Evelyn Fox Keller: A Feminist Synthesis Essay

It can be really hard to mix science and society, but Evelyn Fox Keller, a physicist and feminist, manages to combine the two. She went to college and got her Ph.D. from Harvard University for physics. Keller is currently the Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) (MIT). She also gives talks about females in science, and writes books and papers on it. Throughout her years as a scientist she has dealt with opposition from men who think that women should not be involved in science. She has broke the rules of gender in science. Her ideas are not as simple as just women belonging in science. She believes that science is a masculine subject, but that does not mean women do not belong there.

When would I too despair, fail, or go elsewhere (the equivalent of failing)?” (Agapakis). From the beginning, people did not believe that Keller could succeed in a career in science just because she is a woman. But she did, and was very successful at it. When she was still in college she spent a summer with her brother and ended up working in a biology lab. “In Frank’s lab I discovered a phenomenon. It was a very simple idea, but I recognized its power and that was really something. We didn’t know the genetic code yet, and I recognized a way that we could use a chemical variant of DNA to answer the question of whether one or both strands were coding for proteins” (Agapakis). She recognized facts that no one else did. She even did research, experiments, and collected data about feminism in science. She made an equation that describe the drop-offs in women in science and shared it in one of her lectures. “In the few years before that, I had started thinking about why there are so few women in science overall and I had started collecting data. I started out this lecture with an equation- a birth and death equation- and I showed the statistics I had gathered about how the percentage of women drops off dramatically throughout the academic ladder and I asked, what is killing them off?” (Agapakis). Keller impacted all parts of the science world with her writing and