Not so, according to American historian of science Londa Schiebinger, whose new book, Has Feminism Changed Science?, hits the shelves this month. These, she says, are just a few of the ``facts'' whose scientific credentials have been blown apart by the arrival of feminism in the lab. ``Quite simply, it has challenged assumptions and raised new questions which are often at odds with fundamental assumptions,'' says Schiebinger.

Take `Lucy', our lovely, tiny, fragile 3.2m-year-old fossil ancestor. Unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, she was declared by the man who discovered her, Professor Donald Johanson, ``undoubtedly female''. But when feminist investigators looked for evidence, they found none, not even the accepted sign of a larger pelvis. Lucy was female because all smallishskeletons are by convention female. So much for scientific rigour. But what difference does it make? Quite apart from the fact that mis-sexing a skeleton alters interpretation of the objects found around it, such images colour our understanding of human history. Museums around the world show a robust male towering protectively over and usually ahead of a diminutive consort. Smallness equates with weakness, height with power, but Lucy, it is now suggested by feminist palaeontologists such as the American Lori Hager, was most likely a small man of a species in which size differed little.

The women's movement's insistence on making women visible has persuaded scientists in many fields to take another look at fundamental questions. For example, for 20 years, primatologists primarily studied baboons and drew comparisons with our own behaviour. Baboon society is dominated by aggressive males and docile females.

Yet there are dozens of other primate species that would have presented a very different picture ofancestral humans, with females who, far from being passive, form their own hierarchical societies, are aggressive, exercise sexual choice and compete for resources, mates and territories, just like males.

``The greatest changes to our knowledge that have come from feminism have been the result not of some special methodology,'' Schiebinger says, ``but of what questions are asked.'' But with feminism, ``women's work'' suddenly came under the spotlight and many now argue that it was women's foraging, not men's hunting, that provided the main subsistence for the earliest humans and led to the first tenets of agriculture.

Also, since 1994, US women's inclusion in basic medical research has been secured by federal law and though Britain and Europe lag behind, drug companies and research bodies are increasingly aware they cannot exclude women. And much as many may dislike it, it's the F word that women have to thank for that.