***** I want to stress that we need have no ideological investment in whether women and men exhibit biological differences.... [I]t is in the nature of scientific research that if we are interested in differences, we will go on looking until we find them. And if we do not find any, we will assume that our instruments were wrong or that we looked in the wrong place or at the wrong things. Another problem is that most characteristics vary continuously in the population rather than placing us into neat groups. To compare groups, however defined, we must use such concepts as the "average," "mean," or "median" in order to characterize each group by a single number. Yet these constructed, or reified, numbers obscure the diversity that exists within the groups (say, among women and among men) as well as the overlaps between them. That is why statisticians have invented the concept of the standard deviation from the mean to reflect the spread of the actual numbers around the reified average. This problem is obvious when we think about research into differences between blacks and whites. Just to do it, we have to agree on social definitions of who will count as black and who as white because after several centuries of mixing, the biological characteristic, skin color, varies continuously. Research comparing blacks and whites must first generate the group differences it pretends to catalog and analyze.
*Differences, be they biological or psychological, become scientifically interesting only when they parallel differences in power.* We do not frame scientific questions about differences between tall people and short people, although folk wisdom suggests there may be some. Nor do we, in this society, pursue differences between blue-eyed, blond people and dark-haired, dark-eyed people. Yet the latter were scientifically interesting differences under the Nazis.
Sex differences are interesting in sexist societies that value one group more highly than the other.... The existence of average sex differences is irrelevant to the way we organize society. *To achieve an egalitarian division of labor requires political will and action, not changes in our biology.* (emphasis mine, pp. 128-9) *****
Now, Ruth Hubbard agrees with Stephen Jay Gould, Thomas Laqueur, Will Roscoe, & Anne Fausto-Sterling that sex is a political interpretation of biological facts and that gender is an ideological expression of oppression. If women gain total control over our own bodies, especially our temporary reproductive capacity, achieve equality, and thus abolish gender, we'll look at the idea of "opposite sexes" as disdainfully as we now dismiss that of telegony.
Yoshie