Feminist Science and Pink Ribbons

I have spent my entire undergraduate career as a biochemistry major and most of it as a feminist, yet somehow I never really put the two together. Until recently I had assumed they were mutually exclusive of each other, and to some extent have lived a double life between my lives as a scientist and feminist.

Scientists tend to see science as an objective pursuit of truth, yet personal biases can affect any research. A clear example of how sexism pervades even “objective” science is that the male’s sperm was seen as being active and the female’s egg as passive during fertilization. This was engrained in biology textbooks as truth until it was recently disproved. Another example is that early primatologists assumed that male baboons were the center of social troops; however, this has been clearly replaced with the model of a matriarchal baboon society. A change like this is called a “paradigm shift,” another of which has recently occurred in cancer research.

The dominant model of cancer as a disease is that genetic mutations lead to malfunctioning proteins, which can disrupt natural cell division and cause it to multiply, eventually forming a tumor. This is most likely true in some cases, but this genetic basis of cancer only accounts for a fraction of cases. There has also been a disproportionate focus on “lifestyle” choices that lead to guilt but are only rarely associated with causing cancer. Still, research on this disease model of cancer is the most funded and taught because of its relative simplicity. More problematic is the link between synthetic chemicals and disruption of the cell environment leading to cancer, specifically breast cancer. This model has been repressed as a minority view both in the laboratory and outside, as environmental activists have promoted this as a plausible cause of “cancer clusters” in urban and industrial areas. It has been primarily female scientists and environmental activists who have supported this view, which has only recently emerged to the mainstream and can be classified as a true “paradigm shift” in cancer research.

Feminism is a lens through which I view much of the world around me. Yet for so long I ignored what was right in front of me: my scientific education. No longer can I view science as the objective truth, but instead as an institution with a patriarchal history. Fortunately, cases like this show that even this glass ceiling is crumbling. Bringing feminist perspectives to science means promoting alternative viewpoints, democratization, and multiculturalism. Links between feminism and environmentalism run deep, but feminist perspectives must be incorporated into mainstream institutions such as scientific research.