Cell Q&A with Londa Schiebinger
Dr. Londa Schiebinger is an international leader on the intersection of sex, gender, and science. In this interview with Cell, she discusses the Gendered Innovations project, the persistent STEM gender gap, the importance of considering sex- and gender-related variables and intersectionality in research, and the future of sex and gender research.
Biography
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University, and she is the Founding Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. Dr. Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a leading international authority on the nexus of sex, gender, and science and has addressed the United Nations, European Parliament, and Korean National Assembly on these and related topics. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship, and holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universitat de Vale` ncia, Spain; Lunds Universitet, Sweden; and Vrije Universiteit, Belgium. From 2004 to 2010, Dr. Schiebinger served as the director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for gender Research.
Can you tell us about your research and work?
I’m a historian of science. My work over the past 40 years has focused on understanding how women and non-Europeans were excluded from Western science in a self-reinforcing system that rendered these exclusions invisible by making them appear natural, just, valid, and reasonable. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the low numbers of women in math were explained as an innate inability of women to excel at the highest levels. Even as late as 2005, then Harvard University President Lawrence Summers blamed the poor showing of women in science and engineering on innate differences in mathematical ability. ‘‘There is,’’ he opined at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce that year, ‘‘relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and female population.’’ For Summers, the supposed innate female inability explained why men outnumbered women at the elite levels of mathematics. The distinguished women in the room, including Nancy Hopkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor of molecular biology, walked out.
The same was true in the field of history. When I entered graduate school at Harvard in the late 1970s, there was only one woman tenured professor—in Middle Eastern history. My entire interaction with her was to watch her apply lipstick one day in what was then called ‘‘the ladies’ room.’’ I plunged into intellectual history — and wondered why we were not studying the great women philosophers, such as Simone de Beauvoir, whose foundational work, The Second Sex, discussed how the oppression of women centered on men defining women as the ‘‘Other.’’ Winning a Fulbright, I arrived in Berlin to study nineteenth-century neo-Kantians, but distance from Harvard allowed me to discover new things, such as the emerging field of gender history. After 2 years of working on a dead-end dissertation, I threw it all away and started a new one on gender in the European scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was the best choice I ever made.
It was not clear at first what specific topic I would undertake. The deciding point came around 1981, when MIT hosted a series of lectures on women in science. As I listened, I realized these women scientists were all telling a similar story of being overlooked and undervalued but offered little social or historical analysis of their problems. Here was where I, the historian, could make a contribution. It was also clear that the extensive literature on the scientific revolution had not systematically included women. Although historians studied participation in science from many important vantage points—religious affiliation, class, age, vocation—they ignored entirely questions of gender.
When I began the project, my purpose was not to write about women per se (part one, the biographies, was added to my book The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science late in the process). My objective was to understand ‘‘biological determinism,’’ as it was called in those days. In the 1980s and 1990s, we had not yet won the battle to demonstrate that females were innately as capable in math and science as males.
I wrote The Mind Has No Sex? in the 1980s when it was imperative to expose the privileged first-born twins of modern science: the myth of the natural body and the myth of value-neutral knowledge. I have devoted my work to dismantling this self-reinforcing cultural system. The Mind Has No Sex? told the story of the first depictions of distinctively female skeletons in the mid-eighteenth century. While anatomists claimed these renderings of the female were ‘‘objective,’’ certain parts of the body became political. Great debate arose over the particular strengths and weakness of the female skeleton, focusing in particular on depictions of the skull as a measure of intelligence and the pelvis as a measure of womanliness. Similar studies were done of African skeletons—with a focus on the relative volume of skulls. To many, these ‘‘natural’’ human differences seemed to explain why certain groups need not seek political power or a place in science.
Beginning with my doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, I identified three analytically distinct, but interlocking, pieces of the puzzle: the history of women’s participation in science; the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge. This approach I later codified as strategies for moving forward and dubbed them ‘‘Schiebinger’s three fixes.’’
1. ‘‘Fix the Numbers’’ focuses on increasing the numbers of women and underrepresented groups in science and engineering. Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) implemented programs aimed at jumpstarting women’s careers by increasing funding for women’s research, setting up mentoring networks, and the like.
2. ‘‘Fix the Institutions’’ promotes equity in careers through structural change in research organizations. In 2001, the NSF’s ADVANCE program provided competitive multi-year grants to institutions to implement infrastructural reforms designed, for example, to overcome bias in hiring and promotion, support dual-career academic couples, promote work/life balance with programs to stop the tenure clock, etc.
3. ‘‘Fix the Knowledge’’ or ‘‘Gendered Innovations’’ stimulates excellence in science and technology by integrating sex, gender, and intersectional analysis into the design of research. This third approach is the newest area and, to my mind, the most important for the future of science, innovation, and human knowledge. The European Commission (EC), a global leader in this area, called for sex- and gender-based analysis in the design of public-funded research already in 2003. Incorporating sex and gender analysis into experimental design fosters scientific discovery, promotes rigor and reproducibility, and enhances social equity. This is what Gendered Innovations is all about.
What is ‘‘Gendered Innovations?’’
‘‘Gendered Innovations’’ is a term I coined in 2005 in an effort to shift the field of gender in science into a new gear. Gender in science projects throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s—mine included— had focused on identifying and analyzing examples of bias in science. This was, and continues to be, important. After I published my book Has Feminism Changed Science?, I was increasingly invited to speak to scientists interested in increasing the numbers of women in their fields. It became untenable to enter a room of 500 scientists and say, even with great subtly, ‘‘You are biased!’’ I was looking for something more collaborative, and the term ‘‘innovations’’ captured it. In 2009, when we started, ‘‘Gendered Innovations’’ was the right term; we have now expanded to include intersectional innovations. With the word ‘‘innovation,’’ I can go into a room of scientists and engineers and invite them to work with us as collaborators.
Innovation is about integrating sex, gender, and intersectional analyses into the design of research. The operative question is: how can we harness the creative power of sex, gender, and intersectional analysis for discovery? Does this approach add valuable dimensions to research? Does it take research in new directions? The goal of the Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering and Environment project is to provide scientists and engineers with practical methods for sex, gender, and intersectional analysis. Our materials were produced through a large international collaboration involving the EC, the U.S. NSF, and Stanford University. We’ve now expanded into Japan, South Africa, South Korea, and Uruguay; Institutes for Gendered Innovations research opened in Korea in 2015 and in Japan in 2022. More than 220 experts from across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Asia have participated in a series of peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary workshops and collaborations. New policies have been implemented across Canada, the European Union, Japan, Korea, and the United States.
We hear about the gender gap in STEM. Can you tell us why such a significant gap still remains? What critical barriers remain? And what are the key solutions that will close the gap?
We distinguish the three ‘‘fixes’’ analytically, but, in reality, they work together. Although many people first try to fix the numbers to close the gender gap in STEM, unless we simultaneously fix the institutions and the knowledge, we will not fix the numbers. It is important to recognize that who does science determines, to a certain extent, what science is created. Institutions benefit from the new research questions and priorities that historically excluded scientists bring.
Why is considering sex- and gender-related variables in research important? How does it lead to better science?
Let me mention a couple of our case studies. Our first case study highlighted cardiovascular disease. We showed how analyzing sex in clinical research has led to an understanding that heart disease in women often has a different pathophysiology than in men—particularly in younger adults. That was 2009; in 2018, we expanded the case study to discuss cardiovascular health for transgender individuals. Hormonal therapy can change the blood lipid profiles of people in ways not fully predictable from studying cisgender individuals. Trans women often take estrogens at levels that have historically been associated with an increased risk of venous thromboembolism and a slightly increased risk of heart attacks. Including transgender individuals in clinical studies is important to allow for better risk prediction and care. This may also result in better understanding of the effects of higher-dose hormone therapy on cardiovascular health in adults overall.
‘‘Gender’’ often unconsciously translates to women. To remind researchers that gender is about women, men, nonbinary people, and others, we did a case study on osteoporosis in men. Osteoporosis has been considered primarily a disease of postmenopausal women, an assumption that has shaped its screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Although women have a higher fracture risk at any given age, medical outcomes of fractures are worse in men. Analyzing the interaction between sex and gender in osteoporosis research has resulted in the development of new diagnostics for men, and the search for better prevention and treatments is underway.
We also have case studies on stem cells, AI, gendering social robots, inclusive crash test dummies, and marine science, among other topics. It’s very exciting to see over 40 specific examples on our website detailing how sex-, gender-, and/or intersectional-based analysis can lead to discovery and innovation.
What are the major barriers that exist to incorporating sex and gender into research? And what are the solutions?
The greatest barrier is that researchers in the natural sciences, health & medicine, and engineering typically do not know how to do sophisticated sex and gender analysis—and even fewer know what intersectionality is. This is the failure of the modern university. Sex and gender analysis was developed in the humanities and social sciences and has, for the most part, not made its way across disciplinary divides to other parts of the university. This failure is especially dangerous in medical schools because reflexively generalizing from studies in men, or any majoritized group, to inform women’s, or any minoritized group’s, healthcare can lead to harm. To deliver the best care, professors need to mainstream the latest methods, techniques, and findings related to sex, gender, race/ethnicity, and much else throughout the curriculum.
Where have funding agencies succeeded in advancing the inclusion and reporting of sex- and gender-based analyses in research? Where is more work needed?
As noted earlier, the EC has been a leader in this area. In its 2020 funding program, the EC required applicants to integrate sex, gender, and/or intersectional analysis into the design of research—or to justify that it is not relevant (for example with pure math or theoretical physics research). The new EC policy means that all researchers—from humanists to medical researchers, to systems engineers, etc.—must incorporate this type of analysis, where relevant. The idea is that— and this is important—if taxpayer money is used, the research should benefit all across the whole of society.
To provide the intellectual foundations for this policy, the EC held a 2-year expert group, which I directed. This group consisted of 25 experts from numerous fields of science from biomedicine to marine science to machine learning and environmental sciences.
Other funding agencies have also implemented excellent policies. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) were one of the first in North America, and now sex- and gender-based analysis is expected (not required) across all their national funding agencies. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required, since 2016, that Sex as a Biological Variable be integrated into all research proposals. NIH held a virtual conference in August 2022 where strategies for implementing ‘‘Gender as a Sociocultural Variable’’ were discussed. Over 1,000 participants attended this virtual meeting! And discussion of gender quickly expanded to other important social factors, such as structural racism and intersectionality. I have published on the importance of considering gender as a sociocultural variable.
In 2022, colleagues from Wellcome Trust in London and the University of Copenhagen and I published a global review of funding agency policies titled, ‘‘A framework for sex, gender, and diversity analysis in research: Funding agencies have ample room to improve their policies.’’ As part of that work, we developed a ‘‘policy roadmap’’ in which we presented the five parts of good policy (as they emerged from our review) and catalogued emerging practices under each part. That tool can be found on the Gendered Innovations website under Policy Recommendations, Major Granting Agencies.
While public funders have taken the lead, private funders, such as Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, should also require sex-, genderand intersectional-based analyses in proposals for research funding. When researchers leave sex, gender, age, race, ethnicity, disabilities, socioeconomic status, geographic location, or other important variables out of their research, at best, that limits the generalizability and impact of their work and, at worst, can cause harm. This is why all research must use the best methods available.
Do you think peer-reviewed research journals have a role to play in how sex- and gender-based analyses are reported? If so, what is their role?
In 2016, the European Association of Editors published the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines. These guidelines document best practices for considering sex and gender in research. Many journals—well beyond biomedical journals—have now widely implemented them in their instructions to authors. For example, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Cell Press, The Lancet portfolio, and some 2,300 Elsevier journals have implemented these guidelines. I have catalogued policy recommendations including the instructions and guidance from peer-reviewed journals on the Gendered Innovations website. A group of us are now working on producing a similar set of author and editor guidelines for intersectionality.
But journals and publishers could go further. Publishers, especially of peer-reviewed research journals, might collaborate as a consortium to require sex-, gender-, and intersectional-based analysis, where relevant to the research, as a condition for publication consideration. It is hard to believe that there was a time when clinical trial registration was not required for publication consideration in leading journals. Perhaps one day, the same might be said about sophisticated sex-, gender-, and intersectional-based analysis.
What barriers remain to truly integrating sex and gender into research? How do we overcome those barriers?
Again, researchers don’t know how to do sophisticated sex, gender, and intersectional analysis. It is important to emphasize that sex or gender analysis is not one thing you do, such as including equal numbers of male and female rats in an experiment. This analysis must be considered in each step of the research process from identifying the problem (setting research priorities) to designing the research, collecting data, analyzing results, and reporting. On the Gendered Innovations website, we offer research methods where we detail the types of questions to ask for each of these steps and offer recent literature for those who wish to dig deeper.
To bring researchers up to speed, the CIHR and the U.S. NIH offer online trainings for medical researchers. Gendered Innovations offers workshops for research groups, upon request. And people can use the Gendered Innovations website. But, again, these methods need to be taught during undergraduate, graduate, and professional training such that they become embedded in the science over time.
What do you think are the next big scientific questions about sex and gender that researchers should focus on moving forward?
What is exciting about this field of research is that our understandings of exactly what sex is and what is encompassed in the term gender keep deepening. In 1993, when the U.S. NIH Health Revitalization Act was passed, the struggle was simply to recognize the importance of using non-human animals and humans of ‘‘both’’ sexes in preclinical and clinical trials. At the same time, sex was to be distinguished from gender (a term that entered U.S. academia in its modern sense only in the 1950s). Further, we have gone well beyond the male-female binary to look carefully at intersex/ differences of sex development, and we now break sex down into sub-variables, including genetic, hormone, genital, and secondary sex characteristic variables that may or may not align in an individual. Gender has gone through even more revolutions. We have blown out of the water the binary concepts of masculinity and femininity, largely products of the eighteenth century rallied in the effort to remove women from the public spheres of government and science. We no longer think of gender as a spectrum stretching between two ideal points, but as multidimensional and related to gender norms, identities, and power relations. Some researchers challenge the sex/gender distinction altogether, showing how these classifications are inextricably linked.
On the one hand, sex and gender researchers remake the conceptual foundations of the field. On the other, we address big new research questions. These days, I’m deeply interested in planetary health, the field that joins environmental and human health, and what intersectional approaches have to offer there. Other new topics include analyzing sex-based responses to climate change among marine organisms as guides to ocean management. And machine learning and AI continue to be important research areas—especially in the health arena.
What about intersectional analyses? Can you talk about what they are and why they are important?
Intersectionality describes overlapping or intersecting forms of discrimination related to gender, sex, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, sexuality, geographic location, etc. The term was coined in 1989 by legal scholar Kimberle´ Crenshaw to describe how multiple forms of discrimination intersect specifically in Black women’s lives. In 1989, her concern was that the white feminist movement was excluding women of color.
Let me illustrate this with the iconic example from Joy Buolamwini. During her graduate work at MIT, Buolamwini realized that the systems she was developing could not see her own face—until she put on a white mask. This led to her study ‘‘Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.’’ First, the gender analysis showed that systems performed better on men’s faces than on women’s. The race analysis showed that systems performed better on lighter compared to darker skin. It’s the intersectional analysis that most interests me: systems performed the worst for Black women. Error rates were 35% for darker-skinned women, 12% for darker-skinned men, 7% for lighter-skinned women, and less than 1% for lighter-skinned men. These results are unacceptable from scientific, equity, and justice points of view. Buolamwini and her co-author subsequently developed an intersectional dataset aimed at improving system accuracy.
There are many such examples. I am currently working on a Nature Perspective to highlight examples and methodological insights to move intersectional research approaches into the mainstream. It is critical that universities incorporate sophisticated methods of intersectional analysis across their curricula, researchers implement these methods in their research, funding agencies support and incentivize this type of research, and publishers require intersectional analyses as a condition for publication. Designing sex-, gender-, and intersectional-based analysis into research can spark new perspectives, raise new questions, and open new areas of research.
Schiebinger, Londa Schiebinger, Cell (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.01.045