ABSTRACT
Although everyone agrees that an appropriate, supportive work environment usually aids in building a successful career, neither the nature of the laboratory climate in general nor gender differences in the climate and their impacts on women’s careers in particular have been studied thoroughly. A few observational studies by sociologists of science have examined laboratory climate. Sharon Traweek (1988) describes highenergy physics laboratories in Beamtimes and Lifetimes. Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar (1979) revealed laboratory practices in immunology, and Bruno Latour (1987) explored technology. Although these studies have tended to mention gender issues in passing, if at all, Traweek describes the laboratory as a man’s world from which women have been marginalized:
In the fifteen years I have been visiting physics labs, the status of women within them has remained unchanged-in spite of major
transformations, in North America and Europe, in opportunities for women and attitudes about their roles. In this book, women remain marginal, as they are in the laboratory. The lab is a man’s world, and I try to show how that is particularly the case in highenergy physics: how the practice of physics is engendered, how laboratory work is masculinized. (1988, p.16).
