Sexism in science: review of Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj’s ‘Lab Hopping’

“Especially when women made it to higher levels, their gender marginalisation carried an extra burden of immaculacy, which, needless to say, men are exempt from.” The last four words of this sentence from the book Lab Hopping, are not “needless to say”; in fact, they bear repeating. Lab Hopping is the wisdom-dense new book by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj delving into what it means to be a non-cis-male scientist in this milieu, a painstaking effort to map the incursions of power gone unchecked despite claims that science is objective. The violence of erasure The authors lay bare several barriers to women’s entry into and persistence within science, from implicit sexism to a lack of role models, from horribly delayed grants to insensitive obligations and expectations, from lofty invocations of oppressive symbols and narratives to execrable preoccupations with caste. Lab Hopping weaves all of these stories together into a clear-headed, opinionated, and fierce history that stands in stark contrast to the one that historian of science Meera Nanda decries in the book: “The history of science IS the history of exclusion of women.” And while women have a tough time navigating the structures and strictures of science, the authors, to their credit, also adopt an intersectional view of the exponents of scientific work to unearth and discuss several axes of oppression, including attitudes towards disability, caste, language, and – baffling as it seems – transparency.