This is Part II of a series.  Read Part I.

Methods

My examination of museums and science centers took me to science museums and centers of varying sizes in both Northern and Southern California.

In order to obtain a representative sampling of California’s diverse museums, I visited seven science centers of varying scales, geography, and foci, ranging from tiny suburban science centers to the megacenters in Southern California.  This was a labor-intensive but fascinating project that required me to use three primary research methods:

1. Close readings of the exhibits and programs, as well as related museum literature, themselves, focusing on their assumptions about gender and gendered learning.

2. Interviews with education, program, and exhibit development staff to understand their perspectives on the science centers’ programs and exhibits.

3. Participant observation in a science center’s education and exhibition development departments.

I decided against summative evaluations or visitor studies because the time and resources necessary to undertaking such research would prohibit me from studying more than one or two centers.  I wanted, instead, to survey the interplay of gender with a full spectrum of science center programs—from public outreach to exhibits to staff training.

Photo by Jennifer Kiernan, and used under a Creative Commons license

To encourage honest responses about gender from my respondents, I promised anonymity to all participating individuals and institutions who requested it.  Few people did so.  Because I am now making this information public on this blog, I have elected to remove any information that would allow someone to identify an individual interviewee or the institution for which he or she works.  In some cases, I changed a person’s title to make it more generic, e.g. director of education.  Funding for museums and science centers fluctuates wildly, and while I certainly would like to effect change in some of these centers, I would not want to jeopardize their programs’ existence through my critique.  That said, I do name institutions when I comment on exhibitions open to the public.

A note on terminology:  Some science center staff insist that their institutions’ exhibitions and programs differ enough from traditional science and natural history museums that they should not technically be called museums.  The difference is that in a science center, “the needs and interests of children are placed before those of the collections” (Caulton 1998m 6).  Because visitors to a science center (as well as academic practitioners!) are just as likely to call it a museum as a science center, I use the terms almost interchangeably here.  Technically, however, most of the institutions I visited are science centers, not museums.

Exhibition Explorations

Although the primary audience for many science centers is elementary school children, adults constitute half of all visitors to interactive museums (Caulton 1998, 27).  It is both appropriate and important, then, to participate in exhibits and read labels from an adult’s perspective, while keeping in mind children’s responses to activities.  I have taken this approach in my forays into different exhibitions.  What follows is an excerpt from a longer essay; to read more of my reflections on exhibitions, visit that post.

Science education has a long history of sexism.  For centuries, women were excluded from science labs, lectures, and classrooms.  Science textbooks have long used sexist metaphors and made chauvinistic assumptions about women’s bodies. Jaime Phillips and Kate Hausbeck have demonstrated that today’s geology textbooks make assumptions about the gender and race of their readers, and other feminist scientists and science theorists, such as Emily Martin and Polly Matzinger have uncovered sexist assumptions in traditional accounts of the functions of human fertilization and the immune system.  Since they deal directly with human bodies, it is not surprising that biology and other life sciences have been especially gendered in their language and assumptions.  Surprisingly, only one of the science centers I visited had a current exhibit on the human body, although two others did address ecology.  Perhaps these topics are too controversial in some ways, or perhaps they are too expensive to mount, because they require costly anatomical models or the upkeep of live plants and animals.  Maybe science centers still are catering unconsciously to a male clientele—after all, girls may prefer exhibitions on the human body (Greenfield 1995b, 925).

My study of exhibitions showed that exhibits focused on the physical or earth sciences were least likely to make gender gaffes.  The floor of the large Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, for example, contained dozens of hands-on activities about the physical sciences, including a kalliroscope, a stream table, a magnet wall, a smoke ring generator, a tornado simulator, and a quake simulator.  Casual observations showed that both boys and girls enjoyed the rather physical nature of these activities, most of which went beyond “push-button”  science to engage the visitors more physically.  A visit to the Exploratorium in San Francisco revealed that many of the Discovery Science Center’s exhibits were modelled on activities on the Exploratorium floor.  However, the Exploratorium, with hundreds of exhibits on its floor, was perhaps the most exemplary science center; in the day I spent there, I uncovered not a single assumption about visitors’ gender—not even so much as a reliance on gendered language.

However, the success of these two institutions in creating an environment that is apparently appealing and engaging to visitors regardless of gender does not mean that all physical science exhibits are fail-proof.  A traveling exhibition titled Space Toys at the Discovery Museum Science and Space Center in Sacramento revealed all too well what can happen when an exhibit design team fails to account for gender—as well as fail to provide hands-on activities to enhance visitor learning.  I visited the exhibition, which was designed by the Arkansas Museum of Discovery, on a rainy Saturday, but despite the weather the small exhibit floor was occupied by several families.  To the casual observer such as myself, it appeared that the young girls present had little interest in the displays of space toys, while boys and men of all ages were held rapt by the objects inside the series of glass cases.  While the men pushed their noses against the glass and waxed nostalgic about the toys they used to have, small groups of women and girls tried to figure out how to use the half-dozen hands-on activities included with the exhibit.  When they grew frustrated with these exhibits, the women and girls moved into the room in which live animals are displayed or into a special room in which visitors could make glitter-filled “space wands”—clearly an attempt to include girls in the exhibit’s content, but I fail to see the science learning in such a task.

Photo by Ryan Somma, and used under a Creative Commons license

In a flyer, the Discovery Museum Science and Space Center claims that “While entertaining your students, this exhibit also educates by meeting California State Standards for Physical, Life, Earth, and Ecological Sciences; as well as Investigation and Experimentation.”  As a former exhibit developer who is familiar with the specific state content standards, I take exception to this characterization.  The exhibit was about material culture and the history of toys, not about space science.  The science center’s staff tried to make the exhibit more scientific by providing visitors with “Search & Find” sheets targeting various grades of elementary school students, but even these sheets are geared more toward boys, with questions about robots, Star Wars, and Star Trek.  While there are certainly girls who enjoy these topics, traditionally these subjects are those with which—thanks to social and cultural conditioning—primarily boys engage.  In an interview, one educator from another institution offered confirmed my fears.  “I teach a living in space class … during the summer time,” s/he said, “and this summer we did notice a particularly small number of girls in the class, and we wondered if there was anything we could do about that, or if we needed to have special programming for girls.  Out of 20 to 22 kids in the class, 5 or fewer were girls.  Space is the stereotypical boys topic.”

It doesn’t help that, with the exception of toys from recent Star Trek series, women are largely not present in Space Toys’s renditions of space travel, and when they are, they must be rescued by men.

An exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles proved equally problematic.  I recall first viewing Mathematica: A World of Numbers and Beyond during my childhood, when the museum was still known as the California Museum of Science and Industry.  I was fascinated then by the cube of lights that could do multiplication problems punched into its keypad by visitors.  I was too young to understand the multiplication, but I enjoyed the spectacle, and I recall being amused as well by the miniature roller coaster that glides around a Mobius strip.

Photo by Ryan Somma, and used under a Creative Commons license

Mathematica was a permanent exhibit from 1961 until 1998, when it was taken down and rehabilitated into a traveling exhibition.  The introductory text on the exhibition wall proclaims that “Mathematica was one of the first truly interactive exhibitions.  Even today, it remains influential.  It won the hearts of teachers and students during its time at the California Science Center.”  Visitors and museum professionals alike have been effusive in their praise of Mathematica, which was designed by Charles and Ray Eames.  In Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions, Kathleen McLean heralds the exhibition as one of the first truly participatory exhibits.  “Mathematica,” she writes, “has not only withstood the test of time (it is as contemporary and attractive today as [it] was 30 years ago), it has also inspired exhibit planners around the world” (1993, 94).

My experience with Mathematica was decidedly different.  In contrast to most participatory exhibitions today, approximately half of Mathematica’s “activities” are sealed behind glass.  This physical removal from visitors was not the most disturbing portion of Mathematica, however.  The exhibition features an extremely large timeline that runs along an entire wall of the exhibition, from ceiling to floor.  Although allegedly depicting the history of mathematics, the timeline fails to name even one woman, even though many women have contributed to mathematics.  A political timeline at the foot of the larger history names only Queen Elizabeth and Joan of Arc.  I mentioned the paucity of women to another female visitor, and she admitted she had noticed the omission and was troubled by it as well.  The panel listing the creators of the timeline mentions only one woman.  Clearly, the exhibit was designed by men for men.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, were the cartoon drawings surrounding the cube of light bulbs.  These cartoons illustrated various mathematical concepts by employing humor.  In illustrating that (A + B) + C does not necessarily equal A + (B + C), each lettered variable was personified.  A and C were men, while B was a woman passed between them.  In depicting the woman as an object to be passed between two men, the exhibition denies women agency of their own.  They are objects, not subjects or practitioners, of mathematics.

The California Science Center did redeem itself, however, with the exhibition across the hall from Mathematica.  The Creative World, a multi-story exhibition, presented physical science problems and asked visitors to solve them.  Among dozens of other activities, visitors could learn about new technologies designed to make cars safer, produce sounds by making objects vibrate, and learn what structures were most likely to survive an earthquake.  Best of all, the Creative World exhibition labels and signs told visitors they “have the power” to solve scientific quandaries by using their creative powers.  The exhibit was textually and physically very empowering, and it was clear the activities engaged children and adults of both genders.  However, I did notice a few of the activity components, such as cranks, were difficult to move, which may exclude the participation of girls and women, who traditionally have less upper-body strength than do men.

An exhibition at Explorit Science Center titled Insides Out: How Your Body Works also did a fine job of presenting biology unbiased by gender.  However, boys and girls did use some of the activities differently from one another.  A mannequin at the entrance of the museum floor contained a long tube on which visitors could tug; the tube was several yards long, representing the combined length of the short and long intestines.  The mannequin was female and wore a polo shirt bearing the museum logo.  While both boys and girls seemed to enjoy the designated activity at this station, the older boys also persisted week after week in fondling the mannequin’s breasts, often in the presence of their teachers, parents, and female classmates.  Such a gesture certainly objectifies women, and might make girls on the floor uncomfortable.  Still, the exhibit development staff (I wasn’t yet a member of it) for that exhibition is to be commended for their efforts to bring the female body onto the exhibition floor in a novel way.

Onto Part III. . .

Leslie Madsen-Brooks is an adjunct professor of museum studies at John F. Kennedy University and a consultant on issues of education and professional development.  If you liked this post, check out her blog Museum Blogging or contact Leslie directly: leslie -at- museumblogging -dot- com.  You can also sign up for her occasional newsletter on museum professional development.