Statistical data and the history of women: a critique of Margaret Rossiter's women scientists in America: struggles and strategies to 1940

Abstract

Rossiter's book, based on a wide variety of sources, including numerous manuscript collections, is a goldmine of information. At its core is a statistical data base drawn from successive editions of American Men of Science. The book adds in a major way to our knowledge of its central subject. It also opens a window onto several little explored topics in the history of American science. However, Rossiter makes no standard tests of the significance of her valuable statistics. More important, she commits the major methodological sin of giving inadequate attention to alternative explanations of the numerical data. The result is that while Rossiter amply documents the considerable discrimination that women faced in the American scientific enterprise, she leaves cloudy the relative force of that discrimination compared to internalized cultural norms, marital and maternal obligations, and the like.

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