The teachings of Galen, a 2nd Century physician, have formed the basis of western medicine for almost 1500 years. He believed that men and women had the same body parts but were different in the fact that men’s bodies were hotter and women’s bodies were cooler. This heat caused the penis to be pushed out of the body. If it was not hot enough, the organ would stay inside and become a vagina.

This explanation of the difference in the sexes was useful to society as it provided a seemingly legitimate reason to treat women as inferior citizens and bar them from certain parts of society- women simply weren’t developed enough in the eyes of society to be trusted with anything of importance. This idea of women’s ‘innate inferiority’ has seeped into museums in a number of ways, even after the science of sex differences were later updated

“Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s and you will find the same in both in every respect”

-Galen

Androcentrism is a bias - conscious or subconscious - placing a masculine point of view at the centre. Men are regarded as “default” and women are a deviation, special, or different.

This view is represented in museums in subtle ways, such as assuming objects were used by men for traditionally “male” activities like war, even though there might be little evidence to support this claim.

The idea that women were “underdeveloped” men has appeared in writings since antiquity and persisted into the 19th century.

Natural history museums, science museums and anthropology museums often have a ‘tree of life’ or the famous illustration ‘March of Progress’ showing the path of hominid evolution. Humans are often represented with a typically masculine body.

March of Progress poster displayed at Lucknow Zoo, Sumit Kumar Singh, 2016

When objects are found in archaeological digs or purchased by a museum without context or provenance, it is often assumed they were used by men unless they fit modern standards of gender roles and stereotypes - standards that may not have existed in previous societies.

In the 1950s in modern day Democratic Republic of Congo, then a colony of Belgium, a Belgian archaeologist Jean de Heinzelin de Braucourt discovered a 25,000 year old bone with notches carved into it. Called the ‘Ishango bone’, the notches were clearly made deliberately, in groups of around 30 marks. Many papers have been written asserting various theories, including the bone was a method of record keeping, possibly counting livestock; proof that the ancient people counted in base 12; a way of recording prime numbers; or they track lunar months.

30 years after the bone was discovered, ethnomathematician Claudia Zaslavsky proposed that the bone may have been used as a menstrual tracker by someone who wanted to keep track of their periods.