From “The Mind has No Sex?” to “Gendered Innovations”: A Historian’s Contribution to Enhancing Excellence in Science & Technology

Photo: Linda Cicero

Join us on September 27 for the annual ECS Faber Lecture with Londa Schiebinger (Stanford University).

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP HERE.

Reception to follow the lecture.

This lecture explores how a historian of science can make significant contributions to science & technology. Professor Schiebinger will quickly sketch her journey from neo-Kantianism to understanding how women and something we might call gender—with intersectional attention to race—were excluded from science during the European scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in ways that made that exclusion seem just and natural. We will take a quick detour into the power dynamics of colonial science to discuss how knowledge circulated between Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the Atlantic World. Finally, we will explore Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment to understand how humanists and social scientists can enhance discovery, innovation, and social responsibility in science & tech. As time allows, we will explore social robots, computer vision, facial recognition, and other topics. This work engages with the politics of knowledge—who produces it, and how who produces science influences to a certain extent the science that is produced.

Funding provided by the Eberhard L. Faber 1915 Memorial Fund in the Humanities Council.

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University, and Founding Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. Schiebinger is a leading international expert on gender and intersectional analysis in science and technology and has addressed the United Nations, the European Parliament, the Korean National Assembly, among others, on that topic. Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universitat de València, Spain, 2018; Lunds Universitet, Sweden, 2017; and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, 2013. Her publications include The Mind has No Sex? Women in the Making of Modern Science (HUP, 1989); Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon, 1993); Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (HUP, 2004); edited with Robert N. Proctor, Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance (SUP, 2008); The Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (SUP, 2017); AI can be Sexist and Racist—It’s Time to Make it Fair Nature (2018); Sex and Gender Analysis Improves Science and Engineering Nature (2019); A Framework for Sex, Gender, and Diversity Analysis in Research Science (2022). Her work has been translated into numerous languages.