Sandra Harding

Education and career

Sandra Harding received her undergraduate degree from Douglass College of Rutgers University in 1956. After 12 years working as legal researcher, editor, and fifth-grade math teacher in New York City and Poughkeepsie, New York, she returned to graduate school and earned a doctorate from the Department of Philosophy at UCLA in 1973.

Harding's first university teaching job was at The Allen Center of the State University of New York at Albany, an experimental critical social sciences college which was "defunded" by the state of New York in 1976. She then joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delaware, with a joint appointment to the Women's Studies Program. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979, and to full Professor in 1986. From 1981 until she left Delaware in 1996, she held a Joint Appointment to the Department of Sociology. She was Director of the Women's Studies Program at Delaware 1985–1991 and 1992–1993.

From 1994 to 1996, she was Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at UCLA on a half-time basis. In 1996, she was appointed Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, which is a research institute. She held that position until 2000. Meanwhile, since 1996 she has been a Professor in the Graduate Department of Education and the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. In 2012, she was appointed Distinguished Professor of Education and Gender Studies. From 2000 to 2005, she also was co-editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Harding held Visiting Professor appointments at the University of Amsterdam (1987), University of Costa Rica (1990), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) (1993), and the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok (1994). In 2011 she was appointed a Distinguished Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University, East Lansing.

She was a consultant to several United Nations organizations including the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development, the Pan American Health Organization, UNESCO, and the U.N. Development Fund for Women. She was invited to co-edit a chapter of UNESCO's World Science Report 1996 on "The Gender Dimension of Science and Technology". This 56-page account was the first such attempt to bring gender issues in science and technology to such a global-scale and prestigious context. She was invited to contribute a chapter to UNESCO's World Social Science Report 2010 on "Standpoint Methodologies and Epistemologies: a Logic of Scientific Inquiry for People."

Harding served on the editorial boards of numerous journals in the fields of philosophy, women's studies, science studies, social research methodology, and African philosophy. Phi Beta Kappa selected her as a national lecturer in 2007. She had lectured at more than 300 colleges, universities, and conferences in North America as well as in Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Her books, essays and book chapters have been translated into dozens of languages and reprinted in hundreds of anthologies.