Gender, Science, and Technology: Ethical Perspectives

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Gender, Science, and Technology Ethical
Perspectives

• 7th Ordinary Session of COMEST
• Hebe Vessuri

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General Overview

• Issues concerning the intersection of gender,
  science, and technology have largely been elided
  in recent philosophical and scientific debates.
  These issues go considerably beyond the
  (important) question of womens participation in
  science.
• Within the larger context of science and
  technology, gender must be considered as a set of
  roles, ideas, and expectations historically
  ascribed to men and women different from
  biological sex gender is a contingent category.
• Gender not only divides physical bodies in male
  and female, but it also separates the social,
  political and cognitive worlds. It divides the
  subjective as feminine and the objective as male.
  The great task of Feminism has been to see the
  hidden and silenced subjective dimension of the
  objective the rational dimension of the
  affectionate and the affective dimensions of the
  rational. (Fox Keller)

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• Science and technology are not only institutional
  phenomena and societal drivers, but also sites
  where gender is negotiated, delineated, and
  formed through processes of knowledge production.
• Historically, science has functioned as an
  instrument of domination to perpetuate the
  subjugation of women. However, in creating the
  conditions for problematizing the very notion of
  gender, science can also be recoded from a
  decidedly feminist perspective and used to
  surpass normative assumptions about gender.

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Key Questions and Concerns1. Social Organization
of Science

• The participation and role of women in science
  and technology the inclusion of women in the
  production of scientific and technological
  knowledge can serve as a lever for larger
  societal transformation and innovation there is
  a social responsibility to promote womens
  participation in science (science is not gender
  neutral).
• Science is a way of knowing and its values,
  among them those concerned to issues of gender,
  shape this way of knowing.
• As science has a social character, amongst its
  priorities must be the search for gender equity
  and a willingness to engage with feminist and
  post-feminist critiques of its epistemological
  biases.
• Women have the right to benefit from scientific
  innovation and be protected from its misuses but
  how can technology be better disseminated and
  placed in the hands of the women who need it?

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Key Questions and Concerns (continued)2.
Social Epistemologies

• Gender is coded into the vast array of those
  things that we call technologies and
  conversely, the social construction of woman
  also implies a particular technology of the
  gendered self.
• Gender and technology are deeply intertwined and
  indeed co-construct one another knowledge,
  material culture, and know-how, are situated and
  gendered.
• Feminist Epistemologies Whose Knowledge? Whose
  truth? Whose models of nature, progress, and the
  future?
• On the construction of scientific heterodoxy
  through language, discourse, and practice what
  role for women?
• Gender, Science, and Technology as implicated in
  a larger socio-historical structure of power,
  exclusionary practices, and naturalized
  hierarchies.

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Gender, Science, Technology and COMEST

• Mainstreaming gender across COMESTs axes of
  research what does this entail?
• Assessing what interface exists between Feminist
  Ethics and the Ethics of Science and Technology
  as understood by COMEST.
• The need to rethink the issue of gender from a
  polyvalent perspective civil society and social
  inclusion, institutions and policy-related
  questions, education and access, new paradigms in
  the ethics of science and technology, cultural
  specificity, and biases in knowledge etc.
• Social and historical pathways of stigma In many
  places women are, by and large, still discouraged
  from scientific careers resulting thus in the
  perpetuation of unbalanced science and
  unbalanced social knowledge bases. For COMEST,
  this means reframing gender equity in science as
  an intrinsically ethical issue, developing
  grassroots and policy mechanisms, and giving
  women a more central role on ethics committees
  across the globe.

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Gender and Science Ethics

• Ethical science is inclusive science, one that
  remains vigilant about how it, consciously or
  unconsciously, remains bound in gendered,
  racialized, and hierarchical paradigms of
  practice and production. In this regard,
  diversity is not simply something that is good
  to have, but an essential critical tool in
  assuring that science is conducted ethically and
  reassessing its historical norms. Science should
  never be used to justify inequality.
• Scientists never work in a void. Their
  Objectivity needs critical assessment.
  Discourses of value-neutrality may serve to
  fortify hegemonic scientific structures and
  attitudes that reinforce gender exclusion.
• Gender-inclusive science ethics demand a review
  of the historical and institutional arrangements
  that undergird exclusive practices.

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Gender and Environmental Ethics

• Creating resilient adaptation systems depends on
  consideration of gender and global environmental
  transformation. The suppression of women and
  their voices has moved in synchrony with the
  destruction of nature and adaption efforts need
  to ensure the well being of the Earth as well as
  the dignity of women.
• We need to closely examine the gender-specific
  impacts of climate change and recognize how
  gender inequality reduces any given societys
  capacity to adapt and be resilient. As long as
  women are disproportionately vulnerable to and
  affected by climate change, adaptation to
  environmental threats will remain imperfect.
• But we should be careful not to over-determine
  the vulnerability of women in relation to climate
  change. Women are not only victims of climate
  change, but also effective agents of change in
  relation to both mitigation and adaptation. Women
  can be key drivers of social and scientific
  innovation.

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Gender, Convergence, and Post-Humanism

• Gender categories are neither fixed nor stable.
  Gender itself is exploded in the inter-face
  between technology and woman.
• From convergence comes the potential for cyborgs
  and other potential hybrids condensed images of
  both imagination and social reality- to explain
  how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory
  and identity should be conjoined, rather than
  resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and
  organism in cyborgs.
• The idea of the cyborg deconstructs binaries of
  control and lack of control over the body, object
  and subject, nature and culture, in ways that are
  useful in postmodern feminist "thought, to
  expose ways that things considered natural, like
  human bodies, are not, but are constructed by our
  ideas about them.
• In a broader sense, the cyborg teaches us that
  the ethics of nanotechnology must engage how
  nanotechnology can subjugate women and also
  emancipate/empower them.

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Conclusions Over-arching Issues for COMEST

• The full gender dimension of science and its
  impact on society remains under-explored and
  feminist science studies and feminist ethics have
  yet to be adequately developed as robust fields
  of inquiry.
• Technological change, especially that designed to
  improve the quality of life in rural areas in
  developing countries, has been more directed to
  the tasks that men perform than to the tasks
  women perform, both in and outside the household.
• The gender specific nature of womens and mens
  needs and the differential impact of science and
  technology on the lives of men and women are
  inadequately recognized by science and technology
  professionals and citizens. Current structures
  and processes for decision-making in science and
  technology for development do not systematically
  take into account the needs and aspirations of
  both women and men in a gender-disaggregated
  manner
• Ethical issues associated with both the conduct
  of scientific research and the application of the
  results of research frequently have a gender
  dimension which has not been sufficiently
  recognized or addressed.

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Conclusions Over-arching Issues for COMEST

• How or should the gender issue enter COMEST?
• Can it be an approach to be integrated in the
  different actions engaged by the Commission?
• Is it to be introduced as a special area of
  reflection?
• There is a broad range of possibilities open to
  us which hopefully will be considered and
  analyzed further.
• Thank you!

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Thank you!