Endla Lõhkivi

The article addresses the operation of gender stereotypes in scholarly contexts from the perspective of philosophy of science. The author proceeds from Alison Wylie’s treatment of epistemic injustice that allows us to explain how stereotypes contribute to biased evaluation of research results. While Wylie demonstrates how cool work environment culture supports biased evaluation – by increasing the exclusion of the marginalized groups – the present article focuses on how gender stereotypes undermine the credibility of scholars so that this, too, leads to biased evaluation and the exclusion of weaker parties from the critical discussion necessary for achieving the objectivity of research. The examples are derived from interviews from a study of the culture of Estonian humanities scholars and an international study of the culture of physics.