Jan 01 2009
Why go on, and on, and on about gender
One of the main points I make about gender, often implicitly, is that gender does not have moral value. That is, being one gender rather than another does not, in itself, affect your significance or worth. This may seem obvious now that women, in most first world countries, have equal standing in terms of voting, receiving services, under the law etc. However there are still in direct avenues by which men and women are devalued. For example, a mother is presumed to gain custody unless fairly clear reason is given to refuse her–the same is not as commonly true for men. Women still commonly get paid less due to a legacy of paying less for traditionally female career and continuing to discourage men from entering them (e.g. “nurse” is still named after the ability to lactate and male nursed are asked why they didn’t become doctors). So the attributing of value to gender is now more subtle and more difficult to change.
The second point that I like to make is that we attribute traits to gender that do not correlate to gender. For example during the early modern people women were considered ‘less moral’ because they were often opt to do the ‘wrong thing’ if it avoided an even greater wrong (e.g. stealing medicine for a sick relative). Now we realise that there are different, but internally consistent, types of morality and they tend to differ between men and women.
Thirdly, gender is used as a false dichotomy, when realising just how heavily most traits overlap between men and women. That is, although IQ test (most of them invented by men in a previous century) tend to give men a slightly higher overall score, but this 3-4% is not significant when compared to the fact that the vaste majority of people fall in the area were the gender scores overlap. So knowing a person’s gender does not in any way help predict what their IQ would be–let alone their actual “intelligence” (whatever that might be).
Nevertheless, my overriding perspective on gender is that, in most cases, no great weight should be be placed upon it–so why do I go on about it so much? Is that not hypocritical? I would say: no. Because in order to disregard gender we can not make it disappear, and so we must make it transparent. Gender is a window we see through and to see through it we must… see through it. And to do that we must look at it very closely and clean away the grime and encrusted dirt of centuries of mythology and bad science.
