Gender differences and performance in science.
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Career Choice↗
Biomedical subjects
Londa Schiebinger
Publications and source records attributed to Londa Schiebinger.
Jeanne Baret: the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
The voyages of scientific discovery conjure in our minds images of Sir Hans Sloane bioprospecting in Jamaica in 1687 or Joseph Banks voyaging aboard the Endeavour to Tahiti and New Zealand in 1768. But women also set foot on rickety and unsure ocean-going vessels in the 18th century in the service of science. The German-born Maria Sibylla Merian voyaged from Amsterdam to Surinam in South America in 1699 to search for exotic caterpillars. She sought one that would produce a thread to rival silk, a costly and much sought-after fabric in early-modern Europe. In the process, she produced one of the most celebrated 18th-century natural history books.
Botany↗
Skelettestreit.
Michael Stolberg claims there was a broad movement in the sixteenth century toward sexing skeletons and offers Felix Platter's singular 1583 female skeleton and Caspar Bauhin's 1597 reproduction of that skeleton as evidence. He admits that these illustrations did not become a standard feature of anatomical textbooks, though he maintains (erroneously) that the descriptions of these skeletons became "canonical." Stolberg does not appreciate the extent to which Platter's female skeleton was an anomaly. Distinctively female-sexed skeletons flooded Europe after about 1730, and, importantly, anatomists at the time perceived that these depictions were radically new. Indeed, widespread and protracted debates erupted over the exact features of the female skeleton. These anatomical illustrations emerged within a novel political climate, where sex in the body was newly seen as grounding gender roles in new social regimes. The story of the European study of sexual differences is not one of slow and steady accretion of positive knowledge, as Stolberg implies. That story is fraught with changing reinterpretations and relocations of difference, and new meanings attached to new kinds of sameness and difference within differing cultural contexts. It is wrong to judge foundational shifts in scientific culture merely by firsts.
Anatomy↗
Women's health and clinical trials.
Women have traditionally been underrepresented in clinical trials. In order to translate recent advances in our understanding of the molecular and physiological bases of sex differences into new therapeutics and health practices, sound sex-specific clinical data are imperative. Since the founding of the Office of Research on Women's Health within the Office of the Director at the NIH in 1990, inequities in federally funded biomedical research, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases affecting women in the US have been reviewed. Discussed herein is the evolution of gender-related research innovations, primarily within the last decade, and strategies and challenges involved in the success of this recent development.
Clinical Trials as Topic↗