Gender

Researcher: Pablo Schyfter

Engineering, like science, has been and continues to be an area of work characterised by masculinisation. That is, engineering and science have been and are still routinely viewed as practices congruent with men and masculinity and accordingly incongruous with women and femininity. One way in which this manifests itself centres on subjectivities. 'The engineer' and 'the scientist' are (broadly speaking) masculine subjectivities. As synthetic biology comes into being, so too does the subjectivity of 'the synthetic biologist.' What form will that subjectivity take? Will the field's elevation and emulation of traditional engineering result in a traditionally masculinised subjectivity, or is there an opportunity to craft something new? Can synthetic biology deliver not simply a new form of engineering, but a better, more equal form of engineering?

Talks and Presentations

Schyfter, P. (2015) ‘Gender and the engineering of biology,’ invited presentation at Synthetic and Systems Biology, University of Edinburgh.

Schyfter, P. (2015) ‘Gender and synthetic biology,’ invited presentation at Redesigning Synthetic Biology, The University of Freiburg, Germany.

Schyfter, P. (2015) ‘Gender and synthetic biology,’ invited presentation at the EUSA Synthetic Biology Society, University of Edinburgh.

Schyfter, P. (2016) ‘Gender politics and synthetic biology: Practice, practitioners and potential,’ Science and Technology by Other Means (4S / EASST 2016 Annual Meeting), Barcelona.

Additional Funding

Pablo Schyfter received funding from The Moray Endowment Fund of the University of Edinburgh for a project entitled ‘Women and the Engineering of Biology.’ The research consisted of exploratory interviews with women practitioners in a leading UK synthetic biology centre.