Equality in Science Isn’t Just About “Men and Women”
By: Riley Black
Tags: Equality, LGBTQ, Nonbinary, Queer, Science

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

For people who pride themselves on being smart, scientists sure are being ignorant. I’m hard-pressed to come up with another explanation as to why non-binary and transgender people like me are consistently left out of visions for greater equality and equity in science.

Science, as many of us learn in elementary school, is a way of learning about the universe. Science is also an institutional edifice, with many different facets and roles that involve everything from funding agencies to students. And it’s no secret that Science the institution has a big problem with gender.

Study after study has underscored the point that women in science are underrepresented in research journals, are more likely to miss out on funding because of mens’ unfavorable impressions of women, regularly face harassment in the lab and in the field, and often have to fight twice as hard to even be heard.

Many men of science still don’t get it, and even wannabe allies often think running special “women’s only” events — instead of cultivating equality as the norm — is the answer. And in this ongoing attempt to detoxify Science from the inside, genderqueer people like me may as well be invisible.

Consider an article about the lack of gender diversity in science media posted to The Conversation earlier this year by science communicator Merryn McKinnon. The data crunching showed what you might expect — men are much more likely to write popular science articles or be featured in them than women. That’s a problem. It’s also a problem that nonbinary and genderfluid people were erased by questionable methodology.

Papers on gender parity in science, science media, and science publishing often follow similar methodologies. The authors set their search range — a particular publication over a year, a spate of publications over a larger time frame, or whatever the point of focus may be — and then they start collecting names. From those binders of scientists, the researchers then assign genders. Sometimes they go by what sounds right, like the assumption that someone named Jane would be a woman using she/her pronouns. Sometimes they use algorithms like Namsor to categorize names. Those names are then classified as male, female, or unidentified, the tallies then compared and analyzed.

Can no one else see how fucked up this is? For starters, there’s no such thing as men’s names or women’s names. There are just names, and issues like “A Boy Named Sue” come from the gendered framework we put onto names.(And that’s to say nothing of names like mine — Riley — that aren’t traditionally categorized as belonging to one gender or another.) More importantly, a Dave or Steve or Miriam or Erika might identify as non-binary or otherwise gender nonconforming. A name does not automatically dictate pronouns, gender, or sex. The authors of these disparity studies don’t interview their sources directly. They take a list of names, assign genders based on a binary model, and then tack another publication on their list.

Paper after paper, article after article, Science’s problem with gender focuses on the disparity between men and women. Non-binary people are ignored, and even misgendered, because so much of this discussion is based upon the nonsense notion that there are only two genders, and those genders are dictated by the equally-complicated notion of biological sex. Nor do these studies address issues involving scientists and communicators who may transition or change their pronouns during their career. I wrote under Brian Switek for more than a decade. In a hypothetical, typical gender-in-science study that used my old publications for data, I’d be categorized as a man and not a non-binary person who prefers she/her pronouns.