Feminist standpoint theory offers a framework for making sense both of the substantive insights generated by thirty years of research on the status and experience of women in the academic workplace, and of the persistent controversy that surrounds this work, especially when it concerns women in the sciences. The 1999 MIT report on the status of women scientists, juxtaposed with the debate touched off by Larry Summers' remarks a year ago, provides a point of departure for analysis of how a subject matter and a field of research has been constituted that embodies and, at the same time, puts epistemically consequential pressure on standpoint theory-inspired guidelines for doing (social) science as a feminist.
Alison Wylie is Michelle R. Clayman Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford, and Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at the
University of Washington.
Part of the Institute's Gender Forum series.