First off, I apologize for this post being a bit late. But it’s fitting because this week we’re looking at technology, and the technology services Verizon provides to some neighborhoods is absolutely terrible and only works intermitently, when it works at all. I’ve been trying to connect all morning and resetting the router can’t fix this problem. So if anyone out there is thinking of switching to Verizon Fios: Don’t.
Since I’m a writer for the American Psychological Association, I thought it would be nice to see what psychologists were saying about women and technology at a time closer to the publication of The Female Man. While this post won’t relate directly to the book, I think it will provide some historical perspective about women, technology, and science. The article I will be discussing is called “Women, Science, and Technology” by Sheila M. Pfafflin and was published in the October issue of American Psychologist in 1984. This is about 9 years after The Female Man was published, but still 25 years before the present.
The article first points out that women, even back then with a work force prevalence of 45%, were missing from engineering and physical science fields with participation rates as low as 13%. Pfafflin points to four trends for why this is a problem: The equity issue turned women away because they were less likely to be encouraged to pursue careers and develop their talents in science and engineering. Human resource utilization comes from the failure of the equity issue the country then wastes a substantial portion of technical talent (women) which could lead to serious science and tech consequences. Discrimination against women in these fields, back then, further turned them away. And finally, policy-making in these fields, because of the low rate of woman involvement, was being made with low input from women.
I bring this study up, becuase it made me wonder: “Have women ever been participants in the science and technology fields?” What I mean by this, is this is an issue that we still hear about today. For some reason, I thought it was a recent development (like in the last 10 years), but apparently, for different reasons, it was also an issue in 1984. Pfafflin also makes the point that in the late ’70s the rates of women participating in science and technology were even lower. Prior the the ’60s, very few women were staying in the work place past marriage. Was there ever a time when women were participating in the physical sciences and technology more so than they are today? It doesn’t look like it.
While this is certainly cause for concern for social scientists understanding why this is the case, what I see here is really just the same old media trick of making big news out of old news. It seems like there is a new story a month about how women are avoiding science fields at ever increasing rates. How can this possibly be the case? The four things Pfafflin listed as the causes for concern and problems aren’t as big a deal in academia any more. Women are, with increasing frequency, affecting policy. Academic departments are constantly becoming friendly to both genders not to mention other ethnic and minority groups.
All of this is relavent because, while women may not be participating in science and technology fields at the rates some would like to see nowadays, they never really have. This brings us to Janet: “I’ve worked in the mines, on the radio network, on a milk farm, a vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian” (1). It seems here that Russ is fully aware of the limitations and barriers that were facing women around her time (the ones listed by Pfafflin above) and made a simple point: For women to be included in fields typically dominated by men (the radio network, mines and farms) men cannot exist. Maybe that’s the case, but from what I gather from 20 years of psychological research, women have never participated at rates some folks would like to see. Of course, I don’t think there’s much any of us can do about it, because, after all, we’re English majors.
There’s some great historical perspective here, thanks. This reminds me of a controversy caused by Lawrence Summers a few years ago. Summers is now President Obama’s chief economic advisor, but a few years back, when he was Harvard University’s president, he suggested that women don’t go into the field of mathematics simply because they have no mathematical aptitude. I’ll have the specific quotation by classtime.
I remember that! He was an adviser for a friend of my family’s PhD in economics and they were working closely together at the time, so when Summers was fired over it, it was big news! I remember discussing the quote with my mom, and I don’t recall it being so inflammatory. I felt like there was some slight truth to what he said, but the tactlessness with which he said it caused an uproar. It may have had to do with failures at successfully recruiting women into the sciences, but then again I don’t remember exactly what was said, so maybe it was that inflammatory and my memory just decieves me.