Conference to focus on gender, changing curriculum
Distinguished biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling to be keynote speaker for IREWG event

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and one of the world's leading authorities on the biological bases of sexual expression, will be the keynote speaker at a daylong interdisciplinary conference on women to be held March 18 at UB.

The conference, "Gender and the Changing Curriculum: Educating With(out) Difference(s)," will take place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Center for Tomorrow on the North Campus. Sponsored by the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (IREWG), it will be open to the public. An advance registration fee of $6.25 includes a boxed lunch and morning and afternoon refreshments. Call 829-3451 for information.

The conference will examine how university curricula can be transformed through the inclusion of women in academic, scientific and decision-making roles.

Opening remarks will be made by Jeannette Ludwig, professor of modern languages and literatures. Her topic will be "Setting the Agenda: Educating for the 21st Century."

Attendees will be invited to participate in breakout groups that will discuss "Career Trajectories, Gender in My Discipline," "Constructing a Gender-inclusive Syllabus," "Gender & Technology" and "Gender & Media."

Fausto-Sterling is a distinguished cellular and biochemical biologist, and an expert on the interdependence of modern social structure and biology. She has written broadly and critically about the role of race and gender in the construction of scientific theory and the role of such theories in the construction of ideas about race and gender.

She is professor of medical science in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University, where she also teaches in the Department of Women's Studies. She is a strong advocate of the idea that an understanding of science and feminist insights into science are of central importance to feminist students, scientists, scholars and researchers.

In her writings, Fausto-Sterling raises important questions about whether objectivity and rationality-"standard" hallmarks of scientific practice-actually are inherent in that field. She points out that recent studies on the sociology of science reveal the extent to which science is a social activity and, like any other human activity, is largely the result of social interaction and negotiation.

From the point of view of some feminist critiques of science, these findings are borne out in the way the structure and practice reflect the prevailing androcentrism of society. Fausto-Sterling shows how even the most objective of experiments meant to prove the biological bases of sexual difference can be profoundly biased by that male-centered sensibility.

This bias is manifested, she says, in the design and interpretation of experiments, the hierarchical structures in the teaching and doing of science, biological determinism (the use of data to reinforce social structures that are then grounded in genetics and made irrevocable) and limitations placed on the participation of women in the scientific enterprise.

Fausto-Sterling is particularly concerned with arguments that women are simply less intelligent than men. She also takes on scientists who claim that women have a different sort of intelligence than men, one that is more verbal than visual or spatial. She questions both the techniques used in the experiments that are meant to prove these differences and the objectivity of the scientists themselves.

Although biological science is her platform, the arguments put forward by Fausto-Sterling likewise call for a reassessment of our assumptions about gendered abilities and intelligences in other realms of academe, where, she says, they provide a rationale for sexism in education and employment.

Fausto-Sterling is a noted biologist and author of scientific publications specializing in the developmental genetics of the fruit fly and the evolution of regenerative ability and of sexual and asexual systems of reproduction in Planaria. She also has written and lectured widely on the biological dimensions of intersexuality and its implications for our own society. In several papers, she has analyzed critically the role of preconceptions about gender in the structuring of theories of development.

She is the author of several groundbreaking works, including "Myths of Gender" (Basic Books, 1992) and the well-known article that appeared in The Sciences, "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough." Her own work is widely anthologized and she is the general editor of "Race, Gender, and Science" (1996), in which some of the nation's most outstanding scientists address the interplay of these three subjects.