Evelyn Fox Keller obituary: Physicist who proved no such thing as male advantage in science

Born: March 20th, 1936

Died: September 22nd, 2023

As a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1950s, one of three women among 100 students, Evelyn Fox Keller encountered nothing but scepticism among her fellow students and professors that she might “make it” as a theoretical physicist. She later wrote about how “painful and unsettling” it was to meet “unmitigated provocation, insult and denial” as she pursued her PhD.

These early experiences drove her to become a pioneer in studying the interplay of gender and science. Interviewed by the Boston Globe in 1986, she said: “When there are more women in science, everybody will be free to do a different kind of science.”

Following the upheaval of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and ‘70s, historians such as Margaret Rossiter began to expose the glaring gender inequalities that had always existed in science, and also to celebrate the achievements of female scientists whose work had been forgotten. Keller, who has died aged 87, first made her name in this field with A Feeling for the Organism, her biography of Barbara McClintock published in 1983.

McClintock had toiled from the 1920s to the ‘50s on studies of maize genetics, publishing prescient results on how one gene controlled another that were largely disregarded until confirmed by modern molecular biology. She won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine five months after Keller’s book appeared to widespread acclaim.

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Keller went on to explore in detail how the practice of science had come to be perceived as intrinsically masculine, and to think about what a gender-neutral science might look like.

Keller argued, in contrast to established thinking, that the dominance of white males and a rigid conception of objectivity not only disadvantaged women but also were detrimental to an understanding of the natural world that needed to encompass feeling and intuition. The science writer Tom Wilkie told the Guardian in 2000 that her work “fills out a fuller picture of the relationship between science and the world around it”.

Keller was born in the New York borough of Queens, into a family of first-generation Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Her father, Albert Fox, was largely absent as he ran a delicatessen in the city, and Keller recalled that her mother, Rachel (nee Paperny), was a fragile person who needed care from her children rather than the other way around.

Evelyn first thought of becoming a psychoanalyst but, encouraged by her mathematical brother and a college professor, switched to physics and graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1957.

The huge disappointment of her first year at Harvard as a graduate student was tempered by her experience of spending the summer with her brother at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory on Long Island, where she first met McClintock and was “appropriately intimidated” by her. There she found a brilliant collection of scientists working flat out to understand the biological implications of the recent discovery of the structure of DNA. They welcomed her expertise in theoretical physics and, as she put it, “treated [her] like a queen”. Returning to Harvard she chose to write her PhD thesis on theoretical aspects of molecular biology.

Moving to New York University in 1962, she began research in mathematical biology, and the following year married the mathematician Joseph Keller. Despite the success of her work, she faced challenges in juggling her roles as an academic and the mother of two small children, taking a series of short-term and part-time posts until she became an associate professor at the State University of New York at Purchase in 1972. She separated from her husband and began to think about the predicament of female scientists such as herself.

Well aware of the perils of anecdotal data, she undertook a statistical analysis and was appalled to discover the rate at which women dropped out of scientific careers. In 1974 she presented her findings at a lecture. She proposed that women’s lack of success had nothing to do with their ability, but was a consequence of “the widespread belief that science was an inherently masculine endeavour”.

After 10 years as professor of mathematics and humanities at Northeastern University in Boston, during which she wrote her McClintock biography, in 1988 Keller consolidated her shift in discipline by accepting a chair in the history and philosophy of science at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1992 she received a MacArthur fellowship (dubbed the “genius grant”) and moved to the science and technology studies programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Keller received many prizes and honours, donating the $300,000 Dan David prize that she won in 2018 to Israeli organisations committed to defending human rights in Palestine. She continued to speak and publish into her 80s and her favourite recreation was spirited debate around the dinner table with her many friends from the arts and sciences.

Keller’s marriage ended in divorce in 1976. She is survived by her children, Jeffrey and Sarah, and granddaughters, Chloe and Cale, and by her sister. Her brother died in 2020. — Guardian