Gendered Science: Dissecting the Effect of Gender Roles in Science
Gender roles and stereotypes are ingrained everywhere in society. They very much form the foundation of how people act and how people think. Gender stereotypes are even noticed and followed by children as early as 10 years old. (http://time.com/4948607/gender-stereotypes-roles/). So, it is not surprise that gender roles have a great influence on science, and in particular the study of the human reproductive process, as we read about for class in the article The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles by Emily Martin.
This week I read an interesting article related to this discussion, titled Fussy eggs actively choose sperm with the best genes suggesting that fertilisation is NOT random by Phoebe Weston. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5092821/Fussy-eggs-choose-sperms-best-genes.html) This article discusses the reproduction process, and how the scientific community has long thought of the egg as being passive and the sperm as being active in the process, mirroring societal gender roles. But, researchers have found that, in the case of rats, the egg is actually able to choose and select sperm in an active way, going against the typical gendered ideal of the egg being passive, and also against the Mendelian law which states that gametes are randomly combined. Researchers even found that the egg is able to actively choose the sperm with the best proteins for healthy fertilization. Dr. Nadeau, a researcher working on this project, describes the implications of these findings as follows: ‘We’ve been blinded by our preconceptions. It’s a different way to think about fertilization with very different implications about the process of fertilization’. Furthermore, this phenomenon was also found in sea urchin populations in the Pacific Ocean. This article brings up many interesting ideas they warrant thought, such as the way that human scientists apply human gender roles when describing the biological processes of other species, and how this alters how we think they operate and results in wrong information. Furthermore, this article supports Emily Martin’s argument of how gendered our description of reproduction really is, and it really opened my eyes personally to how much human factors and biases affect many areas of science.
