified? How can we arrange scientific practices so that science and technology serve women's interests? This last question I think is not entirely without relevance to what some of what has been said here. And to give you an element of context, because you think, okay, this is the, you know, the social sciences things are all different, philosophy is one of the least women-friendly fields to the extent that in the early 2010, a number of women philosophers started the gendered conference campaign. This was a blog and basically every time a philosopher spotted a conference at which all the invited speakers were male, they just created a post on that blog. And this initiative created, you know, very, very lively discussions, whether it was a good idea to do this or not, but anyway, that they did and they found plenty of conferences to put on that blog, which has now been discontinued. Some philosophers, I think, have paid a little more attention to these issues than. So, and, but now I would like to come to subjects with which I'm slightly more familiar personally. And so I think what can we say about the role that science has played is the construction of gender stereotypes that we are fighting. And I would like to start with where we are today or where we were maybe in the very recent past and to talk about the draw a scientist test. Marilyn has told me that there is a mathematical version of that draw a mathematician test. Please note that these tests have been conducted in an English speaking environment that is in French or Spanish or many other languages. You cannot just say a scientist and it, you know, doesn't have a gender. So, studies have been conducted for about 50 years and in 2002, Kevin Finnsen in his article that was an overview of all the studies that had been done that the perception of scientists as being male Caucasians working indoors with chemistry was still prevalent in 1999. And here you have a nice drawing that comes from a study of 1983. So I want, so I mean to me as a historian, 1999 is not very far away. So I will take it as a good approximation of the present, right? How did this come about? And history of science can give you clues. Let's start from a chemist male wearing a lab coat, wearing glasses, having moustaches. All these are common features of children's drawing, right? So I'm going to try and say what is the history of chemistry? So in the first instance you can say, OK, we'll look for ancestor. So is chemistry basically a genealogy of Caucasian males from alchemists that we find, for example, in antiquity or in the Middle Ages? That's the first possible narrative. Now, if we look a little harder, not much harder, but just a little more broadly, not Caucasian, right? Just a genealogy of learned men. And this is where mostly history of science is now. But if we look even harder, we find that one of the founders of alchemy was a woman known as Mary the Jewess in the first century of the Common Era. So she is regarded as one of the founders. And we do not have her own writings, but we have references to what she did. So this means that basically writing history results are never final. And we can always look harder. And I would say this is a large part of what some historians of science have been doing recently. That is, we need to look for women, where there are really no women. So in fact, there were women. Mary is not the only one. And if we look, if possible, in different places, we find that in ancient Egypt, somebody who was an Egyptian princess, worked on astronomy and natural philosophy, we find that in, and that was 4,000 years ago. So, you know, I would say, as long as we have historical records, we find women. And just a little closer to us in Mesopotamia, we have a perfume maker who seems to be the early recorded distiller, of course an essential technology in chemistry. In China, beginning of the common era, we find Ban Zhao, who was a historian of philosophy, a politician, an astronomer and a mathematician. And in Chinese records, the earliest master to student relationship that we have for the teaching of mathematics is Ban Zhao, teaching mathematics to an empress. And finally, better known probably to most of you, Hepatia, who died in the early 5th century, who was a philosopher, astronomer and mathematician based in Alexandria. And there are more. If we come closer to us, this is my attempt to fit the list you find on Wikipedia for just the 17th and the 18th century, and actually, you can't see all of it, you know, I would have had to make the font even smaller. So, the point is, how do we make women visible? And I would say, again, in science as elsewhere, because when you do history, you find that, yeah, it's the case in science, but it's the case everywhere in all societies we study. So, one strategy that has been used a lot, and not only by historians, is to write biographies. It's certainly the most popular genre, and it's certainly a good way, then, of bringing female images into the mind of children before they draw a scientist, right? Of course, biography can be, and often is, a way of celebrating its subject. I'm thinking here of one of the first biographies of a woman scientist, that of Marie Curie, written by her daughter only three years after she died. After Marie Curie died. There are also a number of autobiographies and memoirs. And I would like to quote from one I have read recently, the autobiography of Yvonne Choquet-Brure. She who is a mathematician, someone who worked on the mathematics of relativity, so she worked at the intersection of maths and physics. In 1951, she was at the Institute for Advanced Study with her family, which was a husband and a daughter. And she describes herself as basically having to go home early to relieve the babysitter at the end of the day. So, one day, she said, I had noticed when taking tea in the common room that some colleagues were sitting there, absorbed in playing that game of Chinese origin called Go. One of them once told me as I was leaving the common room before the babysitter left. Obviously, a woman can't be a mathematician. She has to look after her children. I snap back. She can't stay late to play Go. So, I think that this is an example. I think Yvonne Choquet-Brure is a beautiful example of a scientist, a woman, a scientist. She writes her memoirs. But I find she doesn't devote, you know, she just, she just sees herself and she doesn't make a big issue of being a woman. Only every now and then there is a little anecdote like this in her memoirs. So, there are limits and there are difficulties to biography writing limits by what you can say about women scientists. And here I was, my attention was drawn to it by a review that Patricia Farah, who is a historian of science based in Cambridge, an article she wrote in Nature in 2013. So, basically she says, in the past, biographer of women scientists thought that they had to make their women extraordinary. You know, it wasn't just enough to be a woman and to have done science and to focus on what science has been accomplished by this person. And she criticizes her more recent writers for also finding that, well, you have to make your biography a selling opportunity and then again making women, you know, scientists, what she calls weird sisters. And she concludes, converting female scientists into publishing opportunities and sell books, but it does the cause of equality in science no favors. Okay, the message being, well, a woman who does science doesn't have to have anything special about her. She just is doing science and that is what is important. Just like for a man doing science is what science she has done. So I think that, you know, one of the messages there and it's also one of the thoughts that came to me when preparing this thought and remembering Yvonne Chocabrio's biography is that there are as many ways of being a woman scientist as there are women scientists. And I think that the least we can do is to allow women, you know, as we do allow men to be unique. Celebrating is a perfectly respectable goal and I think the word to celebrate has been mentioned a lot here, but it is not the goal of historical research. On the other hand, documenting is one of the goals of historical research. And recently a different strategy has been adopted and that is that of prosopography. Prosopography is basically a collective biography, right? Very often you do it because you do not have enough material to write, say, the biography of a single individual that belongs to a certain group, but if you look at a large number of individuals in all this group you can find enough to, you know, describe, well, for example, the social circumstances and the type of trajectory that these people will have had. And again, the main point is that it does inject a social dimension into the history you're writing. So recently there have been, again, a very large number of books about women scientists that are prosopography. Patricia Farah wrote a book on science and suffrage in the First World War. So here I have other cases, other books. Of course, one of them is the book, Margot Lee Shetley's book, on which the film we saw the other night was based. And I also mentioned, I think, at some state, no, maybe it wasn't here. This year is the International Year of the Periodic Table, which is mainly an initiative of IU PAC. And so a number of historians of science have taken this opportunity to publish a book called Women in Their Element, Selected Women's Contributions to the Periodic System. And last but not least, and I will draw on it later, I want to mention a dissertation that was completed this year by Isabelle Lémonon, vaccin, La Savante des Lumière Française, histoire d'une personne à pratique représentation espace réseau. One of the achievements of this dissertation is that she has identified more than 40 women in France who engaged with science in the 18th century, and a number of them are in the later half of the century, women who worked for Gérôme Lallande, nautical almanac. So that's a rather early instance of human computers, because you know that before being machines, computers were women. So these are a few examples. So now let me get back to my representation of a chemist and to just focus on the word representation, which is an important one in the social sciences. Social representations have been defined as ways of knowing characteristic of social reality that emerge in daily life during interpersonal communication and are directed towards comprehension and control of the physical, social environment, or otherwise you can say common sense theories on key aspects of the world that allow individuals and groups to represent it and master it. So that is what this representation of scientists is, a social representation. So, and I propose to give you a very short history of representations of women mathematicians. And that's quite heretical for a historian, but I will start now and go back. In the 21st century, I just want to very quickly mention some comments on Maria Mirzachani in the social media. First, when she was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014, right, you can read the comments yourself. I'm not sure I want to repeat them, but basically you get the image. And when she passed away three years later, sadly, somebody who was a friend of her, also the social media said, a genius, yes, but also a daughter, a mother, and a wife. Now, if we go back to the 18th century and we take another woman mathematician of the time, Emily Duchetlet, Madame du Diffon, who was another, she was a writer and a, of somebody who held a salon in Paris and the saint, Madame Duchetlet, described her as follows, imagine a tall, lean woman with no bottom, with no hips, a narrow chest, two little tits that are barely visible, big arms, big legs, huge feets. I sort of censored what follows, which is about her face. I have to say that when translating this from French into English, and I got the help of a native English speaker, we could not quite render the, you know, the literary quality and the bitchy, or the nastiness of the French completely, right. On the other hand, when, again, Emily Duchetlet passed away, Voltaire wrote, I have lost a friend in French, Anna Miso, a male friend of 25 years, a great man who had the sole fault of being a woman, and whom all Paris mourns and honors. So you can see that this is clearly a compliment, just like what was written on Misa Chani after she passed away. Just a few words about Emily Duchetlet, because I don't think she has yet taken the place that she really should have in the history of science. She was trained in mathematics with people like Mo Pertuy and Clérot, and she wrote a number of books. She, in 1938, she submitted a dissertation on the nature and propagation of fire to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, who did not award the prize, because it was a call for, answering a call for essays, and nevertheless decided this essay was worth publishing. She also wrote a book called Institution of Physics, apparently to educate her son, which was translated into German and Italian in her lifetime. In 1946, she was made a member of the Academia de l'Instituto di Bologna, where there was already at least one other woman. And finally also, one of her major work was the French translation of Newton's Principia, where he exposed his major result from Latin into French. So, she's 18th century. Now, 19th century, 20th century, she comments on Soviet fiacobalewskaya, a female genius with a man's brain and the great mathematician Mobius, if a woman has mathematical talent, it is as if she had a beard, right? Any comment on mathematical genius there? I mean, he's not hers, right? Emmy Neuter, Van der Waarden reported that we in Göttingen mostly call her Der Neuter. Okay, so I think you get the point there. Mathematics is masculine, it's male. You may not do mathematics and be a woman. I think that's how it works. So, okay, we don't like it. It's still here. But why and how did this happen? And I think then what I will do now is to look at the discourses on women and science in the 19th century, because, you know, there was more than more general views about women doing science or should not do science. For example, will not be mathematics, it will be botany, botany and women's education in England. And again, here I'm drawing on the research of Sam George and of Janet Brown, right? In 1796, Priscilla Wake-Field wrote a book where she introduced the linear system of classification of plants which was written in the form of family letters to sisters correspond on their enthusiasm about botany. And in her introduction she wrote, "'Till of late years, botany has been confined to the circle of the learned which may be attributed to those books that are treated of it being principally written in Latin, a difficulty that deterred many, particularly the female sex from attempting to obtain the knowledge of science first defended as it were from their approach." So, of course this is about education because boys went to schools and Latin and women did not. Writing in vernacular languages had been a strategy since the 17th century. Descartes, when he wrote his geometry in the preface, he says, I have written this book in French so that even children and women can understand it. That is actually a very important issue historically what language you write science in and we should think that today since the majority of the world does not have English as their native language this is also an issue for us I should include myself since my native language is French. So, one of the problems about linear classification and women accessing it at the time was that his classification of plants was based on the number and arrangement of their sexual organs. So, translating Latin into English might have resulted in something that many people may have perceived as not proper. On the other hand it inspired other botanists someone like Erasmus Darwin who apart from being Charles's grandfather was also a botanist himself and he wrote a long poem called The Love of the Plants and Janet Brown has studied this poem quite at length and she has produced a table correlating the way Erasmus Darwin characterizes plants and the number of male and female organs that this plant has. So, you can sit there maybe better than I can do but there are all these very comforting plants that have one male and one female organ so that's something familiar gentle, tender as a lamb characterization then it becomes a little more complex and a lot of plants have got only one female organ and at least two male organs so you have, oh you can read it right it's quite sweet you have this, the one that there are unjealous husbands and then of course it gets completely worse because you can see the figures there and you have the Queen of the Suralia so basically what is this it's anthropomorphic projection and then metaphors to you know plants as human beings so therefore plants become a very sexual subject and they are not for women clergyman and poet who was also a naturalist wrote a poem called The Unsexed Female basically telling you how women who study in general and botany in particular stop being women and a little note you can read the footnote for yourself so imagine boys and girls botanizing together I think it's best to love these kind of things because when you think about you know it was enforced in families maybe it's not so funny but anyway Mary Wolfson Kraft did not find it funny either so she is a well known feminist writer and in the vindication of the rights of women she takes issue with another botanist John Birkenhood who in a letter to his son wrote what is in red here the lady who asked the question whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany consistently with female delicacy was accused of ridiculous prudery nevertheless if she had proposed the question to me I should certainly have answered they cannot so this is very clear women cannot study botany because it's too sexual Mary Wolfson Kraft shows I think proper anger there so that's one reason why women should be kept apart from certain knowledge and of course anything that's got life in it will have sex but if we look at something else now we've looked at the subject the subject of study now let's look at the situated knowing subject what was the medical viewpoint on women in general in the 19th century and here I will just again give you a case of Dr. Edward Clark who was an American physician and a professor at the Harvard Medical School he was the author of a book called Sex in Education or a Fair Chance for the Girls a very popular and very controversial 17 editions so he argued that intellectual demands placed on boys were too hard for girls they led to physiological disaster nervous collapse and sterility because of course the main thing about women is their reproductive function and this has to be preserved if this doesn't work then as we will see there is something very badly wrong with it and he describes seven cases in support of his argument one of is Miss Yi who was the daughter of two enlightened person she studied at a women's college and we're told that at the age of 21 she might have been presented to the public by the president of Vasa College or Antioch College or Michigan University as the wishful result of American liberal female culture this is the first decade he wrote this in the first decade after women's college were created in the United States so right it's not just out of the blue and then the case continues just at this time however the catamennial function means the period began to show signs of failure of power so okay he gives a lengthy description and basically she started having headaches headaches and so on no appetite, ability to exercise and sleep a careful local examination of the pelvic organs by an expert disclosed no lesion or displacement there no ovaritis or other inflammation appropriate treatment faithfully perceived was unsuccessful in recovering the loss function I was finally obliged to consign her to an asylum right so this is not funny at all actually sometimes when you read this literature you laugh and sometimes you really want to cry right so the conclusion is not only the sciences but all intensive study is dangerous for women so is this really a nightmare of the past I would say maybe we shouldn't rejoice too quickly because if we look at the way the human body is depicted in anatomy textbooks in which all medical students use so here I'm using two articles one that studies one century and the other one is a more recent one but so what Susan Lawrence and Kate Bendixon have shown is that in the century between 1890 and 1989 anatomy texts have remained consistent in the disproportionate use of male figures or male specific structures to illustrate and to describe human anatomy I think we've all seen these books the use of gender references in chapter headings language and subheadings male specific terms in discussions of shared anatomical structures and female to male homologies all combined to present the normal human body as male and they analyse this in particular with the description of men and women's genitalia so they basically conclude that how the human seeing how the normal human body is routinely depicted as male or male-centered in illustration and language hardly invalidates anatomical knowledge yet becoming aware of how much his anatomy dominates hers in texts designed for medical students exposes unnecessarily genitalia, useless comparisons careless inaccuracy and errors more important this process reveal how far western culture is from creating a non-gendered human anatomy one from which both male and women emerge as equally significant and intriguing variations and with which the medical student can comfortably visualise his patients anatomy so the medical students still assume to be a man so again since this was 1990 you will tell me surely there has been progress in the past decades well not so apparently because there is a study 2014 conducted at Cardiff and at the University Paris Descartes and here I will just quote their abstract so they did a survey they describe their methods and here they say the hypothesis tested is that medical students perceive a gender bias that is reflected in the books they read and the tuition they receive because the anatomy books have not changed our findings suggest that while students recognise the importance of gender issues and do not wish to associate with sexism most are unaware of the possible negative aspects of sexism in this respect the findings do not support our hypothesis means they had been too optimistic nevertheless we recommended that teachers of anatomy and authors of anatomy textbooks should be aware of the possibility of adverse effects on professional matters relating to equality and diversity issues so here you see people like us but in the medical sciences making recommendations on how textbooks should be changed so I would just like to make three concluding remarks about ten years ago when I did what the French have to do to be promoted to professorial rank habilitation the you know and on the front page I put this quotation from LP Hartley the past is a foreign country they do things differently there why I wrote this is there is because my field of study is basically 17th and 18th century and I'm interested in how mathematical and more broadly scientific knowledge circulated between the two ends of the Eurasian continent at the time so Europe and mainly China and I wrote this because I wanted to say the past of Europe is as foreign to me as the past of China and I think that is the conclusion I reached after studying the subject for 20 years well in preparing this talk I became very uncomfortably aware of the fact that well in some other respects no the past is not a foreign country and I think I have shown you what I mean there so scientific progress does not in itself guarantee the raising of the level of gender awareness on the other hand the social sciences have developed tools that are very effective for highlighting gender biases and gender gaps so my last words are let us all use the social sciences thank you