Despite the continuing existence of barriers to women, a generational change in the traditional ‘male model’ of full-time devotion to science and neglect of personal life is under way. A senior female scientist in an academic department has often been an individual, successful by conventional measures, who chose to adopt the strategy of emulating the ‘male model’ as the only way to survive. Treated as ‘one of the boys,’ she often later has second thoughts about the sacrifices that had to be made to be accepted.

A decade ago, we identified a small number of women faculty members who were limiting their time in the laboratory and attempting to integrate a private sphere with their professional life. Recently, more women as well as an increasing number of younger male faculty members have expressed interest in a less-driven work life but stringency in research funding has intensified the pressure to work more. Even though some report that their satisfaction has decreased under these conditions, the most driven scientists submit an increased number of grant proposals and become even more successful. The conflict between their behavior and the wish to change suggests that transition to a more equal balance between professional and personal life is still a long way from being realized, especially at the higher levels of academic science.

Until quite recently relatively few women were willing to openly articulate the vicissitudes of their professional and personal experience in science.

INTRODUCTION

Social practices that work against women's participation in science are often embedded in a seemingly gender-neutral competitive selection system. In this chapter we discuss how the normal workings of the U.S. higher educational system push women out rather than recruiting them into science and engineering careers. We contrast the workings of the unofficial ‘weed-out’ system in undergraduate education at large universities with a ‘everse weed-out’ system at small colleges that must recruit students to their science courses in order to maintain their majors.

The weed-out system

In large universities at the bachelor's or first degree level, women often encounter a ‘weed-out’ system of courses based upon a competitive model that is designed to eliminate unwanted numbers of prospective students. This system has even worse effects on women than it does on men. Its encoded meanings, obscure to young women whose education was grounded in a different system of values, produce feelings of rejection, discouragement, and lowered self-confidence (Seymour, 1995).

A fortunate few women, after surviving this perilous journey, are recruited into a smaller scale, supportive version of the graduate research apprenticeship model. These women had no difficulties academically as undergraduates, in fact they were usually at the top in their classes and worked closely with their professors who were often important researchers. This perhaps explains why virtually all of the students interviewed in the graduate school samples reported positive and successful experiences in undergraduate school.

Ultimately departmental reform is the means to overcome the exclusion of accomplished women from full membership in the Republic of Science. In our most recent study, we were interested in identifying the characteristics of those graduate departments which showed the most and least improvement in the recruitment of women and conferring of the Ph.D., based on National Research Council (NRC) statistics from 1974 to 1990. In electrical engineering, the number was too low to generate meaningful data before 1977, and computer science had not been separated as a distinct discipline until 1978. In light of this, the time periods considered for these two disciplines were 1978–1990 and 1977–1990 respectively. What emerged was a range of departmental cultures. At that end of the spectrum where numbers of American women graduate students and/or degrees conferred were lowest, was what we call the ‘Instrumental Department’. While most departments that we studied reflect the negative attitudes toward women in science, we also identified several ‘Relational Departments’ where positive cultural shifts are occurring.

THE INSTRUMENTAL DEPARTMENT

Not surprisingly, morale was lowest and isolation of women highest in instrumental departments. Many had no programs for women students and if they did, fear of stigma around joining was high. As a tenured woman preparing to leave for industry described the situation, ‘How many faculty hires in the last 10 years? Zero. How many women interviewed? Zero. How many women students are supported? There was one several years ago.

What sort of knowledge?

The function of science is to produce knowledge. What sort of knowledge does it produce? Until recently, this question was supposed to be essentially ‘philosophical’. Unfortunately [ch.1], the philosophers of science have not come up with a convincing answer. In spite of heroic efforts, they have simply failed to come up with a satisfactory definition of ‘science’.

In practice, however, most educated people agree that certain bodies of knowledge are, indeed, peculiarly ‘scientific’. They do this on the basis of a number of characteristic features, many of which lie outside the scope of conventional philosophical analysis. Indeed, as every would-be meta-scientist soon discovers, the ‘philosophy’ of any serious scientific discipline is so wrapped up in its subject matter that it cannot be accounted for historically or analysed without a good grasp of its technical language. Since nobody really knows all these different languages, people have to rely on what they know of the social origins of the knowledge in question. In default of better criteria, they put their trust in ‘scientists’, as individuals and as an organized group, to produce genuinely ‘scientific’ knowledge.

This reasoning is, of course, incorrigibly circular. But remember that we are adopting a naturalistic stance. If the entity that people identify as science has distinctive social characteristics, then it is our job to identify these and analyse them. In previous chapters, therefore, we have portrayed science as a social institution, of which ‘academic science’ [2.8] is the ideal type. We have focussed on its practices and norms, showing how these fit together into a distinctive culture [ch.3], and how they are changing in response to various internal and external influences [ch.4].

Framing the indefinable

We encounter science as a natural kind, not as an abstract category. In other words, like a chair, or a tiger, or a city, we recognize it when we come across it, without having to refer to an explicit formula. Indeed, such a formula is not feasible. It would not only have to be elaborate enough to indicate that science has many different aspects – institutional, mental, material, and so on. It would also have to be broad enough to extend over many different instances of scientific activity, from classifying beetles to theorizing about black holes, from recording folk tales to mapping the human genome, from ancient Chinese medicine to modern Japanese pharmacology, from explaining earthquakes to failing to explain inflation.

A catalogue of all these aspects and instances would obviously be quite unmanageable. It would merely demonstrate that science is too diverse, too protean, to be captured in full by a definition. Moreover, any such definition would pre-empt the outcome of our enquiry. By telling us in advance what science is, it would effectively determine what we would later surely find. We may be very well informed about science, and have a very good idea of various features that are typical of it, but we must be careful not to insist that any of these features are invariable or definitive.

Understanding and explanation

Science produces knowledge. This is something more than codified information. As we have seen, the notion of ‘knowledge without a knower’ [9.3] cannot be taken literally. The myriads of facts and theories in the scientific archives have been shaped by the requirements of interpersonal communication. They have to be meaningful: they have to be capable of being understood.

This meaning may only apply in a very esoteric context. The necessary understanding may be limited to a tiny, highly specialized research community. The production process may have involved an opaque conglomeration of automatic instrumentation, computation and symbolic manipulation. Nevertheless, the norms and practices of academic science require that the nature of this process and its final products should have been communicated to and consciously accepted by human minds. As I have repeatedly stressed, the epistemology of science is inseparable from our natural faculty of cognition.

But scientific communications must not only be comprehensible: they also, typically, enable comprehension. For reasons that we have discussed at length, they relate directly or indirectly to shared aspects of the life experiences of those who utter and receive them. In a word, they are messages that we send to each other about the ‘world’ that we seem to have in common. They thus help us to understand that world.

‘Understanding’ is a complex process, of which we know less about the parts than about the whole.

Problems

Academic science is energized by the norm of originality [3.6]. This norm requires scientists to produce new knowledge – that is, communally acceptable information that was not previously known. To do this, they engage in research. But they can be credited with CUDOS [3.8] only for what they discover through research that they have themselves decided to undertake. Academic science – and, in the end, cognitive change – is thus steered by innumerable independent decisions of this kind.

The significance of this process is often under-estimated. Philosophers constantly insist that scientific knowledge is provisional, but they seldom remind us that, even though it is continually expanding, it is very patchy in its coverage. This is not just a regrettable weakness, which can be forgiven because it will in due course be made good. It is a fundamental epistemic characteristic of academic science, closely connected with its social structure and cultural practices.

To put it simply: at any given moment, what we know and how well we know it depends on what our predecessors decided to study in the past. What we shall know in the foreseeable future will depend on what research we undertake now. For example, we would not nowadays be studying the medical uses of genetic information if Francis Crick and James Watson – not to mention many others – had not individually decided, nearly 50 years ago, to investigate the structure of DNA.

The academic mode

Science is a mode of knowledge production. Its social norms are inseparable from its epistemic norms – what philosophers call its regulative principles. Scientists' ideas about what should count as ‘the truth’ cannot be disentangled from the ways they work together in pursuing it. The philosophy of academic science is part and parcel of its culture.

The regulative principles of academic science are thus important components of its ethos. They are actually so familiar to most scientists, and are stated so often in different forms, that it is not easy to produce a standard list. The simplest way of describing them is to say that they involve such concepts as theory, conjecture, experiment, observation, discovery, objectivity, inference, etc., which we shall be analysing in detail in later chapters.

The significant point here is that although these are usually taken to be independent philosophical concepts they can be directly linked with sociological aspects of the academic ethos. For example, the norm of ‘communalism’ is closely connected with the principle of empiricism – that is, reliance on the results of replicable observation and experiment. Again, social ‘universalism’ is related to explanatory unification; ‘disinterestedness’ is normally associated with belief in an objective reality; insistence on ‘originality’ motivates conjectures and discoveries; ‘organized scepticism’ requires that these be fully tested and justified before being accepted as established knowledge. And so on.

This correlation with the Mertonian norms accords with our naturalistic approach.

The seeds of this book were sown forty years ago. I was always infatuated with science and beguiled by philosophy. They seemed made for each other – and for me. But the better I came to know science, the more I realized that the philosophers were not telling it like it is. Then, sometime around 1959, I was asked to review Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge and Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Each of these great books says important things about science; but in both I noticed a whole pack of dogs that didn't bark. What about the web of lectures, examinations, seminars, conferences, papers, citations, referee reports, books, personal references, job interviews, appointments, prizes, etc. in which my scientific life was entangled? Surely these must have some influence on the work I was doing. So in radio talks and articles I began to say strange things, such as ‘Science is social’ and ‘Research is a profession’.

Those were rash words for a young and aspiring physicist without official credentials in philosophy or sociology. Nevertheless, the heterodoxy was overlooked and my academic career prospered. The books in which I developed this theme – Public Knowledge, Reliable Knowledge and An Introduction to Science Studies – were also very well received, and are still read and cited. Indeed, many of the notions that germinated in these books have since been planted out more formally by other scholars. And just as I foresaw, sociology has superseded philosophy at the theoretical core of ‘science studies’.

The agonistic element

The final norm of academic science [3.7] is organized skepticism. This sounds like a philosophical doctrine, but is not a call for total doubt. The metaphysical notion that we cannot really know anything is not incompatible with being a scientist, but is so general and abstract that it has no more impact on scientific practice than it does on other aspects of life [8.10, 10.5]. Again, scepticism has psychological overtones, favouring a ‘questioning’ attitude, akin to ‘curiosity’ [2.7]. This attitude is as necessary to scientific progress as personal ‘creativity’, although it must not be confounded with a conservative stance that automatically rejects every new idea.

But its real force is sociological. ‘Scepticism’ is a code word for those features of the scientific culture that curb ‘originality’. Personal trust is an essential feature of scientific life [5.7]. But scientific communities do not accept research claims on the mere say-so of their authors. The active, systematic exercise of this norm by individual researchers is what, above all, makes science a communal enterprise. ‘Peer review’ is the key institution of the scientific culture.

We have already noted a number of the ways in which this norm indirectly shapes scientific knowledge. To be considered ‘scientific’, a ‘fact’ or theory has to satisfy a number of general epistemic criteria, such as reproducibility, logical consistency, independence of the observer, etc. These are essential conditions for communal acceptability.

Defending a legend

Science is under attack. People are losing confidence in its powers. Pseudo-scientific beliefs thrive. Anti-science speakers win public debates. Industrial firms misuse technology. Legislators curb experiments. Governments slash research funding. Even fellow scholars are becoming sceptical of its claims.

And yet, opinion surveys regularly report large majorities in its favour. Science education expands at all levels. Writers and broadcasters enrich public understanding. Exciting discoveries and useful inventions flow out of the research laboratories. Vast research instruments are built at public expense. Science has never been so popular or influential.

This is not a contradiction. Science has always been under attack. It is still a newcomer to large areas of our culture. As it extends and becomes more deeply embedded, it touches upon issues where its competence is more doubtful, and opens itself more to well-based criticism. The claims of science are often highly questionable. Strenuous debate on particular points is not a symptom of disease: it signifies mental health and moral vigour.

Blanket hostility to ‘science’ is another matter. Taken literally, that would make no more sense than hostility to ‘law’, or ‘art’, or even to ‘life’ itself. What such an attitude really indicates is that certain general features of science are thought to be objectionable in principle, or unacceptable in practice. These features are deemed to be so essential to science as such that it is rejected as a whole – typically in favour of some other supposedly holistic system.

Striving towards objectivity

When Robert Merton pointed out that scientists are constrained to be ‘disinterested’, he was referring mainly to their professional behaviour. As we have seen [3.5], there are many conventions that severely limit the operation and public display of personal motives in the regular practice of academic science. The direct effect is thus to sever the connections between scientific knowledge and its personal origins.

According to this norm, it might seem that scientific knowledge should always be presented as cognitively objective – i.e. as if referring to entities that exist quite independently of what we know individually about them. But the implication that science rests on and requires absolute realism calls for further discussion, which we postpone to a later chapter [10.7].

As a social norm, however, disinterestedness functions primarily to protect the production of scientific knowledge from personal bias and other ‘subjective’ influences. Strictly speaking, this is impossible [5.3]. There is no denying that scientific facts and theories are produced by human beings, whose minds cannot be completely cleansed of individual interests. Academic science therefore strives to attain consensual objectivity by merging these interests in a collective process.

The norm of disinterestedness thus combines naturally with the norms of communalism and universalism to strip scientific knowledge of its subjective elements and turn it into a genuinely communal product. Indeed, the impersonal style of formal scientific discourse is designed to make research claims appear immediately acceptable.

Generalization and abstraction

The academic ethos lays down that scientific knowledge has to be the common property of a universal community [3.4]. Social realities obviously limit the scope of this norm. Nevertheless, it firmly shapes the type of knowledge that is admitted into the scientific archive. In principle, science deals only with what could be communicated to and accepted by anybody, regardless of their other personal beliefs or special circumstances.

The result is that science is primarily concerned with generalities. Particular facts are not specifically excluded from the scientific archive. Many serendipitous discoveries – especially in the biomedical sciences – have been triggered by published reports of apparently singular events. But such particularities are very, very seldom of ‘universal’ interest. It is quite impracticable to ‘share’ with other scientists the immense quantities of factual information that accumulate in the course of research. If this information is to become communal property, it must be encoded and ‘compressed’ into a much more compact form. In other words, the detailed facts must be interpreted and presented as specific elements of more general patterns – typically as entities governed by theories.

Trying to give a basic, comprehensive account of the concept of a ‘theory’ is an invigorating but fruitless walkabout in metaphysics. In all that follows, we shall treat ‘theories’, like ‘facts’, as primitive epistemic entities – ‘natural kinds’ as some philosophers call them – with which we are better acquainted from experience than from philosophical analysis. Indeed, from this naturalistic point of view, facts and theories are closely interwoven. It is impossible to talk about knowing something as a scientific fact without reference to a theory [5.5, 5.6].

The republic of learning

Academic science is the stereotype of science in its purest form. When people talk about scientific research (as distinct from technology) they primarily have in mind the sort of scientific work that is done in universities. They think of it as the characteristic activity of members of a particular social group in a particular social frame.

Scientists themselves insist that they belong to a community, indicating that they recognize each other as people who share many values, traditions and goals. But this community is essentially notional. The word is used to mean ‘all those people who subscribe to certain general principles of rationality and objectivity, and have such high standards of expertise and mutual trust that they can be relied upon to work together for the benefit of humanity in the attainment of truth’. On the one hand, it proclaims the unity of this group within society at large. On the other hand, it asserts that its members are individuals who are linked together voluntarily by their common attitude to learning and research.

The concept of a scientific community is part of the traditional philosophical Legend. At the same time, however, it encases science in a sociological ‘black box’, whose internal structure is deemed to be irrelevant to the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, the power of the Legend lingers on, even amongst the champions of a ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’.