Gender Is A Social Construct

except when it’s not:

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. . . .

Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centered work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google).

And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously.

It’s almost as though they select these whacko theories only in order to serve an agenda.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: No, the professional engineering exam is not gender biased.

10 thoughts on “Gender Is A Social Construct”

  1. It took me a little while to figure out that the study says that percentage-wise, fewer women who take the test pass the test; I couldn’t tell initially if it was fewer women take the test or fewer take and pass the test (percentage-wise).

    I’m wondering if more women are encouraged to take the test out of affirmative-action BS, so that a firm can claim diversity brownie points for having more women PE’s. Or maybe the talent distribution of women is different from that of men going into the fields where having a PE is needed to progress beyond a certain level. Or maybe more women start getting groomed for management earlier than men and aren’t as prepared for the test. I didn’t see this mentioned, but what are the stats for the EIT test?

    (I might mention that this is all peripheral to me; my field is not one of the ones that has any PE requirements, so even though I’m at the top of the technical ladder at my employer, I never took the EIT or PE exams, nor is there a PE exam for my technical specialities.)

    1. My first point is not very clear (wish there was an edit function for comments!): I’m speculating that if percentage-wise more women are taking the PE exam than men, the percentage of women passing could be expected to be less than men passing, because statistically the cohort of women test-takers may have more “average” ability engineers than the male cohort.

      Obviously all of my speculations are politically incorrect; I have no fucks to give about that 🙂

      1. In Texas, aerospace has an exclusion from the TSBPE for having a PE to call yourself an engineer. So few at NASA have them. Now with generations working like this, it is difficult for new engineers to get the references needed to become a PE will at NASA.

  2. And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously.

    George Orwell only told us about doublethink — he didn’t make it up out of his own head.

  3. Another example is the rejection of transgendered by feminists. This has let to the acronym TERF: trans exclusionary radical feminist. Apparently biomedical construction < social construction.

    1. I never understood why feminists ever supported the ‘trans’ thing, because it inevitably results in the destruction of feminism. If gender is a social construct and anyone can be female, what value does feminism have?

      1. Edward,

        I normally wouldn’t recommend this, but you should see this scene from a UK Big Brother broadcast a couple of years ago. A trans female (an XY claiming to be XX) demands the women on the show acknowledge his, err her, womanhood because of all the years of experience as a woman. Note, the trans wasn’t demanding this off the men, only the women.

        The women acquiesced. I couldn’t believe it. If a swinging dick make had done what the trans did, it would be a lesson in The Patriarchy oppressing women. And you have to see it for the surreal nature of an XY demanding XXs accept the XY’s suffering as an XX. The media portrayal at the time was that the women were being transphobic. My opinion is the women were being verbally abused and harassed by a male, which would be obvious to anyone not giving into pretending with him that he was a female.

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