Objectify This

Last semester, I reluctantly acknowledged that I was not a biology major. I did this after I had long ceased taking classes in the biology department that were required for the major and didn’t pique my interest. I didn’t think of myself as a non-Bio major, but I didn’t think of myself as a non-non Bio major, either. I had completed the credit requirements for the English major without declaring it, and I was beginning to design an interdisciplinary major in the sociological and biological perspective on the female.

I was creating this major in reaction to the strange treatment of the topic of the female by the biology department at my college (and especially by its sociobiologists), a department which had approached their role in education with something between distraction and negligence when it came to gender issues.

I do not doubt that these professors were well-meaning, and I do realize that I am generalizing greatly; certainly there were several gender-sensitive professors, and most of them were struggling to balance the demands of their own research, their teaching, and their family lives.

But when, as a Freshman, I took the class that was to be my official introduction to Evolutionary and Organismic Biology, a subject I believed was to be my future area of study (and in which I had read and worked), I was shocked. Because the course was one of the fundamentals of the biology major and a premed requirement, it was attended by over 100 students (a large number for my tiny college). The syllabus was not casually tossed off by one professor, but agreed upon and taught by the half of the department who specialized in relevant topics, in teams of three, on a rotating basis.

Yet, when the class arrived at human genetics and reproduction, the (male) professor lectured about the formation of the male reproductive system, and went on to the next unit. I raised my hand. “But Professor - what about the female reproductive system?”

“Oh,” he said, waving off the question, “We don’t have time for everything.”

I was furious. This dismissal of the female was exactly the kind of thing that I had feared I would encounter at my college, which I had been warned was an “old boys” institution that unconsciously created an atmosphere that dismissed women and their contribution. Additionally, I had just read Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier, which had suggested that the mostly-male lens of science has presented its audience with a mostly-male perspective on the biological and chemical truths of our bodies.

Even at MIT, which cared enough to devote funding and energy to a thorough 1999 study of gender, it was obvious that women faculty were experiencing subtle and consistent messages that they were less valuable- receiving less attention for publications, working longer before being promoted, and receiving smaller grants and lab spaces.

So academia, and science specificially, which purports to be “objective,” actually often sends these very subjective messages to women that they are not welcome. When I was an intern at the National Institutes of Health, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, (which meant that I was indirectly interning for the Administration of our charming Texan president), I attended a lecture by a very cynical scientist from the National Institute of Alternative Medicince, who said that since there was no large pharmaceutical company funding his research because there was no chance of snagging a lucrative patent, he and his colleagues were pooling their resources with the equally underfunded National Institute of Women’s Health, and conducting joint studies of women’s alternative medicines, because there was virtually no interest in the scientific community in resolving issues like menstrual cramps (dysmenorrhea) when they could be working on, say, male pattern baldness.

In an era where women are economically and emotionally devalued worldwide, it seemed blind that my professor couldn’t take the time to even mention that the formation of the male reproductive system he was describing actually took place within the female reproductive system.

I imagined all of the men in the audience feeling a little prouder of their genitals for knowing their origins, and I imagined this reinforcing their subconscious justifications of superiority, reinforcing cultural ideas of male agency, dominance, and power, while females dutifully took notes about their roles as the presumed ‘default’ sex - since Professor C. hadn’t seen fit to inform them that they, too, were created by the action of specific hormones, and not just the absence of the hormones that created the amazing wangs of their classmates.

So I wrote this email to my professor:

hi there Professor C,

i’m a student in your [introductory biology] class, and i was surprised today by our lecture. Last year i read a great book, called Woman: An Intimate Geography, by a biologist named Natalie Angier, which argues that biology ignores the female and treats her as “default”, as if she were a male ‘missing’ her y chromosome.

I was surprised today when you didn’t mention that women’s reproductive systems are also formed by the addition of hormones that promote the growth of a uterus, leaving the class to assume that the major difference between males and females is the presence or absence of a y chromosome.

I was surprised again when you acknowledged that your graphs didn’t include females but didn’t seek to remedy that.

Biology matters to me because it informs me about modern science’s understanding of the world. I want to understand the whole picture, as clearly as possible, because what i learn in class colors the way that i see the world. My understanding of the different but equal natures of the sexes informs my understanding of myself as an equal among other students. However, i am just lucky to have read Angier’s book — most of my peers know only what you have told them about the nature of gender, and that’s a pretty male-centered lesson. Although it was subtle, there was a definite omission of the formation of the female reproductive system, and a focus on the formation of testes. Since the growth of the uterus is promoted through a similar application of hormones, it seems to me that it would make sense to discuss both systems, rather than imply that the female reproductive system forms as a “default” when male hormones are lacking. This might not seem important to you, but i assure you that for me and for other women considering careers in science (or any male-dominated field), being assured that the female system is valuable and worthy of study is important. (It’s also important for males to know that the female reproductive system is worthy of study, for obvious reasons!) I am extremely sensitive to this kind of omission because i believe that i, as a female, am valuable, which comes from my understanding of my gender as just as valid as that of males.

I’m sure that you didn’t intend to exclude women from today’s lecture, but i wanted to share my reaction with you.

And the syllabus of the class was changed.

For more, check out I Was A Twentysomething Feminist.