‘STEMinism is an attempt to bring more women into science without critiquing the field of science’

Dr. Gita Chadha says that the portmanteau word STEMinism makes her uneasy. “The term very nobly is used to describe the move to bring more women into science, technology, engineering and maths with the belief that this is essentially empowering and liberating for the women,” she says at a talk titled STEMinism and Feminism: Archiving Women in Science held at the Bangalore International Centre Auditorium recently.

Dr. Gita Chadha says that the portmanteau word STEMinism makes her uneasy. “The term very nobly is used to describe the move to bring more women into science, technology, engineering and maths with the belief that this is essentially empowering and liberating for the women,” she says at a talk titled STEMinism and Feminism: Archiving Women in Science held at the Bangalore International Centre Auditorium recently.

Dr. Chadha, the third Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science at the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), then goes on to explain why feminists, including herself, question this term. “STEMinism is an attempt to bring more women into science without critiquing the field of science.”

Moreover, she adds, the term clubs the disciplines of science, maths, engineering and medicine together, and continues to reproduce the silos and privileges of these fields. On the other hand, the field of feminist science studies is an attempt to develop critiques of science, particularly the patriarchal structures within its text and practice and its consequences, she argues.  “The project of bringing more women into science is not the same as feminism.”

This talk, one of three lectures that formed part of the annual Obaid Siddiqi Lecture series covering Dr. Chadha’s body of work and research conducted at NCBS, mostly focused on her attempts to document the gendered experiences of women in science. She talks about how her feminist consciousness has been an important framework for her work, which she feels “makes one smell erasures and detects fingerprints which are missed by others” before going on to describe some of the work she has done in the year spent as Chair.

An important project she has carried out during the past year is called Gender In/Of Science: Feminist Conversations, a documentation of conversations she had conducted with various female faculty members at NCBS. It is, she elaborates, an attempt at creating a living archive of some women scientists in India.

“We need to go beyond role models for women to enter science, which both the state and community often tend to do.” It is also important to raise questions about the nature of science- whether biology, physics, chemistry, or maths- and how they must be bent to feminist standpoints, says Dr. Chadha. “With this intention, I curated the interviews.,”

According to Dr. Chadha, what surprised her the most was the “careful audacity” of these interviews. “None of the interviews are badass, but they are all honest attempts at pushing the envelope, the boundaries to say much,” she says. These interviews, which chronicle these women’s personal journey in their science, their experiences and also what it does wrong, threw some fresh ideas, she says, including those around sexual harassment,workplace toxicityand the gendered nature of science itself. “They (the interviews) provided a very nuanced understanding of the experience of women in science,” she says.