But they have been on their own when it comes to learning how gender influences their training and professional life. Spring semester 1997 inaugurates the NC State undergraduate course Women and Gender in Science and Technology . Women students don't learn about other women doing science.
Men learn about other men doing science.
So women are invisible in the course content, but there are men everywhere in the material. The five professors, all women, are determined to change this. They decided that students needed to understand the role women have played in the development of modern science. So they've been meeting once a week for two years, educating themselves in scholarship about women in science. It wasn't long before the researchers were looking at the issues from a more complicated perspective, said Wyer.