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An update on the Ada InitiativeAn update on the Ada InitiativePosted Jan 12, 2012 18:16 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: An update on the Ada Initiative by Julie Parent article: An update on the Ada Initiative
well, gender itself is a social constructSpeaking as someone who's about to be an uncle, that's not entirely true. No matter how much I might have wanted it (or not), nothing on earth could have me in the situation my sister is in. There are differences between the sexes, and the sexes are very ancient and in some species the differences in behaviour between the sexes are indeed extreme, and those differences are surely implemented by gender-dependent changes in brain anatomy or function. We just don't seem to be one of them. (It probably helps to be a primate: looking around at other closely-related primates, sex-dependent behaviour seems to be one of our most rapidly-evolving attributes.) (But everything else you say is completely to point. Given our sad history to the contrary, for the avoidance of error one should surely assume that any given behaviour is not gender-dependent until faced with very strong evidence to the contrary. That 0% of men in human history have ever got pregnant, and that the machinery is missing, is strong evidence of a difference. Employment levels are not.)
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An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 13, 2012 22:43 UTC (Fri) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link]
"nothing on earth could have me in the situation my sister is in."
Well, of course, there are biological differences between the sexes ;-)
"A socio-cultural phenomenon that divides people into various categories such as "male" and "female," with each having associated dress, roles, stereotypes, etc."
In very early human primitive societies engaged in the day-to-day struggle to survive, roles were doubtlessly more restricted according to one's sex for practical reasons; child-bearing (with no contraception available - a tool developed later by humans to allow us to control our own _biological_ behaviour) would naturally dictate a more sedentary role for women.
But social behaviour is not governed by biology; it is shaped explicitly by our conscious self-awareness. Sometimes this has a subconscious undertow (which can be consciously counteractable once it has been identified), but this too is socially shaped (see my long post in response to giraffedata).
Chimps and gorillas probably get very close to the self-conscious border and may temporarily pass over it; passing, for example, the 'mirror test' (although not without 'practice'), and a gorilla was spotted in the wild [1] taking 'measurements' in water using a stick, indicating perhaps a sense of 'I', wondering whether the water was too deep to wade into.
But apes (and indeed all other animals) are characterised by their inability to stay in the self-conscious realm _permanently_ like we do; there is a fundamental passivity in the behaviour of other primates, behaviour which has not altered over millions of years, and which, without our intervention to teach them tricks and 'sign language', speaks of a lack of sustained, conscious, self-awareness - a lack of any intentionality which might allow them to understand and shape the world around them. While they exist through their lives, our lives are narrated through an explicit interaction with others and the world around us within a baroque, many-layered social framework of our own meaningfully-interpreted invention. No behaviour that arises out of this can be realistically compared to that of even the most intelligent chimp, who cannot be capable of grasping a socially-determined concept such as gendered behaviour, with its 'associated dress, roles, stereotypes, etc.'. Nor can the way we live our lives at all be crudely accounted for by any biologically-determined features, like the comparative size of areas of the brain.
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0930_0509...
An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 16, 2012 14:47 UTC (Mon) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
You're arguing from a flawed assumption, that Wikipedia's definition of gender is correct. It's not--it's POLITICALLY correct. Please recognize the difference.
The very fact that WP puts "male" and "female" in quotes, as if society or culture assigns people to one category or the other, demonstrates the absurdity of the argument. Whether a person is male or female depends on exactly one thing: their chromosomes.
Whether a person acts like a typical male or female relative to their culture is another matter. We're all aware of the ages-old nature vs. nurture argument. It will NEVER be settled because we cannot ever REALLY KNOW all the factors that influence a particular person. It's pointless to try to assign a ratio--the point is that both nature and nurture, biology and society, affect people's personalities. It's foolish to say that it's either one or the other.
Finally, I'm not going to go through this post and your previous one bit-by-bit, but suffice it to say that the examples you cited do not prove that biology has no effect--they prove that society does. (Which is obvious, anyway.) To claim otherwise is arguing from the false premises that 1) we can ever know what the ratio is for anyone, and 2) that it could possibly be one or the other instead of both.
P.S. It seems that we disagree on this, but I was pleased by your first post in which you agreed that attempting to increase women's participation is no different in principle than attempting to increase men's. I guess we agree on that. Discrimination is discrimination, regardless of which group it's applied to. We should be encouraging all people to participate and we should be advocating freedom for all people. We should not be attempting to manipulate anyone, whether groups of people or individual people.
An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 16, 2012 15:39 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> Whether a person is male or female depends on exactly one thing: their chromosomes.
That is (mostly) true, but "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders. One's gender is more correctly referred to as "masculine" or "feminine", and while there is a general correlation, the two categories do not always correspond. One's sex is a biological concept, but gender is a social/cultural phenomenon. Quite a few things which do not have a biological sex--and perhaps are not even biological in origin--are still considered either masculine or feminine. Just look at languages like French and Spanish, where all nouns are assigned a specific gender. Even in English there are a few cases like that; ships are always treated as feminine, for example.
An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 17, 2012 10:33 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
That's mudding the discussion, which is not about abstract nouns but real people. In this case, gender and sex are synonyms.
An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 17, 2012 16:40 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> In this case, gender and sex are synonyms.
No, they're not. Even when speaking of people, there are feminine males and masculine females--people who are biologically male, but express more than the average/expected degree of feminine gender traits, and visa-versa.
Of course, it's generally not an all-or-nothing proposition, but rather a continuum. Most people display at least some gender traits contrary to their sex, while in a few rare cases sex and gender are completely at odds with each other.
"Male" and "female" are biological traits (though even at this level not all cases are perfectly clear-cut). "Masculine" and "feminine" are derived classifications based on physiological traits, behaviors, psychology, and perhaps other factors. There is a strong correlation, to be sure, but they are far from being synonyms.
An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 17, 2012 18:45 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Absurd. Gender _is_ all or nothing. There's no such gender as "30% masculine". Same for sex, salve _exceptionally_ rare cases.
Masculine and feminine are adjectives, while male and female are usually nouns. And that's all.
An update on the Ada Initiative Posted Jan 17, 2012 20:00 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Masculine and feminine are adjectives, while male and female are usually nouns. And that's all. Male and female are primarily adjectives. I believe it is a recent invention to use them as nouns; we used to say "man" and "woman" where we say "male" and "female" now. I even heard once that calling a man a male is special to American English. I never heard a distinction between gender and sex before now, but I like it. There are two things to discuss and two words; it makes sense to use one for each. The history and common usage also matter of course; I don't know much about that. There is a world of difference between masculine and male. I've never heard of a masculine connector or a feminine hamster.
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