In 1987, Congress passed Public Law 100-9, designating March as “Women’s History Month,” intended to honor “women of every race, class, and ethnic background” who have made “historical contributions to the growth and strength of the Nation in countless recorded and unrecorded ways.”

One academic discipline where the contributions of women have been overlooked and undervalued is science. Cailin O’Connor, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of logic and philosophy of science, has spent significant time studying scientific communities and how they learn about the world together – and how cultures evolve unfair rules around characterizations like race and gender. Because O’Connor is a female working in science herself, she has paid special attention to the unique histories, challenges and successes of women who have chosen career paths in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

In this episode of The UCI Podcast, O’Connor addresses why women have been historically underrepresented in science and the barriers that still exist, how the accessibility of science careers for women has changed, and what can be done to increase female representation.

“Divine Life Society,” the music for this episode, was provided by Jesse Gallagher via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

To get the latest episodes of The UCI Podcast delivered automatically, subscribe at

Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

TRANSCRIPT

The UCI Podcast/Cara Capuano:

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast. Our guest today is Cailin O’Connor, Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science in UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Professor O’Connor.

Cailin O’Connor:

My pleasure.

Capuano:

It’s “Women’s History Month,” a fabulous time to discuss women in science. Now that’s a topic you have studied at length. Before we get to that, I’d like to learn a little bit more about you. You have a very rich, extensive history here at UC Irvine, starting as a graduate in 2010, earning both an M.A. in mathematical and behavioral sciences and a Ph.D. in philosophy. From there, you actually started your teaching journey in your current Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science. Why has UC Irvine been the right fit for your career?

O’Connor:

So, it’s a little unusual because most people don’t get hired in their graduate department and then just stay there forever. But I love my department. I have fantastic colleagues and one thing that’s really important for me is that the things I do don’t look that much like standard, traditional philosophy. They’re very interdisciplinary. And so, I always wanted to be at a place where people wouldn’t be policing the boundaries between disciplines and my department – but also UC Irvine and the School of Social Sciences – are perfect for that, and I find it’s just a very supportive place to follow on whatever weird thing I want to do next.

Capuano:

I remember the first time I read “Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science” and my response was, “Huh?” For those of us on the outside looking in, describe a little bit more, please, the work being done here in this department and – to your point – the freedom that you have.

O’Connor:

Yes. Well, so we have logic –I think most people know what that is. Philosophy of science is something people often haven’t heard of and there’s, I’d say, two main things philosophers of science do. So, one thing is to study science itself. So, how does science work and how might it work better? And what happens in the sciences? So, that’s one topic. And then the other is more like complementary or supplementary of the sciences. So, it’s often similar to what people would be doing in science, but maybe a little more theoretical or a little more mathematical. And so, if a neuroscientist is studying the workings of neuron in the brain, maybe a philosopher of science is using that to think about how consciousness works or the mind.

Capuano:

Oh, that makes sense. You personally have a wide range of research interests. You’ve got the philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology and game theory. That’s just to name a few. What specific topics have you investigated?

O’Connor:

I’ve really looked at a lot of topics and sometimes I look at my CV and think, “Well, this is just embarrassingly eclectic.” But there’s three main areas that I’ve done extensive research in. So, one is inequity, and especially how cultures evolve unfair rules around things like race and gender. So, for example, how might a culture evolve a rule that says women do most of the housework? Or a rule that says, “People of color get paid less than white people for the same job.” So, that’s one thing.

Another thing I’ve researched quite a bit is misinformation and the spread of false beliefs, including online and including the ways industry actors or political actors try to spread disinformation. And then the last area is the study of science and scientific communities. So especially how scientists as a group of humans learning about the world work together, how information spreads in science and related topics.

Capuano:

That last part reminds me a lot of a talk that you participated in in 2016. It was for the Forum of Philosophy at the London School of Economics, and it was titled: “Women in Science: Past, present and future challenges.” That’s a pretty big onion to unpeel. So, let’s kind of begin at the beginning there. Why have women been historically underrepresented in science?

O’Connor:

Right. Well, the main reason is not going to shock you. It is sexism. If we look at the history of Western science, for most of it, it was assumed women just didn’t have the intellectual abilities necessary to do science. And women weren’t in social positions to do so either. You know, they weren’t educated usually. Many of them were busy having and raising kids. And even wealthy women who would’ve had the resources to do science were excluded from public spheres, like the sciences, like commerce, like politics.

I will add though, that even when you go back centuries in science, you will find women there, though often they then were erased or forgotten or kind of squeezed out of the history. So, for example, Émilie du Châtelet was a brilliant mathematician and physicist and philosopher in the 18th century, and she’s famous for… well, I mean, she wasn’t famous. Now she’s famous for having debates in these areas. She translated the Principia [Mathematica] to French. But she was kind of erased from the history until – in the feminist movement – people got interested in kind of going back and looking at well, like, “Who were the women working in science?”

So, this is to say all of these things were keeping women out of science for many, many centuries. And in addition, the ones who got in often were disappeared from the historical record. So, it looks even like women weren’t there when they were.

Capuano:

It’s just such a shame when you describe it that way. [O’Connor laughs] And it’s, you know, it’s… How has the accessibility for women to pursue a career in science changed over the years?

O’Connor:

Well, obviously things have gotten much better, starting with early feminist movements and then making steady progress. To this day, we see women facing fewer and fewer explicit sexist barriers to enter science. I mean, if we went back 150 years, women wouldn’t, you know, be allowed to apply for, enter and get a graduate degree – and obviously things like that have changed.

In addition, we see all sorts of changes to broader societies, which has made science more accessible to women. Stereotypes about women have changed and just things like the availability of birth control and childcare – things that allow women to work in any way – have allowed women to enter science. And then as a result, you know, we’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of women in the sciences. And there are fields now like developmental psychology that have more women than men.

All of this said, with these good changes in accessibility, women are still underrepresented quite significantly in the sciences. So, if you look at estimates worldwide, probably about a third of researchers are women. And I think this really reflects remaining barriers to women’s inclusion in science.

Capuano:

Such as?

O’Connor:

There are a number. So, one thing that many women report are issues related to their gender identity that have to do with the respect and the authority that they are given in science. So, a lot of women report experiencing things like “mansplaining,” you know, being talked down to, things explained to you that people ought to know you already understand.

They report people challenging their research or their finding or their choices. They report things like saying something and nobody listens to them. And then a man says the same thing… we’ve all experienced that. So, these kinds of barriers exist, and I’ve experienced some things like this that sometimes have like bordered on parody.

So, once at a conference, a young graduate student – a young man – came up to me, we were talking, he was telling me about a paper, and I told him, I was like, “Oh, yes, I wrote that paper.” And his response was, “I’m pretty sure the paper I’m talking about was written by a man actually.” And I was like, “Okay, well, you know, I don’t know, maybe there’s another paper just like the one I wrote written by some man.” And he came back the next day and he was like, “Well, yeah, I looked it up and it turns out you actually did write that paper.” Well, thank you so much for explaining that to me. I mean, you can see how things like that could be off-putting to women in science.

I once had a student in a graduate seminar say to me, “Cailin, we all know you’re the smartest kid in class, but we need to give other children a chance to talk.” So, that’s the kind of disrespect that many women in science report experiencing and can have a chilling effect on their participation.

Besides these kinds of barriers, there are barriers in formal evaluations. So, for example, in economics, there was a really amazing study done that looked at how publishing affected chances of getting tenure and compared men and women. And it found that co-authored studies in particular were treated very differently, where when men co-authored, it would give them the same kind of boost in their chances of getting tenure that they would for single-authored papers. When women co-authored, they got a much, much lower boost in their tenure chances. And they explained this as probably a sort of reasoning like when you see a man who co-authored, you assume that he did the work. And when you see a woman who co-authored, you assume that her co-author did the work. So, there are those kinds of barriers.

And then there are things related to pregnancy and breastfeeding. I think in general, these things are getting better, but change is slow. So, for example, when I was in grad school, there was no maternity leave as a graduate student. So, you just had to have your kids and if your – you know, I had good supervisors – but if your supervisor wanted you right back in the lab, there was no recourse to say, “No, I need to take time here.” And that can lead to women being left out or left behind, having to take time away from school.

And then last, I would say unfortunately sexual harassment is not gone from academia. Universities will sometimes still protect sexual harassers, and this can be just a huge barrier for women when it happens. And it can be a barrier for women who try to protect others. So, I know someone personally who was denied tenure in a very shady way after blowing the whistle on an older faculty member who was harassing undergrads. This sort of thing still happens.

Capuano:

That’s hard to hear.

O’Connor:

Yeah.

Capuano:

Social justice is one obvious answer to my next question. So, if we put matters of equity and opportunity and fairness – if we account for those – why else does the participation of women in science matter?

O’Connor:

Yes. So, obviously we want things to be fair, but a lot of researchers have argued that gender representation also matters because it makes science itself better and tends to make science applicable to more people.

Traditionally, when most scientists were men, you tended to see them working on things that mattered more to men, which of course makes sense. They are men, they should care about things that matter to men. And you tended to see more work that reflected patriarchal ideas.

One example is in medicine. So, we’ve spent much more time and energy researching male bodies, male anatomy, male everything, and people have tended to do basic research in medicine and biology on male lab animals. And this means that, in general, we know less about female bodies and then medical practice tends to be tuned more to males. So, for example, pill dosage tends to be optimized more for males and that can cause problems for females who are taking pills.

Another example is lately there’s been a lot of attention to the fact that women die of very high rates from heart attacks because their heart attack symptoms vary systematically from those of males, and no one’s trained to recognize those symptoms. So, it tends to take longer for women to be diagnosed of heart attack and treated and then more of them die.

For women’s health, this is very important, but also just for our general understanding of biology and the world. If we look at the history of science, we see this pattern where often patriarchal assumptions are keeping people closed off from research areas that might be interesting and important. And so just to give a little example, starting with Darwin, people assumed that males were the only songbirds that sang – that males were singing to attract females, and it was just them. But more recently, especially in the last few decades, biologists started to notice that in a lot of species, females sing as well, and people had just been ignoring that. And if you look at who is studying female bird song, more of them tend to be women biologists. And there are tons of examples like this.

Capuano:

What can be done to increase the representation of women in science?

O’Connor:

A lot of things can be done, and people have been doing a lot. Though, with the current administration, I think it will become harder to support women in science. So, mentoring programs for women in science I think are fantastic because they often provide social support for young scientists. So, let them know they’re not alone in the things they may be experiencing as women and help young women navigate barriers like having kids while on the tenure track or experiencing sexism.

I also think recruitment efforts for even younger students – high school students – are very important because stereotypes often tell young women that STEM is for men. And so, they might think, “I can’t do that sort of math, or I can’t do that sort of technical work.” But programs that train young women in STEM early and also expose them to women mentors and role models, I think can make them see, “This is something that I could do if I wanted to.” And I think other kinds of accommodations say for pregnancy, breastfeeding, childcare are so important. So increasingly scientific societies provide childcare or free childcare often at their meetings and places to pump breast milk. So, things like that can, I think, really help open the door for women in science.

Capuano:

All important changes. Have you seen improvements in a lot of those areas?

O’Connor:

Absolutely. So, as I said, when I was a grad student here, there was no maternity leave. Now there is maternity leave for grad students.

When I had my twins 12 years ago, you know, I was going to a big meeting, and I tried to find a place to pump breast milk, and they just didn’t arrange it. And I ended up in the custodian’s closet and he kindly let me put my bags in his little fridge. (laughs) And like, you know, now at our main meetings, all of that is like set up ahead of time and arranged – there’s childcare, there are things like that.

You know, now there’s this backlash against the #MeToo movement, but I think that was really helpful in getting people talking about sexual harassment in academia and in philosophy, at least, a number of kind of high profile sexual harassment cases have come to light and people have actually had to leave universities. Whereas traditionally the rule was if you sexually harass people and it’s found out well, we just kind of quietly sweep those women away instead.

Capuano:

Thank you so much for sharing your personal experiences, what you’ve researched, what you’ve learned about it. It’s a lot, it’s a lot to unpack. Let’s get back to you. What are you researching right now?

O’Connor:

Well, my big project right now is actually very on topic for this podcast. So, I’m working on a book – it’s a trade book, so intended for wider audiences – and it outlines how all our background beliefs about things – like gender, but also race, sexual orientation, things like neurodiversity and fatness – so, these background beliefs about people and how they are and who’s better than who end up shaping science. And then what I do in the book is I walk through all the stages of science. So, the places scientists make choices, like, “What topic am I going to research next?” Or “How am I going to design my study? I have data, how should I interpret it? How should I write this up into a paper?” And then I show how in each of these places, these background beliefs can then impact what we do as scientists.

And there are endless fun examples, but I can just give you one, which is that for years scientists believed that homosexual contact was relatively rare in the biological world. And part of it was that they thought homosexuality was pathological or weird and probably also thought it was less common than it is because of social norms. And so, they just weren’t looking for it.

And so, you know, they’d see two gulls sitting on an egg raising it, and they just assume, “We are seeing heterosexual gulls.” But once they started checking, they started finding out that that was not always what they were actually seeing – that sometimes those were two female gulls. And sometimes those lizards mounting each other are two females, and sometimes these rams doing it with each other are two males. And so, once people started looking, “Could there be homosexuality in the animal kingdom?” They found lots of it, and they just had never looked before.

Capuano:

I bet you’re unearthing a lot of those kind of stories.

O’Connor:

Researching this book is endlessly fun because (laughter) the episodes of science that I end up getting into are just sometimes so weird and fascinating.

I read a review article from the 1940s on “menotoxin.” Have you heard of this before?

Capuano:                                                                                                                                          

I have not.

O’Connor:

The idea was that menstruating women emitted a toxin through their skin, their sweat, their saliva, and, of course, menstrual fluid. And you can find dozens and dozens and dozens of articles on menotoxin, and they all find the effects of menotoxin. And they are like putting women’s sweat on frogs and they are injecting rats with like menstrual blood. And they are having women sit in rooms with yeast and seeing if the bread doesn’t rise and they’re positing like causes, like maybe women are emitting these toxic rays, or maybe it’s trimethylalanine, you know, this, that, the other thing. And there are dozens of studies finding this, and it wasn’t really fully put to rest until the 1970s. You can still find letters to medical journals in the seventies being like, “Maybe menotoxin the cause of PMS.”

Capuano:

Wow.

O’Connor:

Yeah.

Capuano:

Now I’m glad I didn’t know what this was.

O’Connor:

(laughter) I’ve ruined it for you!

Capuano:

Kind of!

O’Connor:

We’ve really covered a lot of topics and this was fun.

Capuano:

Professor O’Connor, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and learned a lot.

O’Connor:

Well, thank you so much for having me, Cara.

Capuano:

Some things I didn’t know that I wanted to learn…

O’Connor:

(laughter)

Capuano:

But they’re there, nonetheless. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation. For the latest UC Irvine News, please visit news.uci.edu. The UCI Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.