Feminist scholars began to systematically focus on the gender values in the biological and medical sciences in the 1970s, drawing on and developing a radical social constructivism where facts were treated as social products rather than as objective value-free entities, and knowers were seen to be part of communities rather than as lone scholars. This work ran alongside other developments in social studies of science but was shaped by political commitments to women's rights, in contrast to the intellectual agnosticism of the mainstream, predominantly male scholars of the sociology of scientific knowledge.