What “we see as typical” is not the main fact to be explained. There are certainly many objective differences in what human males and females do, but these are strongly overlapping probability distributions in modern societies, except for physiological reproduction. It’s interesting and important to investigate these distributions, trends in them, and possible social and biological explanations.

Second, you have expectations about these differences, which are one of the likely causal factors of the objective differences in behaviour. They are also highly variable. It’s also interesting, though less important as it’s only part of the story, to investigate the distributions of these expectations, trends in them and possible causes.
If that’s what gender theory is about, I’m all for it. Show us the regressions, please. If it assumes that these expectations are uniform and binary, it’s a load of rent-seeking piffle.

I agree with the above comments that it is hard to identify a single article for all “skeptics.” What I like about this article, though, is:(a) no post-modernist jargon; (b) empirical analysis; and©focus on the ways in which gender infects perception of qualifications.

For something even shorter, there is a newspaper article that covers some of the same ground: Virgina Valian, “Raise your hand if you’re a woman in science. . .” Washington Post Jan. 30, 2005, p. B1. You can find it at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46421-2005Jan29
(Valian’s book, “Why so slow?” on women in science is next on my own list of things to read on this topic (I haven’t yet).)

anne goldstein

Is it feasible to introduce sceptics to gender with just a single article? I don’t know whether it will work for the concept of gender, which is a complex phenomenon, but I do know that one article can do miracles in educating people who deny the existnce of certain phenomena. In the past I’ve been able to convince some economists about the existence of gender labour market discrimination by having them read a very short article—the article on discrimination against female post-doc applicants which was published around 1997 by Wenneras and Wold in Nature. But while their study clearly demonstrates discrimination against women (without any other explanations possible thanks to the exceptional quality of the data, as in the earlier mentioned Goldin-Rouse paper), some responded that this might be an outlier. In that respect it is a open question indeed how much you can gain with one article. Moreover, this was an article about gender discrimination, not about what gender precisely constitutes; perhaps that is more difficult in one article, and it is much less a case of demonstrating whether something exists (yes or no), but rather about making sense of what gender is, and how it works.

For sociologists, perhaps the first chapter of Michael Kimmel’s book The gendered society may induce them to read the whole book (OUP 2000).

“…the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality exhibit this same tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object.”

…women stand, sit and walk around in ways that demonstrate an indecisiveness about whether they want primarily to see, as a subject, or be seen, as an object. Do pretty girls desire directly or do they “want to be desired.” Does a girl walk up and say “hello” in a suggestive manner, or is she more likely to express interest by turning away-sideways and posing- while fiddling with her hair?
Barroom stuff. Simple; in a package designed by a Ph.D

Is anyone really skeptical of the proposition that in different times and places and among different groups there have existed different (in some cases very different) ideas and norms about men, women and their relationships?

I am, to some degree. I think that there seems to be a “deep structure” of ideas/norms that is relatively constant in all successful societies (in other words, if you die out after 2 generations like the Shakers, your ideas/norms don’t really count); how that deep structure works out depends on environment, but the structure (man as protector/woman as nurturer) seems to stay the same all the way back to the primates.

OK, so what does this mean anyway?

The subject of the sentence is something like “feminine ways and forms of occupying space/moving/expressing body language”. Not too bad.

The rest of it makes me think that Aristotle excluded the middle for a good reason, and to wonder if there is any noun to which “exhibits this same tension …” could not be applied.

I am not in the least bit a skeptic that some of our social roles may have little to do with our type of genitals. This whole question of nature vs nurture—which I assume is the parent question—is not new.

What I object to is BS which leaves me wondering what the person is trying to say and why they can’t use simple words. The sentence is pompous and pretentious and doesn’t help raise consciousness.

The term “modalities” adds nothing—in fact it only obscures. The word “spatiality” is also particularly ill-choesen and meaningless. “Comportment” is especially funny in this context since it is such a girly word.

Here is an on-line resource I like:

K. Trigani’s articles (several directly address the Mars/Venus stuff). The “Masculinity-Femininity” article is very well-referenced, scholarly, and [yet] easy to understand.

And in print, these two references are both books, but (especially Zuk’s) they are lucidly enough written, while giving pointers to other research, that they can serve as an approachable index:

Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn about Sex from Animals by Marlene Zuk

The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture by Roger N. Lancaster

re: “gobbledygook” vs. rigor or something-

Time is precious, and if a quick trip through one Zuk chapter will help a colleague from another discipline and/or another land to appropriately question bad applications of questionable sociobiology, why try the uphill battle of getting the marginally interested to read the marginally penetrable?

It makes sense to me that gender roles are distinct from sex differences. But it still seems that most assignment of gender is very highly correlated with “biological” sex.

Are there cultural “gender” examples where there are say 17 different genders or where gender assignment is not highly correlated with biological sex?