Content area
Full Text
Removing Barriers: Women in Academic Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Jill M. Bystydzienski and Sharon R. Bird, eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006, 347 pp., $75 hardcover, $30 paper.
Women, Gender, and Technology, Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson and Sue V. Rosser, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, 204 pp., $55 hardcover, $20 paper.
Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues by Sandra Harding. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, 205 pp., $40 hardcover, $20 paper.
MARY A. ARMSTRONG
Interrogating how gender, race, sexuality, and transnational issues complexly intersect with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is not a new project for feminists. Yet each of the recent works reviewed here offer productive, interdisciplinary additions to the intricate landscape of these intersections, presenting valuable perspectives on the mutually transformative links between gender-based inquiry and STEM issues that lie at the heart of feminist science studies.
Jill M. Bystydzienski and Sharon R. Bird's Removing Barriers: Women in Academic Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics is a particularly useful and comprehensive collection that examines the persistence and seeming intractability of the under-representation of women in academic STEM areas. What makes this collection especially effective is the careful and convincing theoretical perspective by which it is informed. At the very center of Bystydzienski and Bird's approach is the quite explicit rejection of more traditional approaches to understanding and "fixing" the problem of the underrepresentation of women in academic STEM areas. Specifically, the authors refuse to accept what they describe as "interventions that construe women as 'the problem' in need of change" and which primarily focus on helping individual women adjust to doing science or acquiring skills they appear to lack (4). Similarly, the editors challenge the simplicity of the popular "pipeline" theory, noting that while the image of women progressively falling away from STEM careers is an apt one, the leaky pipeline model also fails to critique adequately the deeply masculinist cultural and structural barriers that are fundamentally embedded in science and engineering fields.
This clear-headed approach to the problems of women and STEM success/ retention allows the seventeen essays in this collection to grapple effectively with multifaceted levels of inquiry and analysis while avoiding any of the randomness or...