Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor — primarily caregiving, in its various aspects — that is performed mostly by women.
–Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentry Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).–
Making in the home…
One common rebuttal to the idea that the balance of labor in the household of the white picket fence and the 2 1/2 kids is that not every task in the home is a traditionally feminine one. Repair tasks are a good example of a home job with a stereotypically masculine connotation. But new feminists around the time of publication of the Feminine Mystique argued that men frequently get as-needed tasks, like fixing a door hinge or mowing the lawn, while women deal with an endless sea of daily Sisyphean childcare, cooking, and cleaning tasks. I was noticing that those more masculine tasks frequently have more of a “making” tone to them, too– building a shelf rather than maintaining a child.
…to making in the lab
This “making” versus “caring” difference extends past just the field of digital humanities, too, as far as all sciences. This quote also made me think about how male-dominated fields generally have greater “making” connotations than female-dominated ones. Currently, biology as a field is being silently reclassified as a “soft science.” Hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, are supposed to deal with physical, observable changes, and experiments on the world as opposed to those on people. Until recently, biology was also broadly considered a hard science. The change occurred when, coincidentally, more women began to get biology degrees and contribute to the academic conversation. Soft sciences are now generally dominated by women, and hard sciences still by men. As biology becomes a pipeline for caretaking jobs like being a doctor or testing new drugs, it simultaneously becomes more feminine and less of a hard, making science. The reason this is a problem for women in higher education is that “making” sciences and hard sciences tend to have higher paychecks than caretaking, soft sciences. Interestingly, the average biologist’s annual salary has been decreasing at a rate directly proportional to the ratio of women to men in the field increasing. It’s a saddening trend, but there is hope. Women have officially surpassed men in the average level of education. As more female science professionals contribute to their fields, I hope we can make a large-scale change and pay female biologists fairly and equally for their invaluable contributions.