Q&A with Heather Shattuck-Heidorn

GSL: Heather, congratulations on your new position.  What most excites you about this new faculty position? 

HSH: I'm most excited to be practicing science from within a Women and Gender Studies program! WGS has always been so interdisciplinary - just inherently so, really - but historically there has been either difficulty incorporating science or even friction between WGS and science programs. Which is too bad, because there's always been so much overlap between WGS topics and scientific topics - for human biology it's obvious, but those intersections are also there for research funding, scientific ethics, approaches to climate change - you name it. For me, I'm a biological anthropologist, and so my discipline (which aims to understand variation in human biology) really sits squarely within the topics of concern for WGS. I'm really happy to be here, launching a scientific research program that is rooted in feminist understandings of science as a social institution, research ethics, and approaches to methods and hypothesis formation. I think being here gives me the freedom to really do this explicitly, rather than adhering to disciplinary norms while adding the feminism and gender concerns on the side. I am also excited to be here because I think this is the direction programs are moving across the country - we saw that this year, there were just so many jobs (well, relatively speaking) that were looking for expertise in both feminism and science, in some way. 

And I also need to say that I am just delighted to be back at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Southern Maine. Students here are really special, we truly serve the community that we are part of, and our students are so committed, so focused. A lot of folks have families and jobs, or other things going on - and it's just so exciting to see how learning can be so mind-expanding and create so many opportunities for folks. We're changing lives! 

GSL: How did you come to specialize in gender and science? 

HSH: Well, I've always been interested in WGS issues. I worked at my undergrad women's center, have identified as a feminist for a very long time. But, like many people, I had this sort of conception that feminism was "political" and science was, you know, "objective and neutral". Like the two couldn't go together. 

This first started to change for me when I became aware of the shockingly sexist and racist history of my home discipline, anthropology, and biological anthropology in particular. Early evolutionary biologists and biological anthropologists were deeply invested in using scientific methodologies to support racist and sexist ideologies. And the research, looking back at it, is so obviously flawed, poorly designed, etc. They were so bent on proving what they wanted to find that they simply subverted the supposedly "neutral" enterprise of science to justify their own world views.

So as I was reading about how scientists of yore were (subconsciously or not) really operating out of their own beliefs and position, it became clear that this is always true, to an extent. Scientists are not neutral. I engage in work around gender and science in order to better understand how starting positions, assumptions, background beliefs, and personal biases can end up influencing how scientists conduct research - what questions are asked, what data are used to investigate hypotheses, how analyses are conducted, and how evidence is interpreted. 

I also study gender as a biosocial variable. This simply means that I study how gender (social norms, gender-related roles, gender-related exposures, etc) influence our biology. It is quite common for human biologists to consider environmental and social exposures in their work. Stress, environmental contamination, racism or discrimination, poverty, early childhood trauma - these are all examples of social variables that have clear impacts on human biology. But often, when we consider biological differences between men and women, we forget that men and women can have drastically different environments (think diet, income, education, stress levels, relationships, etc). Instead of considering possible social causes, when we find biological differences between men and women, we usually turn to sex to explain them. So we start looking for genetic relationships, hormone levels, etc. Generally, I think gender is under-explored as a contributor to biological outcomes. 

GSL: What kinds of classes will you be teaching?

HSH: The most challenging (and perhaps one of the most rewarding!) aspects of this position is that I'm now teaching all WGS classes. This is not my prior experience! I have historically taught a lot of science courses (Intro to Human Evolution, Biological Anthropology, Hormones and Behavior, etc) - now, I'm all WGS. So I'm teaching Introduction to Women and Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, and Feminism and Science this year. 

So far, I LOVE the Intro class. One of my favorite things about teaching Intro to Human Evolution was that it was fundamentally world-view changing for students. Once you understand how humans evolved, it really impacts your understanding of yourself in the world, relationships with other life, your family and history - everything. I think Intro to WGS is another course that just absolutely completely changes how students view themselves, their families, and our larger social world. I have students who are telling me that, today, in 2019, they have never considered how most of the movies and books they were exposed to growing up were about men and boys. Or they have never considered the double standard inherent in the words "slut" and "stud". It's mind-blowing to me (and, I think, to a lot of them!). 

GSL: Tell us about your work with the GenderSci Lab.  What is your role in the Lab and what sort research do you do?

HSH: I've been working with Sarah Richardson (Lab Director) and Meredith Reiches (Co-Assistant Lab Director) for almost a decade. I've been so happy to see our work together go from reading groups that were putting out critical commentaries, to seminar series, to a formal lab. I'm the director of Engaged Communications at the lab, and I run the Gender as a Biosocial Variable research stream. In the Engaged Communications role, my job is to manage the blog posts (editing, posting, planning, etc) and to help make sure that lab members get the support they need to write public-facing pieces that still have the quality and tone that we're going for. In the research stream I am running, we are working on operationalizing gender and deploying it as an independent variable that can explain variation in biological outcomes. In the future, my goal is to have community-based research programs in this same area, in order to better understand how gender influences human health and biology.