Daniel Hicks (University of California, Davis), Evelyn Brister (Rochester Institute of Technology)
A long tradition in feminist historiography of science has focused on uncovering the lost and obscured contributions of women scientists. For example, Katherine Brading's work has raised the status of Émilie du Châtelet from a mere translator of Newton to the author of an important conservation law, and the Raising Horizons project has highlighted the role of 19th century and contemporary women in building the institutions of the earth sciences (archaeology, geology, and paleontology). Such projects have shown that, in many fields of scientific research, women have always been significant contributors, establishing important institutions and making major discoveries. But, too often, their work has been credited to mentors, spouses, and siblings, passed on as unattributed “common knowledge,” or simply forgotten.
Taking inspiration from these historiographical projects, we present an overview of contributions of women to 20th century and contemporary philosophy of science. Using the CrossRef publication metadatabase and webscraping techniques, we have constructed a dataset of 38,000 philosophy of science publications, including articles from twenty-eight journals and chapters from three book series (Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, Western Ontario Studies in Philosophy of Science, and Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science). Using automated methods and manual corrections, we coded these for author gender, and applied text mining methods to classify articles by subspecialty (e.g., philosophy of biology; philosophy of physics). Our dataset is publicly available at [link redacted for review].
We analyze the participation of women in the philosophy of science over time and according to disciplinary specialty. This allows us to identify areas of philosophy of science with more women authors and in which women made important early contributions, and we compare our results with existing estimates of women’s participation in philosophy more generally. The project also highlights particular women philosophers of science whose influence may be underestimated.
Finally, this poster will present possible future uses for this database, which we intend to release openly. The database lends itself to supplementation with other sources of data, including citation data and affiliation data. Tracking authors’ affiliations, for instance, could enable us to examine the institutional arrangement of women in 20th century philosophy of science: were women clustered in a few departments, or more isolated? Is there any correlation between productivity and clustering/isolation with other women philosophers of science? We will also discuss the strengths and limitations of these methods.
