Stanford University Press Blog

Londa Schiebinger talks Gender and Science

A Q&A on gender and science with Londa Schiebinger, author of Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering (2008), appears on the higher education news and resource website Inside Higher Ed.

Through her answers, Schiebinger provides insight into the significance of gender analysis—studying the impact of gender on scientific questions and findings, as well as who leads this research—in the sciences. In Gendered Innovations, she “explores how how gender analysis can profoundly enhance human knowledge in the areas of science, medicine, and engineering, offering concrete examples of new research results and future avenues for research.”

She clarifies that this volume does not focus on biases against women in the sciences, but rather how the natural sciences and engineering fields can benefit from gender analysis. These gendered innovations can take place at three levels: 1) Increasing participation of women in the sciences 2) changing the day-to-day culture of labs, universities, and corporations that foster the growth of both male and female scientists and 3) changing the gender inequalities that have been ingrained in scientific institutions and have influenced the knowledge coming out of those institutions. Schiebinger’s book offers detailed examples of how gender analysis has changed specific aspects of particular sciences.

In response to Scott Jaschik's question about the notion of difference possibly leading to biases suggesting inherent differences in women's scientific interests, Schiebinger notes that gender analysis is an inclusive discipline that can benefit both men and women. “We need to be open to the possibility that human knowledge—what we know, what we value, what we consider important—may change dramatically when women (as well as underrepresented minorities) become full partners in knowledge production.”

Search Stanford titles with Google Books

Stanford University Press is pleased to announce that you can now search the full text of our books via Google Book Search. We are currently still in the process of uploading and scanning our backlist, but there are already over a thousand Stanford titles in Google Book Search. When the project is completed, all of our books will be searchable electronically.

While browsing our site, look for a search box like the one below. This indicates that the book you are viewing is searchable.

You will also notice that after you search our website with our traditional search box (which includes title, subtitle, author, isbn, subject, and series categories), you will then have the opportunity to search across the text of all of our books.

We continue to offer tables of contents and chapter excerpts for selected books, and we are excited to make it easier for readers to discover content and find books most suited to their interests.

Sustainability Is Needed for Business Leadership

According to the Alliance for Climate Protection, the organization running the “We” advocacy campaign that former Vice President Al Gore launched this morning, “many Americans are concerned about climate change but don't know what to do about it.” Stanford author Chris Laszlo is reaching out to business leaders to show them that they can actually become more profitable by making their companies environmentally conscious.

A “clean energy economy” is one of the solutions proposed by the We campaign, which agrees with Laszlo that sustainable business practices would help the US economy:

A clean and efficient economy would “lead to over 3 million new green-collar jobs, stimulate $1.4 trillion in new GDP, add billions in personal income and retail sales, produce $284 billion in net energy savings.”

In a recent interview, Laszlo argues that the economy has fundamentally shifted so that US companies must pay attention to environmental concerns if they want to remain competitive:

What has happened is that the marketplace has changed and today if you want to make an economic profit you have to pay attention to environmental and social issues in your business… because they’ve become enablers of competitive advantage. So we’re back to just a single purpose gain. So companies have come out with products that have environmental intelligence built in. Consumers tend to prefer those products if they don’t have to pay more for them.

Laszlo’s book, Sustainable Value, not only presents his argument for the necessity of sustainable business practices, but also provides the tools necessary for leaders to move their companies along that path.

Eisenhower Unmasked

In Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address as president of the United States, he said of the Cold War, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and libert y may prosper together."

According to Ira Chernus, author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (2008), the peace that Eisenhower spoke of was actually a constant state of “apocalypse management” which would involve the endless management of nuclear threats. By using discourse that assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, the author contends that Eisenhower made national insecurity a way of life in America.

The author discusses Eisenhower’s Cold War discourse in a recent article entitled “The Real Eisenhower” for History News Network (March 17, 2008) in which he utilizes a rich source of Eisenhower quotes (often juxtaposing excerpts of public speeches with private statements made within his cabinet) that reveal the former presidents’ thoughts and strategies on the threat of Communism and nuclear attacks.

He describes Eisenhower’s Cold War policy as one, “that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would 'shoot your enemy before he shoots you'; a man who believed that the U.S. could 'pick itself up from the floor' and win the war, even though 'everybody is going crazy,' as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got 'shellacked and nobody got too 'hysterical.'”

In looking at these quotes, Chernus says, “That’s how one president talked about nuclear war, a president who is now especially widely admired across the political spectrum….[I]t should remind us how easily presidents can create images that mask profoundly important truths.”

Chernus reminds us that Eisenhower’s legacy of insecurity is still with us today, and his sentiments on the presidential masking of truth is a poignant one especially upon the 5 year anniversary of the war in Iraq and the nearing end of the Bush administration.

A government report released earlier this week confirmed that the American economy will see a recession in 2008. Families across the country are facing foreclosure on their homes, and the dollar is at record lows.  In an article in The Chronicle Review, David Glenn asks why presidential candidates, especially Republicans, still propose tax cuts based on the now-debunked supply-side economic theory:

The hopes of the supply-side theorists of the 1970s, who proposed that revenue would often rise after tax cuts, have been thoroughly dashed by the last 30 years. Federal revenue fell after Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and again after George W. Bush's 2001 cuts. The vast majority of economists now say that tax cuts must be matched by spending cuts, or deficits will ensue.

For an answer, he turns to The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, released this week by Stanford University Press. Author Isaac William Martin argues that “Republican political leaders (falsely but successfully) interpreted Proposition 13's success in California in 1978 as a broad mandate for cutting income taxes as well as property taxes,” a policy that has shaped and symbolized the party every since.

Martin’s showcasing of how the Republican Party came to so deeply associate itself with tax cuts helps us understand why President Bush stands so firmly by his economic policies in the face of economic upheaval.