I am interested in understanding how gender relations get reproduced and reinforced in technology. Currently, I am co-authoring the introduction to a collection of articles on gender and work that will appear in Knowledge and Society. Women who applied to these two departments were rejected at substantially higher rates than either the male applicants to those programs, or women applicants to other departments. This suggested a disparity in the academic qualifications between the groups. When compared to women applying to the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Biology, women applying to ECE and CoC had lower math and verbal SAT scores, and lower high school grade point averages.
International experiences lead to using postcolonial feminism to transform life science curriculum.
Three recent international science experiences in Kenya, Saskatchewan, and Sweden led to my rethinking feminism and postcolonial critiques in ways to apply insights into life sciences curriculum and research agendas in the United States. Postcolonial feminist theories and critiques open windows to understanding new biases in science. The conscious de-development of southern continents under colonization by countries in northern continents in the 19th and early 20th centuries created a historical backdrop in which centuries of indigenous knowledge of the environment, health, and natural resources, and appropriate technologies were erased. This and the conditions of colonization create an atmosphere, which allows most Western scientists to fail to challenge the notion that they have everything to give and nothing to learn from science, scientists, and technologies of developing countries. Integrating knowledge gained from postcolonial feminism into the science curriculum insures that the next generation of scientists knows the contributions from indigenous peoples and developing countries.