User:Mfagaly/sandbox

=WOMEN=

There is a common misconception that women have still not advanced in achieving academic degrees. According to Margaret Rossiter, a historian of science, women now earn 54 percent of all bachelor's degrees in the United States. However, although there are more women holding bachelors degrees than men, as the level of education increases, the more men tend to fit the statistics instead of women. At the graduate level, women fill 40 percent of the doctorate degrees (31 percent of them being in engineering).

While to this day women are studying at prestigious universities at the same rate as men, they are not being given the same chance to join faculty. Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman has observed that the more prestigious an institute is, the more difficult and time consuming it will be for women to obtain a faculty position there. In 1989, Harvard University tenured its first woman in chemistry, Cynthia Friend, and in 1992 its first woman in physics, Melissa Franklin. She also observed that women were more likely to hold their first professional positions as instructors and lecturers while men are more likely to work first in tenure positions. According to Smith and Tang, as of 1989, 65 percent of men and only 40 percent of women held tenured positions and only 29 percent of all scientists and engineers employed as assistant professors in four-year colleges and universities were women.

Education (Jobs)
In 1992, women earned 9 percent of the Ph.D.'s awarded in engineering but only one percent made it to become a professor. In 1995, 11 percent of professors in science and engineering were women. In relation, only 311 deans of engineering schools were women, which is less than 1 percent of the total. Even in psychology, a degree in which women earn the majority of Ph.D.'s, they hold a significant amount of fewer tenured positions, roughly 19 percent in 1994.

Gender
According to a study done at Brown University, 1.7 births are of intersex babies. At that rate, if 300,000 babies were born, 5,100 would have varying degrees of intersexual development. However, at birth, these babies were assigned a gender based off of their genitalia. In some cases even if a child had XX chromosomes, if they were born with a penis, they were raised as a male.

Culture and Gender Roles
In the 1970's, many academic women, including scientists, avoided having children. However, throughout the 1980's, institutions tried to equalize conditions for men and women in the workplace. However, the inequalities at home stumped women's opportunities to succeed as far as men. Professional women are still responsible for domestic labor and child care. As people would say, the have a "double burden" which does not allow then the time and energy to succeed in their careers. Until the early twentieth century, U.S. women's colleges required their women faculty members to remain single, on the grounds that a woman could not carry on two full time professions at once. According to Schiebinger, "Being a scientist and a wife and a mother is a burden in society that expects women more often than men to put family ahead of career. (pg. 93).

=Women's Health Movement= Another main movement, the Women's Health Movement, emerged in 1960s and 1970s and involved multiple groups such as the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, the National Women's Health Network, and the National Black Women's Health Project. It illuminated how the United States health care system was failing women. Male control over the organization was questioned, which led to women enrolling in medical school, midwives becoming licensed, and women becoming more involved. The movement then sprung several Acts to be passed such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 and the Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering Act of 1980 which specifically targeted the underrepresented groups in medicine, science, and engineering and get them more involved. By 1986, the Advisory Committee on Women's Health Issues was established by the NIH to recommend increasing women's participation in federally funded bio medical research.

=Evelyn Fox Keller=

Her first experience with feminism was when she was attending a conference on "women and the Scientific Profession." Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim argued for more women in science based on the invaluable contributions a "specifically female genius" could make to science. Four years later, in 1969, she put together all her data she collected on the fate of women scientists and put together an argument about women in (or out of) science, based on "women's nature." She had been feeling disenchantment from her colleague publishing her team's work and she had realized the reason behind it until she did her research.

In 1974 Keller taught her first women's studies course. Shortly after, she was invited to give a series of lectures on her work. Having never shared her personal experiences of her story of how it was like for her as a woman becoming a scientist. This lecture marked the beginning of her work as a feminist critic of science. It raised three central questions that marked her research and writing over the next decade.

One of her major works was a contribution to the book The Gender and Science Reader. Keller's article, entitled "Secrets of God, Nature, and Life" links issues in feminism back to the Scientific Revolution in the 17th Century and the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century. In the chapter, one of her main points she addresses is actually one in which she quotes Boyle. "It may seem an ingrateful and unfilial thing to dispute against nature, that is taken by mankind for the common parent of us all. But although it be as undutiful thing, to express a want of respect for an acknowledged parent, yet i know not, why it may not be allowable to question one, that a man looks upon but as a pretend one; and it appear to me, that she is so, I think it my duty to pay my gratitude, not to I know not what, but to that diety, whose wisdom and goodness...designed to make me a man (pg. 103). By Keller addressing Boyle's quote in this aspect, she alludes to how as soon as questionable aspects are displayed in nature, "nature" becomes "nature" and is then feminine