Sobre mulheres, laboratórios e fazeres científicos na Terra da Luz

Abstract

The current women’s participation in scientific field is paradoxical: today, in Brazil, women are majority of admissions in higher education, however they are minority in traditionally male areas of university education; similarly, women have stay in scientific career, but has not accumulated sufficient scientific capital to take on the decision positions of the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. Therefore, an incisive female participation at the university has no meaning the elimination of discriminatory practices in the scientific field. As a result, this research objective to analyze how gender relations are present in scientific field’s consolidation in Ceará-Brazil, taking as reference the biographical approach, interpreting trajectories of three scientist women: Irlys Barreira, a sociologist; Marlúcia Santiago, a physicist, and Regine Vieira, biologist and poet. However these women have consolidated their scientific careers, on their narratives could be perceived the permanency of gender discrimination, for example the difficulty to conciliate academic work and family, especially when they have children. Immersed in the constant disputes between family time and time for science, these women construct strategies to consolidate their careers: they shaped high-performance productivity; also in their trajectories, laboratories are strategically important because it is where they develop research, contribute to the training of students, raise resources and they articulate with researchers from other institutions in Brazil or outside it. They are women that lace science’s networks through their journeys, works, lineages, becoming recognized. The biographical approach in this study intends to contribute in the direction of breaking silence and invisibility that still involve women in sociological, anthropological, philosophical and historical studies of science.