Londa Schiebinger

Schiebinger is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2013), Lund University (2017), and Universitat de València (2018). She was the first woman in the field of history to win the Humboldt Research Award in 1998. Schiebinger has analyzed what she calls the three “fixes”: "Fix the Numbers of Women" focuses on increasing the underrepresented groups participating in science and engineering; "Fix the Institutions" promotes structural change for equity in research organizations; and "Fix the Knowledge" (or "gendered innovations") integrates sex, gender, and intersectional analysis into research design. In 2010 and 2014, she presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology. Again in 2022, she prepared the background paper for the United Nations 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women's priority theme, about using technology to achieve gender equity and female empowerment. In 2013, she presented the Gendered Innovations project at the European Parliament. Gendered Innovations was also presented to the South Korean National Assembly in 2014. In 2015, Schiebinger addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific. Her work was presented in a Palace Symposium for the King and Queen of the Netherlands at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam in 2017. In 2018–2020, she led a European Commission Expert Group to produce the policy review Gendered Innovations 2: How Inclusive Analysis Contributes to Research and Innovation. Schiebinger's work is interdisciplinary. In recognition of her creative work across academic fields of research, she was awarded the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 2010, the Linda Pollin Women's Heart Health Leadership Award from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2015, the Impact of Gender/Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies Pioneer Award in 2016, and the American Medical Women's Association President's Recognition Award in 2017. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (1999–2000) and at the Stanford Humanities Center (2010–2011, 2017–2018, 2022–2023). She served as an advisor to the Berlin University Alliance from 2022 to 2023.

Londa Schiebinger studied at Harvard University and University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is history. Places of work recorded in the authority are Stanford. Employment is recorded with University of Groningen and Stanford University. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, honorary doctor of the University of Valencia and honorary doctorate of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

• Name — Londa Schiebinger • Born — 13 May 1952 • Workplaces — Stanford University • Alma Mater — Harvard University • Thesis Title — Women and the origins of modern science • Thesis Url — https: www.worldcat.org/oclc/13655391 • Thesis Year — 1984 • Known for — Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment • Awards — Humboldt Research Award (1998) James A. Rawley Prize (2005) • Notable Works — The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989)

Schiebinger coined the term “gendered innovations” in 2005. In 2009, she launched Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment, a project at Stanford University. Gendered Innovations has developed case studies and practical methods of sex, gender, and intersectional analysis for STEM. The project was joined by the European Commission in 2011 and by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2012. Gendered Innovations received funding from the European Commission again in 2018 and from the National Science Foundation in 2019. This project has brought together international natural scientists, engineers, and gender experts in a series of collaborative workshops. The project served as the intellectual foundations for the “gender dimension in research” requirements in the European Commission's Horizon 2020 funding framework. The Center for Gendered Innovations in Science and Technology Research was founded in Seoul in 2016 and the Institute for Gendered Innovation was created at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo in 2022. One notable case study came in 2012, when the Gendered Innovations team discovered that Google Translate defaults to the masculine pronoun because “he said” is more commonly found on the web than “she said.” When trained on historical data (as Google Translate is), the system inherits bias (including gender bias). Past bias is perpetuated into the future, even when governments, universities, and companies have implemented policies to foster equality. Schiebinger has also worked to create infrastructure for gender-responsive science across funding agencies, journals, and universities. She advises funding agencies, including the German Research Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation, on policies for integrating sex, gender, and diversity analysis into research. She and colleagues published guidelines for editors of medical journals to evaluate sex and gender analysis in manuscripts submitted for publication. She also seeks to help universities integrate social analysis into core natural science and engineering curricula. She advises industry on developing products that meet the needs of diverse user groups.

Schiebinger's book Has Feminism Changed Science? is split into three sections: "Women in Science", "Gender in the Cultures of Science", and "Gender in the Substance of Science". Throughout the book, she describes the factors that led to gender inequality in science, including how the private sphere is seen as the domain of women and public sphere as for men. She also discusses how an increase in the number of women in the field will not itself change the culture of that field. The construction of gender and science is a cycle, in that ideas of gender can inform what evidence people look for or areas they choose to study, and that whatever is found then influences theories of gender. The first of the book's three sections takes a look at the impacts of some of the first women to be known to have participated in science, such as Christine de Pizan and Marie Curie. The section also examines the numerical count of women in the various fields of science in the late 20th century United States, as well as looking at the breakdown of other factors, such as pay rates and the level of degree held, in relation to gender. The section goes on to theorize that the cultural reinforcement of gender roles may play a factor as to why there are fewer women in science. The second section, "Gender in the Cultures of Science", argues that science has been gendered as masculine and that women report a distaste for the excessive competition fostered by academic science. The section also argues that the splitting of gender roles in personal life, where women still take on a majority of domestic responsibilities, may hinder women in scientific fields from accomplishing more. The third section of the book, "Gender in the Substance of Science", details the perspectives that women have brought to fields such as medicine, primatology, archeology, biology, and physics. Schiebinger states that as of the writing of the book, women earn nearly 80 percent of all Ph.D.s in primatology, and yet, despite this, having a large number of women scientists in the field has not led to a change in the assumptions or culture of science.

Using a theory coined by François Poullain de la Barre, this book focuses on the eighteenth-century history of science and medicine. The Mind Has No Sex? is one of the first scholarly works to investigate women and gender in the origins of modern Western science. It exposes the myths of the natural body and of value-neutral knowledge. Schiebinger demonstrates how science's claim to objectivity renders women's exclusion from science invisible and makes this exclusion appear fair. She argues that women were ready and willing to take their place in science in the early modern period. Schiebinger first identifies these women and the structures of early modern European society that allowed them a place in science. Of note is her work on German women working in guild-like sciences—Maria Sibylla Merian and Maria Margarethe Winkelmann. Winkemann applied to be the astronomer of the Prussian Academy of Sciences when her husband died in 1710. Despite the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s support, she was rejected. The best-known part of this book is Schiebinger's chapter on “Skeletons in the Closet”, where she tells the story of the first illustrations of female skeletons in European anatomy. Schiebinger argues that it was an attempt to define the position of women (especially white middle-class women) in European society that spawned the first representations of the female skeleton. Debate arose over the strengths and weakness of these female skeletons, focusing in particular on depictions of the skull as a measure of intelligence and pelvis as a measure of womanliness. After the 1750s, the anatomy of sex difference provided a foundation upon which to build natural relations between the sexes. The seemingly superior build of the male body (and mind) was cited to justify its social role. At the same time, the particularities of the female body justified its natural role as wife and mother. The book has been translated into Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Greek.

Schiebinger published Plants and Empire in 2004. Developing a new methodology, agnotology (defined as the cultural history of ignorance), she explores the movement, triumph, suppression, and extinction of diverse knowledges in the course of eighteenth-century encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Caribbean—both Indigenous peoples and African slaves. Schiebinger explores the nontransfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World into Europe. Schiebinger tells the story of Maria Sibylla Merian, one of the few European women to voyage for science in the eighteenth century. In a passage in her 1705 Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Merian recorded how the Indian and African slave populations in Suriname, then a Dutch colony, used the seeds of a plant she identified as the flos pavonis as an abortifacient to abort their children so they would not become slaves as well. This book reveals how gender relations in Europe and its West Indian colonies influenced what European bioprospectors collected—and failed to collect—as they encountered the knowledge traditions of the Caribbean. Abortifacients were a body of knowledge that did not circulate freely between the West Indies and Europe. This book won the James A. Rawley Prize from the American Historical Association and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society in 2005. The chapter “Feminist History of Colonial Science" was republished in Hypatia in 2004 and won the J. Worth Estes Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2005.

This book explores the eighteenth-century background of human medical experimentation, in particular asking if the large populations of enslaved people, concentrated on American plantations, were used as human research subjects. A major finding of Secret Cures of Slaves is that, in many instances, European physicians in the British and French West Indies did not use enslaved people as research subjects. Enslaved laborers were considered valuable property of powerful plantation owners whom doctors were employed to serve. However, enslaved people were still exploited in the eighteenth century. Schiebinger sets these findings in the context of slavery, colonial expansion, the development of drug testing, and medical ethics of the time. She seeks to answer questions about how human subjects in this period were chosen for experiments, how notions of uniformity and variability across living organisms were developed. if tests done on white bodies were thought to hold for Black bodies and vice versa, and if male and female bodies were considered interchangeable. Schiebinger also expands knowledge of African and American Indigenous contributions to health and medicine. Europeans tended to value medical knowledge of the peoples they encountered around the world. In the Caribbean, Europeans tested many of these medical techniques. Schiebinger explores what was thought of at the time as “slave medicine” (often a fusion of Indigenous and African cures) in the eighteenth-century West Indies. She argues that proper care of enslaved people as well as soldiers and sailors was a matter of moral concern in this period, but was also a means to secure the wealth of nations. Schiebinger analyzes the circulation of medical knowledge between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and emphasizes that knowledge created in this period is inextricable from colonial conquest, slavery, violence, and secrecy.

Her partner is Robert N. Proctor, and her children are Geoffrey Schiebinger, a professor of mathematics and computational biology, and Jonathan Neel Proctor, a professor of environmental economics. She and her husband each gave their surname to one of their two children.

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Londa Schiebinger worked in history. She was employed by University of Groningen and Stanford University. She belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Stanford University History Department. She worked at Stanford.

• "Londa Schiebinger: Inclusive Design Will Help Create AI That Works for Everyone", by Prabha Kannan, Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, July 2022 • "Women in STEM Need More Than a Law", by Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, Harvard Gazette, June 2022 • "The Researcher Fighting to Embed Analysis of Sex and Gender into Science", by Elizabeth Gibney, Nature, November 2020 • "Academics 'Need Training' on Sex and Gender in Research", by Ellie Bothwell, Times Higher Education, November 2019 • "Gender Diversity is Linked to Research Diversity, Stanford Historian Says", by Amy Adams, Stanford News, October 2018 • "Why Gendered Medicine Can Be Good Medicine", by Rena Xu, The New Yorker, November 2017 • "'성차 따른 의학연구·신약개발은 필수'", by 김나영, Kukmin Ilbo, May 2017 • "朴탄핵은 정치적 과오 탓...성별의 문제 아니다", by 황순민, 매일경제, March 2017 • "Science from women's lives. Better science?", by Carmen Magallón, Mètode, January 2017 • "– Kjønn må med", by Elin Rekdal Müller, Forskerforum, June 2015 • "Technology's Man Problem", by Claire Cain Miller, April 2014 • "Why It's Crucial to Get More Women Into Science", by Marguerite Del Giudice, National Geographic, November 2014 • "Q+A: Gender scholar Londa Schiebinger", by McKenzie Andrews, The Stanford Daily, May 2013 • "L’innovazione di genere è migliore", by Elisa Manacorda, Galileo, November 2013 • "'Tuve hijos tarde para poder pagar una asistenta'", by María R. Sahuquillo, El País, March 2011 • "Study: Housework benefit would help job productivity", ABC7, April 2010