The University of Wisconsin-Madison is looking for a particular kind of biologist: a feminist one. The university has set up a fellowship, administered by its women’s studies department, for life sciences research. While it may sound strange for a social sciences department to host a biologist, the researchers in charge of the new fellowship are hoping to make it more of a norm.
Scholars have long talked about how gender bias affects biology research. Thirty years ago, biologists always described sperm as “penetrating” or “burrowing” into passive eggs, even after research showed that eggs play an active role in fertilization… and that sperm’s swimming is too weak to penetrate an egg. Today, scientists know that eggs and sperm recognize each other, grab onto each other, and fuse to form embryos. (So romantic!) But gender bias continues in other branches of biology. Just this month, Popular Science reported on the problems behind neuroscience studies purporting to find “hardwired” differences between men’s and women’s brains. (1)
Men have taken the places of women in the cosmos.
Men have imposed their mechanistic masculine view of the world.
Men have dominated philosophical thought with ideas about right and wrong.
Do we really need to have something penetrate something else?
Do we really need to define what is being penetrated?
The world is not about penetration only.
The world is not about right and wrong.
The world is all united into One.
Please wake up the women in order to start seeing it again.
As a woman, I can’ t find a more gratifying compliment than this writing here. In our fast-forward, competitive world, it didn’t cross my mind that there were men waiting for the awakening of the woman. It is all about the complementarity of the masculine and the feminine, but we tend to easily forget and get lost in our society’s ways to conceptualize the world. We may have a woman president of the US, but she will still be a man in a woman’s body; our women are kick-boxing, playing football and “giving hell” when in important, CEO positions – because they want to prove themselves as competitive in a man’s world, where there’s no place for feminity; while what our world truly needs is complementarity, in both men and women.
This is a really nice post.
My time reading it was worth it 🙂
Glad you find it interesting! 🙂