Carla Fehr PhD, BSc

Carla Fehr works in the areas of socially relevant philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and feminist epistemology. Her research examines the social nature of scientific research. Simply put, she argues that diversity promotes excellence. Scientific communities that include members from a diversity of social and material locations, and members who hold different theoretical perspectives, facilitate research that is more creative, more rigorous, and better able to meet the needs of a wide range of publics and policy makers, than homogeneous scientific communities. This means that research communities ought to value diversity not only for ethical and political reasons, but also because it makes our science better.
She is also interested in exploring ways to foster this diversity. She conducts research in feminist philosophy of biology, in which she develops critiques of biological accounts of sex differences in human cognition and in the division of labour. Understanding this sex difference research is particularly important because it has frequently been used to justify the relative absence of women in science and technology careers.