What Should We Do About Sex Differences?
The fifth excerpt of my forthcoming book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences
In Case You Missed It…
This is the fifth excerpt from my forthcoming book A Billion Years of Sex Differences. If you’d like to binge on the full collection, you can find it here. And if you want the book in your hands the moment it’s out, you can preorder it here.
In this installment:
Three approaches to sex differences: gender-role traditionalism, gender-role progressivism, and gender-role individualism
Why both gender-role traditionalism and gender-role progressivism clash with the science of sex differences
Why erasing sex differences isn’t realistic - or necessarily desirable
Why gender equality can sometimes mean larger sex differences rather than smaller ones
Why the best approach may be to eliminate bias and barriers, but then “let people be themselves”
What Should We Do About Sex Differences?
Of course, making the world a better place involves more than just establishing accurate knowledge. We also need to decide what we’re going to do with that knowledge once it’s in our possession. How, in other words, should we deal with sex differences?
As I see it, there are three main approaches. I call them gender-role traditionalism, gender-role progressivism, and gender-role individualism.
Gender-Role Traditionalism: Sex differences are natural and good, and thus ought to be preserved and protected. If society starts deviating from the gender roles bequeathed to us by God or nature, we should make every effort to restore things to their natural state, just as we’d restore a broken bone to its natural state by putting it in a cast.
Gender-Role Progressivism: Gender gaps in society have nothing to do with inherent differences between the sexes, and everything to do with discrimination and sexist socialization. As such, we should make every effort to wipe all sex differences from the face of the planet – or even to reverse them to make up for past injustices.
Gender-Role Individualism: We shouldn’t seek to impose any gender outcome on the world. We should instead seek to establish a level playing field, then let the gender outcomes set themselves as an emergent effect of individuals making informed decisions about what would suit them best. Unless sex differences are products of discrimination or cause demonstrable harm, progressives have no more right to eliminate them than traditionalists have to enlarge them.
The science of human sex differences can’t tell us which approach is best, because that’s ultimately a matter of values rather than facts. But it can help us to evaluate the empirical assumptions associated with each position. And it turns out that both the traditionalist and progressive positions butt heads with the modern science.