Gender, Language and Science: More Tools for Critique

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1. Announcements, Calendar Events, Lectures, Questions

• email problems
• precept sign up.
• Course evaluation (anonymous, 3 good, 3 neg., 1 suggestion)
• schedule - next week…images and then schooling.

2. Debrief on the Network Exercise

• what did we learn? (numbers)
• critique

3. Tools for Understanding Gender Difference and Critiquing Information

• theory (ethnomethodology, biological, evolutionary (socio-biology), object relations theory, networks)
• An Evolutionary Perspective on Thai Sexual Attitudes and Behavior - example of faulty reasoning
• research methods (samples, representativeness, replication, pre-conceived assumptions, qualitative vs. quantitative (time frame))
• language, images, and thought

4. Gender and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller

Are the different characterizations myth or reality?

Is the explanation a numbers game?

How did the myth of science arise?

• Development of objectivity - fundamentally a social psychological phenomenon.
• How does gender fit into this explanation?
• boys and separateness
• scientists and personality traits (masculinity, loners, distant relationship with spouse)

• circular process of gender interacting with the myth of science

Why does it matter?

• colors what we choose to see
• the language that we use to describe phenomena is gendered
• sperm and the egg example
• genetics (chromosomal structure) vs. embryology (eggs to adults)
• how to talk about genes (that we can't even see yet)?
• what caused the shift?

Enlightenment's reach is only as far as the political and social realities of the present