scientists become media stars, but the point is that society has managed to assimilate the concept of women in law to a degree that it has not assimilated that of women in science. We have learned to accept women lawyers as women, while judging them as lawyers--and young women, perhaps sensing this, do not feel themselves dissuaded from pursuing legal studies, as their sisters still feel dissuaded from the sciences.
As it happens, these questions are not new. The related arguments over whether science is inherently male (and therefore "naturally" excludes women) have been going on for several centuries, and it is worth reminding ourselves that it was by no means inevitable that the outcome should have been a set of social conventions that by the nineteenth had the effect that "women were effectively barred from the new institutions of science and restricted to the increasingly private sphere of the family" (Schiebinger, 1989, p. 8).
When modern science first emerged, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women were practicing it. Much
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