The Gender Philosophy in Laboratory Work

In the early nineteen hundreds women in science were unacknowledged or barred from work in the public sphere. Most, if not all, public scientific universities and societies were male dominated leaving women in the dust in terms of education or a further scientific career. If women were allowed to dabble at all in the sciences it was in a non-threatening way to their male counterparts as assistants or botanists studying the female art of flowers and flower arranging which was less respected then chemistry, physics, and math.

When working in a lab as a women scientist next to a male scientist in a different lab space many things in demonstration, environment, and tools would change between the sexes because of the gender difference. As a woman working within an Aristotelian workspace the main goals of the lab would be to instrument change towards perfection and heavenly godliness through the four causes of change. This would include sticking to reason and logic while understanding that as a woman, you are not allowed to practice science because there is no logic in a female's brain which makes her moist and hot and unable to deal with large sums of information. If Aristotle had his way she would not even be in the lab at all but rather at home in a private space. Instead, a women would have to work extra hard to her male counter-part in the next lab in order to ascend from a non-being to an actual being which the male can ascend too quickly.

According to Aristotle, the males workspace would be organized and reasonable in it's spacial proportions with burners, acids, and morters separated from each other element. The woman's workspace would be hectic, cluttered, with all the elements mixed between each other on the table in a disorganized, nonlinear, mess. A more Jungian workspace would be working off much of the same base as Aristotle in that women and men are the opposites, men being the more logical and reasoned using the scientific method while the woman next door focuses purely through emotion raising bias by using her feeling for the answers to scientific questions. He would argue that the male would implement the scientific method with clear thinking, judgmental, problem solving manner and he would do his experiment in a clean and well thought environment. A woman would attempt to grow up to have masculine traits, by imitating the males workspace in its organization however she would not able to escape her intuition through use of the scientific method.

A woman would also be more likely to have distractions in her workspace, so she would be unable to tune into her thinking and sensation because of her flighty nature. These two senses are very important to the sciences, however, women can drop the need to be masculine and attain sciences without math such as botany. Botany is a woman based science by Jungian standards which can be easily attained because it involves color and simple structures ingrained in the arts and sewing of women's every day social life. By watching the man in the next workspace for a very long time, the woman could hope to become assimilated to masculine tendencies by leaving her feminine nature completely behind.

If she cannot assimilate to masculine tendencies then she can be passive to her male counterpart much like Ying and Yang of Taoist theory. The woman scientist can become the male's assiatnt and go next door into a more passive and less hands-on application of science. These relationships are intertwined and cannot exsist without each other. Change is good for a scienetist both male and female so their mutual workspaces would reflect that, however there is still a pecking order and patriarchal order. This means the woman would be interacting and helping the man, but probably not being vigilant on her own independent work and there are still some methods with intense math and science it wouldn't be acceptable for her to engage in mentally.

Overall, all these theories would either push out the woman scientist into the male scientists workplace to be his assistant or she would be pushed out of the public sphere all together. All their theories separate women from men in terms of emotion over logic and how it impacts the scientific method that they must perform in the lab. They claim that women cannot do certain types of science and regulate them to emotional sciences such as botany and home economics.