FREE FROM GENDER: Evelyn Fox Keller (top) and one of her oft-quoted books (below) in which she makes the case for radically new thinking about the nature of heredity

Professor Evelyn Fox Keller sits straight on a rickety wooden chair in the white-washed philosophy department classroom, in one corner of the sprawling Jadavpur University campus. A sea-green chiffon scarf covers her shoulders and large earrings dangle as she pushes her steel-rimmed glasses up on her nose. She starts talking and then stops. Nobody can hear a word — the whirring fans are too noisy. And there’s no microphone on the table in front, just a vase of red roses and a glass of water. She starts and stops again. This time, there’s a tune floating in the air — Sare Jahan Se Achha — a car reversing outside. She thinks it’s a cellphone. Her face freezes and then suddenly breaks into a huge grin. She adjusts her glasses again and says: “So … what effect has feminism had on science?”

Smiling in the face of irritation is a nice metaphor for the way she fits into the angular world of professional science. She is on top of several subjects, as a physicist who has also been a working biologist (a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard, a don at MIT, one-time fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study where Einstein worked, a MacArthur ‘genius’ awardee). But her rise to the top has not been without its share of hitches. Because she has also been a consistent critic of male domination in science. Something that has not always been taken too kindly in that proverbial male bastion. But it’s probably her sense of humour that has helped her to stick doggedly on to her agenda: not to “practise science like a man” (and, for that matter, to have her say despite noisy fans and crazy car tunes).

“Keller in Calcutta!” exclaims Somak Raychaudhuri, who was teaching astrophysics at Harvard around the time Keller joined MIT (“just up the road”) in the early Nineties. “She’s considered a god here, do you know that?” You wonder about that as a grumpy little man, in cloudy glasses and dhoti, bangs open the door with his tray of tea and biscuits and walks straight up to Keller’s table. “In the US, there has been an extraordinary transformation in the last 10 years. Today, 35 per cent of scientists are women …,” she stops and looks uncertainly at the intruder. The man bangs the tray down on the table, ignores everyone and thumps out, shutting the door loudly behind him: “Err … 46 per cent of science PhDs are women today. Isn’t that amazing?”

It is. An amazing study in contrasts, that is. Today, if you walk through the streets round MIT, among the hurrying, brightly efficient students, you’ll find them greeting Keller respectfully. But if you follow her around further, you’ll find her eating off paper plates or drinking coffee out of cardboard mugs or sharing a bench with a freshman, talking casually. Despite her fame and scholarship, at one level, Keller exudes an extraordinary informality. In strange ways, she fits right in. Anywhere. Even in dreary classrooms. And, hence, her narrative on the position of women in science continued to flow on that February 23 morning in JU, repeated appearances of the tea-man notwithstanding.

How did she get the women-and-science bee in her bonnet? Apparently, it happened first when she took up theoretical physics as an undergraduate way back in the Fifties. She once expanded on it in an article: “I fell in love (with the discipline) … with my professors … also, I might add, with the image of myself striving and succeeding in an area where women had rarely ventured. It was a heady experience.” It was, however, precisely the opposite experience as a PhD student in Harvard that once again turned her attention to the theme. “Harvard was a disaster,” she says now. “It was a very difficult time to be a woman in a physics department.”

In a telling interview to the Guardian in 2000, Keller had described the agony of being one of only three women among the 100 postgraduate physicists at Harvard. Several months into her first year, apparently, a teacher had offered her a lift and asked how she was getting on. As she started to tell him, she almost burst into tears; then realised that admitting her feelings filled him with acute discomfort, “as if, instead, I had started to take off my clothes”. The experience made her button up further, even more miserable. It is hard to believe now that this elderly woman in a chic black dress with sudden smiles brightening up her visage could ever have been embarrassed about anything. But she was. She had felt persecuted by the faculty and by her fellow students, and bitterly disappointed by the work she was doing.

It was in the late Sixties that she finally found her muse (“I followed my husband to California … and I was sitting at home getting more and more bored. So I started thinking about women and science”). Using the tools of mathematical biology, she got hold of all the data she could find about women scientists: how many there were and how long they lasted in their profession. She found that the attrition rate was really shocking and that the most serious obstacle to the success of women was the widespread belief that science was an inherently masculine endeavour: “Where did it come from? What consequences did it have?” It was the first time she had asked those questions out loud. And that was the beginning of her career as a feminist critic of science.

“My aim was not to make science more feminine,” explains Keller, “but to make it more gender-free, more inclusive and more accessible to women. In other words, make better science.” She talks not just about the exclusion of women scientists, but also about the language scientists use: “The way scientists talk shape what they do. Look at the way biologists describe fertilisation. Watch out for the sexist verbs. It’s always the ‘active’ sperm cell ‘penetrating’ a ‘passive’ egg. Only recently has the picture shifted. Research has shown eggs to be just as alive and busy as the sperms. And molecular biology textbooks today are talking about sperms and eggs ‘finding each other’!”

How did this change come about? Did feminism play a role? “There wasn’t any direct political action, of course,” smiles Keller. “But as more and more women scientists entered in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement, science got a more balanced perspective.” The prime mover was the real change in society: “If you grow up watching strong women characters on TV sitcoms, reading about men’s movements and having generous fathers, you end up with a different view of the world.” The point, feels Keller, is not how women do science differently, but how both men and women can do the same.

Not surprisingly, she has stirred up a hornet’s nest of reaction. It’s easy to come to terms with the idea that stupid, ignorant people — non-scientists — might misinterpret the language scientists use. It is certainly much more threatening to face those from people within the fraternity. No wonder, Keller’s opponents have attacked her for talking “junk”, “bull****”, “what everybody knows” and with cries of “so what!”. Keller doesn’t seem to care one bit. Nearly 70 and still at the top of her profession, she is certain to make many more enemies as she asserts: “Science is the search for reliable, shareable knowledge of the world around us. And it needs to be free from gender.”

“And how do you see your work,” you ask her. The tea-man interrupts, grimmer than ever, perhaps wanting to shoo everyone out. Keller looks at him and gives another of those gleeful smiles: “My work hasn’t changed much.” That remains to be seen. But for the moment, she’s happy to voyage alone through uncharted seas of thought.