'Not too many ladies, but too few men': On the gendered co-construction of social science and its publics

Questions about the different roles of the public have been much debated within sociology of science in general and within the subfield of public understanding/communication of science in particular. However, not very much attention has been paid to the gendered aspects in these discussions, and most often the public has been represented as the passive and consuming part in the complex relationship between science and its publics. This paper argues for a contextually broadened and more circular perspective (Jasanoff 2006), which emphasizes the active role of the public (Bucchi 2008) and the gendered cultures of science (Schiebinger 2001) in the practical making of social scientific knowledge (Camic, Gross & Lamont 2011). Empirically, the paper is focused on the early formation of academic social science in Sweden. More specifically it is centred around a specific historical event in 1888, when the Russian Professor Maxime Kovalevsky visited Stockholm to give the very first series of public social science lectures at the then recently established Stockholm University College. According to a traditional ”linear model”-understanding, Kovalevsky’s public lectures may be seen as a successful event. In its own time, however, the lectures were described as a failure since they attracted and were peopled by the ”wrong” audience or, as one of the contemporary critical voices explained, ”not of course by too many ladies, but by too few men”. In order to understand, first, why the lectures attracted more women than men and, secondly, why this was conceptualised as a problem at all, it is necessary to take both the role of the public and its gendered aspects more seriously, and to sociologically problematize the dominant historical narratives on the rise of academic social science as a predominantly male phenomenon.