[7] When she won the Israeli Dan David Prize in 2018, she publicly donated the award to human rights organizations.

Keller argues that the assumption that the atomistic individual is the fundamental unit in nature has led population geneticists to omit sexual reproduction from their models.

According to Keller, geneticists treat reproduction as if individuals reproduce themselves, effectively bypassing the complexities of sexual difference, the contingencies of mating, and fertilization.

Keller’s studies of the interplay between scientific theory, on the one hand, and the linguistic, technological, psychological, political, and other “external” factors that play a role in shaping it, are among the subtlest and most insightful in the literature.

Ann Hibner Koblitz has argued that Keller's theory fails to account for the great variation among different cultures and time periods.

[16] Koblitz and others who are interested in increasing the number of women in science have expressed concern that some of Keller's statements could undermine those efforts, notably the following:[17] Just as surely as inauthenticity is the cost a woman suffers by joining men in misogynist jokes, so it is, equally, the cost suffered by a woman who identifies with an image of the scientist modeled on the patriarchal husband.

Only if she undergoes a radical disidentification from self can she share masculine pleasure in mastering a nature cast in the image of woman as passive, inert, and blind.

Among the critics of Keller's gender and science theory are the mathematical physicist Mary Beth Ruskai,[18][19] the former presidents of the Association for Women in Mathematics Lenore Blum[20] and Mary Gray,[21] and gender researchers Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram.

[22] These debates raise the broader question of the distinction between the analysis of women in science as a profession vs. gender and scientific theory.