Women’s intellectual genealogy: Key indicators and pathways in the biological sciences in Brazil from the 1950s onwards

Abstract

Based on the pioneering experience of three researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, who joined the institution in the early 1960s, we analyzed the impact of their trajectories on the formation of new generations of women, from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. The objective was to trace the intellectual genealogy of Monika Barth, Anna Kohn and Delir Corrêa Gomes in order to complexify, through a gender lens, our understanding of the conformation of biomedical sciences in Brazil. The investigation uses the search tools offered by the Acacia and Lattes/CNPq Platforms, along with the crossing of archival and oral sources, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. The "matriarchs" of this genealogy are inserted in a historical context in which new agents enter a changing scenario, characterized by the expansion of female social roles and the deepening of scientific institutionalization in our country. With degrees in Natural History, they worked on emerging themes and techniques and contributed to the professional qualification of four generations of scientists to the present day, forming a mostly female and multidisciplinary descendant. It concludes with the perception of the active and fundamental participation of women, still little visible in our historiography, in the process of construction, expansion and institutional reproduction of Brazilian science in different specialties, in the past and in the present. Finally, it raises questions, to be deepened, about the asymmetries and intersectionalities that cross the professional relations between different social groups in different temporalities.