Feminist biology

Feminist biology is an approach to biology that is concerned with the influence of gender values, the removal of gender bias, and the understanding of the overall role of social values in biological research and practices.^[1] Feminist biology was founded by, among others, Ruth Bleier of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (who authored the 1984 work Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women and inspired the university's endowed fellowship for feminist biology).^[2] It aims to enhance biology by incorporating feminist critique in matters varying from the mechanisms of cell biology and sex selection to the assessment of the meaning of words such as "gender" and "sex". Overall, the field is broadly defined and pertains itself to philosophies behind both biological and feminist practice. These considerations make feminist biology debatable and conflictive with itself, particularly when concerning matters of biological determinism, whereby descriptive sex terms of male and female are intrinsically confining, or extreme postmodernism, whereby the body is viewed more as a social construct.^[3] Despite opinions ranging from determinist to postmodernist, however, biologists, feminists, and feminist biologists of varying labels alike have made claims to the utility of applying feminist ideology to biological practice and procedure.

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