Londa Schiebinger

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University, and the Founding Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Barbara D. Finberg Director of Stanford’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Schiebinger's research has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Le Monde, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitschrift, La Vanguardia, at the London Museum of Natural History, on NPR, and elsewhere. She speaks and consults nationally and internationally on issues surrounding women and gender in science, medicine, and engineering.

Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender and science. Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge. Her current work explores how to harness the creative power of gender analysis for discovery and innovation. In 2022, Gendered Innovations was among the winners of the Berlin Falling Walls Breakthrough in the Science & Innovation Management.

She is author of The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Harvard University Press, 1989); the prize-winning Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon Press, 1993; Rutgers University Press, 2004); Has Feminism Changed Science? (Harvard University Press, 1999); and the prize-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, fall 2004). She has edited Feminism and the Body (Oxford University Press, 2000); co-edited with Angela Creager and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2001); with Claudia Swan, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, fall 2004); with Robert N. Proctor, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, (Stanford University Press, 2008); Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering (Stanford University Press, 2008); Gendered Innovations: How Gender Analysis Contributes to Research, ed. with Ineke Klinge (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013); and Gendered Innovations 2: How Inclusive Analysis Contributes to Research and Innovation (Publications Office of the European Union, 2020); Women and Gender in Science and Technology, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2014); with Lilian Hunt, “A Framework for Sex, Gender, and Diversity Analysis in Research: Funding Agencies Have Ample Room to Improve Their Policies”(Science, 2022); with Cara Tannenbaum, Robert P. Ellis, Friederike Eyssel, and James Zou, “Sex and Gender Analysis Improves Science and Engineering" (Nature, 2019); with James Zou, "AI can be Sexist and Racist— It’s Time to Make it Fair" (Nature, 2018). Her work has been translated into numerous languages.

Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; she has also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Most recently, Schiebinger was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2013; the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award from Women's Health at Stanford Medical School, 2010; the 2005 Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association and the 2005 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society both for her Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. She also won the 2005 J. Worth Estes Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine for her article "Feminist History of Colonial Science," Hypatia 19 (2004): 233-254.