With the twin goals of inspiring young women to be scientists and facilitating dialogue that might tease out the factors behind the "leaky pipeline obstructing the advancement of women scientists in Taiwan" (Schiebinger 1999), the first International Conference on Woman Scientists was held in Taipei under the auspices of the National Science Council on 26-28 October 2008. As vice-chairperson, I had the honor of inviting Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller to be the keynote speaker for this significant event. Not only was she herself a scientist, but her well-known 1983 book A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock had also documented the accomplishments of a Nobel Prize-winning woman geneticist. The central theme of this work on gender and science delineated how being a woman—and not an oppressed object—impacted her own winding path to a scientific career, contributing to ideas on the contingencies of femininity and of biological and genetic scientific knowledge. The Chinese translation of the book was published in 1995, and a special edition with a new cover was published in 2008 as the gift for the conference's intended audience—predominantly female senior high school students and graduate students in science.
