Environment170′s Weblog

To make up for 5th week absence:
I thought this lecture was unique in that it wasn’t on a subject most would expect to hear about in a science class, but rather was more policy and opinion based than rooted in scientific fact. Harding lectured on “Gender and the Environment,” and while she brought valid points to the table, I thought that the lecture as a whole was a bit disjoint, going from talking about the notion of gendered environments to the lack of advocacy on behalf of women in the sciences.
In her lecture, Harding introduced the idea that the environment has become gendered due to the way that different groups interact with it. For example, women interact with the environment differently than men because they have different interests in what they want to gain from the environment or use their surroundings for. Similarly, different cultural, religious, and national groups may use the same areas in different ways, and the ways they choose to use the land (or sea) is indicative of their background or traditions as a group. For example, Harding presented the Atlantic coast to prove this point – different groups over the course of history have used this area as a food source, a place to practice rituals, a “military highway,” a trading route, etc. The fact that women and men have different uses for the same environment show that because of these uses, they learn different things from the environment. Therefore, the fact that men are better represented in making policy and decisions regarding the environment presents the problem that maybe in making these policies and decisions they are thinking of the environment as they know it, and not considering the uses and the knowledge that women have established because of their unique relationship with the physical environment.
Essentially, Harding’s main points were that people interact differently with the environment, different sorts of people have different interests in the environment, and different uses and feelings about it, and different cultures involve different resources in how they approach their relationship with the environment. It is because of these differences that people formulate their own opinions about the environment, and thus it is unfair that the people who make the “rules” regarding the environment in our country would more or less come from the same group (mostly being males.) This idea is what led Harding into the latter portion of the lecture, in which she addressed the limitations caused by a lack of equal representation of women in the sciences, and particularly in environmental sciences and environmental policy making. Most of the statements that Harding made, I felt resonated fairly well with me. It is true that women are vastly underrespresented in scientific fields, even after leaps and bounds have been made in terms of women’s rights. However, as a university student I am a bit shielded from this inequity, as most of my science classes have equal representation of women and men, and some classes even have more women than men. I found the examples Harding gave about the under representation of women in sciences and health fields to be incredibly interesting, for example how women weren’t treated properly for sports injuries for years because doctors didn’t understand that physiological differences between males and females were not only limited to reproductive differences

The gender roles that are still relatively in existence today can provide some framework and guidance for setting policy regarding environmental health issues. For instance, although there is a significant amount of blurring across these gender lines, there are still many cases in today’s society where an environmental niche is still defined by a majority of a single gender. An example of this would be the armed forces, where a majority of the individuals involved are in fact men. The gender majority that is used to define these niches can thus be used to guide policies and decisions regarding how to sustain and maintain the individuals within it, which would include issues such as healthcare. Thus, within the armed forces, health issues would be mostly guided by taking into consideration that men’s biological and medical needs are a priority.
Another significant result of this kind of differentiation between genders is that it could also be used as a basis for empirical research in studying how people interact with their environments. Despite the fact that more men and women today are extending beyond typical gender defined roles, it remains that there are still biological and social differences between them. These differences would cause them to interact with similar and different environments in unique ways, as was mentioned by Dr. Harding. Their interaction thus can be studied and observed empirically in order to gain knowledge and insight into the diversity of a society’s coexistence with its environment.
Towards the end of her lecture, Dr. Harding refers to Standpoint Theory, which is a method to gain a better understanding of issues by taking into account the perspectives women have that may differ significantly from men. These differing perspectives are referred to as standpoints, and in order to gain a more objective view of the environment and the issues surrounding it, all of these standpoints must be taken into account. Dr. Harding mentions, for example, how the study of AIDS was at first predominantly centered around its effects on men. In order to gain a more complete insight and basis of knowledge of environmental health concerns such as this, women’s standpoints must also be taken into account (not only in terms of social differences, but in this case biological differences as well.)