Regardless of the political and professional price she has paid for it, however, Gowaty believes her feminism has made her a better scientist—and that her research and others’ feminist studies will contribute new and better theories to biology as a discipline. It was, in fact, Gowaty’s feminism that led her to review the scientific literature, to check what scientific “proof” lay behind the doctrine of rigid sex roles, and to look for alternative theories to explain observed behavior. What she found was a whole lot of nothing.
“The ‘facts’ of choosy females and profligate males have organized studies of social behavior evolution, but few ever asked if the ‘facts’ were correct,” she says. In the rare cases where someone did, the papers that proposed alternative theories were all but ignored by the rest of the scientific community.
It is also her feminist bias, Gowaty says, that allows her to see what others have not. Her research subtly turns age-old biological questions on their heads. For instance, in designing her experiments investigating mate choice, Gowaty created a gender-blind trial that makes no assumptions about how males and females are supposed to act—instead of assuming that males are profligate and females are coy. Rather than pairing females with a set of males and asking which males the females prefer, she randomly pairs males and females and watches who approaches whom.
The paradigm shift is simple, subtle, and scientifically unassailable. Gowaty explains, “Being self-conscious about my politics has helped to make my experiments better than they might otherwise be, because I institute a variety of controls that others might also use … if they were more aware of their own biases.”
One of her favorite tactics is to collaborate with colleagues who do not share her political views, which brings to light assumptions on both sides that might otherwise go unnoticed. And then, she says, she likes to “exploit the goodwill and energy of undergraduates” who do not know her hypotheses or predictions and can therefore make unbiased observations because they don’t know what they’re looking for. It was with those careful controls that she conducted her fruit-fly experiment. Gowaty’s approach to exposing and correcting bias in her science has made her a leader in what might not be a feminist revolution in science so much as a feminist evolution.
Roughgarden agrees that biological research may yet be salvaged from the mire of ingrained sexism on the merit of strong, careful studies. Her book
Evolution’s Rainbow
began as a celebration of the diversity of the invisible, forgotten, or ignored multitudes of genders and sexual expressions in the natural world—things that she says are too often overlooked by mainstream biologists. But as she wrote and researched the book, she recognized that while it was a celebration, it was also a rebuke, “an indictment of academia for suppressing and denying diversity in their own teachings.”
Roughgarden had a twenty-five-year career in ecology as a man before she transitioned to being a woman, giving her unique insight into the world of sexism in academia. She sees the prevailing theories in biology as a way to “naturalize male prowess” and believes that in a field dominated by straight white men, research has become a self-reinforcing cycle of sexism. “The purpose of their theories is often to buy them prestige, and prestige is found in agreement from other straight white men,” she says. “All the other straight white men are in on the racket. [For women] there’s no entree, there’s no avenue to make the truth count.”
Roughgarden has focused on devising alternative theories designed to encompass the diversity found in the natural world, where, despite popular belief, there are more than two genders, certain organisms (like fish) can change gender throughout their lives, and homosexuality is rampant. Roughgarden wants to send the whole discipline of biology back to school to study the facts of the world through a lens that doesn’t filter out inconvenient data that doesn’t match social mores.
She has offered her own hypotheses about the evolutionary forces that have shaped gender and behavior—theories that allow diversity in both gender and sexuality while maintaining the power to explain behavior. Instead of sexual selection—Darwin’s staid theory that relies on a strict gender binary and consigns females and males across all organisms to specific roles—Roughgarden proffers a replacement theory she calls social selection, which describes behavior in terms of not only its reproductive value but its social value as well. For example, she recasts the famous peacock’s tail in light of its ability to communicate social status to other peafowl, both male and female, not just its desirability to peahens. The change is slight, but it allows for a more holistic examination of all behaviors in light of their value in a variety of situations.
Roughgarden’s theories, even beyond social selection, are solid and testable, and they bear the hallmarks of careful thinking. They are designed to be tried by field biologists, to be poked and prodded by researchers, and to be revised, refined, or rejected if they prove inadequate. They are designed to invite more questions, provoke more thought, and spur more research into the very areas that have been cordoned off from critical thought for so long.
To Roughgarden, freeing science from the shackles of sexism is as much a political and social task as it is a scientific one. For feminist research to have an impact on the mainstream biology taught in classrooms, it will take confronting those in power—the deans, the awards committees, the granting agencies, “if we have to picket them and attack them and embarrass them at cocktail parties,” she says—and demanding that women, gays and lesbians, and people of color be included in the highly political processes that play such an important role in determining what questions are asked in science, and therefore what ultimately becomes public knowledge. Diversifying the practitioners of science is a matter not just of principle but also of scientific integrity.
“Knowledge is only as diverse as the members of the intellectual elite,” says Vasey, whose lesbian monkeys are also left out in the cold by biology. “When I look out into the audience [at scientific conferences], I don’t see much diversity. It just makes me wonder how much knowledge is being left out.”
There are small signs of improvement. There are now more women in science than ever before, though the number remains a pittance. And with much public fanfare, the National Academies of Science inducted seventeen women into its 2003 class, 24 percent of the total. Women now comprise 7.7 percent of the National Academies’ members—up from 6.2 percent a year ago. At this rate, we can expect parity in another thirty years or so—around the time Jenna Bush will be running for president.
In the meantime, Vasey’s monkeys and Gowaty’s fruit flies will continue to do their thing, mindless of the political and academic battles being waged over their unconventional couplings. There is precedent for the hope of feminist scientists prevailing, however. Darwin himself faced considerable opposition from both the religious and scientific communities of his time. But eventually the rigorous science of his ideas proved to be more durable than the rigid politics of his era. Thirty years ago, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium—
whereby evolution occurs in abrupt shifts after periods of relative stasis, instead of gradually, over long periods of time. The theory appears to describe the evolution of science itself, and maybe, just maybe, Gowaty, Roughgarden, and Vasey are poised to punctuate the long-standing equilibrium of evolutionary biology.
Choice
Summer Wood / SPRING 2004
“YOU CAN BAKE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT, TOO!” DECLARES Julia Roberts, playing bohemian Wellesley art-history professor Katherine Watson in the period chick flick
Mona Lisa Smile
. She eagerly proffers an armful of law-school applications, standing on the doorstep of the imposingly tony house where Joan (played by Julia Stiles), one of her best students, resides. But it’s too late, Joan replies. She has eloped, and now that she has her MRS, she won’t be getting that law degree after all. “This is my choice,” she says earnestly, but her character, like most of the others in the film, is written so flatly that it’s impossible to tell whether we’re supposed to believe her. The filmmakers clearly meant for women in the audience to breathe a sigh as we watched Roberts’s signature grin crumble on hearing the news—a sigh of pity for those poor, repressed Wellesley girls, and a sigh of relief that women today are free of such antiquated dilemmas as having to choose between work and family.
Fast-forward fifty years, however, and the media is full of stories of real-life Joans: intelligent, ambitious women, educated at the country’s top schools, trading in their MBAs and PhDs for SUVs with car seats. Sylvia Ann Hewlett claimed to have revealed an epidemic of “creeping nonchoice” in her much-publicized 2002 book,
Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,
while Lisa Belkin last year tagged a related trend “The Opt-Out Revolution” in a
New York Times Magazine
cover story. While
Hewlett profiles high-powered women who “chose” to put their careers first and postpone childbearing, only to find out their ovaries hadn’t gotten the memo, Belkin focuses on impeccably credentialed younger women preempting the challenges of balancing career and family by dropping out of the rat race soon after it begins. Neither writer bothers to examine the ways decisions to work or stay home are rarely made solely as a function of free will, but rather are swayed by underlying socioeconomic forces. But both Hewlett’s book and Belkin’s article do illustrate something crucial—namely, the deep, complex, and uneasy relationship between the ideology of feminism and the word “choice.”
The significance of “choice” in the feminist lexicon has fluctuated over time and with the various priorities of feminist movements, but for the past thirty years, it has been most strongly associated with abortion rights. Indeed, since the mid-’80s, “choice” has all but eclipsed “abortion” in the ongoing discourse about reproductive rights. In
Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States,
the historian Rickie Solinger traces the evolution of “choice” in the context of reproductive rights back to Mother’s Day, 1969, when the National Abortion Rights Action League (recently renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America) held its first national action, calling it Children by Choice. These rallies gave NARAL an opportunity to market-test “choice” as the movement’s new watchword. After Justice Harry Blackmun repeatedly referred to abortion as “this choice” in his majority opinion in
Roe v. Wade
, writes Solinger, choice was cemented as “the way liberal and mainstream feminists could talk about abortion without mentioning the ‘A-word.’” Wary of alienating moderate supporters by claiming that women had an absolute right to abortion, movement leaders adopted a more pragmatic rhetorical strategy: “Many people believed that ‘choice’—a term that evoked women shoppers selecting among options in the marketplace—would be an easier sell,” writes Solinger.
Substituting “choice” for “rights” as both a legal framework and a common language indeed proved successful in attracting some libertarians and conservatives to vote for the “pro-choice” position in numerous state-level abortion contests during the ’80s. Because “choice” is, in essence, an empty word, people with vastly divergent political viewpoints can be united under its banner. In retrospect, this is both the word’s greatest strength and
its ultimate weakness. As various constituencies brought their own political prerogatives and definitions of “choice” to the negotiating table, parents, physicians, husbands, boyfriends, and religious leaders all came to be included as rightful participants in making the abortion choice, significantly weakening the idea that women have a right to make this decision on their own. Solinger identifies the linguistic shift from abortion rights to “the individualistic, marketplace term ‘choice’” as deeply problematic, on both a philosophical and a practical level.
The word’s primacy in the arena of reproductive rights has slowly caused the phrase “It’s my choice” to become synonymous with “It’s a feminist thing to do”—or, perhaps more precisely, “It is antifeminist to criticize my decision.” The result has been a rapid depoliticizing of the term and an often misguided application of feminist ideology to consumer imperatives, invoked not only for the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy but also for the right to buy all manner of products marketed to women, from cigarettes to antidepressants to frozen diet pizzas.
When
Sex and the City’
s Charlotte decided to quit her job, she summoned feminism in her defense: “The women’s movement is supposed to be all about choice, and if I choose to quit my job, that is my choice,” she tells a disgruntled Miranda, who’s busy getting ready for work. After suggesting that Charlotte’s “choice” to drop out of the workforce has been unduly influenced by her then-husband, Trey, Miranda hangs up on Charlotte, leaving her shouting, “I choose my choice, I choose my choice,” over and over, as if to convince herself that she really does.
Elsewhere in American culture, one of the newest, and arguably most controversial, intersections between “choice,” consumer culture, and feminism is the argument that undergoing cosmetic surgery can be a feminist exercise. The leading proponent of this theory is Kathy Davis, a women’s studies lecturer at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In
Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body
, Davis decries feminist critiques of plastic surgery, contending that “the paternalistic argument against choice rests on the assumption that women who want cosmetic surgery need to be protected—from themselves (their narcissistic desire for beauty) or from undue influence from others.”
For many young feminists, “choice” has become the very definition of feminism itself—illustrated by the standard-bearing right to choose abortion
and supported by the ever-advertised notion that they have choice in everything else in life as well. The cult of choice consumerism wills us to believe that women can get everything we want out of life, as long as we make the right choices along the way—from the cereal we eat in the morning to the moisturizer we use at night, and the universe of daily decisions, mundane and profound, that confront us in between.
However, at a time when the language of choice is at an all-time popular high, when it comes to abortion, young women may have the least choice of all, especially if they are minors residing in one of the thirty-three states requiring the consent of at least one parent in order to undergo the procedure. Some reproductive-rights activists have suggested that third-wavers don’t turn out in large numbers at the polls——only 52 percent voted in the 2000 presidential election—because they’ve become complacent about the right to choose that their foremothers worked so hard to win.
Though NARAL Pro-Choice America is now courting young women with a web-based “Generation Pro-Choice” campaign featuring the specter of an overturned Roe if Bush is elected for a second term, the current administration’s opponents have paid little attention to issues affecting women’s other life choices, from the wage gap, health care, and education access to the dearth of quality, affordable child care or federal policies designed to ease the burdens often faced by working parents of any sex. While paying lip service to “choice” in its narrowest definition—i.e., preserving Roe—politicians donning the pro-choice mantle continue to neglect the full significance of choice in women’s lives and the underlying social and economic conditions that constrain or empower us to do much more than choose whether to bake a cake, eat it, or both.
Such an uncritical language of choice doesn’t even work in the movies: At the end of
Mona Lisa Smile,
Katherine Watson has little to show for the choices she makes—no tenure-track job at Wellesley, and no guy, either (assuming, as this is Hollywood, that she was supposed to desire both). The fact that Katherine chooses to leave Wellesley—whether motivated by her pedagogical clashes with older female faculty, her reluctance to become part of the elite academic establishment, or having her heart bruised by the swarthy Italian professor who turns out to be from New Jersey—plays like a pretty unhappy ending for a character who has spent the past two hours trying to convince her students that, at last, women really can have it all.