220056 How Many Women Scientists Do You Know?: From The History of Women in Science to Gender Science and Technology Studies (S) (WiSe 2011/2012)

This course explores the history of science from a gender perspective and emphasizes the move—historiographical, conceptual, and epistemological—from women in science to gender in science and technology studies. The course provides a distinctive focus on gender and its implications on science and technology. It is intended to familiarize students both with the history of women’s modes of participation in science and theoretical issues of gender and science/technology in a historical perspective. Furthermore, students will be encouraged to reflect on their own gendered experiences in their encounters with science as students in laboratory and/or social sciences and in technological domains.

Aims
The central aim is to develop the students’ understanding of the factors that shape the emergence and development of the links between science, technology, and society and deepen that understanding through the lenses of gender as a major social factor.

More specifically the course aims
1. to broaden and deepen the students’ understanding of gender biases in science and technology through the study of their history
2. to shift from a discourse of women’s exclusion and marginalization to that of the social construction of sexual differences in science
3. to trace gender metaphors that traverse scientific knowledge in order to undermine students’ perceptiveness of science as neutral
4. to examine how specific technologies shaped women’s and men’s labor and how women altered the intended use of certain technologies
5. to subvert the stereotype that, historically, women have been mainly assigned in safe positions within the industrial production line
6. to equip students with those skills necessary to engage with the key debates in gender and science studies
7. to convey a historical understanding of science and technology as social constructs and to emphasize the importance of technological actors, of artifacts and of new sites of technological activities for women’s lives.