One night in Aspen (USA), writer Rebecca Solnit and a friend were sitting at a host’s table when they were asked about a book they “had to read”. While he smugly told about the work, little did the man know that Solnit was the author herself.
The scene, described in the book “Men Explain Everything to Me” (ed. Cultrix), signed by Solnit, is the so-called “mansplaining”, when men explain the obvious to women, as if they were not able to understand the concepts on their own. .
Alongside “bropriating”, when a man steals other women’s ideas or arguments, the terms exemplify how they can be historically erased in science and have their works stolen.
Last week, psychologist Valeska Zanello was the victim of a case that fits into this process. This is because she stated that her work was plagiarized by psychology student João Luiz Marques.
The content used by Marques discussed topics related to masculinity and toxic relationships. The next day, he made a post in which he apologized and admitted to using her works without giving her proper credit.
“Women’s invisibility happens intellectually, in treatment and in rights, and I made the same mistake, I recognize, apologize and make this text a promise that, on my part, this will not happen again”, says the text of marquis.
THE sheet contacted the university, but received no response.
Zanello comments that the situation is a good example of how structural machismo works. After what happened, she says she received messages from women saying they had suffered the same thing as her. Among men, many tagged her in posts, but with content that they had plagiarized from thinkers who expressed support.
“They were criticizing the boy who plagiarized, only plagiarizing other women. This shows how much we need to discuss this structural machismo, because it is so ingrained that it is invisible to men”, she says. “Being invisible to them doesn’t take away the damage on women’s mental health and work lives.”
The president of the national copyright commission of the OAB (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil), Sidney Sanches, says that there are two types of copyright infringement.
The first, called copying or servile reproduction, is the literal reproduction of a text or other intellectual or artistic content without giving due credit to the author. The second is when the person alters the formatting of the text or work in an attempt to hide the original content and is known as plagiarism.
For the anthropologist and professor at UnB (University of BrasÃlia) Débora Diniz, what happened with Valeska Zanello is not unusual among violations of academic integrity.
“Plagiarism is a way of creating barriers for women”, she says. However, Diniz says that plagiarism is something “silly”, because, today, there are programs that can detect when a text has been plagiarized.
For Diniz, the main ways of silencing women in science are mainly in appearance and recognition. She mentions a very common case that happens in the order of authorship of a scientific article.
“The first author is the one who leads, the one who most wrote, thought and idealized the research”, she says. “In practice, what happened is that the first author becomes the owner of the laboratory or the senior researcher, but not necessarily the one who worked the most.”
The anthropologist says that, in science, the order of authorship matters, for example, to apply for new funding. “Depending on the area, this can be related to how many articles the woman was the first author. And this is silenced, naturalized and the woman ends up disappearing.”
For psychologist LavÃnia Palma, situations like the one Valeska experienced happen and should continue to happen because, despite women having conquered space at work and in academia, the social structure has not yet changed. “Women’s space is still domestic. She goes out to work, but doesn’t leave the maternal role. Public space is still men’s”, she laments.
The reduced reference in the history and science of female figures is probably underreported, as shown in a work carried out by researchers Paula Pelissoli, Maiara Dalpiaz and Clarice Portela, graduated in letters at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (IFRS). ).
“Often, the erasure is such that it becomes visible. This makes any more attentive researcher question whether the absence is due to the lack of women in a certain area, or due to neglect and contempt of the dominant group. Generally, the second option is more common”, explains Portela.
Sanches, from the OAB, also defends the need for historical reparation work to do justice to women authors, researchers, artists and writers who have not received due recognition for their works.
An example is the chemist and first person to discover the double strand of DNA (molecule that makes up the genetic material of living beings), Rosalind Franklin.
She was a graduate student at King’s College London (ING) when she was able to capture, using X-rays, the famous photo of the double-helix material.
Two fellow institutions, James Watson and Francis Crick, published the photo without Franklin’s permission and without giving credit, and are remembered to this day as the scientists who “discovered” the structure of DNA.
In other situations, the silencing is not so much for the appropriation of discoveries, but for the fact that women are in the shadow of famous men. One of the cases investigated by IFRS researchers was Mileva Maric, the first wife of the most famous physicist of the 20th century, the German Albert Einstein.
“The fact that Einstein’s wife was also a physicist, or that she had carried out such relevant work, is not public knowledge”, say Portela and colleagues.
This erasure of women causes a lack of the feminine gaze in the cultural and scientific construction of our society, according to her. “Many times what is considered natural is the result of a secular construction based on a predominantly male vision”, says Portela.
