Short abstract:

We question how scientific practices influence the careers of young women researchers through fieldwork in a robotics and AI French laboratory. Feminist STS allow us to question scientific practices as well as the gendered dichotomies between hardware/software and theoretical/practical research.

Long abstract:

Our research aims to understand why, in the field of robotics and AI specifically, young women researchers tend to leave public academia in greater numbers than their male counterparts.

Through fieldwork in a French laboratory in those disciplines, we draw onto Feminist STS to observe how femininities (van den Brink and Benschop 2014, Martin 2001) and masculinities (O’Connor, O’Hagan, and Brannen 2015) are negotiated in French STEM academia. We find a greater exposure to flirting behaviors and avoidance of assertiveness amongst the young women researchers we studied.

In addition, Feminist STS also allow us to surpass the technology/social dichotomy and how it is expressed in different and hierarchical ways between and within disciplines (Zuckerman, 2001), and lead to more radical understandings of epistemological issues in STEM (Marcetic and Nolin 2022). We observe in our fieldwork that, in addition to this dichotomy, another one persists between abstract and empirical methods in the field of robotics and AI. We highlight the false idea that masculinities are expressed through rational, objective, detached, and abstract methods (particularly mathematical) (Harding, 1991), whilst femininities would be expressed through more subjective, concrete, empirical and holistic rational methods (Faulkner, 2001). Indeed, representations of science are not exempt from moral or political values (Steel & Eliott, 2019).

Thus, our research uses the lens of Feminist STS to question the production of knowledge (Intemann, 2011) in robotics and AI, which helps us study the tendency of women researchers to find less incentives to pursue an academic career in these disciplines.