Bettina Bock von Wülfingen

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Miércoles 7 de marzo de 2018, 17.30 hs.

Abstract: In Argentina it has already been 50 years, in most European countries and the US decades later, that politics were set into place to check and make up for the consequences of the historical exclusion of women from academia. Still the count of women in the natural sciences, math and engineering though, fields promising more lucrative job opportunities than the humanities, is far below 30% in all these countries.

This presentation retraces the history of political measures to level the gender gap in the natural sciences, engineering and math (in brief „STEM“). 

The talk paper focuses on two – seemingly conflicting – and internationally propagated approaches that represent the current status of the debate: Around and after the year 2000 in international feminist and gender studies two different solutions emerged for how to deal with biased contents in the STEM disciplines, in innovation and technology development. “Gendering Science” works with essentializing notions of sex-gender, believed to be easy to operationalize. “Degendering Science” applies queer and intersectional theory, seeks to ‘undo’ gender and to generally democratize science and technology development by early inclusion of most diverse (user) perspectives. Whether we talk about “gendering” or “degendering” therefore is not only an issue of precise language (do we ‘put gender in’ or do we level an already existing gender-bias). It involves theoretical grounding of far reaching concrete material impact in countries and institutions where these approaches are implemented with national funding, or that of the EU, US or the United Nations

Publicaciones seleccionadas: 

•Bock von Wülfingen, Bettina (ed.) »Traces. Generating what was there«. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2017. In print and as ebook:

https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/485164?format=KOM

•Bock von Wülfingen, Bettina (Hg.) »Spuren. Erzeugung des Dagewesenen«. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2017. In print und als ebook:

https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/472548?format=EPUB