Unintended Bias Questions

Central reading: Conversations with Evelyn Fox Keller Links to an external site.. Focus especially on “Stereotypes are Never Idle” to the end.

Analysis discussion questions:

• How does “gender” often come to be equated with “women?” What is different about discussing gender in science versus women in science?  
• Discuss the author’s proposition that masculinity is aligned with rationality, objectivity, and transcendence, while femininity is aligned with irrational, subjectivity, and immanent.
• How did developmental biology’s turn from the competition and reproduction model of evolutionary biology enable new discoveries?
• Discuss the line: “at fertilization, the sperm enters the egg and “activates” the gene.”

Reflection discussion questions:

• What are the dominant linguistic, instrumentational, or practice-based metaphors of your field?
• How are these metaphors linked to the histories of the field and patterns of exclusion?
• What new metaphors have arisen in the past decade or so, and how have they advanced the field?