Should Feminists Clone And If So How
as a kid
i was convinced that i was bionic and
i’ve got my bionic woman running shoes
here to prove it
growing up in toronto canada in the
1970s
i knew i was different i was a girl
who loved science and math but more
importantly
i had completely convinced my
six-year-old self
that i was part human part machine
and a hundred percent awesome
for those of you who are old enough to
remember the bionic woman show was a
show that aired in the 70s
and it starred a very blonde and very
white actress
by the name of lindsay wagner
at the time i didn’t see any difference
between myself
and lindsay wagner’s character jamie
summers
we were basically the same person
one day during kindergarten i
uh my bionic skills came in quite in
handy
i used to love running to the jungle gym
and climbing up some monkey bars that
must have been all of five feet high
one such day i scaled those monkey bars
with my first ever kindergarten crush
let’s call him steve austin
steve and i climbed those monkey bars
and we were enjoying our view of all the
non-bionic children in the playground
when all of a sudden steve leapt from
the top of those bars down to the ground
i motioned to follow him in this amazing
feat of agility and strength
when he yelled to me to stop i asked him
why
he said that as bionic man he could make
that jump
but that as bionic woman i was not
strong enough
and i would never be able to make it and
so i leapt
good god i left i took a leap of faith
and as soon as i landed and was able to
steady myself
i made my way over to my first ever
crush and i started to pummel
pooler steve austin how dare he say that
i
jamie freaking summers was not as strong
as bionic man
our kindergarten teacher rushed over to
us and pulled me away from my out of
character behavior
and said why debolino why are you
punching this poor little boy
i told her he said that bionic woman was
not as strong as bionic man
i think she was sympathetic but i really
still got in trouble
that day i learned an important lesson
that being a girl and being a bionic
girl
at the same time was going to be tricky
another day that same winter i was
making my way home
when all of a sudden a snowball pelted
me in the back of the head
when i turned around to see where the
snowy assault was coming from
and who the perpetrator was i saw a tall
eighth grade boy with blonde hair and
blue eyes
getting ready to throw another snowball
at me and as he was doing so
he yelled the word packy
more snowballs kept coming and he kept
yelling this word pacquiao at me over
and over again
i don’t know what the word pachy meant
and i don’t know why he was throwing
snowballs at me
but what i did know is that thanks to my
bionic legs
i was going to be able to get away from
this bad guy
and so i motored my way home
and when i got home i opened the door
with tears running down my face
i told my mother what had happened i
asked her
what does this word mean she sighed
and she said it’s a mean word used to
refer to people from pakistan
that must have been hard for her it must
have been hard to explain to a
six-year-old
that people were going to be mean to me
just because of the color of my skin
i hadn’t paid much attention to the
color of my skin at that point
i was more interested in the anodes and
diodes and bionic parts that were
underneath my skin
as far as i knew i was canadian my
parents were from india
but they were also canadian
but this early experience with racism
taught me another important lesson
not only was it going to be difficult to
be a bionic girl
but being a brown bionic girl on top of
that was going to be downright difficult
i believe that every instance that i’ve
had or
encountered that i’ve had that has
questioned my abilities or my potential
because of my presumed biological sex or
that has made me feel
inadequate because of the brown color of
my skin
has actually motivated me to think very
seriously
about questions of difference
becoming a molecular biologist actually
taught me
that biology isn’t something that should
be used against a person for who they
are
now as a professor of neuroscience and
behavioral biology
with a joint appointment in women’s
gender and sexuality studies
i get to bring my love of science
together with my commitment
to social justice issues every day
i get to use my interdisciplinary
expertise to create new conversations
between feminism and science
my years of research has led me to an
important conclusion
to address the difference in diversity
issue in stem
we need to do more than just have more
women and minorities
enter into the sciences we actually need
more feminists in science and when i say
this i should be clear
anyone can be a feminist a woman a man
bionic non-bionic all are welcome
so let’s look at some data around
diversity issues in stem
in the 2019 national center
for science and engineering statistics
report
on women minorities and persons with
disabilities
we can actually see that there has been
some improvement in some areas
since the nsf started collecting this
data for example
in the biological sciences women now
hold the majority of degrees
and in fact 52 percent 52.6 percent
of all doctoral degrees in the
biological sciences are now awarded to
women
when the nsf started collecting this
data
35 years ago this number was at 30
percent so yes we can definitely say
that in this particular field there’s
been some improvement
however the report also shows
that over the last two decades there’s
actually been a decline
in the number of women receiving bio uh
bachelor’s degrees
in mathematics and in statistics
and in the computer sciences there’s
also been
a decline and less women receiving
bachelor’s degrees
so interestingly leo there’s
in the field where in biological
sciences where there are a majority of
women receiving degrees
we see an interesting phenomenon
even though 52.6 of all doctoral degrees
are avoided to women
only 42 percent of assistant professors
are women and tenured associate
professors
this number goes down to 35 percent and
at the full professor level
only 26 percent of those positions held
are held by women
many refer to this issue as the pipeline
issue or the leaky pipeline problem
others say that innate biological and
psychological differences between women
and men
is actually the cause behind why women
can’t prosper as much in sciences
now i’m not interested in using or
engaging with either of these arguments
i think that the pipeline metaphor and
evolutionary psychology-based arguments
have actually grown quite stale
i know that it’s important for us to
address gender discrimination
in the scientific workplace and i think
that there are many qualified
individuals
who are doing so but what i also think
is that we need a fresh way to look at
this issue
in order to support women and minorities
in stem fields i think we need to go
beyond just counting heads
and see who gets to become a scientist
in order to support diversity in sem we
also
have to interrogate how it is that we do
science
this means that we have to take the time
to reflect on which questions are being
asked in science
who gets to ask these questions and what
gets to count as scientific knowledge
well how do we go about doing this well
it turns out
that feminists have been working on
putting together a toolkit
that allows us to think about questions
of diversity and difference
in more creative ways certainly in more
creative ways than a pipeline metaphor
or color coded brains allows us to
in fact this toolkit is a game changer
as a feminist scientist i have used this
toolkit
and now i know that the term feminist is
actually a loaded one
and that feminism means many things to
many different people
but this toolkit did expand my ideas of
what feminism
offers and what it means to be a
feminist
it actually allowed me to think
differently about the concept of
difference
it allowed me to think about difference
not as a lack
or as a mutation from a norm and it has
encouraged me to question
how it is that we establish our norms
it has also encouraged me to interact
with the world in a way
where i learned to think with and learn
with those
who are typically marginalized in our
societies
since at least the 1960s and 1970s
when all kinds of social and civil
rights movements were happening around
the world
feminists started developing this
toolkit
and they used it mostly to debunk those
uh
ideas and those scientific ideas as well
that are used to actually discriminate
against people because of their sex
their gender their race their class
and other categories feminist scientists
have been using elements of this toolkit
and applying it
to the scientific method feminist
scientists aren’t interested in
dismissing science or dismantling
science
rather they want to produce scientific
knowledge that is more meaningful
and speaks more directly to the lives
and the material conditions
of people who are typically marginalized
so let’s look at some of the tools in
this toolkit
the first one i’m going to share with
you it’s called feminist standpoint
theory
feminist standpoint theory encourages
the scientists
to originate their questions from the
perspectives
of from the margins and to include those
viewpoints that aren’t usually included
it encourages a scientist to ask where
did my research question originate
who will this research benefit and have
i taken
into account the needs and the concerns
of those whose lives that will be most
impacted by this research
another tool in this toolkit is situated
knowledges
situated knowledges invites the
scientists
to reorient themselves to the
experimental design
the experimental apparatus and to their
object of knowledge
it encourages the scientists to ask does
this scientific experiment
assume that the scientists can have a
view from nowhere
does this experiment make an
accommodation for the fact that there
might be experimental biases
embedded in this inquiry
and it asks can the scientists recognize
that there might be some kind of
connection
or relation with their object of study
another tool in this two kit is called
nature cultures
and this one’s actually come in quite
handy for me nature cultures
asks us to think about difference
differently not in just in terms of a
dichotomy
or a binary it forces the scientists to
ask
in their inquiry am i reinstating
a type of binary that’s based on a
division between biology and culture
or nature and nurture
is my inquiry reinforcing essentialist
kind of thinking or reductionism
and is my inquiry actually repeating
gendered
or hierarchical paradigms
it’s these tools that actually
encouraged me to become a scientist in
the first place
when i started my phd in molecular
biology and reproductive
neuroendocrinology
i made sure to be informed by feminist
health advocates
and reproductive justice advocates in
toronto
these advocates were interested in
knowing
what were the long-term effects of
hormone-based
contraceptives and hormone-based
therapies
on women’s bodies and so i jumped at the
chance
to participate in an experiment that was
led by my phd supervisor
who by the way happened to be one of the
very few female faculty in our
department
in this experiment we asked a question
that had not yet been asked
in this experiment we asked are estrogen
receptors
located in a certain neuron of the brain
we were specifically looking at whether
or not estrogen receptors
were located in what is known as the
gonadotropin-releasing hormone neuron
located in the hypothalamus these
neurons also referred to as gnrh neurons
are known to play an important role in
the regulation of reproduction
for decades however expert
neuroendocrinologists
had determined that gnrnh neurons
actually didn’t express estrogen or
androgen receptors
they had been using a hierarchical
paradigm
to understand the hypothalamic pituitary
gonadal axis
and in this model the brain sends the
commands
down to the gonads there was no room
to understand that there might be
feedback mechanisms from the gonads
up to the brain
my phd work showed that in fact
gnrh neurons do express estrogen
receptors
and that these receptors are active
and that they can change gnrh synthesis
this finding actually has broad impacts
because it tells us that estrogen-based
contraceptives
or hormone replacement therapies don’t
just target the gonads
they might actually add directly at the
level of the brain
and have an influence on our
reproductive cycles on our sleep cycles
and more
using a feminist toolkit actually led me
to search for estrogen receptors in gnrh
neurons
conducting scientific experimentation
actually made me understand
that our molecules our genes our
proteins
our cells our brains our bodies
what they can do our understanding of
what they can do can actually change
in fact molecular biology taught me that
our biologies
and our destinies are not fixed
reimagining how we think about
difference
in the sciences might actually invite
more women and minorities
to enter into and to stay in the
sciences
it might give them the courage to ask
questions that aren’t usually asked
it might give them the courage to
produce scientific knowledge
that actually matters more to their
lives and to the material conditions of
their lives
and even if you’re not bionic
using science and the wonders of science
might take you to another place
as a woman or as a minority and i hope
this can work for all of us
thank you