I recognize the need for understanding specifically female biology. I also recognize the need for understanding cultural and gender roles as in societies and even how they might affect disease treatment or biological understanding.
I don’t know what this is though, or what the goals are.
Any help?
As I read it, feminist biology proposes that male bias has skewed scientific biology research making it not objective research. Feminist biology appears to be research to find out where this male biased biology is and offer a different explanation, hopefully one from more objective point or perhaps female biased, to challenge it.
That’s my take.
Every single red flag I have available when it comes to unbiased scientific inquiry just shot up at that sentence. We have no need to filter scientific inquiry through feminism any more than we have need to filter it through Christianity. By all means, be critical of gender roles, but we don’t need feminist biology. We need scientific biology.
Do you know who else filtered scientific inquiry through ideological filters? Stalin!
That article says pretty specifically that challenging previous biases, and specifically male observer bias and presumptive bias, is the goal. There’s little doubt that such biases are historically real and it’s hard to believe that they’ve all been eradicated today.
Using the word feminist to demark such challenges raises a red flag, I suppose, and maybe she should have called it revisionist biology on the pattern of revisionist history, which also emerged to challenge the biases that pervaded the subject. If it’s been around for 30 years, though, she might have felt that she needed to keep the name.
This will be a one-day kerfluffle among the Neanderthal pundits because of the word. After that she will either do good, important science or she won’t. Come back in ten years and we’ll see.
That patriarchal biases mess up our understandings of such matters as history, law, ethics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies such as literature and art, and so on should surpise no one, but I can see how it can be perplexing to propose that our understandings in the hard sciences need such reconsideration.
But yeah. Not only doesn’t it hurt to pose the question and give it serious consideration, there’s precedent for faulty modeling in some of the hard sciences, biology most definitely included. Primatology is a part of zoology and zoology is a part of biology. Primate studies have included studies of sexual and social behavior, not just bonobo skeletal structure and orangutan blood type distributions. There were assertions made (I can, with some difficulty, dig up a cite if you really need me to) about gamete propagation that assumed without factual research data to base it on that there would be a dominant male and that his DNA would be preferentially distributed. A feminist researcher studied actual social and sexual behavior and tore that apart, with a combination of hard data and analysis of the prior study’s assumptions. She showed this off as an example of conventional researchers projecting human-based cultural beliefs onto the canvas of what they were supposedly studying, and she demonstrated with hard data that the females in that primate species mated often with both belligerant-dominant boss-males and hierarchically unpowerful sub males; whatever social order was being maintained by the male-dominance behaviors it did not manifest as control over sexual access to females in the tribe.
Gender is a real biological issue. Religion is not.
Hyde sounds like a real scientist. She’s currently researching “female human ancestors by investigating changes in pelvis shape - and therefore childbirth anatomy - during the course of human evolution.”
I think there can be a tendency to regard male physiology and male behavior as the default in the life sciences. Female physiology and behavior can end up being studied from the viewpoint of how it differs from “normal” behavior. I’ve read, for example, that drug tests often use all male test groups unless the drug is specifically intended for women only.
She also has a good paleoanthropology adviser (that’s her field), he has a Wikipedia page and everything. So she’s no slouch. (It’s trivial to find her academic site which most post-docs, PhDs, and such have.)
Note that this looks like a fellowship, not a degree program or department or anything. This means it’s basically the stuffy researchy academic version of a “club”. So it’s just a bunch of stuffy paleontology, biology, and gender studies academics that get together to do research. It’s cool, but IMO not much to write home about. It could also be used as a financial incentive (depending on exactly how they mean “fellowship” here) to PhD candidates wanting to pursue relevant research, which isn’t bad either.
Yeah, I’m sorry. I spent a while this morning reading about a professional victim who tried to get veterans fired for rejecting her claims that she got PTSD from twitter, so I was kind of primed to go off on feminism. It is easy to miss male biases in science, and a feminine perspective is necessary. I just need to get better at distinguishing between “feminist scientist” and “professional victim”. Hyde is clearly quite serious in her endeavors.
I think this is the problem I’m having. I totally understand having a feminine perspective; and welcome it. What I’m having trouble with is a “feminist” perspective. I don’t know what that is or how it differs from a feminine perspective
A feminine perspective would be a perspective with qualities associated with women. A feminist perspective would be one that attempts to treat both male and female as belonging to the norm, at least in mind. The way I see it, a male researcher would have a hard time having a feminine perspective, but a male researcher who is suitably aware of cultural and his inherent biases could be a feminist researcher.
“Feminist” = “of, or pertaining to, the political perspective that analyzes the world and its social structures in terms of how they impact upon or are specifically shaped by patriarchy”
A feminist perspective differs from, let’s say, an exchange-theory perspective or a structuralist-functionlist perspective according to the kinds of questions that it asks as starting points for the analysis.
[quote=“AHunter3, post:12, topic:686681”]
“Feminist” = “of, or pertaining to, the political perspective that analyzes the world and its social structures in terms of how they impact upon or are specifically shaped by patriarchy”
[QUOTE]
IMO, the word ‘patriarchy’ there is unnecessarily polarizing and possibly belittling. How about replacing it with something like ‘gender-specific viewpoints’?
And, back to the OP, from a quick look at the research to be supported, I’d describe it as perhaps an area that hasn’t gotten much attention from male-centered researchers, and that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a claim of prior bias or poor science.
How does male cultural bias differ significantly from the myriad biases that every scientist in every field should be aware of and look out for on a daily basis? Why is this a special case?
Seriously? OK, because as already noted a long history of this type of bias appears. With the best intentions, males will never be as aware of their number or nature. Nor is there evidence that the best intentions exist throughout science since evidence to the contrary continues to manifest itself.
Given the number of scientists in the world, having one specialize as an anti-bias expert hardly seems extravagant. In fact, given the insights that minorities in other areas have provided in recent decades in exposure of the cultural biases in their fields you’d think all good scientists would be encouraging many more people to follow in her footsteps.
So we should have black science? Latino science? Gay science? This way lies madness. Scientists of all races, sexes and creeds can specialize, sure, but they don’t need to stick a silly label on their forehead. Science is science is science.
Right, but there isn’t a special branch of “Black Geology”, or “Muslim Chemistry” tucked away across campus from the rest of the scientists in the Gender Studies department. What makes “Feminist Biology” different?
Someone was interested enough to fund it. Nobody is saying this is the key to all knowledge. It’s just a little corner of a field that some people felt like exploring.
I don’t identify as a feminist, but I do see a value to what she’s attempting. I’d be happier if her thrust was feminist medicine than biology, but either way there are a lot of problems in medicine due to the fact that everything is tested on men. Men are awesome, but their bodies don’t work in identical ways to women’s so it’s rather asinine that even today drug trials and even things like standard symptoms of heart attacks are all based on observation in men almost exclusively. When women have a high rate of heart disease and very different symptoms of heart attack than men, it becomes a big problem to base medical knowledge only on one sex.
Are you denying that there are known issues throughout biology, medicine, and allied fields in which differences - physiological and behavioral - between the sexes have been unexpectedly discovered known, with more suspected, because of previous bias in the field? How is this different from specialization in any other segment of the field, gerontology, e.g.? We know there are differences between the aged and younger adults and in fact some older researchers are using their own bodies to determine areas to explore.
The announcement in the OP seems to make clear that this is a field with a history and a strong scientific basis. Are you denying that this history exists? Are you denying that her findings can be science? What exactly is your issue? And please don’t repeat that it’s equivalent to “Muslim Chemistry.” That’s offensive nonsense.