Feminism gets physical: but fails to say anything of value about physics.(CULTURE WATCH II)(Essay)

YEARS ago, between sessions at an academic conference, I heard a woman mention Susie Orbach's 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue. The man she was talking to repeated the title slowly, paused for a few moments in thought, and said, "Can you give an example ..."

The woman jumped in: "... of why fat is a feminist issue?" And the man replied: "No, can you give an example of something that's not a feminist issue?" She was reduced to stammering until the next session mercifully began.

Feminism has connections with any topic you can name, not because women are everywhere but because feminists are everywhere--in academia, at least. John Adams famously wrote that he studied war and politics so his sons could study science and business and their sons could study the arts. In a less inspiring progression, the suffragettes of a century ago set the stage for the women's libbers of the 1960s and 1970s, who in turn gave way to the semioticians and post-structuralists of today.

It's no surprise, then, that in recent decades feminists have been applying their special gifts to the sciences. In areas like sociology and anthropology, there's plenty of room for them to make mischief, and even biology and engineering don't present much resistance if you use a little imagination. For example, Evelyn Fox Keller, a founder of feminist science studies, has complained that most biomedical research uses only male instead of female subjects--rats, that is: "The implicit assumption is, of course, that the male rat represents the species." Another scholar made her reputation by pointing out that texts on human reproduction, when describing fertilization, portray the helpless female egg as "drifting" or sitting passively, while the macho sperm "burrows" and "penetrates."

Having polished off these easy targets, feminists turned their attention to what one of them has called "the hard case": physics. With no people or even animals involved, it might seem an unpromising subject for gender analysis, but that's no problem for a battle-tested feminist, particularly if a tenured appointment is dangled in front of her. When pressed, most feminists will concede that physics does describe an underlying, objective reality; its particles and forces are not simply made up by men to oppress women, and its assertions can be tested and proven true or false. Yet this problem is easily surmounted by feminists determined to find bias.

The status of women within the physics profession is one avenue of attack; another is the interaction between scientific research and society. Aless concrete target is the prevalent notion that physics is somehow the most "fundamental" of sciences, supreme over all the others. This sort of hierarchical thinking, it is said, is alien to women, who are much better at seeing things as part of an interactive whole.

These critics have half a point; physicists, most of whom are male, do tend to think that other sciences are crude simplifications of their own. But do they think that way because they're guys, or because they're physicists? The notion that physicists would gain humility if more women joined their ranks is questionable at best; nothing of the sort has occurred in any other profession. Assertions like that are based on the common but mistaken premise that a tiny group of highly atypical women will display the characteristics of women as a whole. Did Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and Nancy Pelosi bring a gentle, consensus-based woman's touch to politics?