Londa Schiebinger, American academic and author
Londa Schiebinger (shē/bing/ǝr; born May 13, 1952) is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender in science, she is currently Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and from Universitat de València, Spain (2018). She serves on the international advisory board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger has analyzed what she call the three “fixes”:
"Fix the Numbers of Women" focuses on increasing the numbers of women participating in science and engineering; "Fix the Institutions" promotes gender equality in careers through structural change in research organizations; and "Fix the Knowledge" or "gendered innovations" stimulates excellence in science and technology by integrating sex and gender analysis into research. As a result of this work, she was recruited in a national search to direct Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, a post she held from 2004 to 2010. Her job was to promote and support research on women and gender across Stanford University—from engineering, to philosophy, to medicine and business. In 2010 and 2014, she presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology. The UN Resolutions of March 2011 call for “gender-based analysis ... in science and technology” and for the integrations of a “gender perspective in science and technology curricula.” In 2013 she presented the Gendered Innovations project at the European Parliament. Gendered Innovations was also presented to the South Korean National Assembly in 2014. In 2015, Schiebinger addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific, a meeting devoted to gendered innovations in research. She speaks globally on gendered innovations—from Brazil to Japan, and her work was recently presented in a Palace Symposium for the King and Queen of the Netherlands at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.
Her research interests include current issues on gender and ethnicity in STEM and also early modern Atlantic World history. She was the first women in the field of History to win the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1999.
Schiebinger's work is highly interdisciplinary. In recognition of her creative work across academic fields of research, she was awarded the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award in the Stanford Medical School in 2010, the Linda Pollin Women's Heart Health Leadership Award from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 2015, the Impact of Gender/Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies Pioneer Award in 2016, and the American Medical Women's Association President's Recognition Award in 2017. She has held prestigious Fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (1999–2000) and at the Stanford Humanities Center (2010–2011 and 2017–2018).