The course is intended to familiarize students with the history of women’s modes of participation in science and technology and offer theoretical approaches on gender in science and technology. Furthermore, students will be encouraged to reflect on their own gendered experiences in their encounters with science as students in laboratory and/or social sciences and in technological domains. The course is highly interdisciplinary, designed for students in the humanities and social sciences but also the sciences and engineering. There will be a short introduction by the professor every week, which will be followed by extended discussion in class. Short scenarios will be handed and discussed also in class. Each student is expected to actively participate and to have read the assignments.

The course aims:
1. to broaden and deepen the students’ understanding of gender biases in science and technology through the study of their history
2. to shift from a discourse of women’s exclusion and marginalization to that of the social construction of sexual differences in science and technology
3. to trace gender metaphors that traverse scientific knowledge in order to undermine students’ perceptiveness of science as neutral
4. to examine how specific technologies shaped women’s and men’s labor and how women altered the intended use of certain technologies
5. to subvert the stereotype that, historically, women have been mainly assigned in safe positions within the industrial production line
6. to equip students with those skills necessary to engage with the key debates in Gender and Science and Technology Studies
7. to convey a historical understanding of science and technology as social constructs and to emphasize the importance of technological actors, of artifacts and of new sites of technological activities for women’s and men’s lives.

Credits: 5