Originally Posted by
Eckert 2010
Gender builds on biological sex, but it exaggerates biological difference, and
it carries biological difference into domains in which it is completely irrelevant. There is no
biological reason, for example, why women should mince and men should swagger, or why
women should have red toenails and men should not. But while we think of sex as biological and
gender as social, this distinction is not clear-cut. People tend to think of gender as the result of
nurture – as social and hence fluid – while sex is the result of nature, simply given by biology.
However, nature and nurture intertwine, and there is no obvious point at which sex leaves off and
gender begins.
But the sharp demarcation fails because there is no single objective biological criterion
for male or female sex. Sex is based in a combination of anatomical, endocrinal and
chromosomal features, and the selection among these criteria for sex assignment is based very
much on cultural beliefs about what actually makes someone male or female. Thus the very
definition of the biological categories male and female, and people’s understanding of
themselves and others as male or female, is ultimately social. Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) sums
up the situation as follows:
labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to
help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender – not science – can define our sex.
Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about
sex in the first place.
Work on sex differences in the brain is very much in its early stages, and is far from
conclusive (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Men’s supposedly smaller corpus callosum, larger amygdala,
larger premammillary nucleus, are among the questionable structural differences that are
supposed to account for gender differences from men’s greater visual-spatial skills to their
tendency to stare at breasts
Much of the popular work on gender differences in the brain are
based on shaky evidence, and are commonly exaggerations and even distortions of what appears
in the scientific literature. And the scientific literature itself is based on very small samples, often
from sick or injured populations. In addition, not that much is known about the connections
between brain physiology and behavior or cognition – hence about the consequences of any
physiological differences scientists may be seeking or finding. And above all, the brain is very
plastic, changing in response to experience. Thus the causal relation between brain physiology
and activity is completely unclear (Eliot 2009). Nonetheless, any results that might support
physiological differences are readily snatched up and combined with any variety of gender
stereotypes in some often quite fantastic leaps of logic. And the products of these leaps can in
turn feed directly into social, and particularly into educational, policy, with arguments that
gender equity in such “left-brain areas” as mathematics and engineering is impossible
The eagerness of some scientists to establish a biological basis for all gender difference,
and the public’s eagerness to take these findings up, points to the fact that we put a good deal of
work into emphasizing, producing, and enforcing the dichotomous categories of male and
female. In the process, differences or similarities that blur the edges of these categories, or that
might even constitute other potential categories, are backgrounded, or erased, including the
enormous range of differences among females and among males
