Text 2. Gender studies get a bigger role to play

By Alice Pfeiffer

The discipline has been adopted in areas that seem unrelated, like economics and technology.

Since their emergence from the feminist move­ment in the 1960's, gender studies have spread to hundreds of universities worldwide. From Cam­bridge, England, and Stanford, California, to the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Sana Uni­versity in Yemen, gender has become a growing subject in academia. Even the Massachusetts Insti­tute of Technology has a gender program. Multidisciplinary by nature, the courses often encom­pass race and class studies.

An offshoot of sociology, exploring roles and be­havioral patterns linked to gender, the discipline has become increasingly implanted in what would seem to be unrelated fields, like economics or technological development.

In Britain, the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics was established in 1993. In a climate of economics and political science, gender might seem like a strange fit. Yet the department offers master's degrees with specializations that include development and globalization, as well as a master's degree combining gender and media studies.

“Such studies don't necessarily mean working in gender,” says Maja Raskovic, a gender-studies graduate from the master's program at the London school. “Although many of my old classmates are now working for developmental organizations or the civil service, I now work in financial consulting. But my studies have certainly sharpened my anal­ysis of the problems at hand”.

Such problems include the current economic crisis: “Gender studies has always been about the relational interplay within and between conflicts,” Ms. Raskovic said. “The theme of conflict seeps in­to all areas of life, from the very personal gendered, racial and sexual conflicts to the seemingly mone­tary issue of the current state of the economy.”

“It was a blinkered, money-oriented perspective that drove us to this problem,” she added. “In­stead, we need a critical and wholesome under­standing of the relational interplay between all conflicting factors to account for the current state of affairs”.

Gender consideration is vital in any academic environment, said Thomas F. DeFrantz, director of the women and gender studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At an insti­tution better known for physical sciences and engi­neering, the program, celebrating its 25th an­niversary, is having an increasing effect on other departments.

“It's a platform designed to consider how gender issues affect the teaching of science, and issues such as genetic testing, or the way people deal with technology,” Mr. DeFrantz said.

The introductory courses are always full, with students – typically an equal mix of men and wom­en – coming from all of M.I.T.'s major programs.

“Students understand, instinctively I think, that gender and sexuality are implicated in the con­struction of science and technology,” Mr. DeFrantz said. “Students at elite research institutions and universities are compelled to study current re­search in these areas”.

The program has also staged workshops for the M.I.T. faculty, presenting a number of gender based themes, like the mechanisms leading to bias and prejudice.

Gender studies are applicable to all forms of bias, including bias found in academia, said Nina Lykke, president of GEXcel, a gender research center es­tablished in 2006 by the Swedish government and the universities of Linkoping and Orebro.

Set up with the help of a 20 million Swedish kronor, or $2.4 million, government grant, the cen­ter was originally conceived as a five-year pro­gram but it is now working toward becoming a per­manent institution. Dedicated to transnational and transdisciplinary studies of changing gender rela­tions, it offers visiting fellowships to international scholars from multiple backgrounds and at differ­ent stages of their careers. It also offers postdoc­toral grants, to help pay for the work of young re­searchers.

“Our motto is gendering excellence,” Ms. Lykke said. “We want to challenge the traditional notions of excellence and performance. We want to create a generous, open academic space”.

Focusing on issues like sex education and mas­culinity, it also explores less obvious themes like the interactions between gender and information technology, migration, or disability. Workshops and lectures at the center are open to students from both universities, in any discipline.

Sweden has been a pioneer in gender studies, Ms. Lykke said. “It's not considered a controver­sial area,” she said. “On the contrary, we are en­couraged to think of the role of gender in society”.

A similar awareness of gender issues is spread­ing widely in European universities, where gender considerations are finding their way into a broad range of programs. At the European University In­stitute in Florence, for example, gender issues have been incorporated into the law and politics programs.

People are increasingly aware of the importance of cultural conditioning, including gender condi­tioning, said Luigi Guiso, professor of economics at the institute. Intrigued by the high number of men at top scientific schools in the United States, Mr. Guiso recently completed a study on the relation­ship among the environment, gender and math.

From a young age, girls are not expected to do as well as boys in math, and they are expected to be better at reading, Mr. Guiso noted. But the suppos­ition of an innate difference in math ability between men and women, suggested in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard University at the time, is not borne out by Mr. Guiso's re­search.

Mr. Guiso compared math and literacy perfor­mance with a gender gap index developed by the World Economic Forum in Geneva. The index keeps track of economic, political, education and health information in relation to gender inequality in more than 100 countries.

The research showed a clear correlation be­tween the degree of emancipation of women and their high school math performances. In countries with high gender equality, like Scandinavia, the gender gap in math tends to disappear, Mr. Guiso said, but the reading gap remains and even in­creases.

“Is there a genetic component?” he said. “I have no idea. But what is certain is that the role of cul­ture is much more important” [5, p. 10].