On Gender Essentialism

feminism 101

Gender essentialism is the idea that there is a psychological “essence” that distinguishes men and women: that they’re two fundamentally different kinds of people.

I think the best way to understand gender essentialism is to contrast it with biological sex. 99% of people can be classified into one of two sex categories. Males have penises, testes, beards, more body hair, higher levels of testosterone, flat chests, no uterus, no menstrual period, etc. They produce sperm. Females have vulvas, ovaries, no beards, less body hair, higher levels of estrogen, breasts, uteruses, menstrual periods, etc. They produce eggs. It is extraordinarily rare, absent medical intervention, to find a person with a uterus but no vulva, or testes and high levels of estrogen, or a penis and a vulva, etc. While exceptions exist, “sex essentialism” is a generally accurate description of the world.

“Gender essentialism” is the claim that, as males and females divide fairly easily into two distinct types of bodies, they also divide fairly easily into two types of minds.

It is important to distinguish gender essentialism from the (correct) claim that there are, on average, psychological differences between men and women.¹ It is not gender essentialist to say that men, on average, tend to have higher sex drives than women do, but that these two bell curves overlap substantially. The effect size of sex on sex drive has been estimated at a Cohen’s d of 0.62, which looks like this:

From R Psychologist.

This is actually somewhat inaccurate because the same study shows that women have a higher variance in sex drive than men do, but eh, you get the picture.