Needham’s Girls: a historical case study of gender and mentoring in entomology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
James G. Needham (1868-1958) was a professor of entomology at Cornell University from 1906 to 1936, and an active emeritus for about ten years thereafter. As a professor, mentored many women graduate students at Cornell, a group that included twenty-nine who took doctorates. As a scientist, he was a member of an extensive network that included many more women entomologists. These women were located throughout the United States and Canada. Some had been his students at Cornell, some were colleagues with whom he did fieldwork, and others were young women who, even though students at colleges other than Cornell, worked closely with Needham on their dissertations. This article is about the role that Needham, as mentor, played in supporting a vision that was both scientifically and socially unpopular. Through studying the Needham network, the complexity of issues faced by these women and their strategies for coping with them comes to life. Some of Needham's students made major contributions to entomology. This group includes Edith Morgan, Ann H. Morgan, Emmeline Moore, and Elsie B. Klots. Despite the apparent success of these students and of the Needham school as a whole, it was not easy for Needham's female students to establish careers. One problem stemmed from Needham's emphasis on nature study, ecology and systematic entomology; this field simply was not popular in an era dominated by economic entomology, an era that culminated with the widespread misuse of pesticides such as DDT. Other problems reflect the general history of women in American science: professional barriers; conflicts between marriage and career; the onset of the Great Depression, when jobs were reserved for "family men"; competition between women connected by bonds of friendship; and World War II, which brought career opportunities that were often terminated after the war's end. To cope with such problems, "Needham's girls" depended on their mentor and group affiliation to aid them in building and maintaining connections and relationships within a complex network. Though "Needham's Girls" were victims of exclusionary male-gendered science, they also represented a distinct postmodern trend -- the emergence of ecology as a new science.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".