The Review of Democracy organized a book presentation of ‘Negotiating in/visibility: Women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century’, edited by Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasă-Matei, published by Manchester University Press this year.
This edited volume combines individual and collective portraits of women scientists in engineering and medicine, set in the broader context of institutional structures, STEMM, education, activism, and science policy. As the foreword emphasizes, statistics are revealing: only ten female Nobel Prize laureates in science in the twentieth century, representing only 2.3% of the total awardees (xxvii). Laboratories were among the most exclusionary sites of professional science for women in the twentieth century, as several chapters discuss (14). In turn, mobility, as well as personal and professional networks, played a strong role in facilitating women’s access to scientific careers and recognition (18-19). The contributions to science were frequently intertwined with specific concerns related to motherhood and domesticity (22-23). In this context, recognizing and naming such problems becomes essential: gender-based discrimination, rooted in a long history of structural inequality and marginalization of women.
The linguistic and geographical diversity is one of the strong points of this book: three chapters focus on India, two on China, one on Romania, one on Hungary, one on the Czech Republic, one on Greece, two on the UK, and three on the US. By using the concept of ‘invisibility’, the editors emphasize that this phenomenon was shaped by ‘a host of intersecting factors like gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, marital status, sexuality, age, urban-rural divide” (3). Hence, the question at stake is: to what extent invisibility was a form of discrimination or exclusion, or could it also be a strategy of resistance and survival? (3).
Thus, this book documents not only the conditions that enabled invisibility but also strategies to circumvent the obstacles encountered within the scientific establishment.
The book is available open access here.
Participants:
Editors:
Amelia Bonea, Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Irina Nastasă-Matei, Associate Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest
Respondents:
Katja Doose, Senior Researcher, Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg
Rachel Cowen, Professor, Manchester School of Medicine, University of Manchester
Moderator:
Adrian Matus, Editor, Review of Democracy
