Saturday, September 8, 2012

The difficult road of women in the field of science



Since long ago women   have made considerable contributions to the scientific development of the mankind, but these contributions have been almost invisible because of the chauvinist culture that have remain. Society considers women inferior to men in the intellectual aspect and for this reason women have always been subordinated to those “superior beings”, men, because even nowadays women are denominated as the “weaker sex”. Women are important in traditional roles as: procreation, child care and upbringing and domestic roles that belong to the private world of the family.  This culture remains in the individual and social conscience until today. There is a clearly gender bias. Therefore, according to the male conceptions, women haven’t been capable of making contributions to the field of science.
The feminist social movements begin slowly to generate more space for women in different áreas, , exercising the right to have access to the knowledge of the reality, of the world, therefore Access to science, which is conceived as a way to study and explain the phenomena of reality rigorously: the scientific procedure. Still, the role of the woman in the scientific contribution has been generally “forgotten”, an example of this sexism is the fact that there is the impression that all big contributions and discoveries are exclusively male, leaving behind all those women scientists who have been outstanding, but most of them have remain in anonymity. This may explain the lack of women in this area.
Is this fair? Are women less talented with respect to science or just society hasn’t let them “shine” in this aspect?
But even when male dominancy has been present, some women have been able of became famous and have the same credit for their work than any man scientist.
In the next video you can see the most famous ones.


3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with you. But, I would like to emphasize an idea you mentioned above, which points out to the role that some women have inside the house and we don’t pay attention to it: the domestic role. We all know that housewives are the heart of every family, because they are the ones in charge of every domestic issue –-I can’t even imagine this world without them!

    I would like to add that in my first entry, I wrote something related to your topic, and I also mentioned the movie Mona Lisa Smile, in which the leading lady was a defender of women’s right, encouraging her students to study at the University, but at the same time, she hadn’t realized that she was devaluing the domestic role, because she considered it as the end of the world of every woman’s life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "[...]they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church[...] And they tore off her clothing and dragged her[...] through the streets of the city till she died. [...] and they burned her body with fire." In that way John of Nikiû describes how Hypatia was assesinated. Hypatia was a greek phylosopher and matematician. Her work in the field of Maths raised envies in her colleagues, who accused her of being a traitor. She was one of the first women punished for practising science. In the Middle Ages, women were accused of being witches and burned. As you see, history is full of examples of the domain of men in the field of science, but their resilience was bigger than any punishment, and today great scientifics are women.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.