Talking Research on Science and Gender: An Interview with Frank Amico, Ph.D. Candidate in History
I'm originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and I went to Lafayette College in Easton, PA for my undergrad. I got my master’s degree at the University of South Florida. I specialized in gender, ancient history and digital archaeology.
Somewhere along the line, I decided that I wanted to continue studying history but not ancient history, partly because I did not have the necessary language background. I had always been interested in the history of science, and I combined that with my interest in gender history. I decided to study how climate knowledge was gendered. That turned out to be too big a project, and I narrowed it down to looking at the impact of gender on the making of atmospheric science and meteorology.
I am researching women scientists who were active between the 1960s and the 1990s. The first wave of women who got their Ph.D.s in meteorology was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1970s are a time of increased women’s activism which is also mirrored in the meteorological community.
I am focusing on scientific knowledge, actual scientific research, and the approaches that were taken to it. How people do science. There are all sorts of ways that gender plays into the process, the method, and the way that people conceive of what they're doing.
I am essentially concerned with narrating how one scientific community dealt with increased women’s involvement, activism, how women operated within it. I would like to study this through a case study of an institution, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
Interviewing Scientists
It became clear that I would have to conduct a range of interviews with scientists in the field to get at the material that I was interested in. Overall, atmospheric science and meteorology is seen as a predominantly male field, and most of the interviews that have been recorded so far are with male scientists. I have begun speaking to female scientists and recording our conversations. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) awarded me a grant-in-aid to do biographical interviews with women scientists, and I will be doing some in person and some over Zoom with people who are living further away.
I have had to wrestle with the critiques of oral history, that it records only a person’s streamlined memories and is not ‘hard’ evidence. However, the information I am interested in, how people feel or felt about institutional cultures, is more available through oral history. But I am hoping that with the support of archival documents I will be able to tell a convincing story. There have been committees of enquiry into gender equality over the decades which will provide me with more historical data.
Besides archival data and interviews, I will also have to be sensitive to things like architecture for example. Women scientists I spoke with made me aware of how buildings that house scientific communities can be designed to facilitate cooperation. How a vertically designed laboratory reinforces hierarchies, while a horizontally built one can foster collaboration and exchanges of ideas. That’s something I had not thought of before.
Oral History
My dissertation supervisor, Dr. Ron Doel, shared his experiences in interviewing with me. There are also some framework questions that the American Institute of Physics wants interviewers to ask so that one can compare the interviews across time. The AIP and other oral history projects already have quite a few interviews with male atmospheric scientists, so I am concentrating more on talking with women scientists.
I usually review their biographical data, their publications, and their research. I write down a series of questions in the order that I am hoping the conversation will flow, and I record the conversations. The AIP has offered to transcribe the interviews for me, which will be a big help. While I have my questions organized in a certain way, sometimes my interviewees will move into different topics or time periods. Interviewing requires maintaining a balance in following the natural threads of the conversation while staying on top of the interview to prevent repetition and discussing all the things I want to ask. That means that sometimes I have to double back or push my interviewees on their responses.
What really surprised me is that I enjoyed doing oral history a lot more than I had expected. In the beginning, I was quite nervous about interviewing people, and not sure how it would go for discussing the types of material I was interested in. But then, once I had started the conversation, I realized that it is quite fun and enjoyable, and I thought that I was doing a good job.
Archival Research
I would advise them to go to the archives as soon as possible to work out what topic of research is feasible and what is not. I started in 2020, and everything was remote, so I did not get to visit an archive until 2023. It is only when you start opening archival boxes, that you can visualize how it works, and see what kind of documents there are. Had I been able to visit the archives earlier, I would have been able to define my field of research more clearly. Just the exposure to a physical archive, learning how to find documents, and realizing what is and what isn’t documented is such a crucial thing for us, that my main advice is to get to the archive as soon as possible. Your research depends on the documents and knowing what kind of documents there are will shape your research topic.
The other piece of advice I would give is to think outside of the box. For me, it is interesting to look at the social and cultural side of scientific communities, because people don’t do their work in a vacuum, and their environment influences how they look and understand the world around them.